.Dust

I remem­ber when in 2002 I bought a Palm IIIx device dur­ing a visit in the US.

One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing thing at that time was the pos­si­bil­ity to beam my con­tact details to other Palm user by sim­ply aim­ing at the other device. That was the birth of the dig­i­tal exchange of busi­ness cards.

Later the very same tech­nol­ogy come to mobile phones using IrDA, Blue­tooth or SMS.

Now it seems that this will be made pos­si­ble by sim­ply shak­ing hands when you first meet your party.

Hideaki Mat­sui, a New York and Tokyo-​based designed, has released a smart con­cept, the Infor­ma­tion Ring.

All you will is a ring. When you will meet your party and shake hands infor­ma­tions will be exchanged between the two rings. The more hands you shake the more infor­ma­tions will be collected.

At a later stage you will be able to look at the data that your ring has col­lected over time by sim­ply putting the ring on a spe­cial credit card sized device that will dis­play the data stored.

I am always more attracted by this kind of inter­ac­tion between the dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal world. Com­mon use objects, like rings, are brought to life and gain new functionality.

Just to add another bit to this great idea you should note that when the ring is placed in the card it func­tions like a con­troller to scroll the data inside the ring. This will change the func­tion of the ring another time giv­ing it another new life.

How cool is that?

Going through the com­ments in the Yanko Design post on the sub­ject I noticed that a very sim­i­lar project was devel­oped by the Media Lab Europe under the name of iBrand.

[via]

Related posts:

1. Inno­va­tion is in the details
2. What If Thieves Were Social Too?
3. The ME problem
4. Sources of uncon­ven­tional innovation
5. iPhone Sight­ings