Augmented World Expo 2013 was really an amazing experience. I’m co-founder and co-organizer of the conference, along with Ori Inbar, so it has meant a lot to me to see our event grow over the last four years, and thrilling to make such a big splash this year.  There were 1,163 attendees, and the expo show cased an ecosystem of emerging technologies – augmented reality, gesture interaction, eyewear, wearables, and connected hardware of  many stripes, that mark the beginning of natural computing entering the mainstream. It was a unique opportunity to get up close and personal with what it feels like to be an augmented human in an augmented world!

Videos of AWE 2013′s 35 hours of educational sessions and inspirational keynotes are now available on our YouTube channel. I am sharing my own talk (my slides are also up on slideshare here), and a few of my favorites in this post, but there are far to many to post here, so please browse further on the Augmented World Expo youtube channel.

One notable high point of AWE2013, for me, was the showcase sponsored by Meta, a startup developing the first device allowing visualization and interaction with 3D virtual objects in the real world using your hands. It was made possible by the generous contribution from the private collections of Paul Travers, Dan Cui, Steven Feiner, Steve Mann, and Chris Grayson, and passionate volunteers who are helping advance the industry. Sean Hollister of The Verge did this excellent report on the eyewear showcase 35 years of wearable computing history at Augmented World Expo 2013
Also for more on Meta see this article by Dan Farber.

My colleagues at Syntertainment, Will Wright, Avi Bar-Zeev, Jason Shankel, and LaurenElliott all gave great talks. Ironically, we’re not building augmented reality apps or H/W. We all just happen to continue to be very interested in the field.  

Thank you to everyone for supporting the event!

The press coverage was truly extensive:

In the shadow of Google Glass, an augmented reality industry revs its engines
The Verge, Sean Hollister, June 9, 2013, 271 Tweets

The next big thing in tech: Augmented reality
CNET, Dan Farber, June 7, 2013
Pick up on Current News Daily
350 Tweets

AWE 2013 Conference Report: Augmented Reality and Marketing
The Persuaders Marketing Podcast on Dublin City FM, June 23, 2013

AR Dirt Podcast – Ori Inbar AWE2013 Extravaganza Recap
AR Dirt by Joseph Rampolla, June 18, 2013

35 years of wearable computing history at Augmented World Expo 2013
The Verge, Sean Hollister, June 9, 2013
7 Tweets

Augmented Reality: Bruce Sterling, keynote at Augmented World Expo 2013
Wired, Bruce Sterling, June 9, 2013
9 Tweets

On the road for VR: Augmented World Expo 2013
Doc-Ok, Staff, June 7, 2013
3 Tweets

My Interview from Augmented World Expo 2013 [VIDEO] Wassom.com, Brian Wassom, June 7, 2013

Augmented World Expo
ZenFri, Staff, June 7, 2013

AWE2013: Hardware for an augmented world
FBNSantos.com, Felipe Neves Dos Santos, June 6, 2013

Augmented Reality Will Be the New Reality
InvestorPlace, Brad Moon, June 6, 2013

Wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann: Who watches the watchmen?
TechHive, Armando Rodriguez, June 6, 2013

Expo puts augmented reality in the limelight
ABC 7 News, Jonathan Bloom, June 5, 2013

These OLED microdisplays are the future of augmented reality
DVICE, Evan Ackerman, June 5, 2013

Visualized: a history of augmented and virtual reality eyewear
Engadget, Michael Gorman, June 5, 2013

Wikitude announces Wikitude Studio and in-house developed IR & Tracking engine
PapiTV, KC Leung, June 5, 2013

Augmented reality expo aims for sci-fi future today
USA Today, Marco della Cava, June 5, 2013

Augmented Reality: High Dynamic Range (HDR) Video Image Processing For Digital Glass
Wired, Bruce Sterling, June 5, 2013

Will Wright at Augmented Reality Conference: Don’t Augment Reality, Decimate It
AllThingsD, Eric Johnson, June 4, 2013

Philip Rosedale’s Second Life with High Fidelity
CNET, Dan Farber, June 4, 2013

Google Glass competitors vie for attention as industry grows
PC World, Zack Miners for IDG News Service, June 4, 2013

4D Augmented Reality Leader Daqri Announces $15 Million Financing
Press Release, June 4, 2013

CrowdOptic Powers Lancome Virtual Gallery App, Crowd-powered Heat Map
TechZone 360, Peter Bernstein, June 3, 2013

Augmented humans, enhanced happiness?
Crave Culture, Angelica Weihs, June 2, 2013

Metaio & Vuzix to Showcase AR-Ready Smart Glasses at the 2013 Augmented World Expo
Press Release, May 30, 2013

Four ways augmented reality will invade your life in 2013
Quartz, Rachel Feltman, May 30, 2013

Augmented Reality: Augmented World Expoâ„¢ is next week
Wired, Bruce Sterling, May 28, 2013

Strike it Rich with Cachetown and AWE 2013 Playing the Gold Rush 49’er Challenge In Augmented Reality
Press Release, May 24, 2013

Local Community College Student Headed to Silicon Valley to Learn More about Augmented Reality
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Staff, May 24, 2013

Explore an intricate labyrinth with smartphone AR
CNET Australia, Michelle Starr, May 21, 2013

Dartmouth firm lands super app
Herald Business, Remo Zaccagna, May 21, 2013

Augmented World Expo 2013–The Future of Augmented Reality
Silicon Angle, Saroj Kar, May 17, 2013

Meanwhile enjoy Rick Merritt’s great write up of IoToaster (reprinted from EE Times).

“Y Combinator hackathon’s prize-winning designs”

“An Internet Toaster, two pair of faux Google glasses and two novel electronic gloves emerged from a hackathon organized by Upverter and hosted by Y Combinator. SAN JOSE, Calif. – Imagine sending an Instagram to your Internet toaster and printing it—on whole wheat or white bread. Imagine creating your own vision for a variant of Google’s Project Glass.

