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

Will describes an important shift:

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

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

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

Will notes:

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

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

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

And please do use my discount count TISH375AR to register!

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!

Interview with Vernor Vinge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture via IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!”

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.

Social Augmented Experiences leveraging geoawareness and human and machine intelligence to create real time information brokerages, combined with an augmented reality view, can create a new opportunities to reimagine our relationships with each other and our environment.

This Summer, I have been on a blogging hiatus, which has meant I haven’t been sharing as frequently and, unfortunately, the second half of two conversations I had earlier this year, both of which have much influence my thinking on social augmented reality, have languished in private mode -  part 2 of my talk with Bruce Sterling (see Interview with Bruce Sterling, Part I: At the 9am of the Augmented Reality Industry, are2010, and part 2 of my conversation with Anselm Hook - Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook, Part 1. Time to get caught up on some blogging!  The lightly edited transcript of Part 2 of my conversation with Bruce Sterling is posted in full below.

Bruce Sterling has been blogging all the key developments in augmented reality (amongst other topics of interest!) on his Wired Blog, and he brought my attention to Boskoi the Ushahidi based app for Android phones, augmented foraging pictured in use above – for more pics see fightthegooglejugend.

Augmented Reality and Real Time Information Brokerages

Picture above is the path the “nomads” took through the Westhaven cryptoforest with Pieter Bol,co-auteur of the book Biological Globalisation and Theun Karelse of Urban Edibles Amsterdam “who presented his ‘augmented foraging’ app Boskoi.“  For more see, The Cryptoforests of Utrecht and, Westraven Psychogeography, 6 June 2010. Note: Cryptoforests: 1) Urban forests hidden from view 2) Urban fallows that might or might not be considered as forests 3) Gardens gone wild)

My interest in the Ushahidi family of ideas was already fired up by a conversation with Anselm Hook early this year.  We discussed a number of Ushahidi related projects, Swift, Crisis Filter and Anselm’s project Angel, Augmented Reality, and my own keen interest in an open, real time, distributed platform for augmented reality – ARWave.

The Ushahidi platform and the related project Swift has pioneered the real time brokerage of information with people acting in curatorial roles or matchmaking roles coevolving with machine assisted matching to connect wants to haves.  Ushahidi uses multiple gateways including SMS, and Twitter.  But the Ushahidi family of ideas is extremely interesting when combined with augmented reality and suggests many new possibilities for social augmented experiences, as Anselm pointed out, for human to human communications, human to civilization communication, and human to environment communications (e.g., perhaps, how machine intelligence can help bridge the difference in time scale that Kate Hartman explores in her, Research for Glacier-Human Communication Techniques).

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. It is now an open platform with a wide range of applications and growing developer community.  See What is the Ushahidi Platform? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Swift - a project that emerged from the Ushahidi dev community, is a human sensor/real-time brokerage for dealing with emergencies, enabling the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds.

Boskoi – augmented foraging is the first app,  I have seen, to begin linking Ushahidi with augmented reality – although I don’t think there is a full augmented view for Boskoi developed yet?

“The whole point of AR is to see things from a different point of view…”

Click to enlarge poster from upcoming ARWave demo at Software Freedom Day – for more see below

I am often asked what augmented reality brings to the table with respect to location based social networking, which is on the verge of going mainstream in smart phone apps like Four Square. While the first part to my answer is usually to explain what is unique to augmented reality.

As Bo Begole notes, the full vision of AR requires machine perception technologies to detect the identity and physical configuration of objects relative to each other to accurately project information alongside/overlaid with a physical object (see this post on the PARC Blog by Bo Begole on the difference between AR and ubiquitous computing – thank you Rouli for bringing my attention to this).

But it is only in recent months that we have begun to see the kind of tools that make this possible become freely available to developers – see my interview with Jay Wright of Qualcomm here.   Also see this post on Bundler: Structure from Motion for Unordered Image Collections an open source system that allows the creation of 3D point clouds from unordered image collections, e.g. internet image collections.  We now have many tools available to move mobile augmented reality beyond the recent crop of apps relying on GPS and compass alone for positioning into a new era of vision assisted AR apps that will increasingly bring the full vision of AR into our daily lives.

Further, the integration of visual search applications like Google Goggles and Kooaba which can detect the identity of particular objects will add another vital tool to machine perception technologies enabling AR “checkins” on potentially anything in the physical world around us, and more fuel to the Gamepocalypse (e.g. it would be easy to turn every trash can in the city into a basketball hoop as we discussed at the ARNY meetup last month).  And soon, the Pandora’s Box of  facial recognition (Google Goggles have the capability though it is not released to the public yet) will open up.

Jesse Schell described the importance of AR in a nutshell in his keynote for 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?”

But how AR matures as a social experience will be the key to Jesse’s suggestion that:

“Augmented Reality will be one of the things that fundamentally define the 21st century”

There are many interesting forms of AR that are not reliant on a tight registration between media and physical objects – several are put forward by Bruce in the convo below.  And, it is likely we will see AR eyewear as an occasional useful accessory to a smart phone long before we have the sexy, affordable augmented reality eyewear worn that we wear throughout the day.   These speech to text glasses would be a very useful and viable accessory to a smart phone right now for the hearing impaired.

For the moment, as Bruce notes, some of the most interesting and useful augmented experiences to date have not been in the cell phone space:

“There are other aspects of AR besides the cell phone space. There’s Total Immersion’s big display screens. There’s the web-based fiduciary stuff. And there’s projection mapping. And then there’s experience design just for people who need their reality augmented for whatever personal or social reason.”

On of my favorite social AR experiences is this SMS Slingshot.

But I have been excited for a long while about the intersection of mobile social augmented reality, real time communications, and ubiquitous computing see Total Immersion and the “Transfigured City:” Shared Augmented Realities, the “Web Squared Era,” and Google Wave.  And I have described in many places why I think real time, open, distributed communications for AR are so important to developing social augmented experiences – see the slides for my talk at Augmented Reality Event here, here and here for starters.

ARWave at Software Freedom Day 2010, September 18th 2010

Thomas Wrobel and Bertine van Hovell will demo the first ARWave Android client at Software Freedom Day this weekend!

A number of people have asked me, (including Bruce), What will be the future of ARWave now that Google Wave is no longer a stand alone application?  Yes, the recently announced release of Wave in a Box (see here and here) is very exciting for the ARWave team.

The ARWave Android client is the first open AR client built on an open, real time, distributed platform -  based on a server that anyone can download and set up, currently the “FedOne” server but Wave in a Box, hopefully, will be even easier to deploy.  Wave in a Box seems perfect for ARWave’s needs – for more see the WiaB Google Group here.  And for more information on the ARWave client -  click to enlarge the poster below, see the ARWave concept video here, and for more, and how to get involved see arwave.org.   Props to Thomas Wrobel and Bertine van Hovell (posters below from demo for Software Freedom Day), Mark Evin, Davide Carnovale, and Markus Strickler, for all their hard and brilliant work on ARWave.  Also to JCPT the open Android 3D engine that has saved a lot of work!

click to enlarge slide

Social Augmented Experiences that Matter

My ideas on the future of social augmented experience have been deeply informed by the the conversations I had with Bruce Sterling and Anselm Hook this year.

