1) Like most of us I wear a lot of hats. And I frequently work under a designer title. But recently someone said to me, “So you’re a Reality Architect.” I found the suggestion intriguing in part because I have been thinking about what it means to have agency in the algorithmic landscapes of the future that Kevin Slavin describes in his awesome TED talk, How Algorithms Shape the World. And, Reality Architect, if it implies anything, it implies a lot of agency and that is very appealing. But what does a “A Reality Architect do?”

2) When a very brilliant friend came up with this tag line for me, Tish Shute, Reality Architect, “She puts the reality back in Augmented Reality,” I began to become quite enchanted with the idea.

3) My career began with motion control photography creating visual effects for film and television. The Motion Control era which includes Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Terminator, Star Trek, 2010, brought us many of the early design fictions for augmented reality.

4) With the arrival of smart phones I focused on the mobile local experience and making AR a reality. I co-founded Augmented Reality Event and ARWave – a completely open federated, realtime updating system for geolocated data of any sort.

5) But the AR dream has a dark side. This is a still from Keichi Matsuda’s great dystopic vision of AR’s future. Kevin Slavin pointed out in his talk, Reality is Plenty Thanks, that AR as visual layers over reality can obscure what is best about reality rather than enhancing it.

6) Recently I have been exploring what it means to make reality more interesting. Meet Gatsby is a location aware networking startup that I love. Gatsby orchestrates small world moments and creates contextually aware opportunities and serendipity in real life.

7) But we already have experts at making reality more interesting they are called Reality Stars. And when I say I want to make reality more interesting, I have no ambitions to be a reality star. Technology and Story telling are my passions.

8) OKCupid is a startup that has been making reality more interesting and solving dating problems with a combination of data, math and story telling.

9) We are entering a new area 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. And by connecting social graph, interest graph and location Meet Gatsby hopes to creates new opportunities in our daily activities beyond dating.

10) The combination of math, data and story telling is also a key to a new era of corporate intelligence. Quid works with Government and big corporations, “augmenting our ability to perceive this complex world,” to help them make better decisions on big questions in a complex world.

11) Sean Gurley of Quid at Strata NY described understanding complexity as a dimensionality problem. And, where the dimensionality reduction powers of Math meet the human powers of visualization and story telling powers of people is where insight arises. This is where I think, perhaps, the work of a reality architect emerges. An alternate title for a Reality Architect might be a Data Story Teller?

12) There is also a new space of personal intelligence emerging. Quantified Self, Self Tracking and Start Ups like, MyMee – that transforms “symptoms into empowering data,” are giving us new tools to understand ourselves and unravel pressing problems like allergies that frequently leave Drs drawing a blank.

13) Moodscope adds the power of sharing and benchmarking to the personal intelligence equation. “Lift your mood with a little help from your friends?

14) I am beginning to realize I know a lot of Reality Architects. Brian Krejcarek from Green Goose is designing simple fun sensors that turn everyday things into opportunities to play and give us new ways to play life together and be happier people.

15) There is also an interesting community of practice emerging around Habit Design, Nick Crocker demonstrates in, Floss the Teeth You Want to Keep, that there are a bunch of little hacks that exist to improve your ability to change.

16) The wonderful designer Asye Birsel through her project Design the Life You Love (the illustration above is one I did from her recipe) is teaching us organizing your life is not unlike other design problems. If you can visualize it you can change it.

17) With everyone carrying a powerful sensor device in their pockets, the World is Now a Platform for Story Telling. HipGeo keeps track of your movements and then spits out a slick, animated travel diary. Narrative Science is a company that among other things can turn excel spread sheets into compelling stories for executives.

18) But to return to design fictions again. One thing interesting about the HUDs in Iron Man is the emphasis on dialogue, and the sentient portion of the HUD as a character. The Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence is increasingly directed at the interaction between algorithms and people. SIRI, for example, has a more highly developed character than Google voice. So the Aesthetics of AI is something I think aspiring Reality Architects might want to be think about and will probably play a significant role in future job descriptions and job titles we are yet to think of.

19) There is lots more I could say particularly about the importance of agency and putting people at the center of their data – please check out The Locker Project. But here are some thoughts on what I hope Reality Architects will do.

Create tools (not just maps and visualizations) to make reality more reliable, more constructable, and more useable.

20) Build technology that helps us live extraordinary lives. Situationist is an app that “injects our present lives with the unexpected.”

21) Create more opportunities, for serendipity, and fun in our daily lives. And last, but not least, never forget the potential of the phone toss!

Thank you @chrisgrayson and @kellyhadous for organizing TEDXSiliconAlley – great work!

Planetary from Bloom Studio, Inc. on Vimeo.

It is just over a week until Augmented Reality Event, and I know there are a lot of people, including me (full disclosure I am co-chair and co-founder) who are totally psyched to see what unfolds there this year.   Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Blaise Aguera Y Arcas,  Jaron Lanier, Will Wright, Marco Tempest and Frank Cooper will join 107 speakers from 76 augmented reality companies on a single stage (see my previous post) to tell a momentous story of a technology of our time (also see my previous post here).

As Bruce Sterling points out, Augmented Reality is “truly a child of the twenty-teens, a genuine digital native,” and one visible indication that:

..the Internet really could look like a “legacy.” The Legacy Internet as an old-fashioned, dusty, desk-based place best left to archivists and librarians, while the action is out on the streets (see the full interview below).


(photo by Jasmina Tesanovic)

Opening this post is a video of Ben Cerveny’s Planetary app, which “turns your music into a universe,” and enchants all who try it.  Planetary shot into #3 on the Top Ten Free ipad app list soon after its release.

Ben Cerveny’s talk at Augmented Reality Event will be one of the must attend talks (see the full schedule for Augmented Reality Event here, and note my discount code for Augmented Reality Event, TISH295, is still good, if you want to register).

Planetary, while it is not an AR experience,  points the way for AR to take us out of the old-fashioned, “Legacy Internet.”

“Planetary is just the sort of science fiction experience you expect when using an object from the future like iPad,” developer Bloom Studio writes on the app’s iTunes page. ( from Mark Brown’s Wired post).

In his interview on cnet Daniel Terdiman, Ben describes how popular computing will evolve beyond those, “dusty, desk-based place best left to archivists and librarians,” (Bruce Sterling).

Ben points out:

“The tablet is a total disruption of how we understand popular computing. The next era of experiences will be driven by visceral gesture-based input, and rich fluid responsiveness in native graphics contexts. I see the potential for Bloom to help define a “killer pattern” for application design. Because apps have been deconstructed into discrete tasks that flow across devices….”

Bruce Sterling had some interesting comments on the Bloom app:

I’m a big fan of Ben and his good works in infoviz — and urban informatics, too. I admit I’m not sure the I entirely need the metaphor of a solar system in order to play a few Texas blues tracks. But I could be persuaded. Ben Cerveny is a significant thinker and a very well-spoken guy.

I’m not saying that happens tomorrow; I’m just saying, why not? Why not aspire to that?

I too am a huge fan of  The Bloom team, Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, and Jesper Sparre Andersen (also see my post here about Fizz, the Bloom team’s app used by The Locker Project for their Strata demo).  And, if you haven’t already heard about The Locker Project and Telehash – get on it!  This is one of the most important projects of our time – an infrastructure for a better future!

Interview with Bruce Sterling by Tish Shute and Ori Inbar

Tish Shute: As you so memorably put it, “AR is a technovisionary dream come true – something really rare, and you have to be really patient for those….”

What is best and worst, in your view, about the way Augmented Reality technovisionary dream is coming true and emerging to flourish in the wild?

Bruce Sterling: The best part is that AR is truly happening and is a lot of fun, and the worst part is that it’s happening in a Depression. If AR had broken loose in the dotcom days when cash flew around like soap bubbles, man, that would have been psychedelic.

AR that is even more of-our-time than “social media.” AR has arisen directly from modern technical factors that just didn’t use to exist. It’s made from shiny new parts, and is truly a child of the twenty-teens, a genuine digital native. It’s a little kid and it has to walk before it can run, but it’s great to see it walking.

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

Bruce Sterling: I’m all for impact, but 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, in other words, so that they can achieve an “everyday life.” This is like the impactful but underappreciated role of the Internet in the lives of people who’ve been shut-in. If you’re laid-up in a hospital bed, a laptop is a revolution in convalescence.

But that kind of “impact” doesn’t sound too exciting or too profitable. My guess would be that the biggest arena for “impactful AR” would be augmenting cityscapes for foreign people who can’t speak the local language, can’t read the signs, and lack time to learn the local reality. Imagine, say, the Brazilian overlay for Moscow. You could show up, read your native Brazilian overlay of that city, do your business, eat, sleep, buy, leave, and scarcely “be in Moscow” at all. Constructed right, the AR Brazilian Moscow might even be a better Moscow — a Moscow that Russians themselves would pay to visit.

Tish Shute: You pointed out last year, in your opening keynote for ARE2010, that less immersive forms of AR have their own merits. We are still not seeing much “head mounted display weirdness” yet, but many other forms of AR are emerging – mobile, webcam, projected video, sonic augmented reality, even sticky light. You noted, practically everything that AR is involved in is a transitional technology. But since you spoke last year at ARE2010, which of these transitional technologies have shown the most promise for AR?

Bruce Sterling: It’s got to be handsets. Smartphones. The stats there are just amazing. The smartphone biz makes the personal computer business look like a Victorian railroad. When I read a guy like Tomi Ahonen, who talks about transitioning out of the old-fashioned “Legacy Internet,” that idea is startling. But AR is one visible indication that the Internet really could look like a “legacy.” The Legacy Internet as an old-fashioned, dusty, desk-based place best left to archivists and librarians, while the action is out on the streets.

Tish Shute: This year we have seen gestural interfaces go mainstream. What are the most interesting directions for gestural interfaces that you have seen emerge in recent months?

Bruce Sterling: To me, the most “interesting” part is seeing people do gestural stuff in public. William Gibson, my fellow author, observes that cellphones have stolen the gestural language of cigarettes. There’s lots of fidgeting, box tapping, ash-swiping, slipping boxes in and out of pockets… People quickly learn to do that without thinking twice, and they forget how weird it looks. It’s “design dissolving in behavior,” as Adam Greenfield puts it.

The gestural hack scene for the Kinect has been amazing. It’s like watching 1950s Beatnik dancing go mainstream.

Tish Shute: You have observed that Augmented Reality is Glocal which not only gives us different flavors of augmented experience but is “a departure from earlier models of tech startups, where you usually have like three hippies in a local garage. Now you’ve got German-American-Korean outfits like Metaio, and Total Immersion has a Russian affiliate. They’re inherently multinational, both inside the company and out.” What flavors of glocalness do you hope/expect to see at Augmented Reality Event this year.

Bruce Sterling: I’d be pretty happy to see some AR input from Brazil, India, and South Africa. I seem to be picking up a lot of followers in my Twitter stream from those locales. If I saw some Augmented Bollywood Reality, that would pretty much make my day.

Ori Inbar: What sessions will you go to at ARE this year? Who do you want to meet at ARE 2011?

Bruce Sterling: I make it my business to hang out with artists, but I’m hoping to drill down more on the technical aspects. For instance, where exactly are the bottlenecks in building animated augments? It looks like we’re about a sneeze away from jamming some crude Hanna-Barbera cartoons into real spaces. But the devil is in the details there.

Ori Inbar: Your commentary about the evolution of the AR industry over the years had significant focus on style. Is the AR industry dressed to kill yet? Any glimpses of promise in that direction?

Bruce Sterling: I’m not “pro-style” in every possible aspect of life, but as an Augmented Reality critic, it’s clear to me that if you claim to “augment” reality, then you should work hard to augment it — struggle to make it better. Otherwise you might as well call yourself “Defaced Reality,” or even “3D Spam.” When I see that kind of crudity and carelessness in AR, I’m gonna call people out on it. I know there will be the AR equivalent of cheesy billboards and gang graffiti, but I never much cared for those, either.

The industry’s videos have improved radically in the past year and a half. It used to be all about “look at my grainy, shaky handheld video of my cool new AR hack,” but nowadays the biz has really pulled its socks up.

If AR is about “experience design,” as I think it basically is, then eventually, as a matter of intellectual consistency and professional pride, everything you create will be considered part of “the experience.” That’s the industry’s way forward — that’s what it would do if it was grown-up.

AR people already look better than most similar geeks in the gaming business, and some day, I really do believe that augmentation people will become glamorous. They won’t be supermodels, but they’ll be about as chic as, say, professional set designers. Because AR is set design, in a way; it’s real-time interactive set-design for three-D spaces.

Ori Inbar: In the Layar Launch in 2009 you said “it’s the dawn of AR…”, at ARE 2010, you followed up on the theme saying “it’s 9am in the AR industry.” What time is it now?

Bruce Sterling: I’d be guessing it’s around 9:30 AM, but come on, that’s just a metaphor! ARE we all gonna blow off at 4:30 PM and have a beer, or is AR one of those cruel tech startups where nobody ever gets a personal life?

Ori Inbar: Are you reading any new fictional literature about AR that inspires you? And/or What interesting design fictions for AR have you come across recently?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’m always interested in creative people who just plain make stuff up. Because that’s why I commonly do myself. The stuff that “inspires” me is usually stuff that I just didn’t expect to see. But when I don’t expect it, that usually means I wasn’t paying enough attention. I plan to pay a lot of attention to AR this year.

I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense to write fiction nowadays “about AR,” because it’s no longer a fictional topic. It’s become like writing fiction “about cinema.” You can write good fiction about someone who works in cinema, but not fiction about cinema itself. AR is not sci-fi “Augmented Reality” any more, it’s become a real-world phenomenon, a new industry of real augmentation.

With that said, I must remark that I sit up straight whenever I see Marco Tempest do stuff. Magicians are all about mystery and wonder. You wouldn’t see a magician, say, using AR to work an assembly line, or re-order library books, or find a pizza joint in Barcelona. And that’s great. Marco is always gonna do something freaky and out-there, and even though he’s a tech magician, it’s never about the tech first. It’s always about his ingenuity in finding new ways to employ new tools in creating a magical experience for his audience.

Marco’s not an entrepreneur, he’s not gonna revolutionize people’s daily lives or invent Web 4.0, but even if AR becomes “old hat” some day, it’s never going to be old hat when he’s doing it. The guy is a pro, and I’m quite the fan.

Magic Projection Live @ TEDxTokyo 2010 from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.

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.”

The Missing Manual for The Future (or The Future: The Missing Manual)

O’Reilly Media, is famous for is producing  “missing manuals” for new technologies, but thinking of O’Reilly as just a publisher of books would be like saying Facebook is just a website (this came up in the discussion at Media Round Table at Web 2.0 Expo, NY, 2010).   In recent weeks, I managed to catch Tim O’Reilly at several events, Maker Faire, Web 2.0 Expo, Hadoop World, and the free webcast Tim did with John Battelle on The Battle for the Internet Economy (although Tim spoke several other times during this period!).

It occurred to me, as I immersed myself in the depth and breadth of innovation showcased and discussed at these events that Tim O’Reilly, and the O’Reilly team, are creating, The Missing Manual for the Future.

As Tim puts it, we are “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.” Tim uses a quote from William Gibson to illuminate what is at the heart of the O’Reilly project:

“The Future is here, it is just not evenly distributed yet.” (William Gibson).

But Tim O’Reilly makes another point about the future when he speaks.  The future unfolds unexpectedly – so we must invent for an unknown future not a known future, or as Alex Steffen put it so well in his post, Why Our Bright Green Futures Will Be Weirder Than We Think, – “The world we need is one we’ve never yet seen.” The magic of attending an O”Reilly event is that it gives you a chance to work on this koan in interesting ways, and to take more responsibility for how things turn out.

Tim O’Reilly also urges that we think more deeply about what we are doing.  His keynote for Hadoop World , NYC, billed as, “The Business of Data” turned towards “The Consequences of Living in a World of Data.” The 900 strong crowd at Hadoop World was probably one of the most savvy crowds in the world about the business of data, so this was a nice turn.

Web 2.0 Expo with the theme, Platforms for Growth, was a deep dive into the business of innovation.  Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo,  “Thinking Hard About The Future” (or rather “thinking a little bit creatively or differently about the future)  – see video here, developed the call he made at Web 2.0 Expo 2008, to “work on stuff that matters,” into a Four Cylinder Engine for Innovation.   The first of the four cylinders in the firing order is, “Having Fun!” But,  at Maker Faire, Web 2.0 Expo, and Hadoop World I got an inside look at the workings of all four cylinders, and there is more to come, I am sure, as the other O’Reilly events unfold over the coming months including,  Web 2.0 Summit, Strata (a new O’Reilly conference on The Business of Data), and Where 2.0, 2011.

In a free webcast, last week (recording here), previewing Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly discussed the Points of Control Map which is developing into a fun and useful tool to examine a very serious topic, “The Battle for the Internet Economy,” and how the “increasingly direct conflicts between its major players” could effect “people, government and the future of technology innovation.”   In my previous post, Platforms for Growth and Points of Control for Augmented Reality, I had a great conversation with Chris Arkenberg using this map as a springboard.  More on Points of Control later in this post.

The Four Cylinders of Innovation

click to enlarge

From Jet Ponies to Jet Packs: The First Cylinder of Innovation – “Have Fun”

The “maker” energy and its spirit of play, and the courage to create, hack, reinvent and re-purpose everything and anything, is a quintessential example of the first cylinder of innovation firing big.  Many “maker” projects also go on to fire on all four cylinders.   But the Maker forte definitely is in the first cylinder zone (and safety third as some of the rides, including Jet Ponies, warned).  The photo opening this post by Marc de Vinck – for more pics see here, is of Tim riding The Jet Ponies at Maker Faire which took  the New York Hall of Science by storm in late September – see The New York Times coverage here.  The ride was “built by the dastardly danger-hackers at the Madagascar Institute.“ See this wonderful interview with Hackett on his work to design “our specific jets from a patent that was filed in 1960s by a Mr. Lockwood, for Valveless Pulse Jets.” Hackett points out:

“Louder than god, glowing white-hot and looking like the trombone of the Apocalypse, pulse jets are also really shitty, inefficient engines,”

But, he adds:

“I have always wanted a jetpack, and one of the reasons I learned to build these things was to further that goal.”

This grand vision behind the Jet Ponies is a key to firing, The Second Cylinder of Innovation,  “Hey, we can change the world!”

But Jet Ponies, as a stepping stone to jet packs, also really struck a chord for me as I have been devoting a lot of time lately to the emerging Augmented Reality industry, a technology which was lumped in the same category of sci fi chimera as jet packs until very recently.

Data is the Gasoline

“The faces are coming from the sky.  The locations are coming from the sky.  All these apps depend on something, somewhere up.  And that, to me, was always the heart of Web 2.0.  And I am so delighted that people are finally getting it.  Because for a long time, people thought, ‘Oh, Web 2.0, it’s about lightweight advertising supported in a web start up.’  So I went, ‘No, no, no. It’s about the fact that we’re building these giant database subsystems in the sky that are going to drive applications.’  And now, of course, the same application is on your PC, it’s on your phone, it’s on you iPad.  And clearly, the applications are just sort of an interface to something that is being driven from the cloud, and that is fabulous.  That’s the difference.  People get it now.” (Tim O’Reilly, said this as part of a response to the first questioner at the Media Round table Web 2.0 Expo)

Answering questions about the importance of “Having Fun” to innovation doesn’t look quite as fun as riding Jet Ponies! Photo above from luca.sartoni’s Flickr stream

“ the data that is generated by the sensors and the applications that use that data is going to be where people are going to be innovative.” (Tim O’Reilly)

During the Media Round Table, I had a chance to ask Tim more about the role of bottom up innovation in a world where big data is the gasoline for increasingly sophisticated engines – platforms integrating machine to machine intelligence and real time analytics.

Tish Shute: You brought up Maker Faire in your keynote, and again now.  I was there, which not many people in the audience were  [not too many hands went up when Tim asked during his keynote].  But I think one of the things that struck me was the jet ponies – they were just earthshaking to stand near.  They made the ground tremble; they made the world shake.  Yet, most of your keynote, and most of what’s on our minds here, at Web 2.0 Expo, is extracting intelligence from the big data [in the sky], and algorithmic intelligences are the jet engines of the internet.  And of course, not to be forgotten, as we are here in New York City, where the trading markets are creating the air we breathe  [although we probably don't realize it until we lose our mortgage or something] and these algorithmic economies or “robot casinos” as Kevin Slavin put it, are all about speed – it’s not just real-time, issues of latency are  so critical that co-location is key to winning the game of the markets.  [Kevin Slavin brilliantly unpacks this in his talk, "Loitering on the Motherboard." For more in this see my conversation with Kevin Slavin below].

So my question is, who’s making the jet ponies for the algorithmic economies in the sky that you just described?   How can we make a play from the bottom up?  I always feel Ushahidi is one of the jet ponies of the data algorithmic space [because of their great work to bring human and machine intelligence together to solve problems in crisis situations].  But who do you think is doing exciting work and how can we ensure that this powerful world of data and algorithmic intelligences does not become hidden in a closed black box [only really accessible to elite players like the NYC trading markets]?

