Million Dollar Idea Thread

#1

Post inventions/ideas you’ve had that you don’t have the resources and/or knowledge to patent and produce.

Here’s one I came up with recently that I really wish existed so I could use it:
It’s a DSLR camera docking station for your smartphone. Basically you take a typical DSLR camera and remove almost all the buttons, screen and processing hardware. Then, in their place, you put a dock for a smartphone. You use the camera’s lens and image sensing equipment to take the photos and then use the smartphone for processing and ui. The smartphone end of the operation is handled by a preferably open source app that allows you to access all the DSLR’s settings like on any current DSLR camera.

That’s the basic idea, but there’s a few additions to make it better. For example, the docking station would just be a large rectangular inset big enough to fit most phones. You’d then buy a 20-30 dollar case designed for your specific phone that would fit seamlessly into the rectangular inset on the DSLR. Also the DSLR dock could come with a typical DSLR camera’s battery to give it extra life and help power all the camera stuff. You could give it bluetooth capability so that you could take group photos with the camera end on a tripod and the smartphone end in your hand where you can access settings, preview the shot, and take the shot (not sure how this would effect the image processing, may not be possible). If the earlier part is practical, you could make the tripod screwhole on the bottom of the camera attached to some servos so you could use your smartphone to pan back and forth to better position the shot.

Basically you’d take the best of the DSLR cameras and combine it with the best of smartphones.

#2

Make ketchup packets, like, three times bigger.

#3

Universal Game Console with the graphical and processing capabilities of the highest performing game PC setup. That doesn’t stalk you. Shit would sell like weed at Woodstock.

Edit: I honestly have no clue if this exists or not.

#4

Y’know… you need to make sure to keep your own ideas to yourself, there’s no telling who’s prying eyes are watching on the internet and they may just steal said ideas from you. Just my 2 cents.

#5

Eh I don’t really care all that much. It’s a fantasy, nothing more. I don’t intend to run with it. I have other ideas…I don’t share those.

#6

I want to invent the cure for cancer, but I currently don’t have the means, money or knowledge to produce it.

But I do approve of this

#7

I had one idea I’m sure would make a ton of money, but I wouldn’t know how to make an online dating website. (which it would have a lot in common with, but isn’t.)

#8

A while back when I played some stuff on a friends Xbox 360 I thought it might be a good idea to replace the right joystick with a trackball for aiming instead but my friend didn’t think it would work. Fast forward a couple of years it pops into my head once again while playing Halo Reach at a friend’s house, and I look it up and it turns out somebody already made it.

#9

a device similar in build to a neatdesk scanner that sanitizes your money with some kind of uv ray.

Would cost 19.99 and make millions on amazon from dumbass moms and uncles who fear germs

#10

if it was able to somehow extract the coke that made up statistics suggest is all over cash it would pay for itself in no time too

#11

led spray paint

well basically the paint is made of r/g/b led lights with electric leads designed to form a network of pixels for the purpose of easily turning any surface into a color display monitor just by painting it (walls, roads, signs, etc.)

#12

Chick-fil-A and Whataburger already have these. They’re little plastic tubs with foil on top you rip off. More ketchup and you don’t have to squeeze it all over a tray or napkin or w/e.

They’re one of the best innovations in fast food history, it’s a wonder more chains don’t use them.

This is the sort of thing you’d probably have to make yourself. It would be really difficult to build one set of hardware to play every system’s games and emulation is pretty much out of the question, not to mention I doubt the console makers would buy into the idea. So you’d probably have to get each system, tear it down and build all the parts into a custom case like this guy named Ben Heck did. However, they did end up eventually making such a thing for the old school consoles, there are a few third party consoles that will play NES, SNES, and Genesis games.

Who knows though, with consoles moving towards x86, maybe it will be easier to accomplish such a thing, maybe then you could just have a custom PC with a boot loader to switch between consoles.

What my brother and I have been discussing is a way to effectively harness the power of heat. So much energy is lost as heat in many devices and so much of the sun’s energy is transformed into heat which dissipates into the ground and atmosphere. If we could somehow capture this heat energy and transform it into electricity we could make a substantial dent in our dependence on fossil fuels. Of course how to do it is the real trick, it would probably require some sort of advanced meta-material which we would have no idea how to design, and which might not be cost-effective at all.

#13

I want an iPod hookup that connects to your brain. Anytime you get a song going in your head, it will fade your playlist to the song that you’re thinking of. It helps me get songs un-stuck from my head by playing them.

A way to store backups of myself to a computer database to download to a clone body if I suffer an unfortunate accident (a la “Altered Carbon”) would be nice too.

#14

That would be nice, I’ve got a song that’s been stuck in my head for about a year but I can only remember a piece of the melody, and all my attempts to find it have failed.

I’ve heard it’s because your brain knows there’s more to it than what you can remember, so it keeps playing it over and over again trying to remember the rest of it.

#15

Underwear that turns farts into soothing tunes and fresh lemon scent.

#16

Rob a bank for a million dollars.

#17

Completely off-topic side track because this is a super interesting philosophical question. If you were to have such an accident and copy yourself, would the copy be you? I would say no. Imagine you had no accident, but copied yourself anyway. Obviously the clone wouldn’t be you, you’d still be you. So why should the operation work any differently just because the original was destroyed? So basically there’s no point in backing yourself up other than comforting those who would miss you.

I want someone to steal my idea just so I can buy the damn thing and use it. I’m pretty sure some company is going to make a smartphone DSLR sooner or later, I just wish it’d happen sooner. AFAIK there’s absolutely no technical limitation, and hasn’t been for years, that would make the idea unfeasible.

Seeing as a lot of these have been more of “I wish I could have this” rather than “I came up with this realistic invention” I’ll throw in one of mine:
A chip in my brain with direct access to the internet. Preferably with a database of information designed to be accessed in the same manner as knowledge stored in your brain so I’d practically have infinite knowledge.

#18

^ As to your first point, that reminds of the question of teleporters in the style of transporters in Star Trek; do they actually move you, or do they just destroy you and then make a copy?

#19

I would suggest the latter, and by the same thought experiment. You would functionally die, yet not a person would know the difference.

#20

Virtual reality machine. You’ll be unconscious within the machine, but within your mind, you’re able to do whatever, sorta like a lucid dream, and you can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell just as you would in real life, and you remember everything once you wake up.

I’d climb Everest, fly, go to other planets, and shit like that…[COLOR=‘Black’]and maybe have a little sex too…

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