Bruce Sterling notes in the conversation below, location based social apps like, Four Square, are interesting because they are not “urban geography like Google’s satellite stare from above,” but rather “groups of citizens are doing portraits of their own region.” Augmented Reality, with its of lauded power to make the invisible visible is, of course, is the ideal tool for “citizen portraits”  to the next level.  Cory Doctorow described to me three years ago (see here) an “inverse surveillance society,” enabled by an augmented view  – “where all the data from the positional and temporal characteristics of all the objects that we own were in aggregate visible and available so that we can mix and match them remix them understand them and have more agency in the world.”

It is very cool to go back to reread this conversation now that it is becoming possible to build the kinds of apps Cory described, and Bruce Sterling envisioned in Shaping Things (see Amazon.org  page 111).

click to enlarge

My  conversation with Bruce earlier this summer (see below) took place on the heels of are2010 – Augmented Reality Event.   See the video of Bruce’s keynote, “Bake a BigPie,” here,  and the final keynote, “Seeing,” by Jesse Schell (see video here) in which Jesse riffed on AR and the man with the X-ray eyes.  Both these awesome talks are still fresh in my mind.  Bruce noted how we should pay attention to augmentations for people and situations that could really use some augmentation… and not get too fixated on the coming of AR Goggles.  He elaborated on this in our conversation (again full transcript below):

“Well, it’s a matter of deciding whose reality it is that you’re trying to augment. I’m not trying to be a bleeding heart about it, but obviously there are people in our society right now with reality that could really use some augmentation. They are mostly disadvantaged people. They are vision impaired, or maybe they have autism. They might be senile and just can’t remember where they put their shoes. These are people who could really use some help, right?”

So, start with people who really need sensory or cognitive help. Before you turn our geeks into Superman, why don’t you try turning some people who are harmed into more functional individuals? Then you’ll be able to learn how to do that. Then maybe you can ramp it up to these Nietzschian heights of the superb Man With the X-ray Eyes. Whatever.”

What will make AR interesting and useful long before and long after we see the full vision of AR eyewear manifest is its social aspects.  Bruce points out:

“My argument would be that if you want people to be more sensitive toward certain, say, issues and problems, it’s better to find the people who are already sensitive to those issues and problems, and give them a bigger stake in your augmentation system.”

“Say that I am really worried about public health. Well, if I have a lot of nurses that are using my system, people who are aware of my issues, then I could be walking around and I’ll see a lot more tags saying, “This is where he got food poisoning!” “In this shooting gallery, many people have caught AIDS!” Or, you know, “Tuberculosis has been spotted over here in this building.”

At that point, I could simply share their knowledge and get some social intelligence. As opposed to trying to amp the basements of my little hacker-mind and drag stuff up that’s escaped my conscious attention.”

Finding new ways to broker information – bring together needs with haves and different participants, empowered and disempowered  is., as Anselm discussed with me, one way to change our view of human to human, human to environment and human to civilization communication (particularly in light of this  “sobering account of how open data is used against the poor in Bangalore” that as @timoreilly noted recently OpenData Empowering the Empowered).

The key idea in a crisis filter, Anselm noted,  was to break up the participants into different kinds, to connects wants with haves:

“There are people who are in  situation.  We call them citizens.  And then there are reporters, people who report situations back to Twitter.  And then there are curators, people that canvas Twitter looking for important Tweets.  And then there are first responders, people who take the curating collection of responses and then act on them.”

This kind of brokerage between people acting in a curatorial role or matchmaking role with each other can be extended into and coevolve with machine assisted matching as Anselm explains.

It is also a vital part of creating social augmented experiences that matter.

One of Anselm Hook’s projects, which is called Angel is the the most radical expression of connecting wants with haves in that the idea is that “you have a situation, you broadcast that situation, and help magically appears.  You don’t even sign up for a service.  You just get help …

As Anselm explains this is the same idea of a brokerage for dealing with emergencies, but applied to the long tail of crisis response.  As Anselm describes it:

“I am interested in personal crisis.  ‘I lost my cat.  Help.  I can’t find where my kid is.  I am out of gas.  I have a flat tire.  My house is on fire.  My aunt is trapped in the bedroom.’  The kind of personal crisis that is just as important, but is not enough to get a national movement to help you…

I will publish this conversation with Anselm in full in an upcoming post.

Zorop – an ARG for World Peace

If you want to be part of a really exciting experiment to reimagine our relationships with each other and can be in San Jose this weekend, I highly recommend exploring this “rabbit hole”.

Thank you Gene Becker, Lightning Laboratories and Ubistudio for sending me this invite:

“Ken Eklund (@writerguygames) is developing a wonderful game for the 01SJ Biennial called ZOROP, aimed at creating World Peace(!). Some of you might know Ken from his work on the amazing ARGs EVOKE and World Without Oil. Anyway Ken, along with his collaborator Annette Mees, are furiously working to get ZOROP ready to go for the Sept 17th premiere at 01SJ.

Are you intrigued? I thought so, and here are your next steps down the rabbit hole:

> Check out http://zorop.org to learn about the game

> Follow @ZoropPrime to watch it unfold: http://twitter.com/zoropprime

> ‘Like’ ZOROP on FB for a different view: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Zorop/141140772593618

> Become one with the game; consider volunteering as a Zoropathian: curious@zorop.org

> Head down to San Jose on the 17th, play the game, and ride the ZOROP Mexican Party Bus. Seriously.”

Interview with Bruce Sterling

Click on image above to see video clip from from brucesflickr

[Note the first part of this interview is here and I broke in anticipation of Part 2 just as I started experimenting with an idea Joshua Kauffman – an advisor and entrepreneur working on design in the public sphere gave me for an interview technique – the All Souls College one-word question interview.  Although apparently they recently scrapped it and I am not very good to sticking to a single word!]

Tish Shute: We were talking about these proximity-based social work networks like Foursquare and Gowalla and how they may influence the emergence of social augmented experiences.

So Joshua’s suggestion for the first word was “territorialization” e.g. how do these new mobile social experiences like Foursquare, and the observation that actually rather than breaking down territorialization – which would be a good thing, tend to support territorialization…

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, they’re re-intensifying it in a very odd, electronic fashion.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Bruce Sterling: It’s not true of projection mapping or the webcam fiduciary display stuff. But with the handheld stuff, and especially the urban informatic stuff, it really can’t help but take on a local flavor. Layar is like “Augmented Dutch Reality.”

And TonchiDot is “Augmented Japanese Reality.” It’s hard to imagine a Layar interface going gangbusters at Tokyo. Whereas the TonchiDot interface, which is so clearly influenced by Anime and cartoon graphics…. Maybe it could find some niche of hipsters in Amsterdam hash bars…

Stuff that’s socially generated by people on the ground, as with Foursquare and Gowalla, is bound to take on a regional influence. Right? It’s like the New York hipsters who were early adopters of Foursquare. They’re not mapping New York! They’re mapping Hipster New York.

