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from the none-so-blind-as-he-who-would-not-see dept.
There's nothing dystopian at all about these high-tech blinkers for humans
Ever feel like you're having too much fun in the office? Like your boss just isn't getting enough value out of your life? Fear not: Panasonic has designed a pair of high-tech blinkers* that block out your peripheral vision to help you concentrate on the job at hand.
The concept is called Wear Space, which consists of a lightweight, wraparound fabric screen that conceals a pair of Bluetooth headphones. The screen cuts your horizontal field of view by around 60 percent, while the headphones come with a built-in noise-canceling feature that can pipe in music of your choice. It charges over USB and has a battery life of 20 hours.
The Wear Space isn't an official Panasonic product (yet), but a prototype was developed by the company's Future of Life design studio. An early version was shown at SXSW earlier this year, but the creators of the Wear Space are now raising money for the device on Japanese crowdfunding site GreenFunding.
[...] *Also known as blinders. The metaphor we're going for here is the equipment used to restrict a horse's vision, so we're using the correct terminology, as recommended by the Kentucky Derby.
See also: Open offices have driven Panasonic to make horse blinders for humans
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday October 18 2018, @11:22AM (19 children)
But if you use the goggles, you could cram the employees in like sardines. Like a virtual Japanese capsule hotel.
What health ramifications? I can only imagine that it would screw up someone's vision, or cause them to be sitting for longer periods of time. And these are already problems for a worker staring at a screen all day.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @11:36AM (2 children)
Like brain damage resulting in inability to process peripheral vision correctly? Brain rewires itself to ignore invalid inputs, and in this case, this rewiring itself can be called brain damage.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 18 2018, @02:01PM
I'd expect it to be kinda similar to putting on a pair of glasses. If you only wear contacts for a long time, then put on a pair of glasses with *exactly the same prescription*...you'll pretty quickly feel nauseous or vaguely sea-sick, and it might take several days or even a couple weeks to get used to them before that stops happening. Even though it's the same prescription, the fact that the glasses don't cover your entire field of vision the same way contacts do can create some problems. There's not really any long-term effects though...I wouldn't expect any permanent damage unless you're literally wearing the blinders all day long.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:18PM
Oh, I'm sure "to save our brainz" they'll help out by having the corporate overlords sell advertising on the inside of the blinders. So you'll get to stare at "drink pepsi" ads all day long.
I wonder how many simultaneous video banner ads they'd have to force employees to look at to break even on labor and bennie costs.
Not kidding about this; I recall an initiative to put banner ads on an internal intranet at a former employer to help with the budget; in the end what saved the employees was pointing out that 99% of the tech-ish company employees used ad blockers regardless how low the percentage in the general population, so we wouldn't get any revenue.
I mean, nobody complains about the company providing space for soft drink vending machines with giant ads on the front...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Thursday October 18 2018, @01:19PM (13 children)
I was thinking maybe that is more mental health than anything else.
If I knew I worked at a place that issued me blinders because they decided to make an open office environment to foster creativity due to the more easily promoted interactions with my peers, co-workers, and loud mouth on speakerphone making personal calls, that they need to issue blinders to everyone in order to allow them to do their jobs... rather than conceding the issue and agreeing to address it properly... I'd be upset.
I can usually, if I have to, ignore everyone just fine, but then people might call me a jerk if they are not used to being able to easily distract someone. Anyone in a knowledge worker position tries to focus and don't listen to every sound or watch every flashing light. Otherwise they won't be very good at focusing, but I admit some places are worse than others, and any tool can help if the company actively seeks cost savings in one metric while ignoring productivity loses as another metric. Blinders are a way to admit no fault! Just help the weak willed focus by issuing these!
Putting on blinders also signals to others that the person wearing them is busy; I suppose earbuds or headphones seem like people are not working., but they already can help stop unwanted walk-ups. Wearing earbuds without playing anything is a common tactic to avoid actively being distracted by people, but doesn't help focus except to encourage others to not bother the wearer.
I expect the blinders to work the same way, unless there's a different issue about people bolting to the bathroom the moment something unexpected appears in their peripheral vision...
Handing out blinders is ultimately a means of having others (workers) be instructed to pretend and hide from the problem they (executives) created. We are unlikely to see any vice presidents at a company wearing blinders. The fact that Panasonic is even marketing this as a solution is a problem. It means the issues of productivity loss in an open office environment is so widespread that Panasonic thought they could profit off executive embarassment--and likely will succeed with that.
It is the rare executive that would readily admit they are wrong about open office spaces; it costs money to put everything back as it was AND concede the mistake (loss in the conversion, loss in the conversion back, lost productivity and revenues from the disruption and time when in an open office space... a desire to not be wrong about it is very strong.) I would expect they would be eager to jump on a cheap solution without admitting a problem. Win-Win!
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Thursday October 18 2018, @02:07PM (6 children)
I spent most of my shift yesterday with one or two people standing behind my desk telling me to work on one task; someone sending me IMs asking me to immediately work on another task, and my phone constantly ringing with someone else asking for ANOTHER task. All expected to be done right this second. Juggling four or five things at a time all day long.