Those were among the 32 projects from more than 130 designers at a recent all-day event organized by Upverter.com and hosted by Y Combinator, a startup incubator in Mountain View, Calif.

Winners took home iPads, Pebble watches, Arduino kits and Raspberry Pi boards after dedicating about 10 hours of their Saturday to hacking on their best ideas. Some took with them hopes of products that could make it to the market or new-formed teams that could be the heart of a new startup. Others just had a good time.

Here’s a look at some of the winners.

Printing on whole wheat or white

The IO Toaster (above) is sort of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of social electronics. It’s an Internet-connected combo toaster/printer that creators say can “bring the cloud to your breakfast.”

The team adapted code from an LED matrix to control heat transmission down to the pixel level. They hope to present the device at the Augmented World Expo at SXSW as well as at other hackathons and hardware meetups.

The team included Sam Cuttriss, Josh Cardenas, Tish Shute, Lauren Elliott, Jason Appelbaum and both Otto Leichliter III and IV.

Peripherals and apps for the IO Toaster

The potential for the IO Toaster is great, said team members who brainstormed spin off products including:

• FaceToast: Your friends’ Facebook status messages pop up automatically at breakfast.
• Instagram Toast: Patented sepia tone filters add artistic textures to photos (above). Too grainy?
• Toasted, Augmented Reality: Toast revitalizes boring QR codes (below).
• Pop Tweets: Twitter toaster pastries. Follow your favorite fruit flavor.
• FlipToast: Create an edible FlipBook with a carb-hinge technology in development.
• Angry Toast: A hyper sling and gimble add on hurls slices at kids trying to leave for school without breakfast.

Touch screen toaster displays

Designers of the IO Toaster created this animation to show the romantic possibilities of their product.

Grand prize was a real grabber

Meet the Tactilus team

Fitness glove has something up its sleeve

Baby gets a robo rocker

And other winners were…
At the end of the day, 30 groups took two minutes each to pitch their hack (below), some of which judges pitches in the circular file. A handful of others got various levels of recognition.

The winner in the most marketable category was the DIYNot, a plug that fits between your recharging device and the socket to turn off the two amp energy flow anytime you want. The Window Blind Controller, a clip on device that keeps streetlight out in the night and lets sunlight in during the day, got a nod from judges.

Judges also liked the Walkmen, an ultrasound virtual walking stick with haptic feedback for guiding disabled people. A team from Electric Imp got the Corporate Shill Award for a networked dispenser that spits out M&Ms in response to tweets. Another group added Wi-Fi links to home switches opening a circuit for new kinds of remote controls—and pranks.

From here to China and back

I’m really excited that we opened a call for proposals today for Augmented World Expo (registration opens February!).  Our edgy conference on augmented reality has morphed into the world’s first Expo about the augmented world.  If you loved ARE you are going to find Augmented World Expo the most important event of 2013, and if you never got a chance to attend before register early to reserve your spot!

“The way we experience the world will never be the same. We no longer interact with computers. We interact with the world. A set of emerging technologies such as augmented reality, gesture interaction, eyewear, wearables, smart things, cloud computing, and ambient computing are completely changing the way we interact with people, places and things. These technologies create a digital layer that empowers humans to experience the world in a more advanced, engaging, and productive way.

Augmented World Expo will bring together the best in augmented experiences from all aspects of life: health, education, emergency response, art, media and entertainment, retail, manufacturing, brand engagement, travel, automotive, and urban design. It will be the largest ever exposition demonstrating how these technologies come together to change our lives and change the world.

Registration will open in February.”

ARE2012 is being live streamed this year, and the wrap up fire side chat between Bruce Sterling and Daniel Suarez and a surprise stupid fun grand finale is still to come. We have a live stream this year so you can see for yourself! Also you can catch up on any sessions you have missed, including the video of my talk, Augmented Awareness and Reality Games. My slides are here and my speaker notes are below, enjoy!

1. Hi my name is Tish Shute. Currently I am working with Will Wright and Stupid Fun Club on a new genre of personally aware mobile games that move away fromt he idea that games are a way to escape reality. If you want to know more about what I mean by Reality Architect please feel free to look up my TEDXSilicon Alley talk “On Becoming a Reality Architect..” .

2. As Will puts it, “games are getting more and more personal to the point that our actual lives are becoming the most interesting gaming platform.” Personally Aware Games, Life Based Gaming or Integrated Games are expressions that are just beginning to emerge to describe this idea that our lives are the most interesting gaming platform.

3. Will Wright’s talk at Where 2012 is a must see. He pointed too a turning point for mobile gaming.- a shift for games from being about simulating reality to being about parsing reality.

4. The ghosts of AR past. Bruce Sterling at ARE2010 mentioned that AR eyewear was haunted by the spectre of ARs Gothic Stepsister – virtual reality, and Jesse Schell probed on the other hand AR’s aspirations as the ubiquitous all seeing data eye– the man with the x-ray eyes.. As Jesse put it, “You guys are going to put it together…and then everybody is going to be like, oh my god we are freaking naked, all this information about me is out there…I had security through obscurity, but not anymore…”

5. Yes, it seems we have put it all together. Although the ubiquitous all seeing data eye – our x ray eyes have turned out to be carried around in our pockets or integrated into our clothes and eyewear is not yet ubiquitous, at least yet. But, for the moment, we are looking at the most intimate aspects of ours lives only as an opportunity for optimization and efficiency, (but there are some interesting apps/products emerging – try out the Heart Rate app – if you hold your finger up against the camera an you will get a pretty accurate reading). But as the explorations of makers, hackers and self trackers move out into consumer culture the quantified self is ripe for new forms of expression http://www.electricfoxy.com/projects/modwells/The term “gamification” has been worn out already . We sense its shallow inadequacy. So what’s next?