It’s all about Williamsburg and places where 24-year-olds go to drink… They found a demographic niche there. These guys are building the service for them. They’re people who are willing to work for Foursquare for free, because they want to wear the little king hat.

Tish Shute: I got the far far away badge ‘cos I live on the Upper West Side!

Bruce Sterling: But that’s not urban geography, right? I mean, that’s not like Google’s satellite stare from above. That’s a group of citizens doing a portrait of their own region. You’re going to see interesting things happen because, of course, people who use Foursquare elsewhere are going to check into New York, and they’re going to look at the “New York Foursquare.” They’re going to be aliens who interact with Foursquare people in New York and annotate what they’re seeing.

Tish Shute: Oh! Yes. Good point.

Bruce Sterling: That Foursquare community has a certain émigré soul. It’s different from the normal émigré soul of simple tourists on New York. So you’re friend there is right about the territorialization.

Tish Shute: Yes, Joshua Kauffman is a smart guy! Yes I am interested to see what interesting kinds of deterritorializations proximity based social networks and the hyperlocal view of augmented reality might bring, not just the new territorializations.

Bruce Sterling: It’s not the intense kind of territorialization, like gangs putting down graffiti markers and beating people up. It’s an inherent regional character that comes with using peer production to build your database.

Tish Shute: We were discussing whether AR could break down the walls between people – people who share the same physical space but actually inhabit different territories even if they are sitting on the table next to you.

Bruce Sterling: You know, I just wrote an article for my Italian magazine column. I think I mentioned this to you – a report about ARE 2010. I titled it, “Chicks Dig Augmented Reality.”

Tish Shute: [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: There is a very heavy social element to AR, and a phone based element. So the question is: Why would a woman wear a fiducial marker? Like our Metaio speaker at ARE2010 who had a fiducial marker on her lapel pin.

Tish Shute: Right. Lisa!

Bruce Sterling: Why would a woman go out in public with her Facebook profile on her body?

Tish Shute: Well I can think of some reasons…

Bruce Sterling: So that men will approach her, of course.

Tish Shute: Yes the core of all successful social networks is always a form of dating app.

Bruce Sterling: You do it a social icebreaker. It’s like: I’m a woman, I’m sitting here alone, and you can sort of glide by and, you know, take a snap of me. Then you retreat and have a beer with your friends and you work up the courage, and then you come and say, “So! Susan! I understand you like bicycling! And, boy, me too!” Right?

Tish Shute: There are all kinds of social barriers between people in cities that AR might be helpful in breaking down. An extreme example is the dilemma you actually quite often face as a New Yorker as you walk around a city. There are people asleep on the pavement and you don’t know if they’re dead or alive.

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: And you sort of like have this awful ethical dilemma of like, “Am I walking by someone I should be shaking by the shoulder, right, to wake them up so they don’t die, right?”

Bruce Sterling: Yes.

Tish Shute: You said in your keynote that we should pay attention to augmentations for people and situations that could really use some augmentation..

Bruce Sterling: Right. There actually is such an app in Britain right now. I posted about it: two Augmented Reality schemes for rubbish and hobos.

Tish Shute: Right. Yes I saw that!

Bruce Sterling: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage and hobos.” You don’t need to personally find out whether this hobo is worth your help. What you need is a good way to report the hobo to a hobo check-up service. They come in, and they look on their own database or supply a database to you, or a facial recognition unit, whatever. The service says: “Oh, well. That’s Fred. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. He always sleeps in that alley. Let him be.”

The same goes for the rubbish — although I don’t want to compare rubbish to hobos. In fact, people do go out with their AR kits and take pictures of abandoned garbage bags and broken glass. They upload them with geolocated tags for the local garbage guys. Guys who are sitting around doing pretty much nothing because they don’t know where the rubbish is.

And they will come out and get the rubbish! I mean, they just deputize guys to go out and follow these alerts. Right?

But nobody predicted — least of all me — that you were going to have a high-tech Augmented Reality system that consisted of removing rubbish and derelicts. Right? But rubbish and derelicts always go profoundly under-reported. It’s just hard to get people’s attention.

But it’s very easy to set up a system so that, if you get ten reports on the same piece of rubbish, that’s going to work its way to the top of the stack. That’s why I was trying to get AR people away from the romance of the hottest app for the shiniest machine. More toward a design stance that’s more user-centric.

Where are the actual problems about stuff that we perceive? Stuff we can’t do anything about? Or people whose mechanisms of perceptions are harmed. They could be doing good work, being more participative, if they didn’t, basically, walk around without their glasses on.

Tish Shute: Well this leads well into the second word, Joshua suggested was interesting spring board – sensitivity.

On the one hand we can do these things for people who maybe need the augmentation because they have difficulty with one or another sense, e.g., their eyes are not functioning, or their ears are not functioning. But on the other hand, we can’t cross the social bridge to communicate with people who are temporarily disempowered in relation to the rest of society e.g. hobos and people who sleep on the streets of New York City.  And even though Augmented Reality could potentially be helpful it can even be more disempowering to the already disempowered.

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: But re “sensitivity” – does augmentation increase or decrease our sensitivity? This is a problem that Will Wright brought up [see video of Will Wright’s keynote at are2010], e.g, the problem of parking HUDs getting in the way of your intuitive parallel parking skills. The Lexus that takes driving control from you when you look back, ‘cos it knows that you’re looking at the road, and it starts to brake. Right?

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: The fact that the problem with technology is that it makes us less sensitive, right, augmentations sometimes get in our way?

Bruce Sterling: I suppose that’s true. But I’ve heard that said about practically every medium. Especially television.

Everybody wants to blame machinery for their lack of morality. It’s hard to top something like the Kitty Genovese killing in New York. This sort of legendary New York horror story from the 1960s. A woman is stabbed to death in public, no one does anything.

Tish Shute: Right.

Bruce Sterling: I don’t think that our media is making us any less humane or more callous.

Tish Shute: All right. Oh no! I see what you’re saying. Perhaps I misrepresented what Will was suggesting by putting it that way. The question is perhaps more how do we get the sensitivity into the technology. Human bodies are fantastically sensitive and sensory.

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: And we have these like sensitivities. For instance, How could augmentations of reality be like a blush ? You definitely want an interaction that’s not just this data being pushed at you. But what is the data that counts, right? Will shows a slide often of an iceberg with the tip of the iceberg which is the conscious mind.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, I see. Yeah.

Tish Shute: And underneath it is all the preconscious stuff that really counts, right? Any thoughts on that?

Bruce Sterling: I did take interest in that. Will has obviously been spending a lot of time studying cognition.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Bruce Sterling: I’m not convinced that AR has got a lot to do with that. There is certainly a trend there. There are a lot of people who want to do body hacks and brain hacks. I can imagine AR being used for that purpose, but it seems like a niche application. What is the point of our accessing even more stuff that’s outside of our consciousness?

