I've been going on about secondary attention and sound for a while. But it's been hard to get over what I mean, or to find anyone who thinks I might not be mad. I've even been trying to build some examples of my own, but it's been slow going. I've now settled down to hoping I'll be able, one day, to build something on the BERGcloud.
In the meantime - choir.io is a lot of what I mean. A bit like Peep but made for now. Here's how they explain it:
"Choir provides a programmable interface to translate events into a rich set of context-aware sounds. Our users mark events with emotions and intrusivensses and we take care of the rest.
...Choir has three killer applications.
First, ambient sound monitoring. By associating user or server activities with different sounds, you can stay aware of the current statuses without having to look at the graphs. If something unusual happens, you would hear the changes almost subconsciously. Failed login requests, rejected credit card transactions, 500 errors are a few good examples here.
Second, notify without interruptions. Today your notifications are mostly delivered via email or chat room messages. You have to bear the cost of context switches to checkout these messages. Choir can provide you with a more fine grained control over different type of notifications. For example, you might choose to play a pleasant, low-intrusive sound when a user gives a kudos to a support ticket, but you would probably want to select a negative and intrusive sound, maybe a sea monster roar, if a user just unsubscribed from your service. If you hear too many of the scary sea monster noises, you will know something is wrong.
Third, celebrate with others. Some companies would hit a giant gone when they close a new deal. It is a great morale booster to bring the whole team together and share the excitement of successes. Now you could configure Choir to play a cheerful sound when a new paid user sign up for your service."
I suspect they're also foreshadowing is the solution to the Google Glass stare. Google shouldn't be using your eyes for this, they should be using your ears. Stick all the same information in your background attention, via your ears, and you solve a lot of problems. Anything where you need the actual information can be done via text to speech. You've seen how it works - it's Jarvis.