Show HN: Mani – Place virtual sticky notes in real-world spaces | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mani – Place virtual sticky notes in real-world spaces

mani.ai

86 pointsnarenkeshav57 comments

It's not a bad idea, but the landing page needs more clear non-video illustrations of exactly what the experience looks like. The videos are somewhat helpful but they are so jumpy with lots of quick cuts that it's hard to get a good look.

Agree completely - the video should be slowed down a lot, and less bouncy

I'd like to use this around my house. We are renting it to some friends this summer, and it would be great to stick notes around each room, explaining various quirks and where things are. But it's a bit weird to "publish" the notes and have my house show up on a map. Is there a way to "not publish" my notes publicly, but perhaps be able to share them selectively via e.g. a URL or an invite in the app?

To be clear: I would pay for this app, happily, for that functionality.

Why not use real sticky notes?

I guess there are many reasons, e.g. for some people it’s easier to find their phone than a pen; or lack of sticky notes.

Or the notes fall off, etc

It would be cool, but you could also place a piece of paper on the nightstand in each room with instructions for the same effect.

Technology doesn't have to be the answer for everything.

For static notes paper and pencil is the simplest and best technology. Smartphone app might come into picture if you want the notes to be dynamic or have personalized content.

"DON'T TOUCH THIS HANDLE - IT LEAKS!" -- it's sort of hard to explain exactly what handle I'm talking about in a bedside note, but trivial with virtual (or real) sticky notes.

Lots of reasons!

There is potentially a lot of information I want to share, and it would be weird to have dozens of notes all over the house. Plus it would be fairly natural for the renters to read them and then immediately remove them, and then, weeks later, forget what they said; "Wait, what's the trick to getting the bath temperature right? Wish I hadn't removed that sticky note!"

Also, I can spend the next week+ building up the "library" of notes as I go through the house, vs. having to do it as a "last chore" before we leave the house, putting sticky notes all over the darn place and trying to prevent my 3 and 5 year old children from grabbing them.

And we could re-use the virtual notes with zero effort the next time we rent the house.

Had a similar idea years ago, but thought more of a gps-located twitter. A tweets sticks to a location an can be private or public. People who use the app may have access to special deals. Monetizing in the sense of coupons. The app would incentivize people to explore and find gps-tweets.

A decade ago, there was a similar product called "Sekai Camera" [1]. In Japan it was heavily hyped and then spectacularly failed. Maybe it was too early. Maybe the implementation was bad. Or the idea isn't as great as it appears. We'll see.

  [1] https://wsa-global.org/winner/sekai-camera/
  [2] https://thebridge.jp/en/2013/12/sekai-camera-closes

Oh hey, I had this absolute exact idea 10 years ago. I ended up pivoting to something else, but I'll watch your development with keen interest :)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is one of the use-cases lots of people've thought up for location services + AR, over the last decade-plus.

It has the following problems:

1) A bad chicken/egg critical-mass problem for adoption. (Apple, Google, and maybe Facebook are best positioned to overcome this, if they built the feature in to their OS or apps)

2) Content moderation.

3) Even if you treat it as a friends-and-family thing rather than a more broadly social experience (which solves #1 and #2 fairly well) AR on a screened device is approximately 1,000x worse to use than on the hypothetical non-dorky and practically-useful-battery-life AR glasses that every major tech company seems to expect in our nearish future (judging by their continued emphasis on AR, despite its being kind-of a shit and gimmicky interface outside some niche uses on current hardware)

I suspect 2 and 3 are why FB, Google, or Apple haven't taken on the challenge in 1, yet. I expect they will if/when 3 gets solved, and this kind of real-world commenting/tagging thing will be widespread in a hurry.

yeah that makes sense. I was actually planning to do it based on hyper-geolocation as opposed to using the camera

Haha, likewise. I've been walking around for the past year thinking about how this should exist. Glad it does now!

This has literally been done tens of not hundreds of times. It’s probably one of the go-tos for students in any kind of art/hci class. I did it myself back in 2007 as a student with a partnership with Telefonica and the Catalan government in Spain!

every "hackathon" I went to for years had some try a variation of this. and "bill-splitting" apps. but... wtf - you're an adult who can afford an apple smart phone. how many times are you "splitting a bill" and having to settle up with people such that this is such a burden that you'll want to use an app for that? that one truly flummoxed me, but every hackathon event (pre-covid) I went to had people talking about this sort of problem.

I’ve seen these apps used at almost every company I’ve worked at that orders food delivery once or a few times per week.

What precisely where they using it for? Beware of the dog here?

I was talking about the bill splitting apps that are used in situations where the same group of people frequently orders food together.