Tim O’Reilly: “Well, I think there’s certainly a lot of interesting things happening in, say, the financial services that a lot of, kind of, the Internet folks are kind of blind to.  I think that there are companies like Next Jump which are really good with data and good with algorithms. But kind of speaking specifically to the maker side of this, that whole sensor enabled world which is going to produce data is in its infancy.  What we have that I think is so powerful right now is we have the first portable sensor platform.  I said in my talk the other day, you know, your phone has ears, it has eyes, it has a sense of where it is.  And these are all available to application developers. You know, you can compare, say, Dodgeball to Foursquare, you can see how different… Dodgeball is Foursquare in the tele-type era.  Foursquare is now possible because there are so many more capabilities on the phone.

And I think that we are going to see a lot of other areas that are revolutionized by the sensors in the device.  It could well be that some of them will come explicitly out of the maker kind of projects, or it could just be that make is sort of a proxy for them.  So yeah, Arduino is this great maker sensor platform, but hey, here’s a consumer sensor platform [holding up phone]. Maybe we vaulted past the maker stage already and we just didn’t know it.

And that’s not entirely true, because Arduino is building a whole economy of special purpose devices.  But it feels a little bit like the days when people rolling their own PCs coexisted with the rise of Dell, who was a kid in his college dorm room who made his own PCs and sold them on the net, but figured out how to scale it pretty quickly and get good at it. But there were still a lot of garage shops, you know, ‘I’ll make a PC and sell it to you’ people for probably a decade before there was really a clue that that was a commodity industry.  In fact, I do think the sensor platforms are going to become a commodity industry.  And the data that is generated by the sensors and the applications that use that data is going to be where people are going to be innovative.”

The internet operating system is a data operating system and it is happening in real time (Tim O’Reilly)

click to enlarge the image above  – a slide from Mike Olsen’s  (CEO of Cloudera) keynote at Hadoop World

Not only do we have a portable sensor platform in our pockets  but developers also have powerful platforms and tools to make sense of data that fuel our apps.   Opensource Hadoop makes available, to anyone with some data munching chops, the power to work with giant unstructured databases and do the kind of real time analytics previously only available to giants like Google.  Big players like Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter use Hadoop (Jonathon Gray from Facebook noted they add 10TB a day).   But, as this great roundup of Hadoop World points out, while Hadoop gets the press for handling petabytes of data , Mike Olsen (CEO of Cloudera) noted, the fastest growing area of users are working with clusters smaller than 10TB and over half of the Hadoop clusters were under 10TB in size.

Four Square: A Platform for Growth with an ecosytem built on top of data that exists in the real world

As an augmented reality enthusiast it is not hard to guess that one of my favorite platforms for growth is Four Square.  See Dennis Crowley’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo here.  The Four Square API has been available to developers since November 2009,  and there are already a number of  interesting applications, and there will be many more to come.  The screen shot above is of geopollster – see the gallery of Four Square apps here.

@dens tweeted recently  “Politics + @Foursquare = @GeoPollster” http://geopollster.com <- I love love love that people are using 4SQ to think about election tools

As Kati London pointed out in her keynote, Four Square is the “kind of augmented reality that is aimed at shifting or changing a person’s social reality, e.g. the mayor badges in Four Square that change my relationship to the people and the place I am in, and augment engagement and reputation through socially driven consumer tie ins.” We are already see augmented reality developers beginning to work with the Four Square API – see here, Foursquare + Augmented Reality + Virtual Graffiti = ARstreets.

As augmented reality development tools mature, Four Square will, increasingly, become an important platform for creative AR developers interested in integrating the power of this platform for augmented engagement and reputation with “device aided augmented reality that can shift visual experiences of situated geolocal experiences.” With the Qualcomm vision based augmented reality SDK now available for download, and Wave in a Box soon? to be released, and an ARWave client working on Android (almost!), I have been exploring the Four Square API in my non existent spare time!!

The Four Square API also offers some interesting possibilities for exploring games that take the complex economy of Four Square – not personal data but aggregates of behavior, as their subject matter (for more on this see my conversation with Kevin Slavin later in this post and in an upcoming post).

I took this picture of Dennis at Where 2.0, 2009 at the beginning of Four Square’s phenomenal growth (they are at 4 million plus users now).

Pachube (Patch-Bay): a web service for storing and sharing sensor, energy and environmental data

Eighteen months ago, I interviewed Usman Haque (architect and director, Haque Design + Research) and founder of Pachube – see Pachube, Patching the Planet.   Usman pointed me to this wonderful evocative image from T.R. Oke’s book, “Boundary Layer Climates” (original photo source Prof. L. E. Mount’s The Climatic Physiology of the Pig).  “It’s the same piglets, in the same box, but on the right hand side the temperature has been increased. This small change in how the space is “programmed” has dramatically changed the way the ‘inhabitants’ relate to each other and how they relate to their space.”

The Challenge of Connecting people and environments.

At Web 2.0 Expo, I got the opportunity to talk with Usman Haque again.   Pachube, is becoming an established platform now, Usman explained.  They have a development team of eleven and robust back end.  And, they will now be spending some more time on the front end, including a redesign of the website, making “it a lot easier to widgetize the entire website so that you will be able to take almost any element and embed that into your own website.” And, as Usman mentioned in his presentation, they are working on an augmented reality interface, Porthole, for facilities management and, “as a consumer-oriented application that extends the universe of Pachube data into the context of AR – a ‘porthole’ into Pachube’s data environments..  Usman is also contributing to the AR standards discussion and on the program committee now for the W3C group on augmented reality.

Click to enlarge the image above from Chris Burman’s paper for the W3C, Portholes and Plumbing: how AR erases boundaries between “physical” and “virtual”

Pachube, is sometimes described as the Facebook for Data or an analogy Usman prefers, a Twitter for Sensors.  At Web 2.0 Expo, I had an amazing opportunity to hear from Twitter and Facebook about their strategies as platforms for growth.  This gave me lots of fuel for questions about Pachube’s approach to developing their platform.  Simplicity was a theme that Facebook  and Twitter both affirmed as a key.  One of Pachube’s challenges will be to deliver ease of use, and the equivalent of Facebook’s “like” and  Twitter’s “follow” to gain mass appeal.

Here is a brief excerpt from my upcoming conversation with Usman:

Tish Shute: So as a platform you see Pachube as having more in common with Twitter – a Twitter for Sensors. In what ways is Pachube similar to Twitter?

Usman Haque: Well we are the Twitter of sensors, devices & machines in the sense that, really, the API that enables all this communication is important, much more so than the website itself. It is where, basically, most of the millions of our hits actually go, is to the backend. And we’ve now got dozens of applications built on top of the system, a little bit like Twitter’s applications; you know, all the apps are the important part.

But we are actually going to be doing some quite exciting things with API keys that we haven’t really spoken that much about in public. But we have come up with a pretty innovative solution to make almost every resource have granular privacy options on it, now discussed here.

At Hadoop World, Tim O’Reilly also raised some interesting broader questions that are very relevant to Pachube’s vision to “patch the planet”, e.g, the problem of digital identity in the age of sensors? (Smart phones already know their users by the way they walk!) And, “How should we think about privacy in a world where data can be triangulated?”

Usman talked about Pachube’s approach to both the technical aspects of how to build a massively scalable system, and the conceptual aspects of how people connect to each other, and what they might do with these new opportunities to connect environments and sensor data  (see my earlier talk with Usman, Pachube, Patching the Planet, for a detailed explanation of some of the concepts behind Pachube).

I look forward to posting this conversation. Pachube is growing, and Usman always goes beyond the familiar tropes of connecting human and machine intelligence.

2nd Cylinder of Innovation: “Hey Can We Change the World!”

The possibilities for reimagining of the role of data in healthcare produced some of the most powerful “Hey Can We Change the World” moments for me at both Web 2.0 Expo and Hadoop World.  The slide above is from Esther Dyson’s brilliant Ignite presentation, “What you can and can’t learn from your genes?” are here,   Tim O’Reilly also brought up the powerful role real time data analytics can play in improving healthcare in his Hadoop World Keynote.  Also see Alex Howard’s post, 10 Lessons for Gov 2.0 from Web 2.0 for some more great, “hey we can change the world moments” at Web 2.0 Expo.  The keynote from Lukas Biewald of CrowdFlower and Leila Chirayath Janah of Samasource (screen shot below) in particular, is a provocative exploration of the future of work in the new ecologies of human and machine intelligence.

Changing the World When Our Lives Are Increasingly Shaped by Forces Invisible To Us?

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Mike Olsen, CEO of Cloudera, noted that “the largest area of data growth does not come from humans interacting with machines; rather, it’s from machines interacting with each other” (see here in Minor Technical Difficulties).   One of the most interesting presentations at Web 2.0 Expo was Kevin Slavin’s, “Loitering on the Motherboard,” which, as Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his keynote at Hadoop World, is a talk that raises all kinds of questions about a system where big players are gaming the data for their own ends.

Kevin Slavin, a founder of Area/Code, notes the operating system of our mortgage, life insurance, the operating system of currencies and gold is now governed by machine to machine intelligence and algorithimic economies outside of human cognitive processes.  The markets are now legible only to bots in an algorithmic arms race with bots surveilling bots, and throwing off false information in a bid for counter-surveillance.  He showed some slides of the eery but beautiful visualizations of traces of the trading bots created from the Nanex API.

The screenshot above is from the Nanex: Crop Circle of the Day – Quote Stuffing and Strange Sequences.  “The common theme with the charts shown on this page is they are all generated in code and are algorithmic. Some demonstrate bizarre price or size cycling, some demonstrate large burst of quotes in extremely short time frames and some will demonstrate both…” This one is a zoom of the NSDQ “Wild Thing.”  Wild price/size repeater from NSDQ running at 1,000 quotes per second, effecting the BBO along the way (I love the great names Nanex gives the different patterns and traces produced by the trading bots).

Nanex supplies a real-time data feed comprising trade and quote data for all US equity, option, and futures exchanges. They have archived this data since 2004 and have created and used numerous tools to “sift through the enormous dataset: approximately 2.5 trillion quotes and trades as of June 2010.” May 6th 2010 (day of the flash crash), had approximately 7.6 billion trade, quote, level 2, and depth records.

Kevin points out that our lives are being shaped by criteria invisible to us and the old hackneyed tropes of machine to machine intelligence such a robots reading HUDs in English are long worn out.  The latter point is, perhaps, something for us augmented reality geeks absorbed in ideas of “making the invisible visible” to chew on.

Changing a world shaped by forces that are, increasingly, invisible to us presents a huge challenge.

But I had the glimmer of a, “Hey Can We Change the World” moment, when I attended Kevin Slavin founder of Area/Code’s presentation and had a conversation with him after his talk.  Could games take these complex economies as their subject matter?  The economies of  Farmville and games like WoW are not opaque at all, and these are environments with complex economic behavior, “where you can actually have enough data to understand what it is” – “it’s not so much about personal data.  It’s more about, like, aggregate behaviors.” “Games that can really model those, and play with those, and take those as the subject the way that Monopoly takes Monopoly as a subject could be really interesting.” Kevin made many fascinating points – more to come on this topic.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson, of Kevin Slavin speaking at Web 2.0 Expo NY, 2010, from the O’Reilly Conferences Flickr stream

Here is the beginning of our conversation:

Talking With Kevin Slavin

Tish Shute: You began your talk today about visibility and where some of the algorithmic masters of disguise went to work, after they had solved the math behind stealth bombers.  I thought perhaps you were leading into ideas about a reverse surveillance society.

But you surprised me, as I felt you made visibility itself kind of a non-issue by the end of your presentation and that counter surveillance became basically a time and speed issue.  Now I am not sure quite how to imagine a counter-surveillance society, something I try to think about…

Kevin Slavin: Well, let’s see.  There’s a couple ways to think about it.  I think one point is just that when we talk about counter-surveillance, we usually locate that as something that comes from  the bottom up, something that comes from the population. Think about the way the plane spotters discovered the CIA black rendition flights.

I think in general, when people talk about counter surveillance, or sousveillance, they imagine it as an inversion of the traditional relationship between the people and the state.

But that’s what’s interesting. What’s happening now, is that there are forms of surveillance and counter-surveillance that are in play beyond any human perceptual horizons. These forms are at their most sophisticated in financial services, in the markets.

If you were a bot, and could read the market legibly (which humans cannot), what you would see, effectively, are bots that are surveilling bots. Then you have bots that are throwing off false information in a bid for counter-surveillance. Many of the bots are, themselves, surveilling other bots; each one of them is trying to figure out what all the other ones are going to do. In essence, it’s an algorithmic arms race, and game theory has become concrete, since the theories are code, the code is action, and the action affects, let’s say: your mortgage.

And so, basically what you have is you have this series of algorithms that are all looking to discern each other, while also trying to prevent themselves from being discerned. I think of the tunnels under the trenches in WWI, tunnels to surveil the trenches, and then, later, tunnels to surveil the tunnels. There’s a few examples of this kind of thing.  But It’s especially strange when it’s computer code, and at the magnitude we’re seeing today.

All of it, as noted in the talk, accounting for 70% of all the trades in the market. 70% of the market trades are never touched by human hands or even seen by human eyes; they don’t move through a conventional cognitive process.  And that’s why you get things like the Credit Suisse algorithm, it was buying, selling 200,000 shares of stocks to itself over and over and over again. It was a bug and it slowed the market to a crawl.

Credit Suisse was fined, in essence, for failing to control an algorithm. Maybe that’s the first time an algorithm was treated like a human, in a way. As if the algorithm broke the law, and Credit Suisse was responsible for letting it do so. For me, that feels like a threshold event.

It’s not that humans never made mistakes when trading on the market. But when algorithms err, they err with magnitude.

The idea that we now have bugs in the United States market economy is really worth looking at.  If Apple can’t keep code bugs from the most simple iPhone apps in a closed and regulated ecosystem, I’m pretty certain we’ll have a lot more Credit Suisse type bugs in the future.

And that will be pretty interesting. There will be viruses, and the operating system they will operate on will be the operating system of the United States. The operating system of your pension, your house, your life insurance. The operating system of currencies and gold.

Tish Shute: I was hard-pressed by the end of your talk to think of like, “Well, what would be the equivalent of, sort of a people’s uprising to create a better fairer society in this kind of world where, really, the things that affect the key aspects of lives most are going on beyond human perception at an algorithmic level?”  But you made a pretty radical suggestion at the end…

Kevin Slavin: Well I think increasingly the markets have become delaminated from anything meaningful. First from goods, then from fundamentals, and now finally from homo sapiens. So that’s hard to fight.

It’s the race towards abstraction that makes it impossible to simply “resist.” The latest version in the long series of fiscal catastrophes was based on Wall Street finding goods that could be rolled up and sold with false valuations, but goods that would take a long time to fail. Mortgages are handy like that. It’s the tradition of extending the abstraction as long as possible, until finally the bill arrives and the banks fail. I don’t know if that’s something to rise up against or not. It’s like a rally against evil.

But really, I think the point is that it won’t be the people that rise up. It will be the financial services themselves that rise up. They’ll just detach completely.

That was harder to do with cotton or with wheat, with simple futures; they keep financial services tied to the ground.  So what we’re doing is creating increasingly complex financial instruments that are further and further removed from anything you can touch.  Like the way a mortgage is abstract. But, of course, the bottom line is that at the end of that mortgage lies someone’s home.

It’s said that Wall Street is now moving onto life insurance, because that’s going to take even longer to fail.  They’re doing the exact same thing. The word is that they are rolling up CDOs made out of crap life insurance policies, same way they rolled them up with crap mortgages a few years ago.

And those will probably take, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years to unwrap and unravel.  But what you see in the meantime, is that they are looking for things that are increasingly abstract, intangible, removed as far as possible from the experience of everyday life.

So maybe this is good. Maybe that’s financial services rising up. Lifting off. I think best case scenario now is that they actually leave humans alone altogether.  That, someday, they are just trading, effectively, completely arbitrary goods, the stocks could be anything at all, maybe for crops that no longer exist, and I’m just saying that then these bots would no longer affect what we do and what we are, it would just be a robot casino, an invisible paradise in the air.

People are the platform: How Games Can Be Engines of Innovation in Our Lives

See the video of Games that Know Where We Live here (screen shot above)

Kati London, Senior Producer, Area/Code, in her keynote showed how games that know where we live can shift players perspectives – from device aided augmented reality that can shift visual experiences of situated geolocal experiences to a kind of augmented reality that is aimed at shifting or changing a person’s social reality, e.g. the mayor badges in Four Square that change my relationship to the people and the place I am in, and augment engagement and reputation through socially driven consumer tie ins.

Area/Code has recently developed two games for the Knight Foundation that take people as the platform.  Macon Money, uses very simple games dynamics (for more see the video of Kati’s keynote) in a game designed to help “Knight’s continuing efforts to support revitalizing Macon and creating a vibrant college town.”

The other game that Area/Code has designed with the support of the Knight Foundation  is for the Biloxi and Gulf Coast community, a game called Battlestorm.  “The game’s purpose is to increase awareness about natural disasters and change the way people prepare for them.”

3rd Cylinder of Innovation: Build products, business models and entire industries.

Glympse – real-time, private location tracking

Julianne Pepitone, Yahoo! Finance, nailed the essence of Web 2.0 Expo, NYC, this year in her post, Web 2.0 Expo startups are big on neighborhoods, storytelling.  She writes:

“At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City this week, executives from big sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora all spoke about industry trends. But the showcase of 27 startup tech companies stole the show.”

Listen carefully to Tim O’Reilly and Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, question their picks from the startup showcase at Web 2.0 Expo.  Also see this video of Fred and Tim discussing their conversations with all the start ups.  This  is one of the clearest public windows onto both how to present your company to VC, and how to figure out what are the most important questions for you as an entrepreneur  building a business in a world of data.

Glympse successfully pitches their “jet pony” strategy for a location based business, and is Fred’s pick.  They hold up well under pressure and answer Tim and Fred’s hard questions about how their start up will not get overtaken by an encumbent player with resources and market share before they can gain traction.   food52 responds to Tim’s probing about their strategy for business data analytics that he points out are vital if they want to survive with the small margins of ecommerce.  There is a list of all the participants in the start up showcase in Brady’s post here. hour.ly was the audience pick.

Shazam for Faces!

My favorite start up was a biometric service doing face, iris, and finger print matching, Tactical Information Systems.

Tim and Fred also liked them, and they have an interesting discussion about the merits or not of approaching your platform through a narrow first application as Tactical Information Systems are with WanderID -  an application to help identifying lost Alzheimer patients.  As Fred pointed out, they are potentially the Shazam for faces, so why start so small?

I  had asked TIS the same question when I met them in the “speed dating” session.  This is just their first toe in the water as they are a two person company at the moment. Their vision for their platform is big.  Mary Haskett and Dr Alex Kilpatrick, the founders of this quintessential jet pony for the algorithmic economies in the sky, are not only a partnership with the credentials to do a  Shazam for faces – see their bios here, they are the people I would want to be running a Shazam for faces!  They really get the consequences of living in a world of data – check out Dr Kilpatrick’s absolute killer Ignite talk, “Defeating Big Brother.” (screenshot below)

How Can Augmented Reality Add Value to the Real Time Internet/Data Operating System?

planefinder.net – an augmented reality app that lets you find information about planes by pointing your phone at the sky, “including flight number, aircraft registration, speed, altitude and how far away it is” (via MacLife).

The new opportunities in the algorithmic economies in the sky were center stage at Web 2.0 Expo and there are some interesting AR apps for the real time internet/data operating system emerging, like planefinder.net.  But Augmented Reality was still pretty low profile at Web 2.0 Expo (except that NVidia augmented reality demo attracted a lot of attention at the sponsors expo).  However, everyone working in the emerging industry of AR should recognize that apps big on “neighborhoods and story telling” are heading right up the AR street, and that platforms like Four Square and Pachube present enormous opportunity to explore the possibilities of AR.  And if augmented reality enthusiasts are not already paying attention to real time data analytics, and Hadoop, they should be (see this post for an excellent round up on Hadoop World).

At Hadoop World, Tim O’Reilly referenced the great tagline from the  IBM commercial:

“Would you be willing to cross the street — blindfolded — on data that was five minutes old? Five hours? Five days?”

As I have noted in several earlier posts – see here and here for starters,  we are just seeing the tools  for developing near field, vision based, mobile, social AR become widely available to developers, so there should be a new level of AR apps emerging through 2011.  There is a wonderful discussion in the comments of this post by Mac Slocum, “How Augmented Reality Apps Can Catch On,” between Mac, Raimo one of the founders of Layar, and Chris Arkenberg on what constitutes a platform for growth for augmented reality.

Mac’s post, the comments and Chris Arkenberg’s post on the latest edition of the Gartner Hype Cycle, that rather curiously placed Augmented reality almost at the peak of inflated expectations. really got me excited about exploring an idea I have been thinking about for a while, which is to get the AR community to discuss the Points of Control map.    See my discussion with Chris Arkenberg here, Platforms for Growth and Points of Control for Augmented Reality. The recording of  John Battelle’s and Tim O’Reilly’s webcast on Points of Control is posted here.

The interactive Points of Control map is an amazing tool to think with! Check it out in movements, territory and movements, acquisition mode.  There is a competition for the most interesting comment and most interesting acquisition suggestion.  The prize is a ticket to Web 2.0 Summit!

What is the Future of Social?

The recent “defection” from Google to Facebook – see Lars Rasmussen, Father Of Google Maps And Google Wave, Heads To Facebook,  is as MG Siegler of TechCrunch points out, “the biggest one since Chrome OS lead Matthew Papakipos made the same jump in June” (TechCrunch also notes “current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor was heavily involved in the launch of Google Maps”).

