Ditto was the result of an ideation exercise with entrepreneur Surj Patel to create a product that provided a permanent video presence between two places. Intended to create intimacy between families separated by distance and ability, a key consideration was to offer a pair of permanently connected items, where one party could configure it for the other.
Carbon and Surj created a fictional product, Ditto, named after the ditto mark to symbolise words or figures to be repeated. Ditto was envisaged as pair of ‘magic mirrors’, activated by ‘glancing‘ or tapping one to make the other ‘chime’ or ‘glimmer’. Both would be paired upon purchase and permanently ‘entangled’ by a mystical Red String Of Fate, in essence creating a video wormhole between two places. Our motivation was to craft simple, enchanting and natural interactions that connected rooms as much as individuals.
Though fictional, much of Carbon’s thinking was grounded in real projects such as the OpenCV computer vision toolkit as well as research projects including MIT’s Genie Bottles, Media Lab Europe’s iCom, Oren Horev’s Tactophone Jun Fujiwara’s Sound Bottle.