6. There is barely a trace of AR’s Gothic stepsister VR in the Google glasses pitch which is super simple and seems to be aimed at optimizing Pinterest like social shopping experiences, by taking photos and videos from your direct eye-line and disseminating them through Google+ No mentions of mapping, tracking and registration or how they are working the hands free part yet – all I’ve seen for input is nods so far. Is eye movement tracking up next – or what? Thrun was pretty down on the AR ghosts – the man with the x ray eyes stuff (I’m already feeling nostalgic for classic AR!). But seeing with shared eyes is what makes AR technology super interesting as Jesse Schell pointed out at ARE2010, “The internet allowed us to think with shared memory…Augmented Reality will allow us to see with shared eyes,” Jesse Schell ARE2012. Applying our design chops to this possibility space seems like a pretty good project to me. Bruce has always said that AR should be more about creating experiences than the technology.

7. And we do need new forms of expression in our digital culture where technologies of seeing are primarily technologies of watching used for power and control.

8. If you haven’t already drunk at the New Aesthetic fountain you have some googling to do after this session – start with James Bridle’s Tumblr and Bruce Sterling’s essay http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/ perhaps. James Bridle might have already closed the New Aesthetic tumblr but this collection of images is a provocation to explore the possibilities of feedback loops between people and machines – a reflexive augmented awareness where we play with modes of digital seeing. I think AR and digital seeing is in need of a New Aesthetic more than most technologies because augmentation implies that we have an idea of what is aesthetically valid at a given time and place, and that we have a position re the difference between augmented and degraded reality, and machinomorphic and anthropomorphic modes of perception. Howie Woo’s “in yo face facial recognition” project (pic in my opening slide too), uses crochet + cunning to transform facial recognition into a reality game.

9. Reality Games can give us new opportunities to explore the free play in the systems of our lives. AyseBirsel, a friend and brilliant designer from New York City has being showing people, in a series of innovative workshops, how to bring powerful design tools to their lives, to design not necessarily a better life but at least an original life, beginning with a method of deconstruction,reconstruction, and visualization. The goal of an original life rather than an optimized more efficient life challenges AR and reality game designers to explore the possibility space of our lives.

10. We are already parsing our lives through powerful digital filters. Four Square has shown us the power of the fundamental change to maps that has at it’s center the notion that “you are here”. See Adam Greenfield’s Where 2012 talk for a deeper understanding of the significance of this change to mapping. While location is a powerful filter to parse what Will call’s the GPS “global possibility space” of our lives, it is not the only one.http://dornob.com/you-are-here-3-real-life-works-of-digital-map-inspired-art/

11. Time is another a powerful filter for our lives and games. Jonathan Blow’s Braid explores how time can be manipulated in different game worlds.

12. Cosplay (or costume role playing) is different from earlier incarnations of say renaissance fairs or civil war reenactments in its integration into the present. In Tokyo a commuting hub turns into a cosplay mecca every Sunday and as AT Wilson puts it “turns a non-place to a place.”

13. “[TimeHop] sends users a daily e-mail reminder of what they did a year ago, and it does so by retracing the subscriber’s digital footsteps Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.”http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/fashion/timehop-a-new-online-service-tells-you-what-you-were-doing-a-year-ago.html

14. Reality Games have of course predated a machine readable world. This book on Cold Reading by Ian Rowland parses the rules of the game that enables “psychics” and “fortune tellers” to deploy techniques that border on actual mind reading. http://www.thecoldreadingbook.com/Life’s players – “pick up artists” & “psychics” and “con-artists” are master gamers of the intimate social dynamics of life but NLP and semantic tech are bringing digital seeing to the kind of intimate social dynamics that are the domain of cold reading.

15. Status games are a core dynamic of life. The great ethnologist Erving Goffman, devoted his career to analyzing the face-to face relations of everyday life. Goffman, described everyday social life as a strategic game that could be understood through the metaphors of the stage.- front stage and back stage. But, as we parse reality, digital hierarchies and the abstractions of data viz begin to control the information flow and create a new stage for status games that demand a a different kind of awareness of what is back stage and what is front stage in social lives.

16. We are entering a new era of social intelligence where people and algorithms are interacting in interesting new ways. OKCupid has been getting a lot of attention for offering social intelligence that can help us play better in our dating lives. Did you know your profile narratives can reveal whether you like rough or gentle sex?

17. We are also beginning to see an interesting New Aesthetic for Artificial Intelligence -the expressive interaction between algorithms and people. SIRI, for example, is no cold reader, but she does have has a more developed character than Google voice.
Jeff Kramer has an excellent post on Weavrs – personality based social – web robots. I like weavrs a lot because they are out on there at the edge with there exploration of the expressive power of bots. Bots shape our algorithmic world from call centers to Wall street but we have barely began to explore their expressive potential .
Weavrs exist on their own. You can ask them questions, but you can’t tell them for example ‘I like this, post more like this. Weavrs are social web bots that evolve and grow without your direct hand guiding them. But as Jeff Kramer in his interesting post on Reality Augmented notes,

“it’s also obvious that having more full featured persona creation/control options is going to be a big part of the future of social bots too.”

18. The eruption of the digital into the physical is a catch phrase for The New Aesthetic. And RjDj’s Dimensions app and awesome Inception app, I think are exemplary explorations of new aesthetic dimensions for Sonic AR. The dimensions app pulls data from your surroundings — including movement, time of day and microphone input — to give you a very personal experience that adjusts to and transforms your environment and actions.

19. Imrov practitioners are early explorers of Reality Games. The Life Game is one of Keith Johnstone’s projects and his books on Improv have been a great source of inspiration for RPG players and game designers. A CMU student visiting Stupid Fun Club once asked Will what he should do to be a better game designer and Will said study Improv!

Will Wright’s talk at Where 2012 is brilliant. It elucidates a turning point for mobile gaming.

