A7's Memory Concept

This is Andy Morris, and here is my Orientation Device concept. I have a LOT of different ideas for this project so it's hard to pick just one I want to work on. So... this may change over time. But here's my top pick for now.

How often have you been on the internet searching for something, and suddenly realized you have gone so far off topic that you have forgotten what you were originally searching for? Well that happens to me a lot. Maybe I have memory problems, maybe not, but I'm sure it happens to a lot of people. As early as 10 years ago, it was a different story. The internet was not quite the same. Sites were optimized for slower modems, so less graphics were involved. There were no commercial sites that were promoted based on keyword searches in Google. In short, there was a whole lot less clutter, so finding what you wanted was easier.

These days, it's almost impossible to find what you want. Imagine this scenario: What if every street sign in Canada had a billboard attached to it? How hard would it be to find your way to McCaul Street if the word McCaul was 5 inches long in the middle of a 10 foot billboard? But that's precisely what the internet has become. Pop-ups, ads, commercial sites, fancy graphics and flash animations designed to distract us at every turn.

So how great would it be if we had some technology that "just knew" what we were looking for? Wouldn't it be fantastic if you could just press a button and be put back on the right path? Well that's what I will attemt to create; The "Lost and Found" button missing from our browsers.

When you think about it, our memory is quite simple. We are conditioned to follow things in sequence. Movies are designed with a certain narrative and structure, because the filmmaker doesn't want to confuse the viewer. When surfing the net, we follow a path, links, of common ideas based on keywords. Once we branch off into another direction, our memory automatically adjust itself to create the "new" narrative and path we are following. So our original path is lost, gone deep into our minds, only to be recovered at some point a few days later when another event triggers this path in our mind, or in the case of amnesics, perhaps that path is never to be found again.

The technology in principal is simple: As you search the internet and view pages, a database keeps track of the content you are viewing. As you continue to surf and follow links, it watches for multiple occurances of keywords, and stores them by importance. Then, when you get "lost", you simply click a button, and it shows you the main words on the pages you have been viewing, and offers suggestions on what you may have been looking for.

However, the technology in practice is much more complex than it sounds. There has to be a way for the tool to "read" the content off the pages, sort all the words, ignore common words (the, and, etc), store the words in a database, then later retrieve them and display those helpful suggestions. It has to link into the browser in an unobtrusive way. It has to know what is relevant to store, and what is not relevant. In fact, I believe it's too complex for me to actually create. But that hasn't stopped me before. :)

Oh... and of course there's one more feature we cannot forget: The OFF button, to appease the privacy advocates.

A7