Efficient service delivery for auto rickshaws!

Walking through the busy streets of India, one of the largest economies of the world, you feel helpless when you don't find a auto rickshaw. Here are some new designs I found on the net for the future auto rickshaws of the world:

Yamaha's electric rickshaw

An auto rickshaw is often the only source to commute out of small localities where our amazing public transport system can't yet access. Often these three wheeler taxi services are all pooled up in specific locations and at the end of the day we have to find them. 

TVS auto rickshaw

"What if" there was an app created which would allow auto drivers to find us when we need them. As Indian auto drivers experience the benefits of the growing economy, they are bound to buy smart phones as prices come dwindling down in the near future. An application can be developed on the phone which will allow the user to send out a call service to the nearest auto driver! The call service should also give details of the final destination to the auto driver giving him the power to choose too. Makes me think why hasn't this sort of an application been developed for taxi services as off yet.

User experience and the next dimension!

Computers today interact with us primarily through sight and sound. Our primary mode of consumption of data on the net is in the form of either videos or sound. Take yourself a decade into the future and imagine what if computers could also interact with us using the other senses. Where you can taste an exotic fruit from India or smell wild flowers from the Amazon or even feel the fresh water of a stream ripple through our fingers.

Like Plato described a world of forms where everything was perfect, we could very well be heading towards creating a world of our own; a perfect world where we store the perfect form of everything we know. Perhaps this is the future mission for Google; store all known digital copies of taste, smell, touch and maybe even emotion. If the senses are eventually nothing but electrical impulses in our brain, we can very well replicate them in the future. User experience could take on a whole new dimension in the future. 

The implications of this could be tremendous. Imagine walking into a restaurant and actually tasting your meal before you buy it! Or tasting the flavour of a coffee brand before you pick it up at the super market. Imagine watching a movie at the theatre and actually experiencing the sense of smell which was part of your plot.

This might sound like science fiction but research is already being done in this space. For example, Disney Research is working on a technology called Telsa Touch where your touch experience on your touch screen phones could be made to feel as though you are really touching different surfaces.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/08/tesla.touch.disney/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Source:http://komar.cs.stthomas.edu/qm425/02s/Lloyd3_files/image003.gif

I think in the next 20 years or so we will very soon be able to walk into Star Trek Holodeck's and experience anything we want.