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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

The title doesn't lie. I've scrolled about a kilometer and I've learned everything from GNSS, mesh networks, how to pair units and privacy implications.

But I have absolutely no idea what is is.

What does it do? Why would anyone want one?

So it seems it has a vibe mode and a compass mode. You can pair with four other totems and if you tilt it up you can find them. How? I don't know but supposedly the arrow get's brighter when you point it in the right direction maybe?

Vibe mode blinks with the music.

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Strangely, I found the image at the beginning to be very informative: (https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65e4ed3b65febd941c403512/...)

Each person's device shows the bearing to each other person's device, based on color. You can find other people with linked devices, and the UI looks dead simple after pairing is complete.

I had that same issue. (To be fair, this is a deep link to the page explaining how it works, not what it is.)

Anyway, the main page explains it: https://www.totemlabs.com/

Basically you and several friends get these devices, go to a festival or event together, and it helps you find physically find each other. The display indicates which direction they are relative to you.

This means you don't have to play the "let's meet back here in 90 minutes" game.

Obviously you can just use a cell phone, but that only works if there's good coverage.

In large events (100k+ people within a square km or so) cell phone networks often get saturated to the point of not working anymore. You can have 5 bars but not be able to download anything because the cell site is overloaded.

Theme park + teens seems like a use case.

I read the article and it beautifully explained that it is a tool for people at public gatherings like festivals to easily be able to find each other. And to be able to alert friends to find one of one would feel uneasy in a situation.

The direction of your paired friends is indicated by the max. Four lights at the outer ring. The compass tracks the direction you are going towards and this way, by aligning the "needle" with the target light it leads you to your friend.

Go to the homepage. https://www.totemlabs.com/ The OP article looks much more like something to read if you know what it is, and want to know how the engineering team pulled it off.

They're for keeping track of and finding friends at events like raves or big concerts. I don't know if this one does, but others have an "I'm in distress" feature that alerts all their friends as well.

Disclaimer: I've never used one. Well, honestly, I've never been to a rave or huge concert, so I'm not the target audience.

Yeah, they've got an SOS button on the back that'll (silently) make your friends' devices blink to say "come find me." Not sure how noticeable it would be on the dance floor without a noise or vibrate, though.

So how did they solve the "horrible people exist and will use this to stalk and murder their victims" problem?

Normalizing these types of things is not great, imo, and I'm not sure even Apple has pulled it off yet, with their airtags. Any tech that is tracking and surveilling you can be used to track and surveil you, and any company that doesn't explicitly say "we will not harvest, monetize, abuse, or otherwise misuse your data" will harvest and sell your data, using "industry standard" anonymization or other techniques to sell a false sense of security. Any bits of data you give away are bad, but gps style realtime location tracking is dangerous as hell.

Phones are bad enough - not sure I appreciate the niche this is filling, or why "even more robust" tracking that works when phones don't is a positive.

Plan ahead, use walkie talkies with your buddies if there's no phone service, or so on, the potential for harm from this tech seems to heavily outweigh any ephemeral convenience.

> So how did they solve the "horrible people exist and will use this to stalk and murder their victims" problem?

My making you pair them with your friends.

> not sure I appreciate the niche this is filling, or why "even more robust" tracking that works when phones don't is a positive.

You've never tried tracking friends with phones in a super-crowded place where the cell network is falling over, like a baseball game or concert venue.

> Plan ahead, use walkie talkies with your buddies

That's a great idea! Plan ahead and use a radio-based device to find and navigate to where your friends are.

You know. Like the one in this article.

Addressed in the linked article:

> Can the Totem Compass allow someone to follow me home?

> The Totem Compass is designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to follow you home after the event. Because the Unity Mesh Network™ relies on other compasses to communicate, when the festival disbands, the mesh network disappears. At that point, the max range reverts to the peer-to-peer range of 500-1000 meters.

> Once you get in your car or rideshare vehicle at the end of the night, you will quickly get out of range of anyone else who bonded with your compass. This means that the only way someone could track you after the festival is if you keep your compass on, and if they stay within 500-1000 meters of you during your entire trip.

Why the thing doesn't just have an off switch...

It does have an off switch. Repeating from the above for emphasis:

  This means that the only way someone could track you after the festival is if you **keep your compass on**

Also implied in the instructions when you arrive at the festival:

  Turn on your Totem Compass

When I saw the headline I was really ready to make fun of it and say it sounds like more of a Burning Man art project than a viable product, but after reading the linked article, it seems like they really put much more thought into this than I was inclined to give this sort of device credit for.

It looks like it lets you send very low-information signals that allows you to ping, check status for, and navigate to other device-holders you are paired with.

It seems interesting, but I think it could use smartphone pairing and chat capabilities to actually get off the ground.

Also, for a device intended for festivals, fall is a poor release date. Most of the year's festivals will be concluded.

Step 2 is: you go where we say.

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