Collectively Sharing People’s Visual and Auditory Capabilities: Exploring Opportunities and Pitfalls

The sharing economy, virtualizing the peer-to-peer-based sharing of physical or logical resources such as cars, houses or people’s spare time with digital technologies, has recently attracted a great deal of attention. Investigating the feasibility of sharing other types of physical resources, particularly human bodies, offers promising opportunities with which to expand the current scope of the sharing economy. This study explores the opportunities and pitfalls of collectively sharing parts of the body, particularly human eyes and ears, to build and explore novel services based on wearable cameras and microphones. The paper proposes a novel concept named CollectiveEyes to realize a digital platform for collectively sharing human seeing and hearing, then presents a prototype platform of CollectiveEyes to demonstrate key features of CollectiveEyes. The essential contribution of the paper is that it reveals potential opportunities and pitfalls of collectively sharing physical capabilities of the human eyes and ears for building a novel digital platform and diverse services on the platform. We mainly found the following two promising research directions extracted from the current study: (1) CollectiveEyes enhances human thinking abilities through multiple visual perspectives; (2) nonhuman’s visual perspectives offer potential opportunities to access more diverse perspectives for augmenting human thinking abilities.