Zero Mean Lag Synchronization
Current technologies privilege message passing over coordination. It is very easy to repeat a known text in almost perfect synchrony with another speaker, but any attempt to do so over VoIP, such as Skype, will fail. It is not possible to chant over Skype or mobile phone (although lags over traditional PSTN services may, under optimal circumstances, be small enough to permit protracted synchronization). The lags induced by current IP communication services do not impede message passing, but they do not support synchronized activity.
But synchronized activities are ubiquitous, e.g. in collective prayer and chanting. Even a handshake can be seen as a zero-mean-lag activity demanding real co-presence among the actors. When we are in the presence of another person in the flesh, we engage in reciprocal real-time interaction that brings us together in a powerful manner that we all appreciate viscerally, but that is not yet given technological support.
If we can provide technological support for zero mean lag synchronization, a huge space of potential applications opens up in providing people a means to meaningfully interact with a heightened sense of co-presence.
The solution is not difficult, as long as the two interacting systems can predict each other to some degree. The key is that what one system, S1, hears or sees at time t is not the behaviour of the other system, S2, at time t-1. Rather, S1 has a predictive model of the behaviour of S2 based on some recent history. S1 is presented at t with the predicted behaviour of S2 at t. In addition, S1 also finds out at t what S2 actually did at t-1, and updates its predictive model accordingly. S2 behaves in a similar fashion.
The nature of the predictive model will depend on the specific characteristics of the domain, but the underlying approach is entirely generic. Two sample implementations suggest themselves: chanting, in which an utterance is repeated thereby allowing prediction after the first iteration, and the mirror game, which is described in Noy et al (2011).
This project requires the expertise of a networks engineer or similar who is interested in opening up a novel space of interactive technologies that generate a strong sense of co-presence. The two example implementations suggested above (or others) would provide enough to encourage others then to increase the space of possible applications.
References
Noy, L., Dekel, E., & Alon, U. (2011). The mirror game as a paradigm for studying the dynamics of two people improvising motion together. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(52), 20947-20952.