AR – Page 2 – ɔimoɈɒ

from Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality

Published in 1993, Cybergeneration was a radical departure from R.Talsorian Games’ previous successful Cyberpunk line. Whereas the latter focussed on style over substance, high calibre firearms and heavily armoured Solos backed up by geeky NetRunners, CyberGeneration focussed on the kids of these embittered mercenaries and endowed them with nanotech-derived superpowers. In Cybergeneration, the Net became … Continue reading “from Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality”

In Cybergeneration, the Net became actualised from Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality. Individuals would see augmented reality objects as readily as they would see real world objects – 3D objects in realspace. At the time I knew that IP addresses were ‘geotagged’ but this was long before we realised that GPS units could be embedded into superslim phones that were always net-connected.

This week we also saw Metaplace, one of the many 3D Virtual Worlds with User Generated Content, fall by the wayside. “It raised $9.4 million over two rounds of funding with that goal in mind, managing to get the buy-in from new investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz last October.” but they just announced their closure on Jan 1st, 2010. I think this is typical because Virtual Worlds require you to sit in front of a computer and limit your interaction through keyboard and mouse pointer. In a 3D world, the mouse pointer becomes a single fingertip by which you interact with the world. For Augmented Reality, we have to avoid the mobile phone screen becoming a keyhole by which we view the world. We have to be able to touch it and to hear it.

Earlier this week, Edo Segal, write a guest post on Techcrunch describing a cyberpunk story he wrote 16 years ago which involved augmented reality and I’d hesitate to link this with Cybergeneration (despite the identical publishing year).

Edo reckons the building blocks of an augmented reality system have to be more than we currently have, which amounts to little more than search. He sees the four main blocks as being:

Realtime Web (Twitter, news flows, world events, and other information which relates to changes in the world)
Published Information (sites, blogs, Wikipedia, etc.)
Geolocation Data (your location and information layers related to it, including your past locations and that of your friends, as well as geo-tagged media)
Social Communications (social graph updates, IMs, emails, text messages, and other forms of signal from your friends).

and he handily provides a diagram.

but he says something in the Techcrunch post which resonates:

One only needs look at a teenager today as they do their homework, watch TV, play a game, and chat while watching their Facebook stream to get a sense for humanity’s expanding affinity to consume ambient streams. Their young minds are constanty tuning and adapting to an age of hypertasking.

and I reckon that this is being unfair to some of us oldies. In March of this year, I met with Ewan McIntosh, one of the 4IP commissioners and part of the round-table chat included the admission that he watches TV with a laptop on his lap and a mobile phone on the arm of the chair beside him. This is how my household watches TV. The concept of not being connected while consuming information is alien to me. I want to look around the periphery of it, I want to dig deeper and, at the moment, technology is failing me.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Augmented Reality at the moment is a sham. It’s all search and toys. Either you’re pulling geotagged information from one of the search engines or content silos (and I include Wikipedia here) or you’re using geotags and fiduciary markers to drop toys here and there. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s not enough to be just tagging stuff and re-presenting it as your own. There has to be something novel coming out of it – even if it’s just the presentation of context.

The CyberGeneration example is a good one. Their solution, Virtuality, included the presentation of interactive tools in Virtuality – whether those be musical instruments or even keyboards and computers. We’re touching the edges of a world where hardware itself is virtualised and made into software. We’ve already seen this done in something as simple as the ‘Compass’ app on the iPhone – it’s a virtualised hardware solution projected onto a multi-purpose handheld display. At some point we’ll figure out how to internalise that display and I reckon that MIT’s Sixth Sense technology is probably one way of doing it (though I guess that having a projector on your chest is a limitation of the technology we’re currently using rather than a potential prototype)/

In early 2010, I’d like to invite some of the other players in AR-related technology in Northern Ireland, like Awakin, Filmtrip, the Design Zoo, ReDisc0very, Ulster MediaScapes and others to have a “DevDays” type event where we talk about the very possibilities of augmented reality solutions. Some of them read this blog, some don’t – but I’d like to hear of other folk in the province (and beyond) who are interested i talking and/or presenting in a BarCamp-esque situation.