Will describes an important shift:

gaming has primarily up to this point been about simulating parts of reality, now I think it’s moving toward the idea that maybe we can start parsing actual reality, and incorporating that into our play experiences.

He unfolds a vision for a new genre of personally aware mobile games that move away from a “presumption that reality sucks and we want to get away from it.”

I’m super excited to be working with Will Wright and Stupid Fun Club to create a new genre of mobile experiences that express this vision.

Will notes:

as a designer nowadays, I don’t feel like there’s any meaningful limitation that I have. The amount of technology that used to be applied to NORAD, tracking incoming missiles, is basically now in my pocket, helping me find frappuccinos. Actually quite a bit more technology than NORAD had back then.

It is a rich, dense talk so enjoy the video and explore the CaptionBox too!

Also I hope you can join us at Augmented Reality Event, 2012, Santa Clara, CA on May 8th and 9th. Will Wright will be judging the Auggies with Bruce Sterling, Daniel Suarez and others. I will be talking about “Augmented Awareness & Life Based Games” in the AR Games session, along with Brian Selzer, Ogmento and Richard Wetzel, Fraunhofer

And please do use my discount count TISH375AR to register!

I am super excited to be speaking at SXSW Interactive 2012, as part of Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club, on “A Lifestyle with a Gaming Sense.” Michael Trice just did a post on our session for SXSW.com, Screen Burn Panels at the Palmer Presents Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club. The photos of Will Wright, Tish Shute (me!) and Peter Swearengen are by Anya Zavarzina. Thank you Anya for such great photos!

I have been too busy to blog much lately, but there is a lot to unpack in future posts in my quote in Michael’s SXSW post!

“Really we’ve entered a new era where the world has become a platform for storytelling and the goal is to turn everyday life into an opportunity for play, relatedness, and new forms of autonomy and fun. We’ve now come to a point where software has moved out of the computer and into the world. Rather than viewing this process in terms we’ve already grown out of, like gamification, we view this as an opportunity to explore everyday activities as possibility spaces.”

For the complete post, including Peter Swearengen of Stupid Fun Club on StoryMaker, see here http://sxsw.com/node/9969

Interview with Vernor Vinge

Tish Shute: Many of the pioneers of the emerging AR industry who will be speaking at, and attending Augmented Reality Event, consider “Rainbows End” one of their key inspirations. [Note: If you want to attend ARE2011 readers of this post can use my discount code TISH295 ($295 for two days, or for one day only TISH1DAY11 for $149]

What is the best and worst, in your view, about the way Augmented Reality is emerging from science fiction into science fact?

Vernor Vinge: Progress that sets the stage:
The worldwide market penetration of cellphones in the era 2000-2010 was of a size and speed that would have counted as foolish implausibility even in science-fiction of earlier times. More than half the human race suddenly had access to knowledge and comms. Being in the middle of this firestorm of progress, we can’t really judge ultimate effects, but I expect that smart phones and the empowering aspects of social networks and AR are still massively underhyped. (This is not to say that individual innovation enterprises can’t fail; the treasure is there for those who dare, and ultimately the whole human race can benefit.)

But I can still whine:
Some — mostly political/legal — issues are disappointing. These affect AR but also the broad range of our progress with technology:
o Software patents and some styles of cloud computing are blunting the ability of average people to innovate. In the 2010-2020 era, average people should have the building blocks to empower them to create (and throw away at the end of the workday) tools that in olden times would have been the whole purpose of a business startup.
Unfortunately, some companies restrict and compartmentalize their releases like we’re still living in the twentieth century.
There are also some mostly tech issues that I’m impatient with (speaking as a never-satisfied consumer and fan:)
o The low pixel counts in contemporary head up displays.
o The poor position coordination in current HUDs.
o The lack of mass market acceptance of HUDs.
o The lack of progress in distributed store-and-forward between
mobile devices (sub-femtocell, ad hoc and transitory forwarding).
o The lack of progress in uniform solutions to centimeter-scale
localization.

Tish Shute: What do you feel will be the most impactful application of AR in people’s everyday lives?

Vernor Vinge: There are nebulous and fairly high likelihood answers: AR apps that let each person/team see those aspects of physical reality that are important for their current activity. Pointing technologies that coordinate with that AR vision. The combination is a revolution of interfaces, and the probable physical disappearance of more and more of the gadgets that twentieth century people associated with high tech.

There are also more specific, spectacular, and necessarily uncertain impacts (that depend on social acceptance and the development of network infrastructure for consensual sharing of local imagery).
o Economic disruption of the trend toward huge, expensive display devices.
o Bottom up social networking, arising from GPL’d tools. I see this as very disruptive, in good, bad and arguable ways, as illustrated by descriptive terms such as “consumer protection clubs”, “belief circles” and “lifestyle cults”. Some of these could be as public as our topdown social networks. Some might be quiet and widespread, perhaps growing out of pre-existing groups that already have a lot of intermember trust. (See:http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/C5/index.htm)
o More farfetched, but in the tradition of the last 50 years: the digitization of external visual design: building architecture could give less priority to physical appearance and more to cheap physical strength, network access support, and physical modifiability.

Tish Shute: I interviewed Bruce Sterling earlier this week – http://www.ugotrade.com/2011/05/06/augmented-reality-transitioning-out-of-the-old-fashioned-legacy-internet-interview-with-bruce-sterling/.  And, I’m really looking forward to your “fireside chat” with Bruce at the end of Augmented Reality Event to sum up the event [see the full schedule for ARE2011 here].  But was there anything that particularly rung a bell for you in my conversation with Bruce?

Vernor Vinge: Bruce says:  “… it’s pretty clear that the people who would weep for joy to have Augmented Reality are people whose reality is already damaged. People who need reality augmented as a prosthetic …” This really rings a bell with me. And social networks with AR may have a special impact at small sizes, even just _two_ players. At such a scale, they might be better called “joint entities” than “social networks”. For example, two differently disabled persons, where one is mobile. There’s a lot more that could be said about this, including applications that could be done (maybe are being done) already.