These moves have drawn my particular attention as did Bret Taylor’s response in his conversation with Brady Forrest at Web 2.0 Expo to Brady’s question, “How soon until we get the Facebook firehose?”

If you have been reading Ugotrade you already know how important I think an open, distributed, standard for real-time communications such as the very innovative Wave Federation Protocol could be for AR development  -  see ARWave and my presentation at MoMo13, Amsterdam last year, The Next Wave of AR: Mobile Social Interaction Right Here, Right Now!

The anticipated release of  Wave in a Box, has raised hopes in the developer community that  WFP will soon become easier to work with, and hopefully more widely adopted.  Like many others, I wonder what will happen to Wave in a Box now?

But the innovation of Wave is deep and broad (and as many have pointed out hugely ambitious).  Perhaps the boldest attempt yet to innovate both at the low level of architecture (where Google is so powerful) and at the high level of the Mark Zuckerberg, “big idea,” which as Tim O’Reilly notes is, “What is the future of social?” MG Siegler noted Facebook Groups Is Sort Of Like Google Wave For Human Beings.

But I deeply hope that the open, distributed standard part of the Wave big idea is not lost in the mix here.

Fourth Cylinder of Innovation: Keep the Ecosystem Going, Create More Value than You Capture

The Points of Control map is interactive, so please click here or on the image above for the full experience.

Tim O’Reilly points out that there is a worrisome dark side to the Points of Control Map – see Tim’s keynote here.  To paraphrase some or his points:

There are companies on the map that are forgetting to think about creating a sustainable ecosystem.  Rather than growing the pie, they are trying to divide up the pie and that threatens to cause the fourth cylinder of innovation to misfire.  This fourth cylinder is essential to the ecosystem.

Tim O’Reilly looks back to the lessons of the personal computing industry which was incredibly vital and creative, and lots of people made money until a couple of big players “sucked all the air out of the ecosystem” and innovation had to go elsewhere.

The Power of Platforms is to create value not just for your company but for other people.   Create value for yourself by creating value for other people.  Tim O’Reilly used the wonderful example of  Henry Ford inventing the weekend so that there would be enough people with time and money to buy his mass produced cars.  Think about building the ecosystem that will support the future your are going to build.  Grow the pie rather than cut up the pie.  This will be the vital fourth cylinder of innovation in a Web Squared world.

Tim O’Reilly has long proposed that  Web 2.0 is all about harnessing collective intelligence,  But as Gartner predicts, “By year end 2012, physical sensors will create 20 percent of non-video internet traffic.” Yet another previously unevenly distributed future is going mainstream, and if you haven’t read it already, now is the time to read this paper by Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle, Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On.

The Consequences of Living in a World of Data

To bring this very long post to a close!  Here are just a few of the key questions re The Consequences of Living in a World of Data that Tim O’Reilly raised during his keynote for Hadoop World:

“How would we solve the problem of digital identity in the age of sensors? (Our smart phones are able to know their users by the way they walk – their gait!)

“How will we input data when our devices are smart enough to listen on their own?”

“How should we think about privacy in a world where data can be triangulated?”

“We are moving to a world in which every device generates useful data, in which every action creates information shadows on the net.”

“Shouldn’t we regulate the misuse of data rather than the possession of it?”

“How do we avoid a data arms race?”

“Create more value than you capture.”

The Points of Control map is interactive, so please click here or on the image above for the full experience.

Today at 4pm EST, 1pm PDT John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly will discuss the Points of Control map and The Battle for the Internet Economy in a Free Webcast:

“More than any time in the history of the Web, incumbents in the network economy are consolidating their power and staking new claims to key points of control. It’s clear that the internet industry has moved into a battle to dominate the Internet Economy.

John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly will debate and discuss these shifting points of control as the board becomes increasingly crowded. They’ll map critical inflection points and identify key players who are clashing to control services and infrastructure as they attempt to expand their territories. They’ll also explore the effect these chokepoints could have on people, government, and the future of technology innovation.”

I’ve been wanting to start a discussion on the  Points of Control map in the Augmented Reality community for a while now, and Chris’ recent post on the latest edition of the Gartner Hype Cycle, “Is AR Ready for the Trough of Disillusionment?” and this post by Mac Slocum, “How Augmented Reality Apps Can Catch On,” and the conversation in the comments between Mac, Raimo (one of the founders of Layar), and Chris, all prompted me to get a conversation started…(see below for all that followed!).  Chris put me on the hot seat back in June when he did this very generous interview with me on Boing Boing, so it was time to turn the tables.

Tim O’Reilly, in his  keynote for Web 2.0 Expo, pointed out there is both a fun and a dark side to the Points of Control map.  There are companies on this map, he noted, that rather than “growing the pie,” are trying to divide up the pie, and they are forgetting to think about creating a sustainable ecosystem. I expect the conversation between Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle to dig deep into this Battle for the Internet Economy.  If, like me, you have another engagement at the time of the webcast, you can register on the site to receive the recording.

AR is still too young to figure in the battles of the giants, but there will be a lot to be learned from this conversation.  And, The Points of Control map is good to think with from the POV of AR in many ways.  As Chris Arkenberg observed:

“When I look at this map, the points of control map, it’s really interesting to me, because what it says to me with respect to AR is each of these little regions that they have drawn out would be a great research project. So every single one of these should be instructive to AR.

In other words, we should be able to look at social networks, the land of search, or kingdom of ecommerce, and apply some very rigorous critical thinking to say, “How would AR add to this engagement, this experience of gaming, or ecommerce, or content?”

Looking at each of these individually and really meticulously saying, “OK, well yes, it can do this but how is that different from the current screen media experience, the current web experience that we have of all these types of things?”   You know, how can augmented reality really add a new layer of value and experience to these? And I think that process would really trim a lot of the fat from the hopes and dreams of AR and anchor it down into some very pragmatic avenues for development.  And then you could start looking at, “Well, OK, what happens when we start combining these?” When we take gaming levels and plug that into the location basin, as you suggested.”

Chris Arkenberg is a technology professional with a focus on product strategy & development, specializing in 3D, augmented reality, ubicomp and the social web. He uses research, scenario planning, and foresight methodologies to help organizations anticipate change and adopt a resilient and forward-looking posture in the face of unprecedented uncertainty. His personal work is collected at urbeingrecorded, and his professional profile is here.

He is also one of the founder/organizers of AR DevCamp which is currently scheduled for Dec. 4th (somewhere in SF or The Valley!)  Chris said, “No further details atm (still trying to find a venue and get sponsors) but please direct people to http://ardevcamp.org for upcoming information.”

Talking with Chris Arkenberg

Tish Shute: I know some people thought the positioning of AR by Gartner near the peak of the hype cycle was misguided, and based on a very narrow understanding of AR as used in marketing apps. But reading your post I thought you made a lot of good points.

Chris Arkenberg: It’s tracking hype, right? It’s not necessarily tracking the growth of the technologies or their maturation so much as it’s tracking the general attention level. And what’s interesting to me is that tends to affect the amount of money that goes into those technologies.

Tish Shute: I was particularly interested in your post because I have been writing a post about two recent O’Reilly events in NYC, Maker Faire, Web 2.0 Expo, and then Hadoop World, where Tim gave a very interesting 45 minute keynote.   AR was pretty low profile at all three events.   But the NVidia augmented reality demo attracted a lot of attention at the sponsors expo, and Usman Haque, Founder of Pachube announced in his presentation, they are working on an augmented reality interface for Pachube called Porthole, its designed for facilities management and, “as a consumer-oriented application that extends the universe of Pachube data into the context of AR – a ‘porthole’ into Pachube’s data environments.. “  Usman also mentioned, when I talked to him, that he is contributing to the AR standards discussion and on the program committee now for the W3C group on augmented reality.  For more on this standards discussion and the Pachube AR interface, see Chris Burman’s paper for the W3C, Portholes and Plumbing: how AR erases boundaries between “physical” and “virtual.”

I think pioneers in the augmented reality commmunity should pay attention to these wider conversations about the Battle for the Internet Economy, and the exploration of the  “Platforms for Growth” theme at Web 2.0 Expo is very important- this is a course also a nudge to read my upcoming post on these O’Reilly events!

Also I have another project I have been chewing on that I would like to talk to you about.   I want to start an AR conversation about the wonderful Points of Control map produce for Web 2.0 summit by John Battelle. [ Note there will be, "Battle for the Internet Economy" free Web2Summit webcast w/ @johnbattelle & @timoreilly Wed 10/27 at 1pm PT http://bit.ly/b46cmb #w2s]

Up to this point, understandably given the immaturity of the technology, AR has little role in the “Battle for the Internet Economy.”  But this doesn’t mean that the map isn’t good for AR visionaries, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and developers to think with.   And both you and Tim have pointed out the potential for AR to leverage the giant data subsystems in the sky.   I have to say the positioning of Cloud Computing on the brink of heading down into the trough of disillusionment in this recent rendition of the Gartner Hype Cycle seems ridiculous!

Cloud Computing is already ubiquitous hardly seems credible that it is headed for a trough of disillusionment!

Chris Arkenberg: Yeah, it’s ubiquitous so why even talk about it when it’s your fundamental infrastructure?

Tish Shute: Yeah and I seriously doubt it is imminently headed for a trough of disillusionment….and this brings me back to the Points of Control Map which as John Batelle points out, “aims to identify key players who are battling to control the services and infrastructure of a websquared world” in which the “Web and the world intertwine through mobile and sensor platforms.”  This instrumented world, of course, creates a great deal of opportunity for augmented reality. Have you seen that, that points of control map?

Chris Arkenberg: I think I have, actually.

Tish Shute: There has been much debate about how this intertwining of the web and the world will play out in augmented reality.   Chris Burman points out in his position paper for W3C,  Portholes and Plumbing: how AR erases boundaries between “physical” and “virtual”, that “trying to draw parallels between a browser based web and the possibilities of AR may solve issues of information distribution in the short-term,”  but it must not have a limiting effect in the long-term.   But now we at least have one web standards-based browser for AR thanks to the work of Blair MacIntyre and the Georgia Tech team.  But I think the discussion in the comments of Mac Slocum’s recent post, “How Augmented Reality Apps Can Catch On” is an interesting starting point from which to think about platforms of growth for AR.  I am not sure if I am stretching his meaning but I think Raimo, Layar, is suggesting that what the Point of Control map call the the Plains of Media content is very important to the growth of the fledgling AR industry right now. And I would agree with this, and add that the neighboring terrain of gaming levels will be pretty key as one of my other favorite AR start ups Ogmento hopes to reveal in the near future! But what do you think was most important in this brief but pithy dialogue between you Raimo and Mac?

[The screenshot above is a teaser video the Gary Hayes from MUVEdesign for his upcoming (2011 release date), game called Time Treasure.  See Gary’s blog for more and Gary’s  post from over a year ago on AR Business models.  Thomas K. Carpenter, on Games Alfresco notes, “I think this is a terrific idea and I find it interesting he’s planning this on a tablet rather than a smartphone.”

Chris Arkenberg: The way I took it…And to give a little bit of context, I came from sort of this apprehension of augmented reality as an expression of the existing Internet. So as sort of a visualization layer that allows you to kind of draw out data, and then, with all the affordances of being able to anchor it to real world things.

And my own sort of path has led me to want to really try to understand that and refine it, particularly with respect to the sort of Internet of things and the smarter planet idea of just having embedded systems everywhere. And specifically, what is the value-add for augmented reality as a visualization layer of an instrumented world?

And so that’s caused me to be a bit biased towards that side of AR. And the way I took Raimo’s comment was that he was saying that, “You know, really what we’re interested in is media.” That he was effectively saying that AR for them is really just about that space between the screen and the the world, or between your eyes and the world, and what you can do there.

Certainly I had considered it in the past, but I hadn’t really focused on it or assumed that it was a priority as a business model. And so he kind of reminded me that, actually, there’s a lot of entertainment applications. There’s a lot of, obviously, advertising and marketing applications.
And so I felt that I was being a little narrow in my focus…

Tish Shute: Yes this comes to the heart of what I am interested in about the role AR can play in opening up new relationships to the world of data that we live, not just making it more accessible and useful to us when and where we need it, but AR as a road to reimagining  it..

Have you seen any interesting work yet to explore these great data economies in the cloud through AR. I mean can you think of any others – there is planefinder.net but others?

Chris Arkenberg: I’ve seen a few just sort of skunk works type applications that people have been playing around with, again, to try and reveal things. One of them was similar to the aircraft, but it was more for military use and being able to identify things of interest in the sky. I’ve seen a couple other for navigation, so being able to identify mountain peaks on a visual plane, for example, but this isn’t so much about revealing an instrumented world.

Tish Shute: Yeah, I think that was from the Imagination right? I know that’s an interesting one. Usman at Web 2.0 Expo, in his presentation, mentioned the work Pachube is doing on an Augmented Reality interface. I interviewed Usman again as my last long interview with him was nearly 18 months ago now and Pachube is well on the way to becoming the Facebook of Data or the analogy that Usman prefers – the Twitter of sensors!

Chris Arkenberg: Hmm, interesting.

Tish Shute: And to go back to your comments on Augmented Reality not getting caught in some of the traps that have made virtual worlds lose relevancy I think that is vital that AR developers understand the strategic possibilities of key points of control in the internet economy because the isolation and Balkanization of virtual worlds were certainly a factor in their rapid slide into the trough of disillusionment – although many would argue that a fundamental flaw in the kind of virtual experience that Second Life and other virtual worlds constructed was really the fatal flaw (see James Turner’s interview with Kevin Slavin Reality has a gaming layer).

But Second Life’s isolation from the other great network economies of the internet was certainly a limiting factor.

Chris Arkenberg: And that’s been exactly my sense, and I’ve, over the years, tried to encourage development in that direction for virtual worlds. I did work, through Adobe, to help develop Atmosphere 3D back in the the early 2000’s. And we did a lot of work to try and understand the marketplace and the specific value-add of doing things in 3D over 2D.

And this is kind of why I keep referring back to VR and VW’s with respect to augmented reality, is that with immersive worlds, there was this idea…there was this big rush. Everybody was so excited about it. It was obviously the next cool thing. And everybody wanted to try to do everything in it. You could do your shopping in virtual worlds. You could have meetings in virtual worlds.

Tish Shute: and shopping, yes ..that didn’t work out so well!

Chris Arkenberg: And everybody was very excited in developing these things. And what it really came down it is, “Yeah, you can, but it’s actually a lot better to do those things on a flat plane or in person.” Meeting Place, WebEx, TelePresence – those tools generally do a much better job at facilitating TelePresence meetings than a virtual world does. The same with TelePresent Education. There are only very specific things that both VR and AR are really good at.

And that’s where I find myself with augmented reality right now, trying to really pick through that and critically look at which uses are really appropriate for an AR overlay. And again, I think that’s why the hype cycle is important, because it reflects back this desire that AR is going to be the next big thing – the be-all, end-all of interacting with data in the cloud – and forces us all to take a critical look at why we should do things in AR instead of on a screen.

AR is not going to work well for most things but it’s going to be very good for certain uses. Right now I’m very keen at trying to understand what those things might be.

Tish Shute: I had this wonderful conversation (more in an upcoming post) with Kevin Slavin one of the founders of Area/Code at Web 2.0 Expo and I think some of what he describes about the data brokerages of High Frequency trading have some interesting implications for AR’s role, say, in ubiquitous computing. The trading markets are now pretty much dominated by machine to machine intelligence; machine to machine brokerages. They are basically game economies on the scale that we can barely wrap our heads around where the speed that bots and algo traders can access the network is the key. We really have no clue what is going on until we lose our house…

Kevin was also interviewed by James Turner on O’Reilly Radar. He talked about how much of the interesting work in location based mobile social apps is defined in opposition to the model of Second Life. He also talked to me about how we are seeing “first life” take on the qualities of “second life.” What goes on the trading floor is largely a performance secondary to a more important world of machine intelligence with giant co-located servers and bots fighting for trading advantages measured in fractions of seconds.

He pointed out how we draw on all these tropes from sci-fi movies, these HUDs based on ideas of machine intelligence where the robot talks to the other robot in English through an English HUD!  Many of our current visual tropes for AR are perhaps just as inadequate for the kind of data driven world we live in.

Of course, when you are thinking of having fun with dinosaurs, or illustrated books, or whatever, this is not, perhaps, an issue.  But if you are thinking of augmented reality interfaces as being important in a battle for network economy, and platforms for growth,  how this new interface helps us live better in a world of data is an important issue.

Chris Arkenberg: Now, does that indicate that the UI just needs more overhaul and innovation, or more that the visual interface for those experiences shouldn’t really leave the screen? It shouldn’t move on to the view plane?

Tish Shute: Yes we have a few concept videos that try and explore this ..

Chris Arkenberg: Well, and I think this will happen at the level of human-computer interface. I mean that’s always been its role, in making coherent the sort of machine mind, for lack of a better term, making it coherent to the human mind. So I mean there is a lot of this sort of machine intelligence, the semantic Web 3.0 revolution, where it really is about enabling machines, and agents, and bots to understand the content that we’re feeding them.

But at the end of the day, they, for now, need to be providing value to us human operators. So there’s always going to be a role for human-computer interface and user experience design to make this stuff meaningful.

I mean, if you look at the revolution in visualization & data viz, this is of incredible value because it takes a tremendous amount of data and collates it into a glanceable graphic that you can look at and immediately comprehend massive amounts of data because it’s delivered in a handy, visual way.

So I see that as a fascinating design challenge, how the user experience of the data world can be translated into meaningful human interaction.

Tish Shute: Yeah. And when we see Stamen Design pursuing a big idea in AR, that’s when we might start to rock and roll, right?

Chris Arkenberg: Yeah. In my article, I sort of jokingly suggested that Apple will create the iShades. But, they’ve got the track record of being way ahead of the curve and delivering the future in very bold forms.

Tish Shute: A key part for the battle for the network economy is to bring the complexity of data into the human realm in a way that increases human agency. Kevin suggests that the giant robot casinos of markets should actually lift off into total abstractions as theses machine-driven trades get back into the human realm in ways that are so damaging to our lives – a lost house or job! The notion of a counterveillence society where people have more agency over the important aspects of their lives, health, housing, job (which I discussed with Kevin – interview upcoming) has gotten pretty tricky!

But I think we will begin to see AR eyewear for specific applications (gaming and industrial) get more common fairly soon – possibly as smart phone accessories.

And it is clear that AR is going to be, increasingly,  a part of our entertainment smorgesborg in coming months. Itouch has a camera (although lower resolution), Nintendo’s are AR-ready and many aspects of the AR vision of hands-free spatial interfaces will go mainstream through Natal.

But we are yet to see an app/platform emerge for mobile. Social AR games that turn every bar and cafe and ultimately the whole city into a gaming venue  -although I think Ogmento and MUVE aim to lead the way here! Will an AR company achieve Zynga level success by using the Foursquare, for example?

My feeling is that the lesson of Zynga is pretty important for mobile social AR games. Could Flash social gaming have taken off without Facebook?

Chris Arkenberg: And that’s the real driver. And again, as you mentioned with Second Life, and this was exactly my own sense, is that they stuck to the closed garden model and didn’t get the power of social and collaboration. They attempted to add some of those affordances within the world, but, you know, ultimately most people aren’t in virtual worlds, and most people aren’t using augmented reality. So leveraging the really predominate platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare, being able to leverage those affordances, that connectivity, into a platform like augmented reality, I think, is really critical. Because again, you get nothing unless you have the masses, unless you have people present.

Tish Shute: In AR research there is a long history of the notion of powerful AR-dedicated devices, but smart phones and tablets are good enough,  and can launch augmented reality into the heart of the internet economy. I think  the elusive AR eyewear will come to us initially as a smart phone accessory for specific apps.  But, for the moment, most AR apps make little attempt to play in the wider internet economy.

Chris Arkenberg: And I think it’s actually much lower hanging fruit, really, to do gaming, marketing, transmedia. Because then you don’t really care about the cloud, or maybe you only really care about a little part of it that your gaming property is addressing. Then it becomes much more about entertainment, and much more about persuasion, and sensationalism. And if you’ve got dancing dinosaurs on your street, great! It’s entertaining, it’s cool, it’s new. That stuff is fairly straightforward.

I keep coming back to this idea of, you know, the instrumented city. What sort of data trails do you get out of a fully instrumented city? So maybe you get traffic patterns, maybe you get geo-local movements of masses, maybe you get energy usage, that sort of thing, all the, sort of heat maps you can generate from a city. But then what good does it do to be able to have that on an augmented reality layer versus just looking at it on a mobile device or looking at it on your laptop?

Tish Shute: Of course the use cases for “magic lens” AR are different from the kind of hands free, 360 view with tightly registered media, that a full vision of AR has always promised. The 360 view is quite a different metaphor from the web and mobile rectangular screens.

Chris Arkenberg: Yes, yes.

Tish Shute: Did you see that great parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” with the iPads versus the iPhones, right?

Chris Arkenberg: Oh, really?

Tish Shute: I tweeted it cos i thought it was quite funny and a little close to the bone!
[laughter]

“ur wanna an ipatch 2 b the new fad?” #AR gets cameo in Twitter, iPads & iPhone’s Michael Jackson-Inspired Parody via @mashable

It is hard to get away from the importance of eyewear when discussing AR!