Tish Shute: One of the things he is talking about is game dynamics, is it? The role of the imagination in play. For example, he shows the high dynamic range photos that make the world magical. Something you want to engage with playfully. This he points out increases a sense of agency because you are encouraged to engage and to play with the world.

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’m a literary guy. Italo Calvino did a lot of writing about this. He talked about the classics of literature. Why do we read the classics? Calvino said we do not read, but reread the classics. And the reason we do that is that, at first, we read a classic book and we think, “Boy, this book is really good.” Then, five years later, we read it again and we think, “Boy, this is a really good book, and it’s got so much more in it than I thought it had when I was 18.” Then we read it again at 28, and it’s like, “OK, now I really seem to understand this book, and it means something to me now that I didn’t know when I was 18 and 25.”

What you are doing through that access is learning something about yourself. So Will is arguing is what I really need is like a better augmentation. So that I can go in there and sop up the book all at once. I can grab every cultural nuance in it, instead of the stuff that’s sliding past me because I’m 18 and kind of young and hasty. Maybe I could have certain words and phrases helpfully underlined, that are like, “OK, well, this part is problematic for you.” In some sense, that’s not allowing me to be 18.

I’m never going to have the experience of my own maturation against this text, because I’ve devoured it all in one gulp.

My argument would be that if you want people to be more sensitive toward certain, say, issues and problems, it’s better to find the people who are already sensitive to those issues and problems, and give them a bigger stake in your augmentation system.

Tish Shute: Yes the social augmented experiences are going to be the most valuable.

Bruce Sterling: Say that I am really worried about public health. Well, if I have a lot of nurses that are using my system, people who are aware of my issues, then I could be walking around and I’ll see a lot more tags saying, “This is where he got food poisoning!” “In this shooting gallery, many people have caught AIDS!” Or, you know, “Tuberculosis has been spotted over here in this building.”

At that point, I could simply share their knowledge and get some social intelligence. As opposed to trying to amp the basements of my little hacker-mind and drag stuff up that’s escaped my conscious attention.

Tish Shute: Interesting that seems to bring us to another kind of repetitive theme in AR, the people tend to pigeon hole it as “merely” a visual interface. But actually, it’s the intersection, isn’t it, of social intelligence and augmentation.

Bruce Sterling: Well, it depends entirely on how you design the system. If I’ve got a military augmented reality, I would expect that to be mostly about urban fighting. It’s going to be about kicking in a door and shooting terrorists. If I pull that helmet off my head and put that on the head of an emergency worker or a cop, I’m going to get a militarized cop or a militarized emergency worker.

Tish Shute: Well the histories of the two great mass media of the twentieth century – TV and the atomic bomb were intertwined, and I suppose the evolution of ubiquitous media, augmented reality and urban warfare is already intertwined too.  So how can we encourage augmented realities to move beyond military roots that is common to much technology and into more peaceful urban realities?

Bruce Sterling: Well, it’s a matter of deciding whose reality it is that you’re trying to augment. I’m not trying to be a bleeding heart about it, but obviously there are people in our society right now with reality that could really use some augmentation. They are mostly disadvantaged people. They are vision impaired, or maybe they have autism. They might be senile and just can’t remember where they put their shoes. These are people who could really use some help, right?

So, start with people who really need sensory or cognitive help. Before you turn our geeks into Superman, why don’t you try turning some people who are harmed into more functional individuals? Then you’ll be able to learn how to do that. Then maybe you can ramp it up to these Nietzschian heights of the superb Man With the X-ray Eyes. Whatever.

Tish Shute: Did you notice that a couple of apps actually like TagWhat have apps geared towards people with disabilities – I haven’t had a chance to check it out.

Bruce Sterling: I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking at their tags.

Tish Shute: I was discussing this with Joshua who mentioned Zachary Lieberman’s Eye Writer, which is for people with locked-in syndrome. Do you know that?

Bruce Sterling: Sure. And people appreciate that because the poor guy, he’s laid up with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Now they’ve given him a way out. AR is like a spark of new hope that gives his life meaning. What’s wrong with that?

Tish Shute: Yeah. And Tim Byrne using Sixth Sense for Autism is interesting.

Bruce Sterling: Let’s consider it the other way. Let’s say this graffiti writer there, instead of him being sick and weak, let’s say he’s an athlete. So I want to make him into a super-human graffiti writer. I want him to run around graffiti-tagging the entire town before dawn. Is that a good idea? Do we need that? Super human, super taggers? What if he’s going to spray up stencils of Nietszche? I kinda wonder whether the game is worth the candle.

Tish Shute: Yes I suppose it is not a great social scenario to be always augmenting the lives of the elites! Hmm, the third single word interview question is “homophily,” and earlier were you’re saying that we’ve kinda got to accept this is very much part of AR – as how it works, because hyperlocal experiences gets created by local communities – that up to know have tended to be homophilies.

Bruce Sterling: Well, I think that’s easily handled with some design thinking. You’ve got to do some user observation and show some sympathy with the user, and to be aware that you’re designing for the user and you’re not designing for yourself.

In a field as young as this, it’s mostly geeks building cool stuff for geeks. In a lot of ways, it’s a “can you top this” contest. That’s OK, but it’s not good design to be your own client all the time. It’s like writing novels to amuse yourself, or sitting on the porch singing the blues on your own guitar with only yourself to hear.

Tish Shute: What will it take for AR mature out of this “geeks building cool stuff for geeks” phase do you think?

Bruce Sterling: It’s necessary to master some of the tools first. I think of the way the web has developed over the years. When the World Wide Web first appeared, it was just for physicists, and was all line commands and quite unstable and difficult. Then you got usability studies, and things like Ajax and so forth. It’s a very painstaking thing.

We’re not best at building interfaces for the best computer scientists. Web 2.0 was built from things like watching people cry while they were trying to fill out insurance forms. “Well, why are you so upset?”

“Well, I got to the end of the webpage, and then it said I took too long, and it cut me off and now I have to start all over!” Jesse James Garrett, right? Benefactor of mankind.

If you’re experienced, you think: “Why don’t I build a little module here, and kind of move the form over here, then I’ll periodically update it with some asynchronous Java and XTML.” And people are like, “Gee, how odd.” But that really works for real people. It comes from studying what people want to do. Whereas, the current AR approach to a problem like the insurance form would be like, “I will give you the ability to record the entire insurance form, and it will flash before your eyes!” OK great, that’s a cool hack, but I don’t really need X-Ray Eyes to fill out my insurance form. What I need is a more user friendly interface.

Tish Shute: Well it seems like we are moving into the terrain of Joshua’s fifth word “ventilation,” – if I understand it rightly – it is at least partially the antidote to territorialization because it’s this idea that a place needs air so we come out of our hermetically sealed boxes of the way we relate to a place and what kind of augmentation would bring more oxygen to that space.

There was an interesting moment in the Auggies because when Maarten Lens-FitzGerald presented the guerrilla shopping Layar and basically Mark Billinghurst and Jessie Schell who spoke first didn’t seem too impressed. They didn’t want to walk to shopping – that was what web shopping did, it saved us from walking to shop… but I felt, to me you picked up on something which might have some bearing on “ventilation” in that this AR shopping Layar was kind of squatting Prada – a favela chic AR shopping thing?