Picture via IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

Tish Shute: As Jesse Schell pointed out last year at ARE2010, “The whole point of AR is to see things from a different point of view … How can there be a more powerful art form than one that actually changes what you see?”

The magic lens of the smart phone, screens – large and small, projection, audio and sensory devices are mediating our AR experiences today. Bruce pointed out last year in his opening keynote, that these less immersive forms of AR have their own merits.

But eyewear has always been integral to the big vision of AR. Do you see some interesting futures for AR without eyewear? And, How long before AR eyewear is part of our everyday lives?
Vernor Vinge: This importance of vision is a visionist claim :-), but for the majority of us who have sight, binocular vision is by far the highest bitrate input we have, and we have enormously sophisticated wetware for analyzing what we see. Current display tech is far short of fully exploiting this input channel.

Along the way to this goal, I expect we’ll pass through mini-eras of exploiting the best-available tech. Right now, that is the tablet and the smartphone. Sometimes I almost wish for slower progress: in the nineteenth century, you could profitably spend your tech lifetime mastering one mechanism (for instance, black-and-white silver halide photography). The whole world would benefit from your career. Now, we rattle through the mini-eras so fast that we never fully exploit what’s zooming past before we’re on to the next stage.

How fast (or if) HUDs like in Rainbows End show up will probably depend on network and localizer tech as much as the HUDs themselves, with clear generational differences within such eyeware. In fact, it’s fun to imagine the mini-eras you could get with different combinations of HUDs tech, localization, and networking.

(Aside, a quibble: I think AR should not be restricted to visual only. There are tactile and kinesthetic possibilities, at least.)

(Aside, a whine: If only we had an output channel with the bitrate and flexibility of vision! Wearables plus voice and gesture could do some of that. Going further might involve scary human re-engineering. In Fast Times at Fairmont High, I speculated that a small re-engineering (eidetic memory) could give a form of highrate output,
simply by allowing selection from very large menus.)

Tish Shute: Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Computing are intimately connected. Is a distinction between AR and Ubicomp still useful? (This recent PARC blog post: http://blogs.parc.com/blog/2010/03/defining-ubiquitous-computing-vs-augmented-reality/ takes a look at the definitions.)

Vernor Vinge: In a literal sense there is a distinction, and there is enough technical challenge in AR to justify specialists spending all their time with AR. But Augmented Reality’s importance to humanity is in its role as a portal to the power of ubicomp and human cooperation.

Tish Shute: Augmented Reality, as we understand it now, is a human centered experience. But even now some of the most important aspects of our lives are governed by machine to machine intelligences that operate for the most part beyond the reach of human perception, e.g., the trading bots of Wall Street. What role can augmented reality play in better mediating between human intelligence and machine to machine intelligence? Does AR hasten the arrival of the technological singularity?

Vernor Vinge: I see four or five concurrently active paths to the Singularity:
a) Artificial Intelligence: We create superhuman artificial intelligence in computers.
b) Digital Gaia: The worldwide network of embedded microprocessors, sensors, effectors, and localizers becomes a superhumanly intelligent entity.
c) Internet Scenario: Humanity with its networks, computers, and databases becomes a superhuman being. (Bruce’s story “Maneki Neko” is a beautiful and subtle illustration of this possibility.)
d) Intelligence Amplification: We enhance individual human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces.
e) Biomedical: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological function of our brains. (I regard this last item to be the weakest of the possibilities.)

AR is central to progress with possibilities (c) and (d).
If we humans want to keep our hand in the game, AR is an important thing to pursue.

Tish Shute: Powerful computer vision apps are emerging for smart phones and face recognition technologies are beginning to appear in consumer apps. Do you think we need a major shift in the way we handle data ownership? And, is “there is a real risk of our augmented reality world being owned by interests which are not our own?” (see my conversation with Anselm Hook last year. http://www.ugotrade.com/2010/01/17/visual-search-augmented-reality-and-a-social-commons-for-the-physical-world-platform-interview-with-anselm-hook

Vernor Vinge: Yes, there is such a risk. (See also my political/legal comments in response to your question (1).)
More broadly, I see DRM and the Law being used to reify our intellectual heritage as permanent private property. If this could work, it would be the biggest grab in history — and a major roadblock on human progress.

But even setting aside all the open/closed/free ideological questions, there is another important issue here: anytime laws are passed making popular and easily accomplished behavior illegal, things get very ugly. It may seem frivolous to compare this to the first stages of the War on Drugs, but that’s where serious enforcement would lead.

Tish Shute: We have seen gestural interfaces go mainstream in the last year. What are the most interesting innovations with gestural interfaces that you have seen in recent months? What sessions will you go to at ARE this year?

Vernor Vinge: I’m way behind the curve as to what is happening right now. Collecting data points on real hardware and applications is a high priority for me in attending ARE 2011.

Tish Shute: Are you reading/writing any new fictional literature about AR? And/or, What design fictions for AR are most interesting to you in the moment?

Vernor Vinge: As to writing: My novel The Children of the Sky should come out this October from Tor Books. It’s set in the far future and is the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. Alas, the story has only indirect connections to our present technological interests.

As to reading: I got a big kick out of Daniel Suarez’s duology Daemon and Freedom(TM).

Singly’s appearance at the startup showcase at Strata 2011 this week has excited thought leaders across the web since the story got out. Singly is a new startup that exists to provide oxygen and commercial support to the open source Locker Project, and new protocol TeleHash.

With some wonderful serendipity I met Singly on my first night at Strata.  The next day, I talked in depth to Jeremie Miller and Simon Murtha-Smith, two of the three Singly co-founders (see later in this post). I also had the opportunity to ask Tim O’Reilly, Alistair Croll and Roger Magoulas for some of their thoughts on the significance of this project (see below for their comments).

