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.

The prophets of Augmented Reality, Bruce Sterling (best know for his science fiction works, his non-fiction includes “The Hacker Crackdown,” “Tomorrow Now,” and “Shaping Things”), and  Vernor Vinge (author of “Rainbows End” and “The Coming Technological Singularity”) are joining  Will Wright (Legendary game designer of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore), and Jaron Lanier (a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, legend of virtual reality research, and the author of You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto) to judge the Auggies at the Second Annual Augmented Reality Event, 2011, Santa Clara, Ca., May 17th, May 18th!  Pictures top row, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Will Wright, 2nd row, Jaron Lanier, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and Frank Cooper III.

Augmented Reality has been prototyped in science fiction writing and films for many years now.  But Augmented Reality Event, the first global event dedicated to the emerging industry of AR,  is your chance to be part of a momentous transformation of science fiction into science fact.   Bruce gave a seminal keynote last year at ARE2010, “At the 9am of the Augmented Reality Industry…” But we are edging closer to high noon this year – see John Markoff’s recent New York Times post, “Augmented Reality Comes Closer to Reality,” and Bruce Sterling’s opening keynote at ARE2011 will raise the bar for us all again.

Bruce Sterling  and Vernor Vinge will wrap up the show with fireside chat.  Jaron Lanier will be keynoting at are2011 for the first time and Blaise Agüera y Arcas (a leader in Microsoft’s mobile strategy), will return to top his Ted talk demonstrating innovations in Bing Maps and Augmented Reality.  Frank Cooper III, who serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Consumer Engagement Officer of PepsiCo, will give, an up to now, missing perspective of  the big brands’ on Augmented Reality (AR).

“The main stage at ARE 2011 will be blessed with science fiction visionaries, ground breaking scientists, mind blowing technologists, and legendary game designers and more!”

Come prepared to Augmented Reality Event.  Read as much Bruce Sterling and Vernor Vinge as you can, and follow @bruces blog on Wired, Beyond the Beyond.  With only a few weeks to go until Augmented Reality Event, myself and co-chairs Ori Inbar, and Chris Grayson, have been working hard on a preliminary schedule ( by the time you click on this link it should be updated again).  You can follow us on twitter for updates as they come in – @tishshute, @comogard, @chrisgrayson,  and please follow @arealityevent and join our ARE facebook posse.  And, of course, don’t forget to register soon while we are still offering discount codes.

Readers of this post can use the code TISH295 for $100 of the already sweet price if $395.

If you joined us for Augmented Reality Event last year, you will know that the”Auggies” – an award for the best AR demo presented live with commentary American idol style,  is a chance to join the best and brightest in AR as they write the next chapter for AR in the sharp and often amusing reparte between judges and contestants.  Submit your demo proposal here under the “Auggies” track.

The picture below is the Auggie Award for the best AR demo designed by Sigal Arad Inbar.  (See, Ivan Franco recounts the team’s ARE 2010 experience, and winning the event’s first-ever Auggie Award, and the video shot at the YDreams booth by Bruce Sterling. “The Hotness” – YDreams rocking it at ARE2010 from brucesflickr)

ARE2011 will include more than 90(!) speakers in 30 sessions organized into 3 tracks: business, technology & programming, and production & design.

It will feature special activities such as a Startup launch pad (submit your proposal here under track: “Startup Launch Pad”), and an ARt Gala with live performances.  There will be displays by top AR artists of AR art projects and live performance art by the world’s best AR artists featuring: Helen Papagiannis, Amir Baradaran, Sander Veenhof, Ina Centaur and more to be announced.

The exhibition area will be open throughout the 2 days of the event and will include the latest product demos by the leading AR companies, as well as a career fair to help grow the fledging industry.  A small number of booths is still available in the exhibition hall ($995 for 10′x10′).Grab them while they last!

A press conference will kick start the event, as a vehicle for AR companies to launch new products and services. Submit your proposal here and add: “Press Conference” in the title. The event wrap up will feature Marco Tempest with a live AR Magic show

I have been so busy working on are2011 (and another project yet to be named -  hint I am focused on social augmentation and the world as a platform for a geo-situated social interest graph), that I have had no time to blog since I was on The Potential for Augmented Reality in Education Panel at SXSW, 2011. But I have posted my slide deck here for my talk, “Enchanted Objects and People: Data Driven AR.”

