Recently, I have been reading about this concept of Mesh network: “wireless devices that talk to each other instead of to central towers”. Although the idea has been out there for ages, no big deal of application has been build out of it. Most of the effort into this domain concentrated on the middle-ware effort to put everything in touch. So, I thought that maybe one interesting to do is to think about a new possible application to start seeing the effect of such network philosophy.

The idea is simple: everybody (or almost) is carrying around a Bluetooth enabled device. Fine. What if while you walk around and you get in touch with someone else, you exchange something with that person? This something may be, for instance, a virtual pill containing a question or an idea. Then the person who got the pill may add a contribution to the idea, or an answer to the question.

Next phase is that the pill never stops but is always circulating. Fine. The point is how can the author get in touch with the contribution/answers? Well, a possible answer is that whenever an user connects to the internet with the phone, or pass by a bluetooth device connected to the internet, all the pills’ contained on the phone get transmitted to an internet site where they can be retrieved and viewed by everyone.

Possible features of the system is to include a kind of social/physical positioning to the propagation of the pills in the network so to unveil interesting aspect of the place where we live and of the people we pass by.

My research interest into this concept is to enquiry how people form opinions through the development of the messages contained in the pills, and how people use unconventional emergent technologies in a spontaneous collaborative way.