Bruce Sterling: I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting what Maarten had in mind by that. But I think Maarten sees his structure accurately as an experience thing rather than a mapping thing. I think he’s proudest of things like the Berlin Wall app on Layar, as opposed to Layars that help you go get a hamburger. It’s like…so when Layar inserts parasitic augmented shopping over other people’s real shopping? That was rather a subversive thing.

I think the key there is that his client is called “Hostage T-shirts,” right? I mean it’s actually kind of a transgressive little hippy T-shirt store that Layar can dump anywhere in the world. Layered right over, say, Versace and Prada. I don’t know what becomes of that effort. And I’m not sure about the term “ventilation,” because that’s a term of art I haven’t heard much.

Tish Shute: Maybe it’s like in a cafe. Ventilation would mean we were able to communicate with all these different categories of people that we normally would be unable to connect to, even though we might be sitting only a few feet apart.

Bruce Sterling: So it means ventilation in the bottles of our homophilies.

That’s not a personal problem for me. I commonly live in foreign cities and, you know, and spend a helluva lot of time talking to strangers at conferences. So I don’t think I’d have that particular tight little social island problem.

Tish Shute: Of the three judges at the Auggies, you seemed most enthusiastic about the Layar entry.

Bruce Sterling: It may be they’re not as familiar with the business models of locative AR as I am, and as Maarten is. It was kind of a subtle in-joke he was making about Layar’s own business model there.

Tish Shute: How do you explain that?

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, Layar’s in the business of selling software to make mapping and urban structures into ecommerce.

The ideal way to do that obviously would be to move the richest customers into the most expensive shops in the most rapid way possible. Or at least distribute them in the directions they want to go, a la Google. Whereas this app that Maarten was talking about puts big barnacles in the way that are selling punk t-shirts.

Tish Shute: Right! Right!

Bruce Sterling: The Dutch are a bit subtle in their humor. I rather imagine there’s a lot of discussion in Layar’s inner circle about exactly what they want developers to do with their platform. They’re going to have considerable political difficulty deciding who can have a Layar key and how you discipline people when they start doing weird stuff. “The Oakland Medical Marijuana layar.”

Tish Shute: Well, finding nudists is one of the top layars at the moment.

Bruce Sterling: You know, obviously so. And finding narcotics in Amsterdam, or a prostitution layer. I warned them nine months ago this was bound to happen. I’m sure they’re aware of it. I don’t think Layar wants Google’s style of cool, technocratic detachment.

Tish Shute: But that’s pretty difficult to do in current augmented reality because we don’t have all the mathematical voodoo for full on AR search yet, do we?

Bruce Sterling: Well, you can hire it out. Somebody’s going to do it, if they get interested enough. There’s Nokia-Yahoo. Nokia-Yahoo! just did a big corporate deal…involving Nokia’s mapping system and Yahoo’s localization. So the Nokia-Yahoo! mash-up is called Nooo! Or could be called Yahno. Yakia! Unfortunately ridiculous names.

Tish Shute: It’s interesting because you mentioned the spiders’ mating problem at Google. They’ve got all the pieces to make this kind of level of AR obviously right now. But they actually haven’t done it yet.

Bruce Sterling: There must be at least some discussion in Google, but the same goes for Microsoft. I’m frankly baffled by Microsoft, because it’s just full of insanely brilliant people. What the hell are they doing in there? Name one serious innovation that’s come out of their labs in five years. They make Integral Research look dynamic. It’s really kind of sad.

Tish Shute: It’s a very curious situation with AR though, because AR more than any new technology relies on these big hordes of data particularly for the mapping, right? And only the big four have the data – although we are beginning to see upstarts, Earth Mine, Simple Geo… Did you get a chance to meet Di-Ann Eisnor from Waze – real-time maps and traffic information based on the wisdom of the crowd.  Waze is a very interesting project that is a potential giant killer.

Bruce Sterling: No, I didn’t talk to them. I’ve seen people speculate that Earthmine and Apple are going to make an allegiance. I guess if you’re thinking that urban informatic mapping is a super big thing for AR, that must be true. But I’m not convinced that’s necessarily the case. People have pointed out that you can just use Google Maps, and you don’t have to walk around with a little visor. There are other aspects of AR besides the cell phone space. There’s Total Immersion’s big display screens. There’s the web-based fiduciary stuff. And there’s projection mapping. And then there’s experience design just for people who need their reality augmented for whatever personal or social reason. [dog barking]

Tish Shute: Right. Oh, I’m in the middle… My son’s come. What a good hair cut!

Bruce Sterling: Hi, there.

Tish’s Son: Hi.

Bruce Sterling: How’s it going, sir? Good to see you…

Tish’s Son: Good.

Tish: [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Yeah. Nice looking shirt. I like the back of it.

Tish Shute: That’s from the American Shaolin Temple. [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: All right. Awesome. Kung Fu geek shirt.

Tish Shute: Yup he is a bit of Kung Fu Geek. He and his dad did an iPhone app on it for Yu-Gi-Oh, for Yu-Gi-Oh scoring.

Bruce Sterling: Awesome. Plenty of Pokémon-style combat in Yu-Gi-Oh.

Tish Shute: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because you’ve talked about this aspect. That all of this, the Pokémon aspect of AR hasn’t kicked in yet. But it’s obviously a match made in heaven to some degree, isn’t it?

Bruce Sterling: One would think so, yeah. The whole little kid gaming thing. What does that have to do with Google or Bing? You don’t need a massive database for stuff like that.

Tish Shute: Yeah, you’re right. But good tracking, mapping and registration requires a lot of mapping…

Bruce Sterling: Well, our current tracking, mapping and registration requires that. Maybe there’s some other way to hack it that we don’t know about yet.

Tish Shute: That’s a very interesting point. We always have to stretch the way we think about mapping… perhaps its a real-time understanding of the location you’re in…perhaps the map is being negotiated through several social processes?

Bruce Sterling: There are maps, and then there are maps. There’s a kind of artillery map where you need to know the precise location of target spaces. And then there’s the kind of social map where I’m really looking for the IN-N-OUT Burger where my sister went last Tuesday. That’s a different system.

Tish Shute: And I think AR, at the moment, we’re getting the most out of the social maps certainly. And the other [machine perception technologies to detect the identity and physical configuration of objects relative to each other to accurately project information alongside/overlaid with a physical object] is still kind of the big dream, isn’t it?

Bruce Sterling: They say that men never ask for directions and women never read maps. Clearly, the genders have different ways of navigating the world. Who’s to say what manner of augmenting our experiences is hottest? I’m not convinced that today’s rather rigid geolocativity is really what our society wants from that particular service. Maybe what we want is something more folksy. Some useful nudge in the right direction as opposed to grids with 200 meters here and instructions to turn such-and-such.