Chris Arkenberg: Yes, so the hardware, to me, is a big stumbling point right now, or it’s a large gating factor, I think, for realizing what an augmented reality vision could really be like. That it really does need to be heads up. This holding the phone up in front of you is fun to demonstrate that it’s possible, and it’s valuable in some ways…

Tish Shute: And it’s particularly nice in some applications like the planes app, the Acrossair subway app where you hold the phone down and get the arrow, right?

Chris Arkenberg: Yeah, the way-finding stuff I think is really valuable…

Tish Shute: Sixth Sense really caught people’s imagination because it managed to deliver the gesture interface with cheap hardware, even if projection has limited uses (no brightly lit spaces or privacy for example!).

The other important and as yet unrealized part of the AR dream is real-time communications. Many interesting uses cases would require this. As you know that is my chief excitement, along with federation, in the Google Wave Servers for (which should soon be released at Wave in a Box) for ARWave.

Chris Arkenberg: Well my sense of Wave is that it was a ChromeOS protocol that they instantiated, or that they exhibited in the public deployment of Google Wave. That that was a proof of their sort of low level architectural solution. Because, you know, they’ve been rumored to be working on this cloud OS for some time. And so my sense is that Wave is actually one of their core components of that cloud OS, and that it just happened to incarnate for the public in a test run as Google Wave.

Tish Shute: I do hope that Wave In the Box will lower the barriers to entry to people experimenting with this technology. The FedOne server was just way too hard for most people to take the time to set up. Of course, it is the brilliance of the Wave Operational Transform work that also poses problems in terms of ease of use. But Wave Federation Protocol is pretty innovative. And could even play an important role in a real time communications for AR eyewear connected to smartphones. The challenges that Wave takes on re real-time communications, federation, permissions and filters are pretty important ones for AR…

Chris Arkenberg: Especially when you’re trying to federate a lot of permissions and filter a lot of data, which all of that gets even more important when you have a visual layer between you and the real world.

Tish Shute: You got it. Yeah!

Chris Arkenberg: I think that’s really valuable real estate, both for third parties that want to get access to your eyes, as well as for you, as the user, who still needs to navigate through the phenomenal world and not be occluded by massive amounts of overhead data.

Tish Shute: Yes, I am sure Google has big plans for the next level of cloud computing and Wave looks at some key challenges. I suppose federation poses some key business problems. I think it was Michael Jones who said to me that it was a bit like socialism in that you have to be willing to give something up for the greater good.

Perhaps federation does not present enough appeal because of its challenges re business models?

Chris Arkenberg: Well, I wonder. I mean there’s got to be some value for their ad platform as ads are moving more towards this personalized experience. Advertising is becoming less of a shotgun blast and more of a very precise, surgical strike. So being able to track user data to such a fine degree to mobilize the appropriate ads around them wherever they are, on any platform, is certainly very valuable to Google and their ad ecology.

Tish Shute: Many people have high hopes that HTML 5 by lowering the barrier of entry for  browser style AR could also pave the way for some interesting AR work..

Chris Arkenberg: Well, as much as I would hope that all the different players are going to come together and establish some shared set of standards, really, what’s happening is it’s a rush to the finish line to be the first…to get the most penetration in the marketplace so that Layar, for example, can say, “It’s official. We’re the platform.” And then the consolidation that will follow, where the Googles and the other big players like Qualcomm say, “OK, it’s mature enough. We’ll start buying up all the smaller companies.”

And that’s where the real challenge is right now is that there are no standards. It’s such an immature technology that you have a lot of different players trying to establish the ground rules. And again, this is one of the challenges that faced public virtual worlds, is that you had a lot of different virtual worlds that weren’t talking to each other in any particular way, and that they each had their own development platform. And so you end up with a very fractured ecosystem or set of competing ecosystems, which is kind of what’s happening with AR right now, where a developer has to choose between a number of different new platforms or hedge by deploying across multiple platforms. Basically, the web browser wars are set to be recapitulated by the AR browsers.

Among them, Layar and Metaio seem to be getting the most traction. But there’s still not a really strong case for a unified development ecosystem to emerge.

Tish Shute: So a discussion of ecosystem development brings us back to the Points of Control Map I think. So what do you see as key points of interest for AR developers to watch in the Points of Control Map? And where do you want to sort of put your bets, right? We are still really waiting for mobile social AR to emerge into the mainstream.

Chris Arkenberg: Yes. And that’s primarily the shortcoming of the hardware itself, but also of the accuracy of current GPS technology. That’s another kind of gating factor, because again, AR wants to be able to express the data within a distinct place or object.

So in a lot of ways, other than kind of what we’ve allowed for the broader entertainment purposes, for AR to really work, there needs to be more resolution in GPS location. So for it to be truly locative…because it’s OK to tell Foursquare that you’re in Bar X. But if you want to be able to draw data directly on a wall within that bar, or do advertising over the marquee on the front, you need more factors to accurately register those images on a discreet location. So that’s another, sort of, aspect of the immaturity of AR, is that it’s still very hard to register things on discreet locations without employing a number of diverse triangulation methods.

Tish Shute: Right. The mobile AR games we see at the moment are really just faking a relationship to the physical world unless they rely on markers or some limited form of natural feature recognition which is really just a more sophisticated form of markers. But the Qualcomm SDK does offer some opportunities to tie AR media to the world more tightly as does the Metaio SDK. But in terms of a mobile social AR game that could be like the Cape of Zynga to FourSquare in Location Basin [see the Points of Control map]… We haven’t seen anything close yet.

AR should be able to bring the check-in mode to any object in our environment.

Chris Arkenberg: Yes, yes. And that’s actually one of the early interests I had in the notion of social augmented reality. I wanted a way to tag my community with invisible annotations that only certain people could read, and found pretty quickly that that’s very difficult to do. I mean you can kind of do some regional tagging, like on a beach, for example, but if you wanted to tag the bench that was on the cliff above the beach, it’s very difficult to do that using strictly locative reckoning.

There’s all sorts of really cool social engagement that can be revealed when people are allowed to attach things to the world around them, to the streets they normally pass through, or the points of interest that they normally engage in. To be able to author on the fly on the streets and attach it discreetly to an object effectively.

Tish Shute: And yes we do have all kinds of markers and QR codes. But Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch made a good point that QR codes: “Until QR code scanners become a default feature of most smartphones and they start to become actually useful enough for people to go through the trouble to scan them, they will remain a gee-whiz feature nobody uses.”

Chris Arkenberg: So again, this gets back to competing standards and who gets access to the phone stack, the bundle. Who gets the OEM deal…?

Tish Shute: Yes, the battles for the networks on the Handset Plains are pretty important for AR!
[laughter] I think Layar have made some smart moves on The Handset Plains.

And there are a lot of acquisitions of nearfield technology to look at.  If I remember rightly Ebay bought the Red Laser tech from Occipital – now there’s any interesting company. Their panorama stuff rocks!

Chris Arkenberg: Right. There’s a lot of nearfield stuff that’s supposed to hit all of the major mobile platforms in the next year or so.

I mean I think where this is heading, in my mind, is basically smart motes. You know, little nearfield wide-range RFID’s that are the size of a small, tiny square that you could attach to just about anything and then program it to be a representative of your establishment or of an object, that then you can start to tag just about anything. I mean you can’t rely on geo to do it, but if you have a Nearfield chip there that costs maybe like two cents to buy in bulk, and you can flash program it, then you can start to attach data to just about anything.

Tish Shute: Yes ‘cos some things still remain very difficult for near field image recognition technologies like Google Goggles.

Chris Arkenberg: Well, if your phone can interrogate for Nearfield devices, and it detects a chip in its near field, it can then interrogate that chip. The chip may contain flash data on itself, or it may contain the local server in the establishment, or it may go to the cloud and get that data back.

Tish Shute: Yes there is moverment from the top and open source hardware like Arduino has created an opportunity for all sorts of creativity with instrumented environments.  And the handheld sensors in our pockets – our smart phones create a lot of opportunity for bottom up innovation too.

Chris Arkenberg: I mean that’s my guess. If you look at what IBM is doing with their Smarter Planet initiative, they’re partnering with a lot of municipalities, and obviously with a lot of businesses and their global supply chains.

But they’re basically working with municipalities and all these stakeholders to instrument their territory, their business, or their city, as it were. So they’re working to provide embedded sensors and the software necessary to read them out and run reports & viz. And presumably that software can extend to include some sort of mobile device to interrogate the sensors and read the data.

That’s kind of a top-down approach of a very large global company working with top-down governance bodies to do this. Simultaneously you have the maker crowd experimenting with Arduino and such to build from the grassroots, the bottom up approach.

And that’s primarily gated by the amount of learning it takes to be able to program these devices, to be able to hack them. Typically, the grassroots creators who make these devices don’t have the luxury of very large budgets to make things highly usable and Wizywig.

So the bottom up community is a sandbox to create tremendous amounts of innovation, because they are unconstrained by the very real financial needs of the top down innovators. And so you get a lot of fascinating innovation, a very rich ecology from the bottom-up approach, but you don’t get a lot of wide distribution. But that does filter up to and inform the top down approach that has a lot more money to put into this stuff. And it ultimately has to respond to the needs of the marketplace.

I mean if there’s an answer to the question of whether something like AR will succeed through the bottom-up grassroots approach or the top-down industry approach, I would say it would be both. That handsets will be hacked to read the bottom up innovations of the maker community, and handsets will be preprogrammed to read the top down efforts of the IBMs of the world.

Tish Shute: Yes but i have to say it is very time-consuming hacking phones (I have just seen a few days suck up in this myself so that I could upgrade my G1 to try out the new ARWave client!). I mean Android has obviously been the platform of choice because of openness but the business model of iPhone and its market share in the US sure make it important for developers.  It’s like you don’t exist if you don’t have an iphone app for what you are doing.

Chris Arkenberg: Yeah, and that’s the challenge, because at the end of the day developers prefer not to work for free and a solid, reliable mechanism to monetize their efforts becomes very appealing.

When I look at this map, the points of control map, it’s really interesting to me, because what it says to me with respect to AR is each of these little regions that they have drawn out would be a great research project. So every single one of these should be instructive to AR.

In other words, we should be able to look at social networks, the land of search, or kingdom of ecommerce, and apply some very rigorous critical thinking to say, “How would AR add to this engagement, this experience of gaming, or ecommerce, or content?”

Looking at each of these individually and really meticulously saying, “OK, well yes, it can do this but how is that different from the current screen media experience, the current web experience that we have of all these types of things?” You know, how can augmented reality really add a new layer of value and experience to these? And I think that process would really trim a lot of the fat from the hopes and dreams of AR and anchor it down into some very pragmatic avenues for development. And then you could start looking at, “Well, OK, what happens when we start combining these?” When we take gaming levels and plug that into the location basin, as you suggested.

Tish Shute: Some of the important platforms for AR don’t appear to have spots on the map like Google Street View and other mapping technologies that hold out so much hope for AR, or am I missing something?

Chris Arkenberg: You mean on the map?

Tish Shute: Yes for the full vision of AR we need sensor integration, computer vision and cool mapping technologies to come together. Do you see where Google Maps and Google Street View… Where would they be?

Chris Arkenberg: Yeah, I mean it’s certainly content, it’s location…

Are you familiar with Earthmine?

Tish Shute: Yes, yes I am, definitely. Earth Mine, Simple Geo, Google Street View, user generated internet photo sets like Flickr all of these could be very important to AR, potentially.

Chris Arkenberg: Well, and the interesting thing about Earthmine is that they’re effectively trying to do an extremely precise pixel to pixel location mapping. So they’re taking pictures of cities just like Street View, except they’re using the Z axis to interrogate depth and then using very precise geolocation to attach a GPS signature to each pixel that they’re registering in their images. Effectively, you get a one-to-one data set between pixels and locations. And so you can look at something like Google Street View, and if you point to the side of a building, in theory, it should know exactly where that is.

They’re rolling this out with the idea of being able to tag augmented reality objects in layers directly to surfaces in the real world. So that’s another approach to trying to get accurate registration and to try and create what are essentially mirror worlds. Then your Google Street View becomes a canvas for authoring the blended world, because if you plop a 3D object into Street View on your desktop, and then you go out to that location with your AR headset, you’ll see that 3D object on the actual street.

Tish Shute: There was some experimental work with Google Earth as a platform for a kind of simulated AR but I suppose Google Earth doesn’t figure in the battle for the network economy as it never got developed as a platform.

Chris Arkenberg: It hasn’t tried to become a platform, to my knowledge. I mean I know some people are doing stuff with it, but as far as I know, Google owns it, they did it the best because they have the best maps, and there’s not a huge ecosystem of development that’s based around it other than content layers.

And my sense of everything else on the Points of Control map is they’re looking more at these sort of platform technologies that…

Tish Shute: Yes, re platforms for growth for AR. Gaming consoles will probably emerge as a significant platform for AR this year.

Chris Arkenberg: There will be much more of a blended reality experience in the living room for sure, and with interactive billboards. Digital mirrors are another area. So I mean if we kind of extend AR to include just blended reality in general, you know, this is moving into our culture through a number of different points. As you mentioned, it will be in the living room, it will be in our department stores where you can preview different outfits in their mirror. We’re already seeing these giant interactive digital billboards in Times Square and other areas.

It’s funny. I mean for me, the sort of blended reality aside, the augmented reality, to me, is actually a very simple proposition in some respects. When I look at this map, augmented reality is just an interface layer to this map in my mind, just as it’s an interface layer to the cloud and it’s an interface layer to the instrumented world. It’s a way to get information out of our devices and onto the world.

Tish Shute: The importance of leveraging existing platforms has become pretty clear but it is interesting Facebook definitely gave Zynga the opportunity but would Facebook be so big without Zinga’s social gaming boost?

Chris Arkenberg: I feel that Zynga has definitely helped its growth…But I think Zynga has benefited a lot more from Facebook than Facebook has from Zynga.

Tish Shute: Zynga certainly proved you could build a profitable business on Facebook’s API!

Chris Arkenberg: They did. And they also really validated the Facebook ecosystem and the platform. They really extended it… Zynga benefited from the massive social affordances that Facebook had already architected and developed. They brought gaming directly into Facebook, and particularly, this emerging brand of lightweight social gaming that when you sit it on top of a massive global social network like Facebook, it suddenly lights up.

Tish Shute: AR pioneers should quite carefully go through this map. There is so much to think about here. I’m a kind of fanatic about Streams of Activity in AR. Real time brokerages and their potential for AR is something I am fascinated by. That is one reason I love the ARWave project.

Anselm Hook, to me, is one of the great thinkers in this area of real time brokerages – with his project Angel, and the work of Ushahidi, which is now the platform for augmented foraging (see here). Anselm is now working on AR at PARC which is exciting.

Chris Arkenberg: Well, there are some challenges working with data streams. Presentation and filtering I think is a big challenge with any sort of stream. Because obviously, you have a lot of potential data to manage, to parse, and to make valuable and comprehensible. So I think this is bound very closely to being able to personalize experiences, or having very discreet valuable experiences. Disaster relief, for example, I think is an interesting idea that ties into the Pachube type of work. Where, if you had the headset and you were a relief worker, and you had immediate lightweight, non-intrusive, heads up alpha channel overlay, waypoint markers showing you all of the disaster locations or points of need, AR becomes extremely valuable, because it’s a primarily hands-free environment. This is why the military stuff is so interesting.

Tish Shute: Ha! We are running into the eye patch/shades/goggles/sexy specs thing again. But filtering and making streams of activity relevant will be very interesting for AR.  Again that it why I love the Wave Federation Protocol work because what they have built into their XMPP extensions. You can have your real-time personal data streams, or community streams, or broadcast publicly – the permissions are built.

And Thomas Wrobel’s original vision of these layers and channels is only fully expressed if you have the eyewear.

Chris Arkenberg: Well, and it becomes redundant if it’s on a mobile. To use a very basic example, Twitter, obviously there’s an app you can view those streams of activity on the camera stream. But you can view that real time data on the screen. Why do you need to see it heads up?

The reason I really pay attention to what the military is investing in, one, because they have a ton of money, but also because they tend to represent the core bio survival needs of the species…So, when I look at computing, I see this very obvious trend of computers getting smaller and smaller and closer and closer to us because they’re so valuable to our success. They give us so much valuable information for engaging our world on a moment by moment basis. So, of course now we have these tiny little handheld devices that give us access to the global knowledge depositories of human history, because it’s so useful to have that stuff right at hand.

The only impediment now is that it takes one of our hands, if not both of them, to access it. So if you are in the natural world, which we are all always in the natural world, ultimately, you want your hands free in order to engage with the world on a physical level.

I see computation, or rather, our access to computation is just going to get thinner and thinner, and we’ll very soon move into eyewear, and inevitably, we’ll move into brain computer interface in some capacity.

So when you’re the disaster worker, or a deployed soldier, or the extreme mountain biker, or the heli-skier, or just an adventurer, there are a lot of very practical reasons to have access to information on a heads-up plane. I see AR as being so profound and so valuable, but we’re getting a glimpse of it in its infancy, and it’s got a ways to go to be able to really contain what it is we’re reaching for.

Tish Shute: I agree.

Chris Arkenberg: And that’s been a big criticism I’ve had with all the existing AR implementations that I’ve seen, is that the UI really needs a revolution. It’s very heavy handed. It is not dynamic, even though it’s supposed to be. It does not take advantage of transparencies. It treats the screen like a screen. It doesn’t treat the screen like a window onto the real world. When you’re looking on the real world, you don’t want a lot of occlusion. You want very soft-touch indicators of a data shadow behind something that you can then address and then have it call out the information that’s important to you.

Tish Shute: Now, that’s a very nice kind of image you’ve conjured for me there. Do you see that more could be done on the smartphone than is being done within that? Or are we like waiting for the old ishades?

Chris Arkenberg: I think there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement on the smartphone UI. Nobody’s really played around with it much. And again, I think that’s in part that there hasn’t been a really established platform with enough money to fund interesting UI work. We see it in some of the concept demos that float around every now and then.

I guess it’s both a blessing and curse that I’m always five steps ahead of where I’m trying to get to.

Tish Shute: Yeah, I am familiar with that feeling!

Chris Arkenberg: So I’m always trying to reach for the vision even though it’s a bit distant. I think there’s going to be a lot of development on the handsets. But again, I think we need a lot of refinement. We need a lot of real critical analysis of why this is a good thing.

To get back to the original point of Raimo’s comment, it struck me. And I knew it, but I just had set it aside as gimmickry. But he’s right. Content is a huge driver for this. Just stuff that’s engaging, and fun, and cool, and shows off the technology so they can get enough money to make it through whatever Trough of Disappointment may be waiting.

Tish Shute: Yeah, don’t underestimate the Planes of Content!  They are a great place to get interest and money to keep AR technology moving on, right?

Chris Arkenberg: Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, there’s a lot of freedom there. And you can piggyback on all the rest of the content that’s out there and jump on memes and marketing objectives, etc…

And there’s a lot of stuff…I’m blanking on some of the names, but some of these historical recreations of city streets. There’s a street in London where they overlaid historical photos in a really compelling experience. [Museum of London - http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/] Again, I’m completely forgetting the attributions, but hose are the type of things that can really be pursued on the existing platforms. There is stuff that’s really compelling and really cool.

I heard of another interesting use case – and I should say that I can’t find attributions to this anywhere on the web and I may be paraphrasing or mis-representing the actual work, but I think the concept is worth exploring anyway. But the idea was that you could take the locations of border checkpoints and conflict sites in Palestine and Israel and visually overlay them on an AR layer in San Francisco. And it would do some sort of transposition where you could virtually view these things in San Francisco with the same locational mapping superimposed. So you could see where the checkpoints where. You could see where the wall was. You could see where suicide bombings were and where there had been conflicts. [I cannot find any citations for this!]

Tish Shute: But with an AR view? But why would you use an AR view if you are in San Francisco, then?

Chris Arkenberg: Because it superimposes two realities, translating the Gaza conflict into San Francisco as you are walking around. You can interrogate the world. There’s a discoverability aspect where you’re using the headset to reveal things, or the handset rather, to reveal things that you could not see otherwise in your city. It was done as an art piece, but as a provocative, obviously political art piece.

Tish Shute: Very interesting. I’d love to see that. Because that’s interesting to get away from this idea that you actually have to sort of have this one to one relationship between the data and the world is kinda nice, isn’t it? Well, not one to one, but a very literal…getting away from that literalness is kind of good.

Chris Arkenberg: And that’s a possibility of virtual reality and augmented reality merging, that maybe virtual reality is actually going to do best by coming out of the box and writing itself over our reality, so that as you are walking around, you are no longer seeing San Francisco, but you are seeing part of Everquest or World of Warcraft.

Tish Shute: Well this is where Bruce Sterling gets to that point he made in his keynote for are2010, that if we actually have viable AR eyewear, then you get the gothic stepsister of AR, VR rising from the grave!  He asks whether the very charm of augmented reality, is in fact that it adds rather than subtracts from your engagement with the world and that getting get sucked back into the black hole of VR might not be so great.

Chris Arkenberg: And then you get all sorts of interesting challenges to social cohesion if you have a lot of different people experiencing very different worlds, effectively. That if there is no real consensual reality and a majority of your local populous is, in fact, experiencing very different and unique versions of the world, what does that do to social cohesion? How does that reinforce tribalism, for example, when only you and certain others get to opt in to a particular layer view of the world?

