This is why showers are great.
So, I've had an idea for a sort of a game/social experiment program thing: boxes.
Boxes sections off a bit of your hard drive into a special folder, called your box. You can put whatever type of files in there that you want, it doesn't matter. But anyway, your box stores files, like a regular computer folder. Whenever your computer is online, the contents of your box is also online, and visible through a Boxes client. The client program is a 3D, first person world, in which there is a room, and two boxes. When you start the program, your box is there in the room, and so is another random user's box.
They are portrayed as physical cardboard boxes. The room isn't empty, it has a bookshelf, a bed, a window, and all sorts of things. The types of furniture or items in a room are picked at random, so the room you go to is always different. The view out of the window is literally the Google Streetview of the midpoint between your location and the location of the other anonymous user.
But I digress. Anyway, there are two boxes, containing physical representations of the files. Word documents show up as paper, audio files as cassette tapes, records or CDs (based on the quality of the recording), photos show up as framed photographs (with procedurally generated frames, PDF or ebook files as books, executables as games or software on a disk, etc. The storage of your "box" is based upon how much real life space these items would take up.
Anyway, the fun starts when you open the boxes. All of the devices necessary to use the items in the boxes are present in the room (phonograph, computer, etc.), so you can take things out of either box, and use them in the 3D environment. You can take things from your box, and put them in the other person's box, or the other way around. Anything left outside of a box when you walk out of the room is deleted.
So basically, you open someone else's box, and see what they have. You can take things, leave things, or just put them back. You can spend as much time there as you like, but there's only one catch: you can only go into a room once per day, and your box can only be randomly accessed once per day. That prevents somebody from deleting all the files in your box every five minutes. So what it basically boils down to is: put cool stuff in your box, share things with strangers, and see what happens.
I think it would be a fairly interesting program to make, if not requiring a massive budget that I will never have. It was just a shower thought, and I thought I would share it with you guys.