Besides, there’s other hacks we haven’t considered. We’re very dependent on GPS, but just suppose all those satellites are blown out of the sky in a solar storm. Would we really want to give up mapping? Wouldn’t we just come up with some other nifty hack? Radio beacons, let’s just say. Atomic clock timers in towns. Or maybe just little QR codes on lampposts that give you the exact location of that lamppost, and just click the thing and have it calculate where you are.

Tish Shute: Yes the NextHope OpenAMD project had a clever way of triangulating location indoors.

Bruce Sterling: Well, GPS is there and people all want to use it. It’s got good API, so of course you want to. And the guys who are good at doing it are real geolocative freaks. But the mere fact that we can do it this way, and that you can make it pay, doesn’t mean that it’s the ultimate way to provide that service to people. It’s like saying that Egyptian hieroglyphics must be the greatest way to write, because we’ve got a lot of them and they’re hard to learn. What if somebody comes along with an alphabet? It’s going to be a little embarrassing.

Tish Shute: Yeah, that’s a very good point. Now, this is a more simple ordinary question about the event. YDreams went off the map in the Auggie voting, and walked away with The Auggies. No one doubted that that was the most…

Bruce Sterling: I don’t know. I thought those Occipital guys with the panoramic painting…. That was hairy. I would have been tempted to give them the prize myself, actually.

Tish Shute: And what did you like best about that? Because I agree. I love Occipital.

click to enlarge

Bruce Sterling: I thought it was a more technically difficult stunt than the hand registration thing. Using a hand as a 3-D cursor is hot, but not like painting a panorama in 3-D in real time. That was an impressive technical feat.

Tish Shute: And they hinted at the 2.1.1 AR, more AR version of that. What do you see coming out of that as possibilities?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’d heard of YDreams, so I wasn’t stunned. But I’d never heard of those guys. I wonder what else the heck they’ve got in the attic.

Tish Shute: very cool stuff…

Bruce Sterling: Well, more power to them. But clearly YDreams was the popular favorite. And who couldn’t like it? It was just so AR.

Tish Shute: It was so AR and so gorgeous.

Bruce Sterling: It was pretty, actually.  Except for their ugly menu button and poor font choice.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes. You didn’t like that, did you? [laughs] But with the Occipital panorama, what do you see the next stage of that?

Bruce Sterling: Well, obviously quicker and faster. Quicker and faster and more accurate in a network. Let’s just say I’m in New York and you’re in New York and I’m calling you for help. And you say where are you? I just whirl around like this and I mail it to you on a Google Wave. And you whirl around like that, and then we compare the two panoramas and do an instant triangulation. And you say: I’m over here on this red dot of your screen.

Tish Shute: Yeah, exactly.

Bruce Sterling: We’re navigating with panoramas by having two connected panoramas and considering the difference.

Tish Shute: Yeah, very interesting…

Bruce Sterling: Not shabby, right?

Tish Shute: Not shabby at all.

Bruce Sterling: If you could do it in real time.

Tish Shute: Then the other thing I missed because I was going to meet Will was I missed the Launch Pad competition. Did you catch that?

Bruce Sterling: I didn’t see it either. I thought of another app though.

Tish Shute: Oh!

Bruce Sterling: You’ve got a panorama maker in your home office, and it just scans the office 24 hours 365 and tags anything that moves, right? OK, where’s the clipboard?  At 8:15 it was over here. Now it’s vanished. Now another object is viewed over here. So, logically, ping, you hit it with a sticky light and there it is, right?

Tish Shute: Oh, that’s cool also knowing what has changed in any environment would be a big enabler for a lot of AR visions.

Bruce Sterling: I’m sure there are many other things you could do with panoramas.

Tish Shute: My jet lag is beginning to kick in big time – so many ideas to pursue from are2010 – those panoramas are very exciting though.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, well, it’s all right. We can augment reality! I’ve got three heads and six hands!

Recently, Qualcomm announced an SDK for vision based augmented reality – currently in private beta and open to the public this fall. The Qualcomm augmented reality (AR) bonanza will launch with a $200,000 developer challenge and a SDK that will put vision based augmented reality into the hands of developers without licensing fees.

This is a big step forward for augmented reality and a very important move made by an industry giant to support the rapidly evolving AR industry. Innovation at all levels of the AR stack, particularly at the hardware level (CPU/GPU optimization) is vital for the full vision of augmented reality – media tightly registered to physical space, to take center stage. Vision based AR takes mobile AR beyond compass/GPS based AR post-its, which are only loosely connected to the world (but the staple of most current AR apps), towards the holy grail of AR – markerless tracking with the whole world as the platform.

Click on the image above or see here for a video demo of an AR version of Rock’em Sock’em Robots game.  Mattel, one of the first companies working with the SDK demoed AR Rock’em Sock’em, at the Uplinq 2010 conference (see Chris Cameron’s ReadWriteWeb write-up on Uplinq 2010).

The Qualcomm AR stack, which reaches from the metal to developer APIs, will give Android developers an important edge in AR development. And, when vision based AR starts getting integrated with visual search capabilities, and combined with cool tools like Unity, we will start to see the augmented world get really interesting.

Visual search is already an area of AR getting a lot of attention, with Google Goggles, Point and Find, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo set to launch “chokkan nabi,” or “intuitive navigation,” in September, and the recent partnership between Layar and Kooaba. Metaio’s mobile augmented reality platform Junaio is already integrated with Kooaba’s computer vision capabilities.

And, of course, I am particularly excited about including open distributed real time communications for AR in this stack, which is why I asked a group of developers who have been inputting into the ARWave project if they had questions for Jay Wright, Qualcomm.  Thank you Yohan Baillot, Gene Becker, Anselm Hook, Patrick O’Shaughnessey, Thomas Wrobel, Markus Strickler, and Davide Carnovale for your input.  [Note: see my upcoming post, about the future of ARWave and real time distributed communications for AR following this Google announcement.]

Jay Wright, “is responsible for developing and driving Qualcomm’s augmented reality commercialization strategy.” He “handles partnerships with leading innovators in industry and academia and leads Qualcomm’s efforts in enabling augmented reality within the mobile ecosystem.” In the interview below, Jay very generously answers our questions in detail.

A key contributor of questions for this interview is Yohan Baillot. Yohan is working on a full vision of AR – integrating computer vision, visual search, open distributed real time communications and AR eyewear. Yohan Baillot is founder of Simulation3D, a consulting and system integration company specializing in interactive visualization systems and eyewear-based AR systems. (I hope to bring you an interview with Yohan soon!).

Qualcomm was the title sponsor for are2010, Augmented Reality Event, and played a vital role in making this event an historic gathering of the talent and creative minds at the heart of the emerging AR industry. Watch out for the videos of the are2010 sessions to be posted at the end of August. My are2010 co-chair, Ori Inbar, is preparing them to go online while kicking his newly funded start up, Ogmento, into high gear! Ogmento is also one of the start ups pioneering vision based AR.