Tish Shute: Yes Jamais Cascio wrote an interesting piece on that issue on AR and social cohesion a while back.

An eye patch is a more logical vision than the goggles in many ways but I suppose the loss is stereo vision?

Chris Arkenberg: And actually, there were developments in military helicopter technology many years ago that used a single pane square of glass over the eye mounted to the helmets of pilots. And then they drew various bits of heads-up information on it. So that ensures that you’re having a real strong engagement with the real world, which, obviously, when you’re a helicopter pilot is quite important. But you still have access to the data layer of the invisible world.

Tish Shute: I just went to Hadoop World and I have to say, I was awestruck about how big that’s got. I mean Hadoop has gone from like zero to huge in just a few years. I mean it’s just like now everyone has the power of the Google big table at their fingertips.

What’s the play for AR in the land of search?

I could imagine Hadoop being very powerful tool for AR analytics?

Have you got any thoughts on the land of search and AR? Of course visual search is proceeding at a fast pace and there is a lot of promise for integrations with AR in the future but the latency for visual search is still pretty high?

Chris Arkenberg: In the near term, not a lot. In the medium term, there’s a larger trend towards virtual agents that you can program or teach to keep watch over things for you as an effort to scale down the data overload. So search is something that’s going to become more personalized and more active. There’s a movement to make it so people can essentially deputize these agents to be always searching for them; to be out there looking for the things that they have told these agents are important to them.

So active search for AR I think presents some challenges, obviously because you need to do text input, typically, or voice input. Voice input, I think, is much more achievable than text input for AR. But I can certainly imagine an AR layer that is being serviced by these agents that we have roaming around the web for us reconciling their visual view of the world with our personalizations. AR apps are contextually aware so it knows that if you’re downtown, it’s not going to be giving you a ton of information about Software as a Service infrastructure, or what have you. But that, instead, it’s going to be handing you little tidbits about a particular clothing brand you’ve opted in to follow and information about music venues & schedules, for example. Or perhaps you’ll be on the lookout for other users that have opted in to publicly tag themselves as a member of this or that affinity.

I keep coming back to this idea of AR as really just a simple visualization layer that all of these other technologies can potentially feed into. So in that sense, search becomes a passive thing that AR is just simply presenting to you in a heads-up, hands-free, or potentially hands-free environment.

Tish Shute: Yes, the big challenge is the stepping stones to that point! Small steps that keep interest going into developing the underlying technology (and not just in research labs!) that will bring us that interface.  We have seen some movement already with Qualcomm.

Chris Arkenberg: And there are bandwidth issues as well, as we can see with the Google Goggles, which is a great idea of visual search. But you have to take a picture and send it to the cloud and wait for your results. It’s not a real-time dynamic interrogation of the world.

Tish Shute: Yes we are really only at the very beginning of AR being ready for prime time.. it would be interesting to ask AR developers how many of them use AR on a daily basis.

Chris Arkenberg: I think a lot of us, we’re just informed by the sci-fi myths and fascinated with the potential now that’s it’s starting to become real. But I think we all kinda get that it’s still extraordinarily young. I mean the web is extraordinarily young. And AR is itself far younger in a lot of ways in its implementations.

Everybody has a lot of excitement about all of the great potentials that are being unleashed by this great wave of the Internet and the web and ubiquitous mobile computing. So that’s why, you know, you look at that map and we talk about AR and you can’t talk about any of the stuff without talking about all of it, in a lot of ways, particularly with something like AR where it’s so ultimately agnostic and could be completely pervasive across all of these layers.

So my fascination is with the future, and I measure our progress towards it by the young nascent offerings from the platform players and the developers. And yeah, a lot of it is…it’s akin to getting that first triangle on the screen in 3D. You know, when the renderer finally works and you get a triangle on the screen, and you go, “Oh my God, it renders.” And then you can start to really build polygons and build objects, and start doing boolian operations, and get light and rendering in there, and textures, and on, and on, and on.
So I’m fascinated by the Layars and the Metaio’s…
[laughter]

Tish Shute: Yes and hats off to all the players in the emerging industry, Layar, Metaio, Ogmento, Total Immsersion, and all the others who are finding clever ways to bring fun aspects of AR into the mainstream, and fuel interest to take the technology to the next level.

Chris Arkenberg: Absolutely. And the hype cycle is very valuable. It has really helped launch the AR industry. It’s brought a lot of eyes, and it’s brought a lot of money into the industry. And it’s forcing people like us to have these conversations to understand how to refine its growth and really focus on the potential in all these different venues, whether it’s trying to save lives, or better understand your city, or have really compelling entertainment experiences.

Everybody’s excited, and everybody’s sharing, and everybody’s trying to move it forward in a way that’s the most productive.

Here  is the “world premier” of  the  ARWave demo – also see on youtube here.  Below are the slides from our panel: The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences, with Anselm Hook presenting on “10 reasons Why Ar Not a Flash in the Pan,”  Jeremy Hight, spoke on “Augmenting the Map,”  Sophia Parafina presented on “Citizen Sensor,” and I presented the “ARWave” project.  These slides are also posted on the Where 2.0 site.  Joe Lamantia was unable to come from Europe due to last minute obstacles, but you can check out his slide deck here. The videos of the Where 2.0 keynotes are up, and I highly recommend watching what went on at this watershed event.

We got so much positive feedback for the ARWave project at Where 2.0 that I am very excited about the next steps, and about our session at WhereCamp tomorrow.

WhereCamp will be at Google, Maxwell Tech Talk and the buzz continues!  The latest from WhereCamp is:  WE ARE OVER-SUBSCRIBED. HOWEVER PLEASE SIGN UP ANYWAY. THE EVENT TAKES PLACE OVER TWO DAYS. IF WE REALLY HAVE TO TURN PEOPLE AWAY ON SATURDAY YOU CAN STILL COME ON SUNDAY.  Hope to see you there!

Where 2.0 is going to be epic this year (see my interview with Brady Forrest here), and it is so exciting to be part of it.  Location technologies and augmented reality are annointed rulers now.  Time Magazine recognized augmented reality as one of its 10 Tech Trends for 2010 (for more see ReadWriteWeb).

The photo above is by Jeremy and Lisa Hight.  Jeremy Hight is an information designer, theorist and artist working in Augmented Reality and Locative Media.   His essay “Narrative Archaeology” was named one of the 4 primary texts in Locative Media.

Jeremy Hight will be part of our panel: The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences, with Anselm Hook, Joe Lamantia, Sophia Parafina and myself. We will debut the video of the ARWave project demo that brings together augmented reality, geolocation, and wave federation (more details later in this post).  And, Jeremy will bring to our presentation some augmentations on his recent brilliant work and paper, “Writing Within the Map.”

Greg J. Smith’s points out in his in depth look at Jeremy’s work that it, “dovetails with some of the main points in Bruce Sterling’s recent atemporality keynote at Transmediale” – fortunately there is a transcription of Bruce’s keynote here.  What is so awesome about this dovetailing is that you can get a feel for the fun part of living in an, “atemporal network culture.”  And, if you want to really understand just how much locative media and augmented reality have changed us, you  might want to dig into these texts.

Bruce Sterling and Jeremy Hight, and members of the ARWave team, and a superb cast of augmented reality movers and shakers – including Will Wright and Jesse Schell, will be speaking at Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, June 2nd and 3rd.

But, this week, the AR community’s attention will be on the events at Where 2.0.   The keynote speakers will be streamed live, so if you are not fortunate enough to be there, tune in!

The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences

On our panel, Jeremy Hight, Anselm Hook, Sophia Parafina, Joe Lamantia and I will cover some of the key social, cultural, technical and interactional questions for exploring social augmented experiences. There will be five lightning presentations, and an opportunity for questions from the audience, and a world premier of the ARWave demo!

1) “Augmenting the map as interface: AR and Locative Narratives” - Jeremy Hight

*Map augmentation of the historic route 66 can house an essay contest and publication globally but as embedded within that map augmentation instead of books or even web sites.

* A place on a map can be a graphic index and database to save and collect
the writing of that place with a graphic or textual search index.

*One can pop immersive visualizations of abandoned or lost buildings from map location in shared software and collectively augment (imagine channels within the lost core of detroit where one is memories and accounts tagged within parts in the immersive visualization while another is of poems and stories written by people moved by the place and its semiotics and story).

*The news stand is to be the map.

*New forms of literature will be born of mapping, spaces,augmentation and
new tools

The concept drawings below (click to enlarge) are a collaboration between Jeremy Hight and Paul Wehby, Senior Designer at LA County Museum of Art.

2) Anselm Hook will look at, “10 reasons why AR isn’t a flash in the pan,” and how, “AR can help us see the world we would like to have exist.”

Anselm notes, “So much of what we do is so fickle and I’m looking for ways to connect digital media work to deep values.”

3) Sophia Parafina will present on, “Social AR and Crisis Response”

“Augmented reality as a multi-party conversation.  Rather than being passive viewers of AR with a limited ability to  checkin to places and make annotations, current devices can broadcast sensor information that can be fused into an interactive stream. AR users can send and receive information, location, and sensor data from their mobile device.  The streams can be federated into a unique AR view composed by the user.

Entertainment and gaming are obvious applications, but it can also be applied to crisis situations such as the search and rescue operations in Haiti.  Efforts such as Mission 4636, the SMS translation service, could benefit from AR views.  The collaboration among the Mission 4636 volunteers was the key element  in their success for providing location and rapid translation to responders on the ground.

With an AR view, responders can send back their sensor information from their mobiles to provide contextual information to remote volunteers.  This extends the conversation between remote volunteers and on the ground responders and fosters collaboration which was a key element for the success of Mission 4636″

4) Joe Lamantia, an experience design and strategy consultant helping to define the interaction framework and scenarios behind ARWave, will discuss, “Design Principles For Social Augmented Experiences:”

“With the exotic mixed realities envisioned by futurists and science fiction writers seemingly around the corner, it is time to move beyond questions of technical feasibility to consider the value and impact of turning reality inside out for everyday social settings and experiences. Thanks to the inherently social nature of augmented reality, we can be sure the value and impact of many augmented experiences depends in large part on how effectively they integrate with the social dimensions of real-world settings, in real time.”

Joe will share, “eight guiding principles for designing experiences that engage naturally with the social dimension, and increase the value of augmented experiences.”

5) “ARWave – A demo and state of play,” from Tish Shute

I will have the awesome privilege, on our Where 2.0 panel, of showcasing ARWave.   We will  premier the ARWave demo which shows how ARWave has accomplished the basics of geolocating data on Wave Federation Protocol (and real time collaboration on this geolocated data).  If you’re interested in the ARWave project join the Mailing list, FAQ are here, and have a peek at the current state of development at Google Code, and the specification for an AR Blip.  We also have Waves for the project hosted on Google Wave.  You can join the general discussion here, and the technical side here.

The picture below is a screen shot from the demo video produced by core AR Wave developer and concept designer, Thomas Wrobel.

Click on the image to enlarge, and note: “The pink thing is from Dennou Coil. Its an anti-virus program (that literally chase’s down bugs and glitches and removes them).”

ARWave

In ARWave, stories or art are tied to place. And as Jeremy Hight writes:

“The possibility exists to take a part of an area and overlay a dystopia, a utopia, multiples of each of these, or even recreations of previous incarnations in the past. Writing and publication thus cannot only be of place, and form(s), but of selected augmentations of icons, streets, buildings and related texts on top of the map. These spaces can be built in real time and can be turned on and off as channels of augmentation that over time illustrate many faces of place in its present, past, possible futures,etc. with texts within these alternate spaces as commentary, as fused aesthetic analysis, or simply creative writing relevant to these charged and hybrid spaces.”

As Thomas notes, Jeremy Hight’s,  “idea of channels ties into the concept of waves = a layer, and people can have many layers on at once.”

This is different from the Layar concept of a layer or rather “layar.”

“We are not talking about layers in the classical map layer way of thinking, where you have a layer of all restaurants or a layer of all mountain peaks, etc.,” notes ARWave developer Markus Strickler.

Currently all geo location apps like Layar have to use their own servers, so users have to use different clients with different log ins to see data from different sources.  But because ARWave uses federation, we don’t depend on centralized infrastructure where the client of one company can only connect to the server of that company.  This opens up many exciting new possibilities for how people can decide to view and publish geolocated data.

With AR Wave, via one login, people can access the whole distributed network of servers (see diagrams below), and any content will be accessible to them. ARWave will make it easy for individuals, not just developers, to layer their environment – allowing the creation of augmented reality content to be as simple as contributing to a Wave.

“ARWave will enable individuals to publish easily to everyone….or just a few people,” Thomas notes:

“To ‘publish’ is also self publication and distribution in communities or like minded groups without the hard read of publication or rejection.” = publishing on a Wave. No one approves it, anyone can publish to communities, or their friends and family. Or even just personal publishing it for their own reference.”

But ARWave does not compete with existing AR Browsers.   On the contrary, AR browsers like Layar, Wikitude and others, could implement ARWave and use it to enhance their applications.

“Layar has a killer browser already,  ARWave would add social features. They can keep their “walled garden” of data and still join the federation of open data too ” (Thomas Wrobel)

Yup, that is the cool part of federation – you can have your cake and eat it too!

Sophia Parafina and I will be organizing a discussion session on ARWave and Federation at WhereCamp, right after Where 2.0, April 3rd and 4th, and Dan Peterson who is in leading the federation effort for Google Wave will join us.

The diagrams below illustrate how ARWave and federation can revolutionize the way we share our augmented realities.

Real Time Social Augmented Experiences

Another key aspect of ARWave is it’s near to real time update capabilities.  As Jeff Pulver pointed out in, “SXSW 2010: The days twitter became less relevant:”

“At South By Southwest 2010 (SXSW), a strange thing happened on the way to Austin. A community of twitter faithful shifted from sharing everything about everything on only twitter (and maybe Facebook) and changed their habits to rely on learning about what was happening and where things were happening by using foursquare and Gowalla instead. I’m sure there were other products and platforms being used including Loopt and GySPii but foursquare and Gowalla were the dominant platforms.”

Later Jeff wrote:

“There were times where I could feel the ebbs and the flows of the people move as different people checked into various locations. While most of this was felt locally in the place I was in, it also became apparent on the platforms when hundreds of people would rush to check in to a location. There were also times when it felt like I was chasing ghosts; These were the times I would go to a spot because a friend had checked into that spot only to discover they were no longer there.”

ARWave’s realtime collaborative capabilities are going to introduce some fascinating dynamics to “chasing ghosts,” as the ARWave framework gets integrated into services like foursquare – a project we have already begun to look at.

Augmented Reality Search

As I mention in my previous post, ARWave presents some fascinating possibilities for AR Search.  For example, one might do advanced searching within waves using SPARQL, which could then display in the form of a personal blip in your viewpoint (which in turn could be shared with others).  Linked data will be massively important in filtering and delivering useful info for augmented views (see my conversation with Will Wright about the problem of augmented reality overriding our very smart instincts and not being useless or worse as a result).

Anselm Hook, who I interviewed in depth recently about, Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook, has some very interesting thoughts on real time stuff, trading brokerages, and  the view within a single city block, which he elaborated on in the second half to this interview which is upcoming on Ugotrade soon!

The ARWave Developers

There are three people who unfortunately can’t join us at Where 2.0 –  the costs of travelling from Europe being an obstacle.  But as they have been developing the code for ARWave that will rock our augmented world, I asked them, in a Wave conversation, to give me a few comments about their interest in working on ARWave, and a pic and a short bio.   Also I should mention the work of the PyGoWave team whose incredibly fast work creating PyGoWave has given ARWave a rocket launch pad.  Also many thanks to the Wave community, see the Wave Federation Protocol documentation, Google’s Wave Server, RubyOnSails (Ruby On Rails based Wave server).

Davide Carnovale @need2revolt

“Imho, the coolest geolocated related thing is that we’re making a world where the info does not necessarily comes from an explicit search from the user, but comes also from the actual locaton you’re in. For instance, you can have special offers in stores like fourquare does, or your friends can leave geolocated notes for you that are triggered when you walk by.  We can have games based on the treasure hunt schema requiring you to actually go to specific location.

Other than this I can think about self-guided tours of the city, maybe user generated too, or for museums.

Naturally these are long term goals with some rl use cases.

As for my bio, there isn’t much to say… I got a first level degree in computer science and I’m taking the second (and last) level. I’ve developed with mobile agents, osgart/artoolkit, brain computer interfaces, linux kernel and that’s pretty much all…”

Thomas Wrobel

“If you are looking for specific advantages of using Wave I’d say;

* Federated – Letting creators tap into bigger userbase. Each new app or data layer will add to the “incentive” for users to join in. Google had some good stats a few months back as to how much a simple login screen can put people off using stuff.  By breaking that barrier it should make AR userbase’s grow.

* It deals with user accounts, permissions, and real-time updating without creators needing to make a new server standard themselves. It lowers barriers to development.

* As the clients, servers, and data can be made separately by different parties, its easier for developers to concentrate on just providing what they want. You want to just make content? No problem! You dont need to worry about doing anything else but that. It would become as easy as making a webpage (or easier!).

* Bots will allow the development of interactive AR games very easily. Just like modern version of IRC bots, the infrastructure does the heavy lifting, and interesting things can be done with just simple scripting.

* The idea is anyone will be able to make a layer onto the world, and people can mix, match and share their layers as they wish. Its not just the data that becomes interesting to see augmenting our world, but the combinations of data! For example, perhaps you could see the profits generated by different companies above their buildings, but also see how environmentally friendly they are at the same time. Or maybe see pollution levels against health-statistics.  Seeing combinations of geolocated data from different sources at the same time has many interesting possibilities both for scientific as well as casual (game/ map/ chat) use.

hmz..I could go on forever listing stuff here really…..

I guess if we are supposed to be forming a roadmap of significant/interesting things for ARWave?

* Example clients letting people make their own layers (waves) and add points to them.

* Letting people log in to different servers

* Servers federated together. (not our responsibility, but essential part of the roadmap).

* Anyone logged into any server can see data from anyone else that’s shared with them, regardless of where they are logged into

* 3D support, demonstrating various sorts of geolocated data.?

* Use of bots for example games?
—-
My Bio’s quite simple.
Studied 3D Animation in Portsmouth, UK.
Moved to the Netherlands, have since been working in creating ARG games, in the last year founded Lostagain (Lostagain.nl).”

Markus Strickler @kusako

“I think the main point behind ARWave is to go beyond simply displaying existing placemarks on top of a live camera view, towards a highly personalized, augmented world where everybody can edit and share localized information collaboratively and in real time. Wave provides the means to do this through its model of persistent real time conversations and adds even more by providing a way for personal agents (robots) to participate in these conversations.

As for my Bio: I’ve been developing Web applications for the last 15 years, hold a degree in Image Sciences and am currently working as a Java developer in Cologne, Germany.”

The video above, The Imawik commercial, is a collaboration between In The Can Productions and Paige Saez for Makerlab

“The Imawik (ImageWiki) is a visual search tool for mobile devices. It allows for the ability to turn images into physical hyperlinks, conflating visual culture with a community-editable universal namespace for images.”

Paige Saez is an artist, designer and researcher.  In 2007 she founded Makerlab with Anselm Hook, an arts and technology incubator focused on civic and environmental projects.

Paige and Anselm (see my interview with Anselm Hook here, Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook) have been asking a very important question:

“Who Will Own Our Augmented Future?”

But most importantly, they have been actually developing applications (again see my interview with Anselm for more background on this), to allow people to play with, hack and explore and create with the physical world platform, and to imagine new possibilities for physical hyperlinking and augmented realities.  This is pretty important stuff, and kudos to Paige and Anselm for beginning this work before the big players – Google Goggles, Point and Find, and SnapTell came hurtling into the field of visual search and physical hyperlinking  – see this demonstration of translation and optical character recognition in Google Goggle’s.  Also check out Jamey Graham’s (Ricoh Research) Ignite presentation at Tools of Change, 2010 – Visual Search: Connecting Newspapers, Magazines and Books to Digital Information without Barcodes, for more see ricohinnovations.com/betalabs/visualsearch.

We are only just beginning to get a glimpse of how contested the social commons of the physical world platform is going to be – see the Yelp controversy.

As Paige points out:

“The lens that you are actually looking through was as important as what you were looking at. And democratizing that lens became the most important thing that we could possibly do.”

I am in total agreement.  One reason I have so much enthusiasm for ARWave (note: if you are interested in following the developer conversations there are several public Waves) is I see this open framework playing an important role in the democratization of our augmented views, by creating an open, distributed, and universally accessible platform for augmented reality that will allow the creation of augmented reality content and games to be as simple as making an html page, or contributing to a wiki.

Federation, real time collaboration, linked data – ARBlips that contain metadata that is usable for semantic searches, and modified wave servers that can listen to and respond to  SPARQL HTTP requests properly (see Jason Kolb’s many interesting posts on XMPP and Wave).  These are just some of the reasons why ARWave could revolutionize augmented reality searches and more! (see my presentation at MoMo13 – video here)

For more on real time social augmented experiences see our panel, The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences at Where2.0 2010, and don’t miss the Where2.0 conference which has been the crucible for the emergence of location technologies.

Augmented realities, proximity- based social networks, mapping & location aware technologies, sensors everywhere, linked data, and human psychology are on a collision course in what Jesse Schell calls the “Gamepocalypse”   See Jesse Schell’s Dice 2010 talk here, and check out his Gamepocalypse Now blog.  As Bruce Sterling’s notes in his post here:

*Another precious half hour out of your life.  However: if you’re into interaction design, ubiquity, social networking, and trendspotting, in the gaming biz or out of it, you’re gonna wanna do yourself a favor and listen to this.

