Ever since reading about Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs) I have been fascinated by the idea of all the possibilities linking two minds together could bring. After reading this incredibly long and detailed article about Elon Musk’s ideas for this sort of interface I have been hooked. My ideas for this are also largely influenced by “The Hydrogen Sonata” by Ian Banks which is where Elon got his initial idea for this concept as a young boy. The interface in the book, and on Elon’s company is a “Neural Lace” that sits on top of the brain and is able to read/write thought data in order to Ultimately back a human up to the cloud, and also gain all sorts of incredibly amazing (and terrifying) abilities that come with that sort of a device.
Obsidian does not have a BMI feature yet (perhaps it’s in Alpha) but since discovering the service last week it has sparked some fascinating thoughts about what it is potentially capable of.
First and likely easiest to implement is a shared vault with another. I know I am not at all the first one to think of this, but I wanted to articulate it here.
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Sharing a vault with a significant other and being able to merge all of your memories about your relationship, your child, your experiences, etc. into a single graph.
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Collaborating with coworkers and being able to work on a project together while understanding the connections that led to each decision they made about the feature they are working on. Being able to understand the why intuitively without having to discover it via discussion would make the flow of the design process much smoother I think.
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Being able to interview an older family member who is beginning to suffer from memory loss and have the ability to build a map of their mind together.
Ultimately what I think fascinates me so much about this idea is that this is the first service I have seen that can merge two minds into one in any sort of visual representation. And, the visual representation is everything here. Graph view shows the connections like nothing else I have ever interacted with, particularly on the scales that it is capable of showing. As for how to do this, I think it might be possible right now by setting up a collaborative file in G-Docs (which is how I sync across devices currently), or you may have to share a single account with another. Looking forward to experimenting with this.
This leads me to something even more exciting which would be the ability to see the graph in AR/VR, and have a 3D representation of the model. Imagine being able to put on glasses and see the nodal network fill the space around you! You could interact with the nodes and move them through 3D space to better understand the problem you were working with. When you touch a particular node it could bring up the Obsidian interface and show you all relevant information, and you could follow the backlink connection lines to every other relevant topic.
As a disclaimer I am by no means a power user of Obsidian yet, just a fascinated observer. The potential for all of this excites me like nothing else I have come across lately. I’m looking forward to building out my notes into a much more robust collection and using it to help my creativity flourish.
Let me know if you have more thoughts! I am really interested to see what other people think.