Metaio, (with Total Immersion, they are one of the first augmented reality companies), has played a key role in bringing a vision component to smart phone augmented reality apps with their Unifeye mobile SDK.  Junaio, Metaio’s own mobile augmented reality platform has gone beyond location based AR with “junaio glue” – “the camera’s eye is now able to identify objects and “glue” object specific real-time, dynamic, social and 3D information onto the object itself,” (see my upcoming interview with Metaio founder, Thomas Alt).  Also, recently, Layar – who continue to innovate at a breathtaking pace, announced a partnership with the computer vision company Kooaba.

Both Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Layar, and Thomas Alt, Metaio, when I spoke to them recently, saw the Qualcomm SDK as a very positive development for AR, and they look forward to exploring its capabilities and integrating it where appropriate with their AR tools.  See more about Layar’s upcoming visit, to the US here – August 10th NYC, and August 12th SF.  Also save the date, Sept 27th, Munich, for InsideAR, Metaio’s upcoming conference.

It is clear that vision based AR will be driving the next wave of AR apps. And, as Maarten and Thomas both pointed out, it will be interesting to see which use cases capture the imagination of users the most. Having more tools freely available to AR developers will certainly be a boost to creativity. And, Qualcomm’s SDK is going to give Android developers, in particular, a big opportunity to take the lead.

Interview with Jay Wright, Director, Business Development, Qualcomm

Tish Shute: Before I start with questions on the new Qualcomm vision based augmented reality SDK, I want to briefly look ahead to what many people feel is vital for the full realization of augmented reality – head mounted displays, or more specifically, comfortable, sexy AR eye wear. Is Qualcomm going to be involved in the development of augmented eye wear and wearable displays?

Jay Wright: I think there’s some core technology that needs to come together so we can have what we think needs to be a see-through head mounted display with a decent field of view. And that looks like something that is quite possibly further than a three to five year horizon.

Tish Shute: Gene Becker asked some interesting general questions about the Qualcomm AR initiatives. He said, “I’m unclear exactly what Qualcomm’s goal is.” It would be interesting to hear from you the Qualcomm view, from the top down.

Jay Wright: Our largest revenue stream comes from sales of chipsets. And we see augmented reality as a technology that drives demand for increasing amounts of processing power. So we want to create demand for chips, higher-end chips, and augmented reality does that. Specifically vision based augmented reality because it is so computationally intensive.

Tish Shute: Yes. And I think that is why people are very excited by the Qualcomm SDK. It is not only the first free toolkit for developers to build vision apps from, isn’t it? There’s been nothing freely available before this, has there? But also Qualcomm is paying attention to the complete AR stack to support vision based AR development, from the chips to game/app development tools like Unity.

Jay Wright: That’s really the goal. We’re not here to be in the augmented reality applications business. Qualcomm’s role in the ecosystem has been to serve as an enabler. And that’s what we want to do with augmented reality: provide the enabling technology that allows the entire ecosystem to flourish.

“Augmented Reality has a number of attributes that make it a great fit for Qualcomm’s core competencies”

Augmented Reality has a number of attributes that make it a great fit for Qualcomm’s core competencies. It’s very computationally intensive, algorithmically complex, requires tight integration of hardware and software, and benefits from tight integration of multiple hardware components. And that’s the kind of problem we like here, where we can apply our core competence of really optimizing complex systems for performance, while at the same time minimizing power consumption.

And as you know Tish, mobile AR is really extremely power sensitive. We sometimes talk about it as a battery’s worst nightmare. It’s roughly equivalent to playing a 3D game and recording a video all at the same time.

Whenever there is something that takes a lot of power, that’s a definite opportunity for us to optimize it.

Tish Shute: Right. One of the core business is chips right, but for Qualcomm there’s basically a lot of profit in licensing. When I talked to the developer community about the Qualcomm SDK developers first question was, “What’s the licensing? What’s this going to cost us in the long run to develop on this SDK re licensing?” And they had all different takes on this. So everyone had different ideas about what your approach to licensing might or might not be. Could you clarify the approach to licensing, as I think this is a core concern for developers.

Jay Wright: Anytime you see something for free, you kind of say, “Hey, what’s the hook?” So yes, it’s definitely a logical question. Our intent is not to generate licensing revenue from application developers using the SDK. So the SDK will be made available free of charge for development, and it will also be free of charge for developers to deploy applications.

Tish Shute: Now, this is another question. You also include not just image recognition capabilities but Unity in the package you are offering developers. Unity products usually involve a license. They do have some free products too, I think. But how does this work? And how do you separate your part from their part, or don’t you?

Jay Wright: That’s a good question. What we’re trying to do with the platform is incorporate it into tools that people already know how to use. So we’re actually going to have the SDK support two different tool chains. One of them is the Android SDK and NDK. And then the other one, is Unity.

We’re working with Unity to create an extension to the Unity environment that will be available as part of the Unity installer when you install Unity from the Unity website. Developers will still be paying whatever license fees are associated with Unity’s products on their existing pricing schedule.

Tish Shute: One of Thomas Wrobel’s question is whether developers can just use the image recognition without Unity? Your answer is yes, you can work with the computer vision component of the SDK separate from Unity?

Jay Wright: Yes, you can.

Tish Shute: Good because we would like to build a completely open Android client for ARWave, and not tie it to Unity unless people choose to. He’s using the open Android JPCT 3D engine, which he’s adapting for AR. So he could actually use the part of the SDK that does image recognition and association with that, right?

Jay Wright: That’s correct. You are not required to use Unity. Unity is just one option for building the application.

Tish Shute: Great! That’s very good. But I’m sure many developers are going to jump on the chance to use Unity. But I mean it’s nice to be flexible because it’s so early for AR that people have different ideas and new use cases coming up all the time. I think it’s excellent you’ve divided that.

Another of Thomas’s questions was, “Can developers use their own positioning data sharing solution?” He’s really talking about AR blips.

Jay Wright: With data sharing solutions, I am assuming that by data he means referring to augmentation data or graphics?

Tish Shute: Yes, and I’ll ask him to elaborate. But, at the moment, everyone is using different ideas for POI, aren’t they?

“The goal with our platform is to make it just as easy for a developer to create 3D content for the real world as it is for a game world or a virtual world.”

Jay Wright: Yes. So let me answer it this way, Tish. The goal with our platform is to make it just as easy for a developer to create 3D content for the real world as it is for a game world or a virtual world. So all we’re really trying to do is provide the computer vision piece that makes the real world look like a bunch of geometric surfaces and potentially some meta data that is associated with this so you know what you are looking at.

So that means from a developer’s perspective, you are still doing all of the 3D content, all of the animations, all of the game logic, all of the rendering. You are still doing that all yourself. So if you think about doing an AR game, you are doing everything you used to do, except you are not creating a virtual terrain. You are just going to map it in the real world.

So if you want to do a browser that is doing POI’s, your POI data, or augmentation, or meta data, or whatever it is, that can be in your application, it can be in the cloud, it can be wherever you want to put it. We’re not putting any constraints on what that content is or where it’s stored.

Tish Shute: Right, and that’s what I hoped for. And I think that does answer the question. People are interested to know how far Qualcomm is going with this. For instance, Gene Becker asked: “do they see a business at a certain level in the AR stack?” As you said AR development basically feeds into the core business of chip development, right? But does Qualcomm also see some new business models developing?