It was a real – pinch myself in case I need to wake up from a dream experience – for me, to stumble across Jeremie Miller with Simon Murtha-Smith sitting behind a hand written sign demoing Singly at Strata (see my  pic opening this post). As Marshall Kirkpatrick notes:

“Jeremie Miller is a revered figure among developers, best known for building XMPP, the open source protocol that powers most of the Instant Messaging apps in the world. Now Miller has raised funds and is building a team that will develop software aimed directly at the future of the web.”

Singly’s appearance at Strata began auspiciously when they won the judges choice award in the startup showcase. And following Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post, Creator of Instant Messaging Protocol to Launch App Platform for Your Life , and The Locker Project: Why Leave Data Tracking to Others? Do It Yourself, Singly have been burning up Twitter.

Singly, by giving people the ability to do things with their own data, has the potential to change our world.  And, as Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, this won’t be the first time Jeremie has done that.

“Pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration,” by Bloom

I was drawn over to the Singly table when an awesome app they were demonstrating caught my eye. Fizz, which is running on a locker with data aggregated from three different places is a first glimpse of one of Bloom’s, “pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration.”

Fizz is an intriguing early manifestation of capabilities never seen before on the web – the ability for us to control, aggregate, share and play with our own data streams, and bring together the bits and pieces of our digital selves scattered about the web (for more about Bloom and Singly, see Tim O’Reilly’s comments below). The picture below is my Fizz. In Fizz, large circles represent people and small circles represent their status updates. Bloom says:

“Clicking a circle will reveal its contents. Typing in the search box will highlight matching statuses.
This is an early preview of our work and we’ll be adding more features in the next few weeks. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions.”

If you are not already familiar with The Bloom team, Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, and Jesper Sparre Andersen – go directly to their about page and you will understand why the match of Bloom and The Locker Project is a cause for great delight.

The Locker Project – a whole new way to connect from the protocol up

As Jeremie began explaining the depth and breadth of what The Locker Project is facilitating, I was utterly gob smacked. And when the penny dropped and I realized this is the whole 9 yards, bringing awesomeness to people with a whole new way to connect, from the protocol up, all I could think was, OMG finally!

Luckily I have had time to catch up with the whole team since then, and recovered my composure enough to ask some coherent questions. But I can still barely contain my enthusiasm for this project.

Singly, The Locker Project and TeleHash take on, and deliver a simple, elegant, and open solution to some of the holy grails of the next generation of networked communications. I have written on, and been nibbling at the edges of some of these grails in various projects myself for quite a while now. Even if you haven’t been reading Ugotrade, just a glance at the monster mash of my pre Strata post will give you an idea of how important I think Singly is.

My previous post raised the question of how to invert the search pyramid and to transform search into a social, democratic act. But if you are really interested in social search, I suggest staying keyed into what Singly is doing with The Locker Project!

One of Singly’s three founders, Simon Murtha-Smith, was building a company called Introspectr, a social aggregator and search product. Singly’s other founder Jason Cavnar was working on another similar project. And they came together as Singly because social aggregation and search is a very hard problem for one company to solve, and they realized that the basic infrastructure needs to be open source and built on an open protocol.

As Jeremie puts it, “We shouldn’t…(every startup that wants to do something interesting) have to spend this much time aggregating the data, building robust aggregators.”

To me what is so important about the Locker Project is that it is built on a new open protocol, TeleHash. And having the Singly team focused on supplying tools and the trust/security layer for the Locker Project will mean that developers have the whole stack they need to do some interesting stuff very soon.

I asked Jeremy to explain the relationship between TeleHash, The Locker Project and Singly.

Tish Shute: So TeleHash…

Jeremie Miller: It’s a peer-to-peer protocol to move bits of data for applications around. Not file sharing, but it’s for actual applications to find each other and connect. So if you had an app and I had an app, whenever we’re running that app on our devices, we can actually find those other devices from each other and then connect. Our applications can connect and do something.

For the entire edge of the network, basically, out there in the wild, and let those things mesh together.

And TeleHash is actually what has led to the Locker project itself.

Tish Shute: So TeleHash led to the The Locker Project and the Locker Project led to Singly?

Jeremie Miller: Singly is a company who is sponsoring the open source Locker Project…the three of us as founders, [left to right in pic below - Jeremie Miller, Jason Cavnar, Simon Murtha-Smith, ]

I took the pic above of all three founders being interviewed by Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web for his post, “Creator of Instant Messaging Protocol to Launch App Platform for Your Life.“  I think we will look back on this moment and say it was an inflection point for the web. At least I tweeted that!

Jeremie Miller: TeleHash is a protocol that lets the lockers connect with each other and share things. The locker is like all of your data. So it’s sort of like a digital person…

Tish Shute: A locker for bits and pieces your digital self?

Jeremie Miller: Yes. So TeleHash lets the lockers connect and directly peer-to-peer connect with each other and share things. Singly, as a company, is going to be hosting lockers first and foremost. But the Locker Project is an open source project. You can have a locker in your machine or you can install it wherever you want…

Tish Shute: Yes it’s often too difficult for a lot of people to set up something locally…so Singly makes it easy to have a locker right?

Jeremie Miller: A lot of people see this cool app or this cool thing they want to do, it’s something that you run in your locker that they need to be able to turn on a locker somewhere very easily.

Tish Shute: So Singly will provide the trust layer and hosting?

Jeremie Miller: Yeah, Singly is a company that will host lockers, as well as…when people build applications that run inside your lockers or use your data, you need to be able to trust them. Maybe it’s like social data and you don’t care that much. But especially once you start to get any of your transactions in there, your browsing history, your health data, like your running logs or sleeping…fit-bit stuff…then it’s much more important to be careful about what you’re running inside your locker and sharing.

So Singly will also look at the applications that are available that you can install and actually run them and look at what data they access, and look at who created them, and be able to come back and either certify or vouch for them.

