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posted by martyb on Thursday October 18 2018, @10:12AM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:12PM (2 children)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:12PM (#750509) Journal

    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.")

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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday October 18 2018, @07:51PM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) on Thursday October 18 2018, @07:51PM (#750618) Journal

    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

      by urza9814 (3954) on Friday October 19 2018, @11:30AM (#750863) Journal

      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.