The Physical Web
github.com
The Physical Web
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: The Physical Web
#2Obligatory http://xkcd.com/1367/ I'm not saying we can't do better than web apps, but even web apps are better at this than native apps.
Re: The Physical Web
#3I kinda hoped the devices would actually serve the apps themselves. I guess a URL makes more sense though. But I wonder if it will lead to physical devices that give 404s when they are obsoleted.
Anyway, this seems pretty exciting.
Re: The Physical Web
#4> "The number of smart devices is going to explode (...)"
But why? Why are you/they so sure? Why do we assume that humans will just appropriate any kind of technology thrown at them?
I assume this comes from educated tech guys, who are thorough with their work, tools and respective usage. How can they be so lighthearted with the premises which relate to human usage of technology?
Re: The Physical Web
#5The way I see it, this is better implemented with AR and CV using specific items as "markers" than with a "nearby lookup" table. The thing you want may be across a highway and still be near making the listing somewhat imprecise.
The range of interactions is also greater with AR, as it gives the ability to be triggered (eg. highlighted) just by looking at it with the AR camera.
Re: The Physical Web
#6I kinda hoped the devices would actually serve the apps themselves. I guess a URL makes more sense though. But I wonder if it will lead to physical devices that give 404s when they are obsoleted. Anyway, this seems pretty exciting.
There's no reason it couldn't mean that anyway - if a device is open to the Internet then the URL it serves via Physical Web could easily be its own. But it allows for less-smart devices too.
The biggest problem I can see, as with all proximity devices, is spoofing. How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?
Re: The Physical Web
#7I like the idea, but the first version seems quite limited. It is more of a GPS based webapp discovery tool. You click on the button, the app sends your GPS coordinate to the main server, which returns all useful webapps in the neighborhood.
I think that using NFC chips, which are extremely cheap, is very appropriate here. Use case: You point your phone to the vending machine/renting car and the respective webapp is shown automatically on your phone.
Re: The Physical Web
#8> "The number of smart devices is going to explode (...)" But why? Why are you/they so sure? Why do we assume that humans will just appropriate any kind of technology thrown at them? I assume this comes from educated tech guys, who are thorough with their work, tools and respective usage. How can they be so lighthearted with the premises which relate to human usage of technology?
I'm not sure what you mean by "appropriating technology". The number of smart devices is going to explode because we want to automate all the things, and collect lots of data. It'd be great if I could ask my stove what food I've eaten this month, how healthy it was, how expensive it was, maybe even tell it to start preparing dinner at a certain time. The way to do that is to put a computer in everything.
Re: The Physical Web
#9Obligatory http://xkcd.com/1367/ I'm not saying we can't do better than web apps, but even web apps are better at this than native apps.
Just put QR codes everywhere.
Re: The Physical Web
#10> "The number of smart devices is going to explode (...)" But why? Why are you/they so sure? Why do we assume that humans will just appropriate any kind of technology thrown at them? I assume this comes from educated tech guys, who are thorough with their work, tools and respective usage. How can they be so lighthearted with the premises which relate to human usage of technology?
This is a rather unusual comment and this link is probably the wrong place to have this conversation, as hacker news is probably the wrong place in general.
Anyway, it's rather simple. It's just taking what we have seen in the past (people appropriating any kind of technology thrown at them [1]) and extending it into the future.
Is this the correct approach? Probably not.
I like to remind myself that there was a time when smoking was the thing to do. Little knowledge about potential dangers was available. Projections about future adaption of the habit might have looked similar.
[1]: Strictly speaking this is not true, since there is a huge cemetery of rejected technology that remains mostly invisible. Smartphones just turn out to be one of the technologies that have become widely accepted, creating a wrong impression overall.