And I hope in the long-run, as this grows and builds, that power users may actually be able to buy a little device that they can plug into their home network that is their locker. Wouldn’t that be cool? This little hard drive or whatever that you plug in.

Tish Shute: Wow – that would be very cool! Architecturally is TeleHash and the Locker Project related to your work on XMPP?

Jeremie Miller: Architecturally, some of the stuff I’ve learned, XMPP, in Jabber it was designed for the specific purpose of instant messaging, but it was still a federated model, in that you still had to go through sort of a central point so you could…a server that lived somewhere. So it was really optimized for like businesses and small groups, teams, as well as big companies out there; ISPs can use it.

So it was designed with that in mind—for the communication path to be routed through somewhere. And where I’ve sort of evolved over the years since then is really fascinated with truly distributed protocols that are completely sort of decentralized so that things are going peer-to-peer instead of actually through any server.

The last 10 years, peer-to-peer has gotten a pretty bad rap with file sharing.

Tish Shute: A really bad rap, yes.

Jeremie Miller: Yeah. And almost because of that, and because it’s really hard to do, that it hasn’t gotten…the potential for it’s awesome. There’s so many really good things that can be done peer-to-peer. And it hasn’t gotten used very much.

But the other side of the peer-to-peer thing that I think is critically important, look at the explosion of the computing devices around a person anymore, both in the home and on our person. We have one, two, three, four even. And the number of devices that are online for you that are yours…I look at my home network router and I’ve got 30 devices in my house on Wi-Fi. What the heck? That’s a lot of devices.

But right now, all of those devices, for me to work with them, I’m almost always going through a server somewhere, through a data center somewhere, which is ridiculous at face value. You go five, 10 years out from now, there’s probably going to be 300 devices on me in some form.

Tish Shute: So we need a peer-to-peer network just to manage our own devices?

Jeremie Miller: A peer-to-peer, yes. You know, my phone should be talking straight to my computer, or to the iPad, or to the washing machine, or refrigerator. The applications in my TV, or whatever, they should all be talking peer-to-peer. And it should be easy to do that. It shouldn’t be that the only way you can do that is to go through a data center somewhere.

[Our conversation continued, but to sum things up, for now, here is the final question I asked Jeremie which pretty much packs in everything I would like to do with TeleHash, the Locker project, and Singly tools/trust layer all in one!]

Tish Shute: How can TeleHash, the Locker, and Singly help people combine personal data from different sources – web and mobile for example, so the data locked up in our social graph on the web can be integrated with, for example, the location data and “the data wake” from our cell phone sensors, to know not only where we have been but to give us more ways to know where we are going?

Jeremie Miller: That’s a pretty packed question, but here’s my simple answer, hopefully just seeds the right discussion

Telehash is the protocol that lets the apps (mobile, sensor, or anywhere) talk to a locker as well as lockers talk to each other, it’s the chatter, moving the bits around the network. The locker is the storage for a person’s data and the crunching ability to analyze it or trigger actions from it. Singly is the company sponsoring the project(s) and helping anyone dev apps atop it. We’re going to build the platform and looking to the world to create some amazing things on top of it (we have lots of our own personal ideas we already want to create, hah!).

The Locker Project is not just “one more rebel army trying to undo these big data aggregations,” Tim O’Reilly

@lockerproject: “We’ll be posting updates on the Locker Project (https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker) here as we make progress, very awesome stuff “

During the Strata Media Conversation I asked Roger Magoulas about Singly and The Locker Project because Roger played Yentl and brought Singly and Bloom together!  Although there was not much time to discuss it, the relationship of TeleHash, The Locker project and Singly to the social network encumbents, came up, and Roger Magoulis and Tim O’Reilly gave some very insightful comments on this when I talked to them afterwards (see below).

Roger Magoulas pointed out:

“I think Singly has Facebook like aspects, but I think a better description is an app platform that integrates your personal and social network data – including data from Facebook. Sing.ly is likely to have challenges with some of their data sources, particularly if Sing.ly gains traction with users.

I like the app platform business model, although they face risks getting critical mass and app developer attention, and I like how they plan on using open source connectors to keep up with changing social network platforms. Jeremie has credibility with the open source community and is likely to find cooperating developers. The team seems to bring complementary strengths to the project and you can tell they all work well together. ”

And Tim O’Reilly went on to elaborate the awesome potential of this platform to bring something new to the ecosystem, and to comment on just how interesting Bloom’s insight into, “data visualization as a means of input and control” is.

Talking with Tim O’Reilly

Tish Shute: So will the Locker Project be able to break the lock of Facebook’s and other big sites’ control of everyone’s data. Sometimes I feel we are stuck in the era of Zyngification, where you have to do what Zynga did and leverage the system in order to gain traction or do anything with social data?

Tim O’Reilly: I don’t think that is the objective of the Locker Project —to break the Facebook lock, because I tend to agree, the value of Facebook is having your data there with other people’s data. What Singly may be able to accomplish is to give people better tools for managing their data. Because if you can actually start to abstract the data from various sites and you can set it and manage it yourself, then you can potentially make better decisions about what you’re going to allow and not allow. Because right now, the interfaces on a lot of these sites make it very, very difficult to understand exactly what the implications are.

And I think all this done right will create a marketplace where people will build better interfaces that will give people more control over their data. They’ll still want to put it on those sites, because why do you put your money in the bank? You know, because it’s more valuable being with other people’s money.

And I think that to conceive of it as one more rebel army trying to undo these big data aggregations is just the wrong way to frame it.

Tish Shute: Yes and framing the question the way you just did – that this is not just one more rebel army, might mean that the stage at Strata will be filled with new startups next year! That’s what I thought when I found out what The Locker Project and Singly was about – that we are about to see an explosion of creativity with personal and social data.

Tim O’Reilly: Yeah, sure. I mean, because at the end of the day, if you can start to extract your personal data in ways that make it more useful, you can potentially create the ability for people to build better interfaces. It’s not just Facebook.

