If this then that just arrived in my life. In its creators’ words:
“Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that).”
For example: ‘If the weather drops below 2 degrees, email me the night before’. The options are fairly basic at the moment, but the potential is exciting. It reminded me of a blog post I ‘almost wrote’ (one of those) a few years ago. In it I was going to show this video:
Everything we sense comes from an interpretation of information. What happens is that we get used to certain ways of doing this. Specifically, our five senses divide the world up into five familiar methods of interpreting it. So when someone ‘sees’ with their tongue, it jars a little, even though a familiar thing is happening: the same information (visual in this case) is being interpreted, just by a different operating system.
If this, than that is a perfect articulation of the building blocks of technology. It describes the same laws that Arduino shares (e.g. if the volume/temperature does this, the motor/device does that). When you break things down like this, things are both incredibly simple and mind-blowingly complex at the same time. The principles are simple. The possibilities are increasingly endless.
Every day, new ways of translating information/data into actions/experiences emerge. But more often than not, our human nature (and our pattern-forming brains) gets in the way of our imagination. In the same way we’ve got used to our five senses (five clear ways of translating information), we get used to a handful of familiar formats. If you want to create interesting new experiences, you need to get better at imagining that a tongue might help someone see.
