sync
Interface for more intuitive scheduling.
Project emerging from parent project on Unstandardised Time, an augmented reality interface that allows people to understand, empathise and synchronise with the active times of other people or groups around the world.
While the augmented reality aspect of Unstandardised Time was interesting, and perhaps the first compelling use of personal-scale augmented reality, it was designed for a near-future context where augmented reality technology has replaced smartphones and is fully pervasive in society. However, the new representation of time that was developed during that project could be used as an add-on for existing scheduling systems.
While we wait for a societally accepted and widespread form of augmented reality technology (hopefully without boxes on our faces), Sync is a solution being developed for our current technological context. Sync is a smartphone application that uses the same intuitive scheduling interface developed in the Unstandardised Time project, but uses the Google Calendar API to set real events and meetings.
App wire-framing
The app allows people to add their relevant contacts, such as friends (green), family (orange), and colleagues (yellow), as well as their normal working or contacting hours. The white line represents the point in time now, and the contacts are vertically distributed on the overview screen depending on what part of the day they are in; the height of the screen represents your 24 hour day cycle, where the pink regions represent the active time, and blue regions represent inactive time of all contacts.
When a contact is selected, their active time is compared to yours, and a white rectangle indicated where the active time of both parties overlap for scheduling a meeting or event.
The horizontal distribution of the contacts indicates their proximity to you geographically, allowing people to visualise their contacts more intuitively in space and time. For instance, a green square on the left side of the screen would represent a friend in your city, and could be used to organise events or meetings more easily on-the-fly as shown in the demo above.
The app is currently being developed for download and use in iOS and Android.