And don’t forget to register now for Augmented Reality Event (ARE2010 in 2-3 June, 2010 – Santa Clara, CA).

Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, and Jesse Schell will be keynoting, and there is a totally awesome line up of AR innovators and industry leaders, including Paige and Anselm!

And:

You are in luck!

Here is a discount code for the first 100 folks to register to the event (before the end of March). Go to the registration page, type in code AR245 and “you’ll be asked to pay only $245 for 2 full days of AR goodness.”

“Watching AR prophet Bruce Sterling, and gaming legend Will Wright, visionary game designer Jesse Schell deliver keynotes for this price – is a magnificent steal.  And on top, participating in more than 30 talks by AR industry leaders will turn these $254 into your best investment of the year,” as Ori  put is so well on Games Alfresco!

If you want a preview of just how exciting it is to be involved in augmented reality right now check out Ori Inbar’s great round up on our latest monthly Augmented Reality Meetup NY (or as, Ori notes, we fondly like to call it ARNY.)  There is lots of video up now (much thanks to Chris Grayson, who  live streamed it).  Augmented Reality Magician, Marco Tempest, is an absolutely must see.  (developers note this is an awesome use of open Frameworks and OpenCV).   The video of the show includes a rare explanation of how it all works  – see here.

Talking with Paige Saez – “Software is candy now!”

Tish Shute: What interests me about ImageWiki is that you have thought about physical hyperlinking beyond the obvious of where to get your next good hamburger and beer, right?

Paige Saez: Right. It was interesting for me in just thinking about the two things. How do you design a tool to work in a way that people are getting value from it? And also, how do you make it work in a way where people can explore and hack it? I think the most interesting technologies, and this is probably something somebody else said sometime, are the ones that disappear, that we don’t see, instead we see through. They become just the intermediaries.  They don’t interfere with what we are trying to do.

It’s a struggle whenever you are developing a new way for people to get information or make something happen, because you are playing with magic a little bit. And you have to make it vanish the way a good magic trick makes an experience a magical one. But at the same time you also need to reveal just enough that you let people in and they can see how to change it and make it their own. That is the interesting tension for this space right now, the idea of augmented reality begins to lead the idea of a social commons for physical things. The Imagewiki project was a locus of just this tension. Tish you and I have previously discussed how difficult it was to even get people to understand the two concepts independently.

Tish Shute: Right, until recently most people hadn’t even heard the term augmented reality and I am not sure that a particularly high percentage of people would recognize it now despite the recent interest in smart phone apps.

Paige Saez: It’s very difficult to get people to understand the two concepts, and now you are adding in the third level of participation as well. So I don’t think it is impossible, but I do think it requires narrative. It is interesting that you were talking about the stories you heard this morning from the creatives at the event [Tish mentioned David Curcurito, Creative Director, Esquire gave an excellent presentation at Sobel Media event NYC] because it’s narrative and the attention to telling a story that help you walk through all of the ways you can understand how completely expansive this area is right now.

So I think we have to play with it, play with the space and the tools. I think we need to have an idea of what we want people to use the tool for, and we need to not only introduce them to the tool and the technology, but also introduce them to the concepts as well. So I see it as a three part process.

I’m really excited to be there with people, helping them do that. I think we need to do this face to face. I don’t think this can be only through a social network. The ImageWiki website is like one quarter of the entire picture, you know? The website is the resource center and the place where you can see people adding images, but what value is it to you to see an added image? It is more valuable for you to be interacting with the image or interacting with the object in the real world.

Designing for the experience of using the ImageWiki got very complicated very fast. I was trying to figure out the main thrust of the design for the UI for the ImageWiki and at a certain point I had to take a step back and say “Okay, this has to be good enough for now because we can lay it out and prototype as long as we want on the Web or mobile UI. What we need to be doing is going outside and actually aggregating and putting images into the database in order to see what exactly happens when we are adding.”  It’s not just like you are taking a picture of something and adding it to Flickr. Using the tool is very context specific and the information is context specific, and you can’t necessarily make that all happen at the exact same time. I think these are really fascinating spaces to be struggling in and I’m so glad to be working in this space.

Images by Chris Blow of unthinkingly.com

Tish Shute: Could you explain why we need ImageWiki? I mean I think I have ideas on this, but perhaps you can explain to me from you point of view why we need an ImageWiki, as opposed, to say, extending the image space of Wikimedia or something added on to Flickr.  I mean maybe something leveraging the geotagged photos sets and APIs we already have?

Paige Saez: Yes, definitely. It’s a really good question, I mean it really is. Like, do you need an entirely new place to be holding images outside of the places that we are already holding images? That’s a huge question; enormous. Especially when you take a look at the problems around that. Its’ exhausting for an end user. Who the heck wants to go and reload everything into yet another place, right?

Tish Shute: Right.

Paige Saez: Moreover, who is going to really bother? Another problem would be what happens to the existing datasets that people have already committed to? And then of course there is the problem of authority and explanations why….Gaining interest and authority in a space when nobody even understands why that space should exist in the first place. And those are just three, you know, off the top of my head problems with that idea.

And yet at the same time, I don’t actually know how else to go about thinking about the ImageWiki unless I think about it as it’s own thing. Then you start thinking about models of large independant image databases that exist already, examples of this from a product standpoint- references to consider. The Getty Foundation comes to mind. There are many other historical centers that have huge resources and images that are licensed out and used. So here we have a working example of people already doing this. But succesfully? I don’t know. We do have a ton of intellectual property rights and copyright issues and ownership and use issues with images currently. As a working artist these issues for me were a major red flag to consider. Working on the social commons for augmented reality starts paralleling issues found in digital rights management and intellectual property.

Tish Shute: But one good thing about Wikimedia, why I focused on Wikimedia, is Flickr and Wikimedia already use a creative commons licensing, right?

Paige Saez: Creative commons, you know they have their own resource center, too. But you know they haven’t been successful as great databases for images so far.

Tish Shute: What would you like to see that they don’t have? Like say maybe start with Wikimedia, right?

Paige Saez: There’s just still a lot of issues with how to encourage people to want to contribute. It’s hard to show the value to someone who doesn’t already understand the value for some reason. At least for me personally this is something I have run into frequently. I don’t know if it is necessarily what Wikimedia doesn’t have, I think it is a lack of understanding of what creative commons really means. And there is still a very strong sense of ownership and concern about creative property rights. Being paid to be creative is a tremendously difficult thing to do. People fear losing their livelihoods. They think this is possible. Is it? I dunno.

For example : Look at me, I take a photograph of something, I can sell that. And there’s a question about whether or not, as an artist, I want to have my photographs in a pool of images that is open and accessible when I could be making money on it instead. Now that is just an example. Me personally, I can see the value. But that is a common concern. The gist of the question being, ‘what value does it bring to give something away versus holding on to it?’ A hugely popular discussion right now.

This is the same crux of the problem we are dealing with when we talk about thinking about images in the social commons for the real world. It’s a conversation about ownership. It’s about, who does this belong to really? If I take a photograph of a Levi’s billboard, does that photograph belong to me or does it belong to Levi’s? We know the boundaries of that. But when the image becomes a living image, an image capable of transmutation; an image that provokes an action or hyperlinks to a product, experience, information….where are the boundaries in that?

Tish Shute: But how is ImageWiki handling that differently from Wikimedia, I suppose is my question.

Paige Saez: We haven’t solved the problem.

Tish Shute: Yes, I suppose it is not like we have fully solve the problem of a creative commons for images on the internet let alone the issues of a social commons for the real world! So neither one has solved the problem, right?

Paige Saez: Exactly. To be honest, it made my head spin. I realized we were building a web application and a mobile tool doing augmented reality, real time feedback on the world and suddenly we weren’t. Suddenly we were dealing with DNS and talking about physical hyperlinks and ownership and property. And basically at that point you just have to sit and really start looking at catching up on IP issues and figuring out how to deal with that space in a much more wholistic way. It became so important that we had to take a step back and go

“Oh my god I think we have really uncovered a real problem here.”

At the point when we were building out the tools we realized something was really going on with our project. Here we were thinking that this was just a beautiful experience of learning about the world around us. We really…Anselm and I both just really wanted this tool to exist. It was something that we both just really wanted to happen in the world, something that we felt really just thrilled to make. And we looked at and used it and realized that instead of it just being a beautiful experience, it was a fundamental shift in how we understood everything. That it impacted our world in the same way the Internet impacted our world. It was a fundamental shift in understanding. A sea-change.

So I put down the prototype and went back to researching, read a ton of books on IP and went and presented to friends, family, schoolmates and co-workers trying to explain the project and then the larger conceptual framework that had emerged from the project. I began using the metaphor of thinking about Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Thinking about a pipe that isn’t actually a pipe.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes!

Paige Saez: ..to try to help explain to people that the image that you see is actually not, you know, it’s not an image of a thing. It’s an image. And that image has a tone and that image has a voice, and that image was chosen. And there were decisions that were made through the interface of the camera, specific decisions that defined the view of what you were looking at. And that that wasn’t being acknowledged and that that was a fundamental part of what the ImageWiki was aiming to do. The lens that you are actually looking through was as important as what you were looking at. And democratizing that lens became the most important thing that we could possibly do.

Tish Shute: So the emphasis for you on ImageWiki was in fact the lens, even though you found obstacles to creating the interface, right?

Paige Saez: Yes. Definitely. That’s what I fell in love with first. I really wanted to be able to use my phone to learn about what kind of tree this was or to buy tickets for the band on the poster I just saw, or see a hidden secret. For me it was very much a story, a narrative experience that I just thought was magical. And that is how I fell in love with it, which is not where I ended up. Where I ended up was realizing it was a fundamental shift in not only my own understanding of how to use the world around me, but in our understanding of looking at the world.

Tish Shute: It would be pretty scary if an image DNS was basically in the hands of either one or very few people, right? I mean even ImageWiki would be stuck with this problem, that if you set up a bunch of servers, you are going to be holding a very, very large image database. I mean, whatever your motivation, right? I think at the minute that is why I am very into seeing everything through the lens of federation, I see that unless we have federation, these giant central, databases are inevitable aren’t they?

Paige Saez: Essentially, yes. I mean I wasn’t able to walk through it as quickly as that. It kind of just overwhelmed me. Looking back on it, it seems perfectly obvious. I was just like “Oh my god, what have we done? Like what is going on?” Particularly for me because so much of my life has been spent in art, it was really easy to immediately understand the connection between the view, the viewer, and what’s being viewed as all just different layers of ownership and understanding that it is a gaze. Right? We know that we are never able to look at something without passing judgment on it, but to see that become a part of the interface in a real-time fashion just blew my mind.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Paige Saez: I think you are right. Getty Images, Flickr images, no matter what you are always holding on to something and you have to be responsible for it. Right? So how do you deal with the responsibility but don’t take on too much ownership? Where is the boundary with that?

Tish Shute: And for me, the simple answer to that is loosely connected small parts, distributed systems and federation. Because there is only one way to be able to utilize these things is to have them distributed so that no one holds all the cards. Right?

Paige Saez: Definitely and I personally agree with you wholeheartedly. However, the idea of distributed power is a concept that most people just don’t know how to deal with.

Tish Shute: And it’s easier said than done because actually the root problems that you are talking about aren’t got rid through federation, because if someone really holds the, sort of, all the good image databases just because they have the potential to be federated, they may not choose to open them up on many levels.

Paige Saez: And even then you have to think about, sort of, like the next level of it, which is we want it to be all open and accessible, but everything is owned by somebody. Like, what really is public anymore, in general?

Tish Shute: And what is interesting though, regardless of what we speculate conceptually on this, we already set off down the road. I mean we have already several large…they are all in beta I suppose, Google Goggles, Point and Find, right? But we have applications that are beginning to implement this. They are beginning to implement search on it, and it is geo-located even if it’s not in an augmented view, right? So it is proximity based.

Paige Saez: Right, right. I mean maybe the solution is that if we follow that line of thinking then Flickr will be partnering with Google Goggles. And then my images would stay under my ownership through the authority of Flickr. And I would use Flickr as my place to add images and they would just be responsive via my devices via AR.

Tish Shute: That’s very interesting.

Paige Saez: Definitely I think so. It is also the shortest distance between things.

Tish Shute: Yes, and as Anselm kept pointing out, basically it is going to happen in the simplest way possible, really, regardless of the implications of that. But OK, getting back to ImageWiki. As you say neither Wikimedia nor Flickr were really designed to take this role, right?

Paige Saez: Right.

Tish Shute: With ImageWiki, you’ve had these ideas and a concern with the social implications of physical hyperlinking in your mind since it’s inception. Are there any design ideas you’ve come up with that you know, as opposed to sort of, as you say, connecting Flickr to Point and Find, or who knows, Google Goggles. How is ImageWiki going to be different, do you think? Is that a hard question at this point?

Paige Saez: It is, and it’s a great question, and it’s a question I really love to think about. I think we have to introduce the politics with the tools. It has to be acknowledged that it’s not just a place to hold information, that’s what I feel in my heart.

At the same time, is that too much for people to really grasp at one time? In my experience it really has been, so the design of the experience needs to allow for an understanding of the power of the tool and the level of authority that the tool offers, while not getting in the way of it; just using it. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, nobody will use anything if it isn’t valuable to them. And so I could talk for miles and miles and miles about how important it is that corporations don’t own all of the rights to all of the visual things in my life, right? For the rest of my life I could talk about that. The idea that advertising is dominating all of our views of anything in the world around us is horrifying. It doesn’t matter unless I can show somebody why it matters to them or how it affects them. It’s just that that is a tremendously difficult thing to explain through a user interface.

And I actually think that it’s great that tools like Google Goggles and Nokia Point and Find are here to do a lot of the hard work of showing people how it works. Recently somebody explained to me their experience of using Google Goggles. They went through this process of saying how the Google Goggles took a picture and then did this really complicated visual scanning thing over the image and it took a full minute.

And I said, “Well of course they did it that way.” And they said, “Well what do you mean?” I said, “Well, what they are really doing there when they are doing all these fancy graphics, is they are showing you how it works.” And even if it isn’t actually related at all to how it functionally works, algorithmically, that’s not the point. The point is that this gesture of the time taken to make it look like it’s scanning an image and going back and forth with pretty colors is giving people the time to process that as an experience. That’s a metaphor for what’s really happening. And these kinds of metaphors are crucial with user experience design. We have lots and lots of examples of them and how they work, and many of them aren’t necessary. Like you know, for example, the bar that shows you the time it’s taking for something to process.There is no relationship between that and reality. But it is really important.

Tish Shute: Yes those bars often have no relationship between the actual time..

Paige Saez: And that’s the thing. Like the idea of time versus our perceived understanding of time. Right? The length of time it takes for your Firefox browser to open and load your last 30 tabs, versus the reality of what’s actually happening. When you are doing that sort of research you are actually accessing millions and millions of places and points of interest all over the world, so we need more of that. We need more of the process shown. Anselm and I worked with a film maker named Karl Lind from In the Can Productions here in Portland to try and make a video about the ImageWiki. We made this little video and I can try to show it to you or send it to you if you want.

Tish Shute: One of the issues with this kind of visual search is that it is inherently dependent on large databases, regardless of where they are federated, are going to be very large. Right? I mean someone is going to have something big, and aggregated there. I suppose someone will figure out the challenges of federated search eventually but that is quite a big challenge!

So I suppose I am still trying to understand what ImageWiki can offer that we can’t get with any other existing service? How will their be a social commons and even a social contract for the world as a platform for computing and physical hyperlinks?

Eben Moglen brought up something when I talked to him about virtual worlds, he said we need code angels to let us know what was going on in the virtual space – who was gathering data and how, for example.

Paige Saez: Tell me more about that, I want to hear more about that.

Tish Shute: Eben suggested this metaphor for when I was asking him about privacy in virtual worlds. The fact that people just didn’t know that when they were pushing avatars around virtual worlds what metrics were being gathered on their behavior. And he basically said that what we need is code angels when we enter these spaces because having the rules of the game buried in a TOC was ridiculous.

Paige Saez: That is a really interesting idea.

Tish Shute: Maybe ImageWiki needs to be our code angel to navigate the augmented world. I mean that’s what I want to see it as. And when I hear you talk, what I hear is you talking in broad categories about what a code angel might be in the space of images and image links to the physical world. I mean that is what I hear from you.

Paige Saez: Yeah. No, I definitely agree with that. It is interesting. In that sense, it is kind of a protection layer. Is that what you are thinking?

Tish Shute: Yes, I suppose because we can’t be navigating a lot of complicated opt-ins and opt-outs just to get around our neighborhood safely (in terms of privacy (also see Eben Moglen’s definition of privacy here…) We will need a code angel that is sort of keeping up with you in real time!

Paige Saez: Right, right. I wonder how that would work in regards to images, though. That is a really interesting thing to try and put on an image. I guess why I am having such a hard time being specific about it, is I am just trying to work it in my head, thinking of a specific use case, like what would be an example of that?

Tish Shute: Well I suppose the example, and this is a crude one, is when you point your Google Goggles to the book jacket, the code angel, this is very crude, would say “You are right now drawing images from the Amazon database – they are collecting data such and such data from your search.

And then of course the ability to have crowd sourced tagging and corrections..

There was a wonderful book that came out last year on how we can have commercial intelligence -Dan Goleman’s new book: “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything”…

how corporations various different stakeholders, including their customers will drive corporations to do the morally right thing because they will lose the commercial support of customers who won’t support them unless they are more green, fairer, do the things we would like them to do whatever that happens to be – physical hyperlinking and tagging I guess would be a big part of this.

Paige Saez: Sort of a transparency issue. And that almost becomes a page rank algorithm in and of itself. I mean now we are really talking about search more than anything, and what tool becomes the dominant search tool. Anselm and I talked a lot about one platform… I mean eventually we will have a unified platform. It will…No matter what, for the Internet and for physical objects and visual objects in the real world. It will just be a matter of, literally, who can find the best and most valuable, most relevant information on a thing. Currently we just have it very proprietary.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Paige Saez: That definitely won’t last. It just can’t, because of the exact problem that you are raising. And we already know too much about resources and information as they pertain to products for us to ever go back to a time where we are not considering other ways of getting information about it anyway. Right?

Like I have the same concerns nowadays when I look at fruit. I look at a piece of fruit in the store. I would never just assume that the person who put the sticker on that fruit, anymore, is the ultimate authority necessarily. I would always assume at this point I could go online and go find out more information about a company. Issues about like eco-footprint or how much toxicity, or pesticides or whatnot are now totally accessible already.

So I am thinking when you look at that piece of fruit and that sticker for Google, say what you are describing, do we just go immediately to the company’s website, or is it even more specific? Do we know that the sticker on that piece of fruit is going to tell us specific information about that? Or are we just getting back the nutritional resources, or are we getting a listing of all of the different options out of a page rank algorithm that shows us, “Well this is the website for the fruit. Here is the nutritional information. Here are the last 15 comments on it.” It’s basically just a basic search.

Have you heard of Good Search?

Tish Shute: you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoodSearch

Paige Saez: Right.

Tish Shute: A code angel interface would have to give you options, wouldn’t it on possible views available?

Paige Saez: Yes. You are then talking about filtering your view. Then it really gets really interesting, of course. I don’t even know if we have a choice in that. I think we are really kind of hitting a wall with who owns the space and the platform. Is it just a basic search because we are already familiar with search? If you had an option to choose, say, “I want to look at this apple sticker and I only want to get…programmatically only looking at my friend’s opinions of this company.”

Or I have a safety valve on it that only shows me certain information based on what the code angel knows about me, my preferences, my age, things like that. Then that gets really, really interesting, because we are trying to do all that work right now just with social media and the Internet. We are already overwhelmed with too much information. It is already past the point of comprehension. So to think that we would actually drill down even more specifics is very interesting.

Tish Shute: That was a point Anselm made about the fact that once you are into this mobile, just in time, one view kind of situation, it is quite different than the Internet where you can bring up all these different screens and go to another website.

Paige Saez: Well yes, mobile is a different level of engagement. Very contextual. Much less information. Much more about timeliness. I don’t want to look an apple and get back a Google search. Oh my God no. That’s the last thing I want. I would love to be able to look at an apple and my phone already knows exactly what I want, information-wise, to get back from that apple. But I don’t know. It’s all contextual and personal. So I think the code angle concept you are talking about is really interesting because you still need to think about who is the person that is adding or creating those level filters- is it you, a filtered friend network, an algorithm? How much work is too much work? Where do we draw the line? How much of this are we willing to let the machine do for us?

Tish Shute: Right.

Paige Saez: And then of course once you have those filters in place, you need control over them. You will need to dial them up and dial them down, be able to choose and add new ones, so on and so forth. It becomes very modal at that point. For example, I want to change my view: To walk into a grocery store and instead of finding out information, I’d want to see where the hidden Easter egg puzzles were that my friends left last week because we’re playing a game.

I’m still really attracted to the creative opportunities with the ImageWiki. I’m really attracted to changing this experience from being a one-to-one relationship (from Corporation to Consumer) to an open-ended relationship (From Person to Person). If I look at a book jacket, sure I can find out where to buy the book, but that’s boring. Who cares? I’d like to find out a link to a story or an adventure or a movie or something unthought-of before.

