20.1.13

Thing Tracker

The Thing Tracker Network got me thinking about exactly what would need to be shared. This immediately brought to mind the classic science fiction work "The Big Front Yard" by Clifford Simak, describing how interstellar trade must be in ideas and information and not material objects. The protagonist trades the "idea of paint" for the "idea of anti-gravity saddles".

What ideas do we have to trade?

I fall back to my design roots, and this forces me to ask what are the use-cases we wish to address? Let me start out with a few off the top of my head.

  • Replacement Part

    Aside from trivial handles and feet, printing replacement parts will probably need the participation of manufacturers. Some, like Nokia, have started this process already. But if you've ever been associated with product lifecycle management, you'll know there is a lot more to it than a one-time publication. Specifically, different product models, sizes, component part differences, configurations, geographies (line voltages, certification, and so on), versions over time, etc. make the correct part difficult to determine even for the manufacturers building it. All of this information would need to be included with the tracked object.

  • Custom Object

    Although there are ways to tailor objects after construction, there will be a use-case for things that are specifically built to fit people, pets, rooms, vehicles, etc. The big problem here is measuring and applying the measurements correctly to the objects. For this purpose, the instructions and parameters would need to be included with the tracked object so it's useful to the receiver.

  • Toys, Jewelry, Art

    By and large, this is the current set of objects, that requires only geometry, material, and some images and assembly instructions.

The current state of affairs is pretty crude. The existing sites like Thingiverse, Physible Exchange, The Pirate Bay, Archive of Our Own, etc. share only .stl files, or whatever else the author chooses to share. These are doomed eventually, because they

  1. don't have full parametric model files
  2. have insufficient metadata
  3. aren't indexed, other than by full text search or user specified ad-hoc tags
  4. aren't versioned
  5. are centralized to one site

The Thing Tracker may answer some of these. For example, it may be decentralized ... as long as the implementation uses something like torrent magnet files. I think the content and use-cases need to be determined and then the implementation will derive naturally from those. Are there any use-cases I omitted?

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