Uber Badge: Wearable Badge for Social Interactions
The Media Lab at MIT is improving on previous wearable badges with the UbER-Badge, which uses infrared and RF to create connections between people and systems. Some of their aims are to do viral message passing like "Memes don't exist, tell your friends", location tracking by displaying on nehibor's badges the last time they saw that person, social networking, storing contacts for later retrieval, and more.
The Ubiquitous Experimental Research Badge (UbER-Badge) is a powerful platform for developing new applications in person-person and person-event interaction. This design takes a huge stride beyond the Media Lab’s previously successful badges (e.g., the Meme Tag (1998) and Thinking Tags (1997)). It is highly evolved in both its technological power and its aesthetics.This Badge is a general computing platform for experimentation with distributed systems and the analysis and enhancment of group social interaction. Although The Badge will be used in crowds of circa 200 people during Media Lab events, it is designed to be open and expandable for future research use, able to encompass essentially any crowd size and a host of possible applications.
All their software is open source, and looks pretty neat. I saw some of MIT's earlier badge/wearable computing work at ACM1, and it was pretty cool. Not very usable by a mass market, but still very promising.