How do we build that in? How do we encourage serendipity? Mystery? I think the ImageWiki is the space for building that in, actually. Not how, that would be the one place, right? That’s my really big fear is that this relationship just stays one-to-one. Click an image of consumable object, get back objects retail value. How completely dull. We have to do better than this.

Additionally, what if I want to take a photograph of a book, an apple, or something and I don’t want to pull back data. Instead, I want to pull back music, or I want to pull back a video, or I want to pull back a song, or lyrics, or a story, or another image. It’s just a hyperlink at the end of the day, you know? That’s all we’re really doing. Hyperlinks can pull back so many different things.

Tish Shute: And that’s one of the reasons I’m into mobile social interaction utility building, because without that, if we don’t have that way to do that in mobile technology…that’s very available on the Internet, as we’ve seen, with Twitter. These applications are very easy to do on the Internet. They’re not easy to do natively in a mobile application..

hey, I’m just promoting AR Wave again. I should shut up.

Paige Saez: Oh, no. I think it’s a fascinating concept, I really do. I totally agree. As we’ve talked about it before, it’s amazing that marketing and advertising are helping push forward AR, and it’s great. It’s fantastic.

But it’s also the worst possible thing that could ever happen because it is such a singular way of looking at an overall ubiquitous computing experience. There are other ways.

The best experience I ever had was trying to explain to people about physical hyperlinks. I had to walk them through it. Good interactive isn’t something you present or show, it’s something you do. Nothing beats just walking around and showing people with a device or a tool or something else.

I mean, God forbid it always stays in our computers and our phones. I really hope we don’t have to be stuck living our entire lives with these horrible interfaces. But for the time being, we will. Having an AR app show you a puzzle, or a mystery, or a game, or an adventure is a magnificent experience, totally overwhelming, and people get it right away. There’s no question; they totally understand.

Tish Shute: Yes, I agree.

Paige Saez: You walk them through the experience with a physical hyperlink and then you say, “Here, I could use this device and I could show you where to buy this thing, or I could use this device and we could start playing a game.” Then everybody gets it.

Tish Shute: So then I have a question, because one of the things Anselm said to me when he wanted me to refer back to you is that he feels that the direction for ImageWiki should be perhaps to focus less on the technology and more on just the actual, I suppose, gathering of the images, how they’re going to be annotated, the metadata, right? But my question to him was, the problem if you do that, without the platform, there’s no experience or motivation for people to do that. Right? Is there?

Paige Saez: Yeah, I agree with you on that one. I’m curious what his…I think the reason why he wants to do that is he wants to be able to show people examples via the resources. Like to be able to show someone a library, essentially, which I think makes sense with some people. I definitely think that some audiences would really relate to that. For me, it doesn’t make sense because I’m just very experiential. I need to do it and I need to show other people how to do it and I need to grow that way. I think that at the end of the day, those are great ways to go about doing it. It’s just it’s a huge thing to do in either direction.

What Anselm’s really thinking on, I believe, is more about exemplifying how we read and understand images culturally. Then you’re really getting into Visual Studies and Critical Theory which is what I did for my Masters at PNCA. I worked on the ImageWiki while I was in grad school, it was something I was doing for fun. Independently of my studies, the project lead to issues on democracy and objects and property and I ended up right smack in the middle of what I was studying; the nature and cultural analysis of images Questions like, ‘what exactly do we get out of images?’ and how all these different things are happening in an image, and people get tons of totally different things out of an image depending on many factors.

The questions I began to ask myself got very philosophical. Questions like “Is this apple red? Is this apple red-orange? Is this a small apple? What’s my understanding of small versus your understanding of small?”

Because you supposed that you needed a text backup to the search, how would I be able to search for an apple? Because what if my understanding of apple is red and your understanding of apple is green. And so if I’m looking for a green apple, am I looking for the same green apple as you? It’s all semantics, sure. But at the same time, it gets bigger and bigger, and it’s fascinating.

Tish Shute: Google Goggles seem to work best on book jackets, basically.

Paige Saez: But book jackets are actually perfect for this. Book jackets are perfect for this problem, because book jackets are specifically designed art. So at the end of the day, we are still talking about creative works, artistic works, that have been designed as a communication tool. But that is not something that people can own. Creative works that are designed are a communication tool, with varying levels of skill to be sure, but still something anybody can do. What we need to do is we need to be using that language. We don’t need to be trying to reach as far as facial recognition. We need to develop our own logos, our own brand, our own…I mean not brand. Brand is a bad way of saying it. Another way of saying it would be like, just use it. Develop a visual language that we can use that is as effective and as well utilized as book jackets or the movie posters or something.

Tish Shute: What are some of the use cases for ImageWiki you would like to develop first?

Paige Saez: My dream…I have like four or five use cases that I want to see happen. One of them is I walk down the street and there is a new poster for my favorite band. And I can just go up to the poster and I use my device, whatever it looks like, and I download the latest album. It’s transactional. I am able to just plug in my headset and walk down the street and the transaction is done. I saw something I wanted. It was beautiful. I was able to get it and I was able to move on in my life. And that is totally possible.

Another one would be I walk down the street and there is a piece of graffiti. And I am able to use my device to find out who the artist was that made it and to give them props, and to point my other friends to the fact that the piece is there and it will most likely be there only for a short period of time- information retrieval and socialization.

Or, use my device to find an Easter egg, to find a narrative puzzle that ends up going on for weeks, and everybody is involved, and we are all playing this game together. Adventure-based, non-linear experiences. I want playfulness, not just purchases.

Tish Shute: Did you think of piggybacking on the Flickr API for geo-tagged photos as a way to work with those databases or not?

Paige Saez: Yeah, we definitely thought about that.

Tish Shute: And why did you decide not to, for any reason or…?

Paige Saez: Ultimately, we just…we were such a small group, we just had to tackle certain things at a certain time.

Tish Shute: Right. And you were so prescient, you were working slightly before we had the mediating devices, weren’t you? You were just before the mobile devices really got adequate for this.

Paige Saez: Yeah. We started on it…I believe it was January…No. December 2007. Basically, the iPhone had just launched like maybe six months prior or something like that.

Tish Shute: But not 3G and not 3GS, right?

Paige Saez: Not 3GS. It was the first generation iPhone. We built the ImageWiki before the App Store existed.

We knew that the App Store was coming out. And we knew that the App Store was going to be the biggest thing in the whole world. I remember getting into multiple fights with friends about how revolutionary the iPhone and the App Store were going to be and people thinking I was totally crazy; people just thinking I was absolutely nuts for being so excited about it.

It sucks that it is a closed proprietary system, but the App Store has done something for software that nothing has ever done in the whole world. Software is candy now. It’s candy. It is like when you are waiting at the grocery store at the checkout line and you are stuck behind somebody, and you have got all these little tchotchka’s, candy bars, magazines, nail-clippers and things. That is the equivalent of software now. It’s become an impulse buy, which is amazing. Nobody would ever have thought…that is actually revolutionary. That’s huge.

Tish Shute: Steven Feiner, who is one of the founding fathers of augmented reality said to me during a conversations at the ARNY meetup that one reason that augmented reality, despite the hype, is manifesting very differently from how virtual reality burst onto the tech scene is that it is about affordable apps on affordable readily available hardware.

“The game is about the world not dragons,” Will Wright, Founder and Chief Executive  Stupid Fun Club, Creator of Spore and The Sims.

I had a brief chat with Will Wright after his talk at Engage!, and I was delighted to hear that augmented reality is high on his agenda at the moment:

“a lot of our stuff is kind of in the experimental format right now, but definitely one of our strong interests is AR.”

Will Wright will be coming to speak at Augmented Reality Event, Santa Clara, CA., June 2nd, 3rd,  2010.  But, for now, here are a few hints at some of the directions that are intriguing him, e.g., the game potential of 3D mapping like Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s  demo of augmented reality maps at TED -  see the full conversation below.

There has been a vital shift, Will Wright points out.  Before the Wii,  immersive was understood as  how much we were pulled into the world of the game.  Now immersive is how much the game pulls us deeper into our world, e.g., our relationship with the people we are playing with as in Rock Band, or engaging with other people’s crazy antics when playing Wii games.

“Computers are imagination amplifiers and toys are imagination constructors.”

The slide above is from Will Wright’s talk at Engage!

Will Wright’s talk was extraordinary, dense, layered, and deeply thought provoking.

I have picked out a few samples from Will Wright’s vast tome of slides here.  They are just a glimpse of the many insights he offered.  If you are still wondering what will transform augmented reality into a mainstream experience, I suggest studying this talk carefully (I think the audio will be posted on the Engage! web site).  Also watch Will Wright’s, Games For Learning Institute talk at NYU, February 17th, 2010, archived here.

Will Wright and Stupid Fun Club are getting ready to takes us to the next level of imagination amplification and construction.

“Smart” things can make us dumber by overriding our instincts

Just one of the many wonderful anecdotes Will Wright told  was the story of his experiences with a new “smart” car (he bought this car with the intent of exploring the pinnacle of the “smart” car experience). The slide above is from Will Wright’s talk at Engage!

Increasingly, artifacts are being designed to send us more and more data, and this car was endowed with an array of sensors supplying data aimed at assisting parallel parking – a notoriously challenging aspect of driving.  But the car  failed miserably in helping.   While parallel parking had been easy for him prior to being deluged with all this data, Will Wright pointed out, ironically, he had to learn to ignore this stuff to park the “smart” car.

Instinctively, we learn to filter the information necessary for parking to the relevant stuff.  This kind of pre-conscious filtering is a key challenge for augmented reality, and one that Will Wright, as a game designer, has given great deal of thought to.

As Will Wright pointed out, a  lot of our ideas about augmented reality, and sensor enabled artifacts, are rooted in trying to give us more data, to “take over our instincts.”   Not only do these artifacts attempt to give us more data, which as in the case of the HUDs for parallel parking can get in the way of our own highly effective intuitive instincts.  But, as Will Wright also noted, these artifacts also have more data which they can deploy independently to override our instincts, e.g., the car detecting your head has turned back to talk to a passenger and applying the brakes!

“Toys Encourage Agency”

Toys can be the antidote to instinct blocking “smart things.”  In contrast to “smart” data spitting cars that “take over” our instincts, toys encourage agency.  Will Wright gave the example of  high dynamic lighting photographs that make the world “toy like” and encourage us want to reach in and play with it (photo above from HDRCreme).

“What Computers are really good at is harvesting human intelligence”

Another key insight that Will Wright explored in depth in his talk was the significance of  crowd sourced intelligence (the slide above is from Will Wright’s talk at Engage!).  If the crowd is training the filter, he suggested to me, this might build the kind of context we need to build meaningful augmented reality experiences (for more on this see the conversation below).

Talking with Will Wright at Engage!, NYC, 2010

Tish Shute: I was very interested by the idea you put out that this deluge of information gathered by sensors is not necessarily a kind of nirvana for augmented reality, in fact it can be just the opposite.  In the embryonic world of augmented reality, we have two streams it seems at the moment – one is the idea of a kind of like hyper local nirvana imagined for AR, in which we get information relevant to us, when and where we need it.   But you talked about some of the problems in realizing this, didn’t you?  The other strand  is the emerging stream of play which you are exploring..

Will Wright: Right.  I think part of it is like what I was talking about-the way our senses are set up to know how to filter out 99% of what is coming into them.  That is why they work, and that is what is beneficial.  I think that is why AR needs to focus on…

You look at what I can find out on Google or whatever, the amount of information is just astronomical.  The hard part, the intelligent part, is how do you figure out that one tenth of 1% that I actually care about at this given second?

Tish Shute: Yes.  Have you seen any examples of AR beginning to do that?

Will Wright: No, not at all.  I think that you have to have a contextual understanding of where I am at, where my mindset is, what my situation is, what my goal state is in a moment by moment basis.  And then it is still a complex task.  But the very first thing we need is more context for building a filter.  See, that filter is changing every few minutes, you know, what I am filtering into my senses is changing, and my context is changing moment to moment.

Tish Shute: I really liked your emphasis on crowd sourced intelligence as the key power of a networked world, is this the seed..?

Will Wright: Well, you can imagine crowd sourcing that filter…it would affect a million people and get a sense of what mental context that they were in and what filter they turned on.  And so, in a sense, the crowd is training the filter.

Tish Shute: Yes.  The problem with projects like SIRI, that is driven by the big DARPA AI project, CALO, is it is centralized – although I am not sure what they intend to do in terms of crowd source corrections?  But if it was all open and we could crowd source as well that would be interesting.  But in the end we need a framework for AR that is as open as the internet, don’t we?

Will Wright: Right.  I think the technological infrastructure needs to be much lighter so that it can be grounded in more like a Twitter feed or something.

Tish Shute: Yeah.  I’m actually working on a project using the Wave Federation protocol as the basis for an open communications framework for augmented reality, AR Wave – not the Wave user interface, just the real-time federation protocol.  But, of course,  for it to become an open framework that could be a vehicle for crowd trained augmented reality it would need good take-up!

Will Wright: Right.  You really want a million people involved.

Tish Shute: Yes our dream is that the creation of augmented reality content will be as open, accessible and  simple as making an html page, or contributing to a wiki.

So in terms of AR games what is interesting on the horizon, presumably games also have to solve the problems of  delivering a hyper local experience.  The car that you described in your talk tried hard to use augmented reality to solve the problem of parallel parking and ended up making it harder.  So giving us the information we need, where we need it, when we need it, and specific to who we are is going to be a big challenge.  But I mean in terms of games, what kinds of hyper local experiences will be most fun and what have you seen that is interesting in terms of augmented reality games up to now?

Will Wright: I’ve not actually seen much at all.  I’ve seen people doing interesting stuff with like Google Maps.  They aren’t really entertainment oriented, but I think you can start thinking about…

I mean I think for a lot of people, Google Street View is entertainment.  But I haven’t really seen something that was really leaning into an entertainment application using existing technology and data that is already out there.

I mean I have seen some cool experiments-people playing Pac-Man in Washington Square and stuff like that, but nothing really serious.

Tish Shute: Yeah.  of course I think one of the missing links is that the barrier of entry is way to high for creating social augmented experiences for smart phones, and as you point out in your talk it is the social implications of the game is what makes it compelling.

Will Wright: Also, I think using them [smart phones] as data aggregation devices rather than just data consumption devices…so that people out there are using their phone, cameras, microphones, or whatever to gather data and get an experience where they are rewarded for gathering data.

Tish Shute: Like foursquare where you get the badges, and people can become the mayor of like a cafe or something.

Will Wright: Right.  Yeah, you can imagine people using their phones to actually kind of pull information…

Tish Shute: A Dutch developer/artist/game designer, Thomas Wrobel,  Lost Again, came up with the original concept for the AR framework we are building on the Wave Federation protocol.  Thomas and his partner Bertine van Hovell design alternate reality games, amongst other things they do…so they are deeply immersed in the potential of the world as game.

Will Wright: Yeah, one of my programmers actually works in Amsterdam….there is a whole sub-community…
Well, yeah.  The possibilities are tremendous.  And Wii is actually training us that way [to be as much engaged with the other players in the physical space as the virtual game], so it is going to happen.

Tish Shute: What are the most exciting things you see at the moment, and for the next 12 months for augmented reality?

Will Wright: Gosh.  I mean I just think there is cool stuff happening in mapping, in general.

Tish Shute: Like Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s  demo of augmented reality maps at TED?

Will Wright: Yeah, I thought the 3-D mapping with Microsoft…I think like the next level of that is going to be really compelling.

Tish Shute: You see game potentials in that?

Will Wright: Yeah.  You start overlaying really cool game potential on top of that.

Tish Shute: Might you get interested and do something?

Will Wright: Oh, yeah.  I mean in terms of games, that is one of my biggest interests, is AR.

Tish Shute: Are you allowed to talk about anything specific at all?

Will Wright: Not yet, no.  I mean a lot of our stuff is kind of in the experimental format right now, but definitely one of our strong interests is AR.

Tish Shute: Yeah, absolutely.  We are over being tied to our desks to use computers -we want to be doing it anywhere, anytime, with anything…

Will Wright: Now the game is about the world instead of about dragons.  I love that.

“The internet eats everything it touches,” write Brady Forrest and Nathan Torkington, O’Reilly Media, Inc., in their must read 2006 companion essay The State of Where 2.0 (PDF).  Now in 2010 that statement is more true than ever.

Last week,  I talked to Brady about what we can look forward to at Where 2.0, 2010,  and what he thinks will be the “internet eating” trends emerging this year.  Brady is uniquely positioned to get a glimpse of things to come.  His job for O’Reilly Media is tracking changes in technology and organizing large scale events, including Where 2.0 which he chairs, and Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC which he co-chairs.  Brady also runs Ignite, and previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search.  And, when not doing his day job, he participates in such Uber Geek activities as Steve the Robot H.E.AI.D – A Human Energized Artificial Intelligence Device…with lasers and generative sound, (click on pic above or see video here).  Look out for Steve the Robot H.E.AI.D, at Augmented Reality Event, June 2nd and 3rd, Santa Clara, CA,  and a presentation from Brady.

As Vernor Vinge pointed out in his intro to ISMAR 2009 – the “possibilities are both scary and wondrous” as “the physical world becomes much more like a software construct.”  Brady Forrest has taken a lead role, since 2004 – when “‘local search’ was interesting but not yet real,” in shaping this transformation.

Where 2.0, together with WhereCamp (this year at Google) constitutes WhereWeek – a crucible for emerging trends in web mapping platforms, and location based technologies.  This year augmented reality, proximity-based social networking, local search, and the rapidly maturing field of Crisis Management are in the  mix along with the huge and long established GIS industry which has moved rapidly into the Where 2.0 space.

But what business models will oxygenate the system is still a key question – one Brady discusses in the interview below.  Certainly, the usefulness of location based analysis, mapping, new interfaces, and bringing this data to every application is clear.

Crisis management is center stage this year Jeffrey Johnson (Open Solutions Group), John Crowley (Star-Tides), Schuyler Erle (Entropy Free LLC) who will present on, Haiti: CrisisMapping the Earthquake.  And Chris Vein & Tim O’Reilly will “discuss how cities and application developers will benefit from open data and what these programs will look like in the future”  in the plenary City Data.

Mobile social, proximity- based social networking, which may soon emerge as a challenger to web based social networks, and augmented reality are the sexy rockstars of  the Where 2.0′s 2010 showcase of potentially disruptive technologies.  Augmented Reality has had a breakthrough year, and this is reflected in its strong showing on the Where 2.0 schedule.  But, as Brady notes, AR awaits the killer app, that will drive it to the next level  Of course, we hope to unveil that at are2010!

At Where 2.0, I am presenting on The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences panel.  We will look at how social augmented experiences will be key to the next wave of mobile augmented reality.  Mike Liebhold, in a complementary presentation, looks at Truly Open AR. If you have been reading Ugotrade, you already know I am an advocate for an open, distributed, real time communications framework for AR – see ARWave.  Wave Federation Protocol is an open fast, compact, federated, communications protocol that is a dream come true for AR.  And, I would hazard a guess that in 2010, real time communications plus location will become oxygen.

But also key to the next wave of AR, as I discussed with Anselm Hook in this post on Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform, will be a view constructed through complex “hybrid tracking and sensor fusion techniques” (Jarell Pair), cooperating cloud data services, powerful search and computer vision algorithms, and apps that learn by context accumulation.”

And as Brady notes in the interview below,  a key step forward would be “to take advantage of your location, but it doesn’t need to have been mapped before.”

For some interesting news on the mapping front (and a discount code for Where 2.0 for Radar readers) see Brady’s post, Flickr Photos in Google Street View. These kind of human built maps have the potential to develop into “photo-based positioning systems” that could create new opportunities for augmented reality.  Brady asks:

“how often the Flickr photos get updated, where else these Flickr photos are going to show up in Google’s services (Google Goggles perhaps?) and will they show up in new search partner Bing? I am doubly curious if Facebook will ever let its photos be used in a similar way.”

Lior Ron of Google Goggles will be at Where 2.0 to tell us all about, Looking into Google Goggles.  And if you want to learn more about how our view of the physical world will be ” rooted in powerful computing, pervasive connectivity, and the cloud” don’t miss this one.  I will be there.  And I very much hope there is a Q and A with this session.

During our conversation (see the full conversation below) Brady gave me his short list for breakthroughs that he sees as having big significance in 2010:

“Well, I think Google Goggles is one of the most exciting things to me.  Having access to a visual search…having someone actually release a visual search engine in that way, to consumers, I think is huge.  You know, you see stuff like that in the labs. But I don’t see it… it’s rare to see it out.

I think Android is huge.  And the way Google is pushing hardware to show off the platform; so the Nexus One being another example and the fact that it’s breaking free from the carriers.  Because I think when we get away from the carriers we are able to see more innovation, it’s what’s going to allow people or developers and companies to really innovate.

And I think Twitter adding geo-location to their APIs and buying MixerLabs is a huge move. I think Twitter may end up becoming the end-all be-all of location services. They are going to be updated constantly by people; they are going to have a really good grasp, real-time, of what is happening in any one place, at least based on the people.

And then with the addition of the MixerLabs data, they’re going to have more datasets at their ready, as well as any data that they start to collect from the clients themselves, like from TweetDeck.

So there are global clients that are updating Twitter.  I think those are some of the most exciting things.  And again, just to come back to Yelp, I think Yelp’s Monocle is also pretty significant, just because it’s an AR [augmented reality] app that’s being pushed into consumers’ hands.

