Geometric Gauge, the Instrument.
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Geometric Gauge, some background on its invention.

Geometric Gauge is the first and only instrument designed since the dawn of the Information Age. There is no other. In every preceding era the necessary inventions were made in that era. This was required to advance the then current state of the art. These inventions were made to solve specific shortcomings of previous inventions pressed into service because nothing better existed at the time.

In the Information Age era we face a few constraints. Some of them are Safety, Information Overload, Resource scarcity, Production efficiency and financial efficacy for best ROI. All of these must be addressed to be able to survive and make a profit and is the same across all industries. There is a perpetual search for improvement of everything, to quote NASA "Faster Better Cheaper"

Information overload is mostly a Safety issue. Being overloaded leads to a loss of concentration with regards to the primary task at hand. This in turn causes humans to make mistakes. Information overload is not too much information, but a time deficit issue. Given more time we can process all information, it may just take much longer than we want it to.

To allow us to process less Information, a smarter way to read, or a way to process information faster, eventually led to the invention of Geometrica.

The Benefits of Geometric Gauge

We solve a number of problems with Geometric gauge. One of the most important ones is that of Safety. With Geometric Gauge there is no need to take focus away from what you are currently doing to get informed by instruments. As long as Geometric Gauge is in your peripheral field of view, the information will be perceived instantly.

Geometric shapes provide the means to display data. As humans are such good shape processors, and shapes can be recognized perfectly in peripheral vision, accurately and very fast, this gives us the ideal means to get data into our minds without reading. If a Geometric shape is distorted in any way, even if only by a small margin, our brains can pick this up accurately. As we exaggerate this distortion when the signal conditions require attention, it eases the brains process to recognize this fact. By using geometric shapes and its distortion together with the redundant encoding of information onto the shapes, we get into a situation where we do not require any numbers or text to show the values of the data. As there are no numbers to read, we do not need to focus on the instrument. This also eliminates interpretation errors and speeds up the process of information gathering, and dramatically improves Safety.

The shapes we use in Geometric Gauge includes circles, squares, triangles, pentagons and hexagons. These shapes are the easiest to distinguish and encode with data, without being confusing. The number of shapes displayed simultaneously is limited to no more than four, to keep the shape size reasonable. Shapes that are too small are difficult to recognize and distortions cannot be seen as readily.

Geometric Gauge as Status indicator

Another very big advantage of Geometric Gauge is the fact that it converts signal data to status information. This allows the technology to monitor very complex systems accurately, in a very simple way. When we monitor a signal, Geometric gauge converts the signal to a shape and to a status. When there are a number of these signals combined in a number of shapes, we may use the shape status and build a new shape where each side represents a shape on a lower level. In this way, via multiple layers in the hierarchy, we can monitor complex systems easily on a single shape.

Geometrica is a rule set based system. This means that there is a set of defined rules that apply to all data. This controls the display, shapes and status information as well as the propagation from lower levels in the hierarchy to higher levels.

This is what the bottom level looks like. On all excluding the second shape, all data is within acceptable levels. On the first Square shape, the data of three sensors are within acceptable limits but the sensor displayed on top is outside its high limit. Bottom level (Normally hidden)

This is the Top level, this is what we monitor

When a signal is driven outside its limits as defined for a system, and the rule set determines that the condition is severe enough, the status is propagated to the top level. We then see this condition as a broken shape with the colour changed to red to indicate the new status. There is normally an icon associated with each side of the shape to remind us what we are looking at.

In this condition we can manually drill down to the data layer to see exactly what is wrong. If so configured and controlled by the rule set, the system can drill down automatically as well.