Objet d’AR

From About.com: Art History Definition: (noun) – French for “object of art.” An objet d’art is something small and decorative – such as a miniature painting, or porcelain statuette, or the hand-print your 4-year-old child made in wet plaster and decorated with glitter when it had dried – that has artistic value. At least, to … Continue reading “Objet d’AR”

From About.com: Art History

Definition:
(noun) – French for “object of art.” An objet d’art is something small and decorative – such as a miniature painting, or porcelain statuette, or the hand-print your 4-year-old child made in wet plaster and decorated with glitter when it had dried – that has artistic value. At least, to you, its owner. (In other words: somebody is going to have to dust that little dust-catching objet, and that person will likely be you. Make sure it’s something you value!)

At the moment there’s broadly two types of AR (Augmented Reality) out there.

Search
Objet d’AR

Search is simply the overlay of data on an AR display. This data commonly comes from retailer indexes, wikipedia, public transport timetables and other sources of data which can be geo-located. These mechanisms commonly use GPS units in smart phones to provide key data. This is an incredibly quickly growing area with multiple competing applications for the same services – whether that’s the London Tube or access to geo-located search data provided by Google or Microsoft Bing.

Objet d’AR is my pet name for most of the fiducial marker-based projects which are appearing all over the web and also in print. We’ve seen them all over Youtube, on the front of Empire magazine, and even in marketing promotions for toys and movies. The Objet d’AR tends to have very little utliity but presents a lot of opportunities for amusement.

So, have you seen any examples of Augmented Reality that extends beyond Search and Objet d’AR?

Where’s the innovative work in AR?

ProgrammerJoe (Joe Ludwig) writes: My discouragement has less to do with Layar specifically than it does with the entire category of tricorder augmented reality. The view through the mobile phone and its camera is less useful than a top-down map would be for every piece of data I have seen so far. For my layer … Continue reading “Where’s the innovative work in AR?”

ProgrammerJoe (Joe Ludwig) writes:

My discouragement has less to do with Layar specifically than it does with the entire category of tricorder augmented reality. The view through the mobile phone and its camera is less useful than a top-down map would be for every piece of data I have seen so far. For my layer in particular, the rider is very likely to know where the stop is. In situations like that where location is unimportant, both the Reality View and Map View actually get in the way.

This experience has led me to two conclusions. First, augmented vision is pointless until head-mounted displays are available. I already felt that way, so now I am just more firm in my belief. Second, filtering data to a useful subset for display is actually the hard problem. Job listing sites, travel sites, Ecommerce sites, and review sites already knew this, which is why they spend so much effort on search. Turns out the problem is the same for mobile location-aware services.

The problem here is that we’re looking at a entire toybox and trying to figure out which game to play?

Some people are looking at markers, interpreting a video display and displaying mini-Darth Vaders or animated coloured cubes. Other people are drawing information from GPS, compass, accelerometer, comparing to built-in databases and overlaying graphics on them. There’s minimal consideration for user interface, for the appropriateness of content – there’s just the hype and the fear of being left behind. There’s too much focus on graphics on screen and, as a result, the use case is people being led around the streets by their phones without consideration of the arm strain, eye strain and the possibility of not noticing the quickly-approaching hatchback car as you cross a road.

At the moment, I’m disappointed that every AR press release is mee-too-ism. There’s a hype storm and the winds are buffering us even as we sleep. We’ve even seen the backlash from folk who are starting to realise that it’s not the panacea. AR is not a useful technology in itself – it becomes useful when you include context – whether that is time, location, heading or any of the data that input into the device.

There’s more to AR than cramming icons onto a tiny screen. Who wants to view the world through a 3.5″ screen anyway? It’s not even about icons on screen! Where’s the innovation in haptic and audio AR?

Thinking different about AR

Gene Becker starts tearing into the current crop of AR Hypeware with a litany of design faults such as Inaccuracy of position, direction, elevation Line of sight Lat/long is not how we experience the world Simplistic, non-standard data formats Public gesture & social ambiguity Ergonomics Small screen visual clutter These are going to plague AR … Continue reading “Thinking different about AR”

Gene Becker starts tearing into the current crop of AR Hypeware with a litany of design faults such as

Inaccuracy of position, direction, elevation
Line of sight
Lat/long is not how we experience the world
Simplistic, non-standard data formats
Public gesture & social ambiguity
Ergonomics
Small screen visual clutter

These are going to plague AR apps though many of the issues are relevant to any mobile application. We have additional limits not mentioned such as in the difference between online storage (which is theoretically unlimited yet static) as opposed to online storage (which is even larger and even dynamic to the point of interactive but subject to signal drop out and bandwidth issues which limit the utility).

