Invisible Pals who’re Fun to Be With

from NYTimes article on Microsoft and Intel today:

“Mr. Horvitz predicted an elevator that senses when you are in the midst of a conversation and keeps its doors open until you are done talking. [...] As for Intel, the company has confirmed that more than 1,000 products are being designed for its coming Atom chip, which is aimed at nontraditional computing systems. Intel views this as a $10 billion potential market that will give rise to 15 billion brainy devices by 2015, Mr. Gelsinger said.”

What will people REALLY want from their brainy objects? We had some interesting discussions about these topics in a few classes from a couple weeks ago in response to questions like these:

Find something non-human. If it had a sensor and datastream, what voice, personality, and intention might it have? What might it want to say to us? Would it use voice, text, or another human communication protocol? What would it want for itself? According to whom? If it tried to appeal to us emotionally, what emotion would it appeal to? How might designers attempt to disguise these as ‘human’?