Yeah, I worked with a team in 2001 developing a Palm Pilot version of something similar for military use.

I dreamed about owning a palm pilot when I was a child. I would sweat at the thought of owning one of these one day: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Palm_TX.... I recall they used to be about $200. Forgot they existed.

I love this. There's a virtual treasure hunt / digital geocaching application in there.

Absolutely agree! This is a really neat use of AR to me. I'm not sure how practical, but can definitely be fun.

I’ll add one more comment as a person who once worked on something similar to this. It looks like lots of people were working on “location based tweeting” around 10 years ago.

It makes sense as around that time Twitter was growing fast and location based services like Foursquare and Gowalla were popular. As well as Google/Niantic Ingress.

Our iteration was based on the concept of “shouts” that had a location and a visibility radius. Reshouts would increase the radius further.

Like the Darksouls soapstone inspired app, where people wrote messages on the coordinates they were.

Unsolicited idea: Constrain your marketing focus to a university town and you got yourself a million dollar idea.

Pittsburgh for example.

Have you considered linking this to Notion / Roam Research API etc?

Higher level concept than standalone 'sticky note' is worth exploring. Lots of indigenous cultures were/are based on memory techniques based on tying specific pieces of knowledge to exact locations: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29759605-the-memory-code

Twitter lets you search for tweets near any location. It's not an exact location because nobody really wants strangers on the internet to know their exact location.

Cool to see this space get some more activity. Wasn't this the general idea of Color Labs [1] way back like 10 years ago? It was a neat social experiment that suffered from over-hype and geographical limitations of networking effects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs

Neat idea, it just needs to be less centralized. A lot more people (myself included) would be interested if this was a federated protocol or API, and not limited just to iPhones. The real limiting factor here is going to be how well you can get other devices to work with it and developing the extensibility.

Not a bad suggestion but I would suggest that OP focuses on the main features rather than something like this. Otherwise you'll have a handful of very happy HN'ers while missing out on 95% of the market that doesn't care about a federated protocol.

It really depends on what kind of market you want to foster. It's nice having the 95%, but sometimes all you need are 1,000 True Fans[0].

[0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

I love the idea of juxtaposing real world location and invisible data.

There used to be an app that allowed to tag and write things on wall. It's of course only visible when you are on the spo.

I am huge believer in the coming of time and location restricted layering of data/art/app.

I started a company that did something very similar. Flook.it - We had grand ideas of locating all of the worlds geo data into what we called a location browser. We were one of the first apps on the iPhone. Still think it has legs...

This is awesome, I would love to see this as a feature in some documentation tools. It should not be the only way to consume it, but being able to put notes on a physical device could be awesome in some industrial applications.

Interesting concept! Personally, I'm not seeing much in terms of a practical application here but possibly a recreational one? I'm imagining a game of clue where you follow the notes to some sort of geocache location.

Looks amazing. How do you handle the changing environments?

A sticky note placed on a wall with something written on it should disappear if it's painted over. How do you handle that?

What about indoors where gps may not work?

> should disappear if it’s painted over

Why?

It would because it won't recognize that wall anymore. Gps can tell the location with limited accuracy. Rest is done by recognizing through camera.

Oh, I see, sorry. I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that you wouldn't disappear if the wall was painted over, but that you would want it to disappear.

If the positioning is precision enough, this could be have great applications in many industries.

Imagine having to tap into the work history of a machine and add latest repair works and notes for others.

Pretty stiff competition from attaching a clipboard to the machine. Also Siemens, Microsoft, and PTC.

Clipboards are perishable, can be lost, tampered with, etc.

Don't know what you mean by Siemens, Microsoft & PTC.

One alternative is to have QR codes that point to a dataset in a database.

>Clipboards are perishable, can be lost, tampered with, etc.

They sure are easy to set up and use though.

>Don't know what you mean by Siemens, Microsoft & PTC

I mean the corporations that already sell software licenses to factories have AR offerings that integrate with their systems.

Convincing smaller shops to convert from a clipboard mounted to the machine to an app is probably more realistic than a start-up getting conquest sales from these companies.

I’m curious about the name? I assumed (and I suspect most women would) it was going to have something to do with manicures or nail salons.

What's the background for choosing this name?

Reminds me of Findery

https://findery.com/

Looks like there are a few of us out here, but I had the exact same idea years ago as well :)

This is great. As AR starts to take off, I hope an industry standard for this gets created.

Nice concept! But what's stopping people from being a-holes and leaving shitty notes?

I'd say the same the same thing that stops (most of people) from writing shitty things on the walls (most of ppl don't feel the urge to) + usual moderation/flagging.

Would be better with AR glasses :-) but amazing work!

Will there be android support?

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