If my employer issued these, I'd be friggin' ECSTATIC that they were at least acknowledging that there is an issue and that people do occasionally need to be able to focus. Right now the assumption seems to be that if you aren't in a meeting, you can't possibly be busy. Acknowledging that some of us do actually need to get work done rather than just *discussing* getting work done would be fucking fantastic.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:11PM (5 children)
Ha, i once had a job with 4 people DIRECTLY over me: 4 bosses.
I lasted 2.5 months and then gave .5 month notice. 4 people off-loading ALL their work onto me ALL at the same time, ALL day, EVERY day.... FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU......
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:12PM (2 children)
Only four?
Let's see...in some cases the same person manages multiple things (the initials in parenthesis are to ensure I count this correctly), but I'm working on two (technically three, but only barely) releases each with their own project manager (AV, PG, and barely RK), three other non-release projects each with their own project manager (SK, RK, AV), then I've got the consulting firm's overall manager (mostly personnel stuff -- MN), two managers for the lab overall (keeping everyone on "schedule" -- RR, GC), the department manager (*generally* only interacts with you if there's a major issue -- LD)...and at least four other people who I would consider my managers but I literally don't even know what their title would be (JB, PB, MA, JC)...those four mostly working on planning rather than in-progress execution (although "planning" here can still be relatively instant -- the "weekly" schedule gets published daily and changes hourly). If we eliminate the overlap, that's 11 distinct people who at any time might walk over to my desk and say "This needs to execute right now, I don't know the requirements or objectives, figure it out."
And that's not counting the fact that dev team is likely to bring their tasks directly to me rather than following the proper process to get stuff slotted through a project, so then I get stuck dealing with that crap too. And then there's the Unix admins who message me when they need help understanding how Unix works, or the shell developers who come to me for help when the garbage they copied off of stack overflow isn't working how they expect because they passed a bunch of random parameters without bothering to understand what any of them mean (ie, they once ran rsync with the "one filesystem" option of -x, noticed it wasn't copying directories mounted from other filesystems but couldn't figure out why, so they sent it for testing anyway at which point I just rewrote the damn script myself, certified my version, and sent them a defect that was basically "commit this script for me because yours is garbage.")
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday October 18 2018, @07:51PM (1 child)
How many of them can actually say "You're fired!", or are most of them just "I'm disappointed, but can't do fuck all about it" types?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 19 2018, @11:30AM
That's...a good question. Potentially none of them, depends on whether you mean fired as in "you are now unemployed" or fired as in "we're seeking new opportunities for you with a different client". Many of them could get me moved to a different team within the client company but that's probably about it. And AFAIK you pretty much don't get fired from the consulting firm unless you get escorted out of the building in handcuffs, and I'm pretty sure the people with the authority to make that decision are working in an office a few hundred miles away. That decision would have to go through HR, and I literally haven't seen an HR rep since I finished training five years ago. They're all out in New Jersey somewhere.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:43PM (1 child)
You really should have used to new cover for the TPS report...
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Friday October 19 2018, @08:22AM
Ill make sure you get the memo
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:13PM (3 children)
Exactly. The asshats that created these open office plans have their own offices with doors that close and are reasonably sound resistant. They are also the same people that have their phone off silent in the office and yammer away into their bluetooth headsets while walking around, interrupting others.
This thing is brought to you by the people that brought us the "war room" concept. Lets get a conference room and stick a dozen people or consultants in it during a major project. I was in one of those for about 2 weeks and while they were all people I liked, I wanted to murder them.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:17PM (1 child)
From curiosity: what sauces would made you like them better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:16PM
Let us just say that using the quote "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!" never got unfunny.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @01:25AM
Dude, we need to talk.
I've been dragged into one of these.
Now I hate, actually hate, half the people.
It's horrible.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:51PM (1 child)
I commandeered a 4K 40" screen about 30 months ago.
We are a startup with 5-6 people per room, until we finally move to get more space. I put my back to a corner, and set the screen as a mock cubicle wall.
The first week, people were laughing at my giant screen. Now half the engineers have copied the idea (we ran out of corners for more).
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:21PM
My boss commandeered a good quality 70" tv screen from a conference room and put it in his area that is about the size of 2 large cubicles. It works great for group code review sessions. It does look funny with 4 people sitting about 7 feet away from it. It is actually very effective instead of crowding around one person's desk when we are doing group sessions.
They eventually bought another one to put in the actual conference room.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Friday October 19 2018, @02:42AM
By that i was thinking if it would affect vision to have part of it blocked off for 8 hours a day. Certainly not an issue short term, but months on end possibly.
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(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday October 19 2018, @09:03AM
Neck and back strain from having to have your head hung low, your shoulders hunched, and your lower back supporting all that unbalanced weight having to maintain your cranial position in such a manner to avoid looking around and remembering what a horror you work in.