You know, you think, “Oh, wow, I’d really like to have a management console for all my contacts.” And you go, “Well, I’m stuck with, I can use Facebook, I can use LinkedIn, I can use my address book in Outlook or Gmail or whatever, or on my local machine.” The tools are pretty primitive. And if we get a better set of tools, I think we’ll see a lot of innovation.

Now, some of those startups might well be acquired by a Facebook or a Google. But it if moves the ball forward in giving people better visibility and control over their data, that’s a good thing.

Bloom’s insight, “data visualization will become a means of input and control.”

Tish Shute: I loved the marriage with Bloom, which is interesting, because Ben and the Bloom team haven’t really talked a lot about Bloom yet, but I gather Bloom is moving to consumer facing work with data?

Tim O’Reilly: What’s really interesting about Bloom is the notion…You know people think of data visualization as output. And the insight that I think Ben has had with Bloom is that data visualization will become a means of input and control.

Tish Shute: Right, very cool.

Tim O’Reilly: So I’ve started to feel like data visualization as a way of making sense of complex data is kind of a dead-end. Because what you really want to do is to build these feedback loops where you actually figure something out, some particular atomic action well enough that you can create an application that let’s somebody actually do something with it. But the idea of visualization as a way of manipulating the data in real-time, data visualization as interface rather than as a report, it’s a small but subtle shift that I think becomes kinda cool.

Talking with Alistair Croll

Sing.ly – Join or Die from Singly Inc on Vimeo.

Alistair Croll: So I’m a big fan of Singly. They were my choice for the Startup Showcase. I think it’s certainly the right time – the team can execute on it. But the thing I like the most is I thought back to the early days of Photoshop.

So, Photoshop was a neat application that could take data in the form of an image and manipulate it. But the real value from Photoshop came from these amazing plugins. Like, there’s a company called Kai’s Power Tools that made these things that would allow you to do manipulations. Today, commonplace things that are built in. But at the time, they were things like building bubbles, and spheres, and drop shadows and stuff like that, cutouts, in amazing ways.

Another company, I think, called Alien Skin that made these things. There’s whole ecosystems of plugins. So you could go and get a plugin and transform that original data in ways you hadn’t thought of. And eventually, there was a macro language for scripting how you could do those things, and that found its way into the Photoshop environment.

But you think about the transformation of digital design from Photoshop, I think if you can take that same pattern of you create the basic ecosystem of a few tools, and then you allow people an open system on top of that, that’s unprecedented. I think it really does allow you to take ownership of that.

And then when you allow people the proper tools to federate that information. I was actually thinking of starting a company a couple of years ago based on data federation like that. But what you really want to say is I’ve got a pattern…It’s almost like a multi-channel mixer. You’ve got a band that is your health, your weight, your blood pressure, family photos, words you’ve used. You know, the more data I record when I carry my phone around with a headset of whatever, all of that stuff goes in, all my searches, everything.

And then I say, “Ah, I want to federate height, weight, and blood pressure with my doctor. I want to federate sleep cycles and nutrition with my child’s teacher,” and so on and so on. And you start to create these federated sources of data where now you have a teacher data mining, in a safe manner, the sleep and health habits of all the students along with report card information. And you suddenly realize that Johnny is borderline diabetic and falls asleep at recess.

That’s something that never would have happened. And that happens when you have tools to federate data and then compute on top of them. So this idea of, like, lifestreaming or life logging, this is a logical consequence of the whole lifestreaming movement; that whole recorded future stuff.

Tish Shute: Yes it really is a wonderful fruition to the visions of the lifestreaming movement [see this interview with David Galernter]. And best of all it sits on a new open protocol, TeleHash and the open source Locker Project that will give tools to everyone to work with these data streams.

Alistair Croll: Exactly. This is the toolset that sits on top of that stuff. Because once I’ve life-streamed everything, great, I have this bucket of stuff that I did that I never look at again. But if I can suddenly unlock that with data mining tools and analyze patterns, all of a sudden that life logging has a reason to have existed.

The biggest problem we have with data right now is we don’t have apriori knowledge of what will be useful. We could have been recording crime reports in the city of Chicago, and a year later it turns out that data is really useful for predicting diabetes in the city, but we didn’t know it was related.

So the problem, and one of the things I think that distinguishes big data from traditional data, traditional data is collected to some apriori knowledge of how it will be used. Big data tends to be collected for the sake of…it’s almost collected on faith that later on it will be useful for something.

Tish Shute: I am very interested in this idea of federation, I actually went as far as to deep dive into Wave servers because of this….

Alistair Croll: Yeah, Wave was a great example of federation, just too complicated. When it was canceled, both users [and developers] were furious.

Tish Shute: Yeah, I suppose you could see Google Wave as a bit of an Icarus project, right? I am so excited by Singly because it is coming sort of bottom-up – a very different approach…

Alistair Croll: And remember, Facebook didn’t work before Friendster. The only difference between being wrong and being too early is that too early costs a lot of money. So it may be that this is an idea that works now, but a couple years ago didn’t work.

Alistair Croll, co-chair of Strata 2011, in his post, reframed the question, “Who Owns Your Data?” as, “It’s not who owns the data, it’s about who can put the data to work.”

And I am sure there will be many more people able to put data to work, and into play, in a multitude of  interesting ways, now we have TeleHash, the Locker Project, and Singly.

Photo by Duncan Davidson.
Strata 2011 is presented by O’Reilly Media. Produced by Good Company Communications.

I think the photo above gives a good idea of how I felt on the last day at the Strata conference. Yup – like the cat who got the cream!

And in case you are wondering where AR is in this story – it is everywhere!  Below is a pic of the AR concept designs that were omnipresent in the media communications at Strata.  The one below I snapped off the job board.  But as Sophia Parafina noted,  “AR is maturing from displaying last year’s text bubbles and dinosaurs to big data overlaid on the world.”