I’ve thought about some of these issues – Line of Sight being one specific issue and my resolution was using the OpenStreetMap vector data as an opaque underlay (as opposed to the AR overlay) on an AR camera view in an attempt to obscure some items which should not be seen in line of sight. It’s a hack, it’s a cludge, it’s yet another layer to manage but it might just work.

The Ergonomics and Gesture/Social Ambiguity arguments are going to depend where the AR use it but suffice to say that there’s a lot of work for Mobile apps to use AR ‘vision’ at the moment and not enough work in ‘AR audio’ and ‘AR haptics’. These are going to make it very possible for better AR experiences that do not require holding your phone at an awkward angle. These also, coincidentally, solve some of the issues with small screen clutter – something that has already been solved in both iPhone apps (where we can see examples of excellence as well as the polar opposite) and, ironically, in another Apple device which doesn’t have a screen.

The data formats issue will become moot at some point as we see standards arising not only from platforms gaining prominence not only in the AR space but also in all Location-Aware applications and the Open Data formats which are being pursued by forward-thinking governments.

The problem is that it’s an exciting time. It’s not dissimilar to the web but at least everyone was on a single protocol base there. We all used IP, we all used HTTP and HTML.

Where do we go from there with AR? Where are the published datasources which any AR browser can hook into? At the moment we will have a proliferation of different platforms, companies wanting to have plugins for their platform developed for every service. This is the wrong way to go.

AR – Openness and Interoperability

Y’see, it’s all about the SPAM. From 5 barriers to a web that’s everywhere Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability … Continue reading “AR – Openness and Interoperability”

Y’see, it’s all about the SPAM.

From 5 barriers to a web that’s everywhere

Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever. (A lack of data portability when it comes to Augmented Reality could cause substantial psychological distress!)

As they continue in the article, no-one has yet published anything representing an open platform free of legal fears but there is an obvious attempt to create a beachhead by a couple of companies and it’s going to take a while for this to settle.

I have a mixed opinion. Control will go to the user and while I tolerate adverts in the web, I wouldn’t want them in Twitter and I won’t want them in my AR lenses unless they are heavily influenced by context. At the moment I see adverts based on the content of the web pages I visit or, in the case of television, on the time and channel – which leads to a very unsatisfactory experience. I don’t care about your 1U servers or your blades. I won’t be replacing my graphics card and I’m probably never going to buy a giant plush microbe.

If I’m walking along the road using my AR browser, I don’t want to see adverts for tampons, viagra, designer watches, managed servers, custom business logos or whatever. The real world is filled with advertising already, I only want to see adverts that have chosen context.

If we move to a standard display platform, like we have with the web, will I still have control over what gets downloaded to my handset? Remember, the data deal we sign up to with our phones is very different to our home broadband. If we step outside an arbitrary border, we start racking up huge charges. Coverage is often poor and every image is going to be worth thousand and thousands of words so online advertising is going to drain our pockets and leech our patience in new and tedious ways.

I’m all for an open platform – but let me choose the filters by which I can see the augmented world.

Welcome to the Desert of the Unreal

A bit more about AR (pr LR: Layered Reality) to whet your appetite. I previously speculated that things would get really interesting when Linden Labs released their AR platform or plugin. The beauty will not, however, be in the presence of avatars in LayeredReality but in the presence of buildings. That said, being handed virtual … Continue reading “Welcome to the Desert of the Unreal”

A bit more about AR (pr LR: Layered Reality) to whet your appetite.

I previously speculated that things would get really interesting when Linden Labs released their AR platform or plugin.

The beauty will not, however, be in the presence of avatars in LayeredReality but in the presence of buildings. That said, being handed virtual flyers by virtual people in real streets has some interest – but only because it beats the real alternative. Handing out flyers is a shit job – something we should use software for.

This, and other examples are at GamesAlFresco’s top 10 augmented reality demos which will revolutionise video games. To a degree, I believe them.

The potential for AR is amazing and finally within our grasp.

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