[Edited hopefully for clarity]
Sally comes home and finds harry immersed at the computer watching a video on youtube or entering an idea on HB. She presses the button near the door and RDTV takes a picture of her smiling and saying hi. She then goes to the kitchen to make coffee. When she reaches the kitchen she hits the RDTV I'M HERE button.
Harry's PC has a popup that says Real Distraction 1.0 message: "Hi!" with Sally's picture smiling. Under the pic it says: you have 10 seconds to respond. Please choose: a. Tell her about the flowers you bought. b. Tell her you'll be with her in ____ minutes. c. Get up and go over to her in person.
If you choose a, the speakers in the kitchen read your message or play it recorded by you. Sally gives you points by clicking the LIKE or DISLIKE up to 3 times. (Clicking both puts it back to 0).
Of course, the system works both ways. So Harry could initiate a "challenge" and Sally responds to it. The system allows the challenging person to give the responding person points for answering nicely, and even more points if you prepared something for them (like flowers, a nice meal, a funny story to tell them, or even a few minutes to listen to their rant about what happened at work).
The responding person get points for the speed of response, and those can be enhanced by feedback from the challenge caller.
If there is no response to the challenge, or if there is no feedback given for the response within a short time, there are points lost.
Videos of challenges and responses can be made public, only if both partners agree about it.
The idea is to save the couple from a long evening of steaming silence, following the response of a grunt or no response at all - to the call of "Hi" when the other spouse entered the house, and to turn the partnership game into fun to play, while overcoming the internet and TV addiction.
RDTV 1.0 comes with 10 small wifi enabled consoles which include a webcam, a microphone, speakers and a few input buttons. These are to be set, one outside the gate, two on the inside and outside of your house door, one on the fridge, one or two near the kid's computer(s) and the rest in different places in the house including two sides of each couch.
The RDTV 1.0 system is integrated with youtube and with your TV station (Here's a job for NDS to do for Sky TV).
Once your comfortable with the system, you could add the children in. Here's where the idea is halfbaked, and to be continued by the smart people of this website.
[To be released soon. Do not read on] --- ---- ----- ---- ----- ----- ----- ------ -------
Please read the annotations to see how this idea should be implemented, for a more positive life in the digital era.-- pashute, Nov 19 2011 The link that started me on this idea http://news.bbc.co...._online/9640887.stm [pashute, Nov 19 2011] I think Microsoft is patenting your idea, with added features for evil. http://m.theregiste...mployee_monitoring/ [swimswim, Nov 20 2011] Half Memos http://www.wordsmit...she+Flam&t=1000&a=n(at anagram maker) [pashute, Nov 22 2011] I just showed this to me wife. She promised me a halfpastry, as long as I wash the dishes and prepare something for tomorrow's breakfast...-- pashute, Nov 19 2011 Is 'halfpastry' a euphemism?-- AusCan531, Nov 20 2011 I just found out that my name is an anagram to Half Memos.
[Edited, for clarity (I hope)]-- pashute, Nov 22 2011 random, halfbakery