We have all grown accustomed to certain conventions and habits in the online world. Some of these are thirty years old! Yet they linger, hampering both communication and thought, even on hot sites like Second Life and Facebook, because we're used to them.
But as our devices and connections grow more powerful, one limited resource becomes increasingly precious... human attention.
This problem goes way back, before the internet, to communications in real life. Our brains evolved subtle tricks for attention allocation, enabling folks to pick and-choose among inputs, prioritizing some while keeping a "gist" of others.
Epocene aims to bring many of these real-life methods to the online world -- some of them for the very first time.
Epocene empowers the user to prioritize other speakers, use time and dimensional cues, track the conversational 'gist' and efficiently get to the point. It enhances both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Epocene also offers unique ways to link real-world settings with virtual environments, to find others with shared interests, and to collaborate inexpensively across great distances.
Eventually, the aim - (using patented methods) - will be nothing less than rescuing the attention economy. We need a revolution that will empower users while unleashing site hosts (corporate and private) to reach out with platforms ranging from PCs to networks to mobile devices.
But all that is in the future. Our experiment is just a taste of what's to come.
If interested in learning more, or participating in one of our alpha demos, please log out and fill in the 'Want More Information?' form on the index page. Tell us why you want an early glimpse of this promising new concept!
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Epocene is based upon patents awarded to scientist/author David Brin. | 