We are entering a new era of collective engagement possibilities for augmented reality, consumer to consumer brokerages which could unleash the the visions of the collaborative consumption movement and tap into our collective energies in totally new ways.  As Seth Praebatsch, Scavngr, suggested in his SXSW keynote, The Game Layer on Top of the World, the power of communal game play may even help us address even the most intractable problems like failure in education and global warming!!

One of my favorite new AR ventures exploring the potential of new forms of social engagement through AR is Suwappu.  We are working on how to get them across the pond and a few time zones to are2011.

“Dentsu London are developing an original product called Suwappu. Suwappu are woodland creatures that swap pants, toys that come to life in augmented reality. BERG have been brought in as consultant inventors, and we’ve made this film. Have a look!”

Click here or on the image above to watch the video.

“Suwappu is a range of toys, animal characters that live in little digital worlds. The physical toys are canvasses upon which we can paint worlds, through a phone (or tablet) lens we can see into the narratives, games and media in which they live.”

Many new players in Augmented Reality will join the pioneering AR companies, Layar, Metaio, Occipital, Ogmento, Total Immersion, YDreams, and renowned innovators, Mark Billinghurst, Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre and the Georgia Tech team and many others will return to surprise and amaze us this year – see the still growing list of speakers here.   Qualcomm, who announced an SDK for vision based augmented reality, and $200,000 developer challenge last year, will also be back with several of their team at are2011!

Visual Search and OCR augmented reality apps have flourished in the last year and they will have a strong presence at are2011.  Long anticipated and oft fretted over face recognition apps are coming to a phone near you soon.  Viewdle, working locally on the phone, is taking a new approach to face recognition.  Google has so far said that they will not use or release the face recognition technology that they apparently already have.  But Shailesh Nalawadi, Google Goggles, will return to are2011 to discuss building out a computer vision search database and 3D Classifiers to solve AR challenges and show us what Google Goggles has been working on recently.  Aurasma, out next month, is perhaps the next big thing in this space, so we are all eager to try it out and see what they bring to ARE2011.

My interview with Anselm Hook, Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook, is still a great reference point for important questions in this space.

Wordlens, wowed us all with OCR done locally on the phone, and they will be  showing off new features at ARE2011. Pulling out WordLens to translate at subway poster for the first time is a magic moment, and guaranteed to impress the person sitting next to you too!    Tactical Information Systems, who Fred Wilson said had the potential to be a Shazam for faces at Web 2.0 Expo, NYC, will show us what they have been up to since then. 

Data driven AR is still in the early stages, but it is data that will unlock augmented experiences of the world around us in many powerful ways.   Also, we are seeing exciting new efforts to put people at the center of their data.  Jeremie Miller who ushered in the Twitter era with his invention of XMPP has brought us a new real time protocol, TeleHash and the Locker Project, that will unleash the full potential of communication at the edge of the network.   And don’t miss Ben Cerveny and Bloom,  at ARE2011, with “pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration” and “where data visualization meets game design,”  I highly recommend Ben’s talk!

Also I am very excited that Mike Kuniavsky will be speaking at  ARE2011 for the first time.  He  pointed out in 2007 that Magic is a powerful core interaction metphor for Ubiquitous computing [and AR].  Offices. libraries, and the desktop provided us with common metaphors that unleashed the power of the PC through files, desktops and trash cans, browsing, etc.,  but metaphors of magic – “enchanted objects and people,” are keys to augmented reality experiences.   And, if Magic is a core interaction metaphor for AR, kinect hacks have shown us that gesture will be the soul of the AR experience.  Jaron Lanier’s keynote will be a must see and make sure you catch Chris Arkenberg’s presentation on the Future of Hands Free AR.

This post is just a glimpse at some of what will be going on at Augmented Reality Event.  I cannot do justice to everything in a single post, so I hope to see you there!  And, if by any chance you have a few moments to daydream between now and then, feel free to ponder your own script for a Green Lantern movie:  “In brightest day and darkest night, no evil will escape my sight.”  I will too.  As @brendanscully noted, “Green lantern’s power is Augmented Reality!”