And we’ll see how useful they find it.”

Talking With Brady Forrest

Pic above from WhereCamp 2009, Brady Forrest, facing camera, checks out Mark Powell’s Food Genome Project.  Check it out here – it just woke up!

Tish Shute: So last year when you were interviewed by Michael Calore for WebMonkey before Where 2.0 you said, “Location is no longer a differentiator it’s going to become oxygen.” And after attending Where Week 2009, I agreed with you and wrote about it here.  But, in what ways did this prediction exceed expectations, and what ways were you disappointed now as we get close to Where 2.0, 2010?

Brady Forrest: Well, it exceeded expectations in that there are now five different mobile OS’s where you can load on third party applications that active users’ locations that can then be shared out.

And so, what it is making is the possibility of real-time social location aware applications.  And this is something that hasn’t truly been possible in years past. Looking back three years ago when the iPhone launched, it was the first major phone, especially in the US, to be location aware.  And a year later, the Apps Store launched, giving developers full access to location, which previously had been held onto very, very, incredibly tightly by the carriers.

And now, a year and a half later, you have Android, you have Palm Pre, you have Blackberry working on their SDK to make it better, but it still is there.  You have Windows Mobile working on their SDK.  And, you know, who knows?  Maybe even BREW will get into the mix.

And AT&T is opening up their own interactive store.  And so, AT&T and Verizon and all their smart phones may now be looking at BREW.

Tish Shute: Right. It was very exciting last year at Where 2.0, where we had all these new toolsets announced and then the iphone being location aware. What were the best implementations of these new capabilities that became available in 2009, do you think?  What, in your view, was the most creative, surprising and disruptive?

Brady Forrest: Well, I am a huge fan of Yelp Monocle. I think, you know, that is just a real life example of using Augmented Reality.  You are on a street.  You have got a bunch of restaurants.  You have got a bunch of businesses.  And just to be able to swing through and look for people…I mean and look for ratings and reviews.

They have just started to institute check in, so you will be able to know where your friends are and where your friends have gone.  And that type of real-time, incredibly useful data is what will make augmented reality a standard part of the landscape.

I think it is that type of data, more so than, say, reference data, that will make people want to have all the possible sensors.  So, what do you need for that?  You need a camera.  You need a compass for orientation.  You need a GPS or, at least, a decent location service.  And then you need a screen where you can actually see the data, and then you need an Internet connection.

So it is not like any phone can handle this.  And so, you are going to need those killer apps to actually drive people to the type of phones that can support this.  I don’t think AR is quite there yet.

Tish Shute: I agree, for true AR you need more that compass, camera, and GPS.  There are some missing pieces for the real deal experience – and not just a pair of sexy AR spec.  As you mention, hybrid tracking and sensor fusion techniques that can combine computer vision technology with  compass and GPS are vital.  We need the compass.  We need the GPS.  We definitely need the camera!  But we need this combined with computer vision techniques to get the tracking, mapping and registration for true AR, or even to deliver a stable experience with the post-it/geonote AR that we see emerging with Layar, Wikitude, and others. At the moment we need to put together the tools for a true AR hyper-local experience.

And, of course, another aspect of this is the kind of physical hyper-links that applications like Google Goggles are building.

Do you have a speaker from Google Goggles at Where 2.0.  I would be absolutely fascinated to hear more about their road map?

Brady Forrest: I was loading Google Goggles onto the program yesterday.

Tish Shute: Oh, you did?  Oh, fantastic. And you have Lior Ron speaking!

Brady Forrest: It is actually possible it is not up on the website, but I talked to them and got them to agree to do a talk on it.

Tish Shute: I very much want to hear more about their road map.  Google Goggle’s is a very, very significant step towards the physical internet and this integration of computer vision with sensor fusion techniques necessary for true AR.

Brady Forrest: I mean that combination with Computer Vision is going to be incredibly valuable, because,  and then the other issue you have there is like is it on the client,  or is it on the server?  And right now, Google Goggles is definitely on the server, and that is not fast enough in real-time AR.  So that is like more of a 10 blue links IO interface.

Tish Shute: And also, they haven’t got an open API, have they?

Brady Forrest: No, not yet.

Tish Shute: Maybe they will announce that.  Can you nudge them?  For true AR,  we need to move forward in several areas – of course, there is the mediating device issues, like access to the video buffers in the iphone, and the development of cool AR eye wear would be nirvana!

But my recent obsession has been working on a real-time communications infrastructure for AR, because that is quite doable now, yet we don’t really have that real-time infrastructure, i.e. a real-time mobile social utility that is really up to the real time requirements of AR [see more about this here and on ARWave wiki].

But we certainly don’t have the integration of computer vision and sensor techniques, and the access to the big image databases we need, let alone the clients we need to put it all together either!

Brady Forrest: Google has done work to help out the community with their support of Open CV.

It is based out of Willow Garage, but I believe that Google has done quite a bit of work on it.

Tish Shute: Could you talk a bit more about Open CV?

Brady Forrest: O’Reilly has  a 500 page book on it.  It came out of the Darpa Project, or the Darpa Contest, where unmanned vehicles are raced.  And that has since become, at least in my mind, the primary computer vision library that people work with.

I actually used it…or, one of the teammates did, on our project we did this summer.  We implemented an Open CV pretty quickly that detected where people were, and then we would play music based on that.

Uber Geek Meeting from ShellyShelly’s photostream
Tish Shute: Is that your Burning Man project? Do you have a link for that, and some pictures, video?

Brady Forrest: Yeah.  Heaid.com.  Human Enhanced Artificial Intelligence Dancing.

Tish Shute: Thank you! This year the augmented reality story has been fairly basic – relying on basic sensors, compass, gps, accelerometers.  But it has also been an exciting year because  we hadn’t even had  smart phones with the camera, and GPS, and compass before this.

But now, the big adventure is to hook this all these sensor fusion techniques up with computer vision so that we can actually do reverse positioning for example from photos from what we are looking at, right?

Brady Forrest: Yeah, and start to use it in a more ad-hoc manner so that as you are traveling around, yes, it will take advantage of your location, but it doesn’t need to have been mapped before.

Tish Shute: Right – moving from mapping to context awareness.  Could you give like a quick explanation of what you did in your Burning Man project and how that relates to this kind of,  ad-hoc, on the fly, beginning to know what you are looking at without it having been mapped before, that is fascinating.

Brady Forrest: Sure.  So we mounted a camera about 30 feet off the ground.  And as people would move underneath or dance, they would move from block to block.  And we had kind of created kind of bitmap of the area underneath and set up different sound zones.  So as people moved from zone to zone, it would play different music.

And we used Maxim FP to handle the computer vision, although it has Open CV library to handle the computer vision part and to handle determining which of the audio to fire off.  And then, also, we had a laser that would play at the same time.

And then we used Ableton Live, which is a very popular DJ software to actually handle the music.  So as someone moved from, say, square A to square B, it would fire off various MIDI signals and Ableton would interpret that.  And each person who went in, up to…well, theoretically, up to 4- 8 people.  But because of how small the stage was and how the sounds are played, realistically, more like 4-6 people.

Each person had there own set of sound.

Pic from extramatic‘s Flickr stream here

Tish Shute: Wow! Awesome.

Brady Forrest: We would be able to detect different people, assign them a sound, or a set of sounds, so, like bass, drums, vocals.  And then we would have clips that played well together that were 3-5 seconds in length.

Tish Shute: At what distance could you detect people?

Brady Forrest: We had a 22 foot area underneath the camera.  That was mostly based on what the lens could capture.

Tish Shute: OMG I love this!  This is really the next step for augmented realities – not just attaching reference data to the world but exploring new shared “cosensual realities” (see Anselm Hook’s interview part 2 upcoming).

I am very interested in how in something you talk about a lot in your “State of Where 2.0″ essay, about lifestyle coming first for a potentially disruptive technology, not commercial considerations.  I still have to post the second half to my interview with  Anselm Hook but Anselm has some brilliant ideas in this area.  He is working on a project called Angel, where part of the vision is for people to actually find what they need without explicitly having to ask for it having to ask for it.

And this brings me to something that is very, to me, noticeable about Where 2.0 this year, and very exciting.  This is that location aware technology and crisis management basically has matured, hasn’t it?  We are beginning to see really useful stuff in this area now.

What is different this year that has brought crisis management and location aware technology together, a world in crisis?

Brady Forrest: Well, I think the primary thing that has brought all these technologies together is Haiti.  Without Haiti…A lot of times, future crises benefit from the current one, because people put in a lot of work.  And so, there is new infrastructure being laid with things such as Ushahidi, which is an open source platform for tracking…well, originally for tracking election violence in, but now is being used to track people and their locations and food requests in Haiti.

Also, Haiti did not have solid, accessible, good maps at the time of the of the earthquake.  And there have been two volunteer projects that have sprung up to help with that.  One being headed by the Open StreetMap Wood Foundation and many volunteers.  And then the other, Google Map Maker. And in both cases the activity around Haiti on these programs went up exponentially…or, I don’t know about exponentially, but a lot.  In the case of Map Maker, it was up 100 times and was the most worked on country for that week.  And one of the most downloaded for that week.

Tish Shute: Yes the work being done in CrisisCamps around the country is very encouraging.

Brady Forrest: And then also, you know, not just Ushahidi or Open Street Map, but also the People Finder which had open API so that different organizations could share their data, thus learning from Katrina.  There are all these different pieces of technology will be used in the future and hopefully be able to save more lives.  I didn’t see…there are iPhones apps that were released.  But I’m not aware of any Android apps.  I’m not aware of any AR apps.

Tish Shute: We don’t have smart phones devices distributed widely enough for them to be appropriate, do we, in a lot of areas where crisis strikes.

Brady Forrest: Yeah and there was criticism that they shouldn’t have been on iPhone.  You know, that iPhones were a waste of time. Because they aren’t…a lot of on the ground agencies aren’t going to have iPhones.  However, a lot of people who are going from the States will, and if the apps are there, then people will start to have them.

But relatively speaking, an iPhone is not that expensive.

Tish Shute: One thing I noticed and actually I discussed this in the second half of the interview I did with Anselm which I am getting ready to post.  But one of the aspects of the crisis filter was having people working as curators looking at messages coming out of Haiti, and while integrating the streams that would be useful is still probably a challenge, many curators will be on iPhones because they are based in the US.

We need to work across all platforms probably.

Brady Forrest: Yes.  Patrick Meier of Ushahidi, who runs Crisis Mappers, he ran a 24/7 emergency room. It was out of the Fletcher School in Boston.

They had volunteers all over the States and Canada.  They had volunteers in Vancouver that were translating Creole messages in under ten minutes.

Tish Shute: Yes and another point that is interesting in terms of the reconstruction and rebuilding of  Haiti is  the whole idea of leap frogging, and the idea that you can really… there’s always, as we’ve seen in other parts of the world, opportunity, when you miss pieces of basic infrastructure, to skip a whole stage and go onto the next one, like how virtual banking took off in Africa because of the absence of brick and mortar infrastructure.

Brady Forrest: To skip to a topic that been in my head, I’m just so bummed that the iPad does not have a camera.

Tish Shute: I was bummed is barely the word I would use.  Particularly as we had just been planning our ground breaking AR/next generation ebook in the days leading up to the announcement!

I suppose there is the hope they’re going to put it in the next one.  But I suppose the play for conventional content delivery is so big that everything else is trivial in comparison – especially in seems jump starting the emerging augmented reality industry!

So we might get thrown a camera and compass in the next round but will we get access to the video buffers?  AR enthusiasts may have to live on table scraps from Apple a bit longer it seems.

But what blows my mind is why hasn’t the iTouch got a camera, been AR enabled?  AR gaming would get an enormous boost from that alone. My son loves even the simple minded AR games available now on the iphone, and he loves iphone games – he has 110 games downloaded!

Brady Forrest: Ridiculous.  Yeah.  I don’t know what they don’t like about cameras.  And I plan on getting an iPad, but because of the limitations I plan on using it for base content and will probably get the bottom line model. I can’t imagine…I don’t know.

Tish Shute: It is very interesting, who actually puts together the big enabling mediating device for AR is still an open question, isn’t it?  I mean, that’s the truth; we have sort of mediating devices but we don’t have the magic brew yet do we?

Brady Forrest: No. Not yet.

Tish Shute: Good enough in some ways, and certainly a start but not quite the real deal.  For me, Where 2.0 this year covers the groundwork for true AR, mobile social proximity-based social networking, visual search, computer vision and sensor fusion techniques….   And because all these things have a chicken and egg relationship laying the groundwork is basically as important as having the mediating device otherwise you can’t do interesting things when we get the mediating device, right?

Is this the year we get the magic brew for AR, i.e., the business model, the killer app, and the mediating device?

Brady Forrest: This is not the year.

Tish Shute: Then I should ask you. Are you in the Goggles camp? That is do you think AR needs eyewear to go mainstream?

Brady Forrest: I think this may be where we get…we start to see what is going to be the killer app that gets people to buy the hardware that will support AR.  You see what I mean?  And then from there the apps will come out and the hardware will advance in that direction.

I don’t think AR has made that leap yet.  It hasn’t, to use almost a cliché, it hasn’t crossed the chasm yet and it hasn’t proven that it will.  Because I don’t know if…I think it’s difficult to tell right now.  Is it going to be games?  Is it going to be data layers? What is going to drive people to an AR device, especially one fully dedicated to it?

Tish Shute: I think in terms of AR games taking off a bit of help from the mediating device e.g. access to the iphone video buffers would probably be enough to stoke up AR games into being a hot commodity.  But in terms of AR data layers  going mainstream, we need some of the other players in the location space to put together the magic brew on the business model, don’t we?

Brady Forrest: That’s why I’m so curious though…that’s why I gave Yelp their own talk.  They are…Those guys are gang busters, they’re a consumer company, very consumer facing website.  They’ve got amazing data stores.  They do a lot of interesting stuff with their data.  And I don’t think people always give them the geek credit they deserve.

Tish Shute: You began Where 2.0 back in 2004, when as you point out, “‘local search’ was interesting but not yet real” and you have always stressed something that’s proven to be absolutely true which is lifestyle before commerce, right?  And that if location based services were going to be big it was because they meant something in terms of our lifestyle, not just because they told us where to get another good burger.  Right?

I think there’s been a lot of breakthrough in that area this year in terms of what location based services and proximity based social networks are to us now, how they’re changing our lifestyle.  What do you see as the breakthroughs for in 2009 and what are you hoping for in 2010?

Brady Forrest: Well, I think Google Goggles is one of the most exciting things to me.  Having access to a visual search…having someone actually release a visual search engine in that way, to consumers, I think is huge.  You know, you see stuff like that in the labs. But I don’t see it… it’s rare to see it out.

I think Android is huge.  And the way Google is pushing hardware to show off the platform; so the Nexus One being another example and the fact that it’s breaking free from the carriers. Because I think when get away from the carriers we are able to see more innovation, it’s what’s going to allow people or developers and companies to really innovate.

And I think Twitter adding geo-location to their APIs and buying MixerLabs is a huge move. I think Twitter may end up becoming the end-all be-all of location services. They are going to be updated constantly by people; they are going to have a really good grasp, real-time, of what is happening in any one place, at least based on the people.

And then with the addition of the MixerLabs data, they’re going to have more datasets at their ready. As well as any data that they start to collect from the clients themselves, like from TweetDeck.

So there are global clients that are updating Twitter. I think those are some of the most exciting things. And again, just to come back to Yelp, I think Yelp’s Monocle is also pretty significant, just because it’s an AR app that’s being pushed into consumers’ hands.

And we’ll see how useful they find it.

Tish Shute: Gary Gale, Yahoo! Inc., is going to talk on overcoming the business, social, and technological hurdles so we can reach the long promised [Laughs] Hyperlocal Nirvana. I think you’ve outlined some of these obstacles in relation to  AR, where there are obstacles are in terms of mediating device, and bringing all the pieces together including computer vision techniques in order to have an AR view. That’s the AR side of it. But the layer below that, which is the layer where actual location based apps that are beginning to go mainstream now,  are these presenting successful business models for location-based services.

So in short, in your view, what are the big hurdles to Hyperlocal Nirvana before we get to AR, even just for these location-based services?

Brady Forrest: Well, how do you make money?

Tish Shute: Yeah, to put it bluntly. I like John Battelle’s way of putting it [laughs] how do we oxygenate the system!

Brady Forrest: So are location-based services something that you can make money in the long-term? Nokia bought NavTec for $8 billion. And then two years later, they’re giving it away free as part of Ovi Maps.

Tish Shute: Right.

Brady Forrest: I’m assuming that that’s actually part of the plan.  And that although their hand may have been forced by Google with their release of Turn-By-Turn that…but it’s still got to be a hard nut to swallow that this huge investment in location ends up becoming a loss leader to sell more phones.

So, can you make money through subscriptions, through selling apps? And I think that is still being proven. The other one is, can you use advertising? And it’s kind of scary to see that Apple is restricting the use of advertisers to use location.

It came out yesterday or two days ago that advertisers cannot use location, or app developers cannot use location for ads. They can only use location to show something interesting or useful to their customers.

And there’s a lot of speculation that it’s because Apple wants to control the location-based ads that go on the iPhone.

Tish Shute: Yes. I heard a strange rumor.  Actually its an un-strange rumor, a likely rumor in fact,  that Apple and MS are getting together to replace some of the Google aspects of the iPhone like search and maps?

Brady Forrest: Yes, …. Microsoft employees get 10% off at the Apple store. There’s a longstanding relationship between those two companies.

And Android is definitely more of a competitive threat than Windows Mobile is.  And it’s well-known what the relationship between PCs and Macs are. So I don’t think…I don’t find that to be that surprising of a rumor.  I do wonder if it would hurt the iPhone, but it doesn’t surprise me that they would consider it.

Tish Shute: I do know, certainly from the AR point of view, Microsoft has recently hired some of the key researchers, including Georg Klein. And they are looking for more people in the image recognition area so it seems currently MS is going to be making a bigger push not just with PhotoSynth, but with image ID.

So it could be a pretty powerful combo between the iPhone, and Microsoft – they have some of the key computer vision research that would be needed for full AR.

Brady Forrest: Oh, yeah. Microsoft has amazing research depth. They’ve got an amazing team.

Tish Shute: But it is a bit of a mystery to me why Microsoft haven’t done more with Photosynth.  As I noted in my previous post, Nokia’s ImageSpace is beginning to do what many thought Microsoft would do with photosynth two years ago.  And “photo-based positioning systems” -  3d models of the environment to cover every possible angle, and then software that can work out in reverse based on a picture precisely where you are and where your facing could be hugely important to AR.  But that brings me to another mystery why haven’t we seen more from Nokia in this space yet – the N900 doesn’t have a compass?

Brady Forrest: Yeah, I don’t know why Nokia hasn’t made more of a space for themselves in these things. They did a lot of early work in these areas. I think they are trying to…my guess is that they’re trying to restructure themselves. They made some pretty big changes on the web-Ovi made its own division. And they’ve been doing a lot of location-based acquisitions: Places, Gate 5 several years ago, Gossler, just the past six months. And so I think that’s really been their focus…and the research team.

And a large company, since they haven’t found a business model, which is what we’ve been discussing here, they are hesitant to launch it, or to…they don’t really know if this is a business that they need to launch, or if this is an app that they should have there out for fun.

Tish Shute: Yeah. And that’s back to the oxygenation of the system and location.  We really still have some work to do to with the business models

Final question!  At the core of many of today’s business model is the idea of hoarding data – that’s an underpinning.

But ultimately, for open AR, we want a situation where we can really share data so that we don’t really have the data all locked inside one particular browser or app. The current crop of AR browsers aren’t really browsers in the sense that we understand a browser on the web today, because the data’s locked inside each service, Wikitude, Layar, Acrossair etc.

I have become very interested with Federation as a model for solving this, so that we can begin to have an opportunity to build consensual relations around data, sometimes sharing, sometimes not. Federation is my big dream at the moment.  And now we even have something to work with in the Wave Federation Protocol. But how do we get from here to there, where we really have a federated world of data for AR and location-based services? But you think people need to solve the question of business models first?

Brady Forrest: I think people need…I think one potential is ads; so serving up content.  And by ads, I also mean coupons, meals, the Foursquare…. what it looks like Foursquare’s going to do, featured content, which is Layar’s.

So we need to see, is that the way we’re going to sell these? The other is to have the best viewer, which in some ways is a race in selling that, but that’s potentially a race to the bottom, price-wise.

Tish Shute: Right. Do you think Google Wave Federation Protocol has a chance of taking off and changing the game for real-time communications, federation, real-time…

Brady Forrest: Quite possibly with the real-time. I think they need to work on the UI.

Tish Shute: Oh dear we can’t discuss the Wave UI right at the end of the interview – of course I believe it would do better in an AR view!   I know you have to go  now but I have to say Google Wave not standardizing the client/server interface – so we could seem some new UIs for Wave [we are working with PygoWave for ARWave because of this], and  iPad’s lack of camera were two huge disappointments in recent months.

Brady Forrest: Yeah. It’s [the Wave client] is very difficult to use.

Tish Shute: But the Wave Federation Protocol is an open fast, compact protocol that is a dream come true for AR.  Open, distributed, real time communications is a very big enabler for AR.  I would hazard a guess that in 2010 real time communications plus location becomes oxygen.