Jay Wright: I think it’s foreseeable that Qualcomm could identify other business opportunities down the line. But we’re certainly not there today. Today, our motivation for the investment in AR is to create technology that is going to advance the chipset business.

Tish Shute: When the news came out about Qualcomm’s support of a game development studio at Georgia Tech at the same time as the SDK I think I wondered what was the scope of Qualcomm’s interest [for more on using Unity for AR development see Vision-Based Augmented Reality Technical Super Session video from Uplinq 2010].  For example, I am interested to know how the Qualcomm initiative in developing an AR stack connects to the effort to introduce an AR browser based on web standards, i.e., the Kharma/Kamra KML/HTML Augmented Reality Mobile Architecture from Blair MacIntyre and the Georgia Tech team (image below)? Are you supporting the open standards based browser development too?

Jay Wright: Blair is going to continue to work on the browser effort. And it’s our expectation that he will use our SDK and technologies for vision pieces of the browser effort where appropriate. So they are certainly not mutually exclusive. I would just think about our technology as one element of what may be used in that browser, as I expect it would be an element of what any other app developer would put in their application, whether it be browser, or game, or whatever.

Tish Shute: Yes Now, this is an interesting question, which is sort of connected…I’m trying to keep some form of narrative for this! It follows from the question about Blair’s web-based standards browser. A few people have asked me why we haven’t heard more from Qualcomm in all these various standard discussions that are starting to come up. I mean is it just too early, or are you too busy, or what?

Jay Wright: No, let me explain. The type of standards that have come up so far have been around how HTML should be extended for geo-browser type applications. And while that’s interesting, I think the standards efforts that Qualcomm would be more likely to be associated with in the near term are those related to API’s that are hardware accelerated.

So one of the things that we are in the process of doing right now, Tish – because as you know, Qualcomm is a company that adheres to standards and strives to produce a leading implementation of those standards on our hardware and software – is we are in the process of determining what API set within the existing SDK should be standardized.

Tish Shute: Right.

Now, my next question is, “Who are the other players at this level of the AR stack in the standards conversation? Who else is working at that level?” Obviously, the AR Lab in Graz was, but now they are Qualcomm, right?

Jay Wright: They are still independent. Qualcomm is the exclusive industrial partner of the Christian Doppler Handheld AR LAB in Graz.

Tish Shute: Does this compete with, say, the work that other AR start ups are doing?

Jay Wright: Our intent is not to compete with companies that have done augmented reality technology. Our intent is to enable the entire ecosystem. So we would like to work with both Metaio and Total Immersion to find ways that they can benefit from our technology. That would be the hope – that our technology can kind of lift and float all boats in the ecosystem.

Tish Shute: There are not many implementations of vision based AR right now? I mean obviously Microsoft is doing stuff because they have Georg Klein now, right, and there is Google Goggles, Total Immersion, Metaio, and it will be interesting to see where Layar’s partnership with Kooaba will lead?

Jay Wright: Yes. I think there are relatively few commercial implementations of vision based AR stacks.

Tish Shute: One of Patrick O’Shaughnessey’s question is he wants to understand what features are going to be in the vision component, very specifically. Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Patched Reality, working with Circ.us, Edelman, and Metaio used the Unifeye SDK to do a vision based AR app for Ben and Jerry’s that’s been getting all the attention lately. He was a speaker at are2010.

He very specifically wants to know what features will be included in the computer vision component. He says, “I’m most interested in understanding what features are going to be in the vision component. Is it marker based?” Well I know it’s more than marker based. I saw some of it in Chris Cameron’s ReadWriteWeb write-up on Uplinq 2010. Is it “NFT? PTAM? other? Also, are you are integrating any backend services.” That is an interesting question!

Jay Wright: So let’s get to the features on the client side, the vision based features. There’s support for, what AR aficionados would know as natural feature targets, or image based targets. And we use those to represent, obviously, 2D planar surfaces.

The other thing that we are trying to do to set expectations, Tish, about where these can be used is to let people know that they work best in what we’re calling near-field environments. So the idea isn’t that you use the system to create a large scale AR system that can recognize buildings indoors and outdoors. It’s the idea where I can recreate 3D experiences that take place on surfaces that are in my immediate field of view, whether that be on the table in front of me, or on the floor, or on the wall, or on the shelf.

Also, when you talk about near field experiences, there are some other constraints that are implied. Like, if it’s in front of me and my immediate field of view is probably going to be pretty well lit. And lighting, of course, is an important requirement.

So we’ll support these natural feature targets, or image targets. And we also have support for sort of a hybrid marker image type. It’s something called a frame marker, which has kind of a black border with some dots on it.

Click on the image above or here to view Vision-Based Augmented Reality Technical Super Session video from Uplinq 2010

Jay Wright: So there’s this additional type. And the reason for this additional hybrid marker type is it has a lower computational requirement than a natural feature target. So the idea is these things can be used as game pieces or elements of play where I want to have a large number of them detected and tracked simultaneously.

So you can have, for example, one big natural feature target that serves as a game board or game surface, and you can use these other things as smaller game pieces. And when you put them out, different types of content can appear on them and do different things.

Tish Shute: Yes, that’s nice! And the other thing I noticed was the virtual buttons. How well developed is that?

Jay Wright: The idea behind virtual buttons is, in addition to supporting augmentation, we want to support interaction. And we think there are going to be different types of user interaction with augmented reality content. It may be hand tracking and finger tracking, but another compelling form we’ve identified so far is the ability for me to touch particular surfaces and have an event fire within the application..

So virtual buttons are rectangular areas on image targets that a developer can define, and they serve as buttons. So you can create a target that is a game board, for example, and define certain regions. And when the user covers that region with his hand, like pushing a button, your application can detect that event and take some action.

Tish Shute: Nice! And what is the documentation on these capabilities that is offered by Qualcomm…For example Yohan Baillot, who is interested in integrating eyewear-based AR systems with smartphones asked. How deep does this go? Will there be full documentation on Snapdragon, people who want to work at that level? Is there a chip SDK?

Jay Wright: . Qualcomm’s model is to work with providers of the operating systems and deliver functionality of the chip through the operating system. So many operating systems APIs will take advantage of functionality that’s in the chip. But there is no separate chip SDK per se.

Tish Shute: I suppose that does come up a little bit with one of Anselm Hook’s questions, because there is some overlap with Google Goggles here, isn’t there, in terms of what you’re doing, right? Are you going to work closely with Google Goggles ?

Jay Wright: Google Goggles is performing what we’ve described ‘visual search’. So the idea is you take a picture, send it to the cloud and identify it and the results come back. I think if we see Google Goggles go in a direction where there’s an AR experience that would be a good area for us to collaborate with Google.

Tish Shute: Anselm Hook is very interested in having some kind of open standard around this physical tagging of the world, right, – the physical world as a platform. But I suppose that’s down the road but is there a plan to start talking about open standards here – visual search with image recognition? That’s a very powerful combination. (see my interview with Anselm Hook here).

Jay Wright: I think it is. And we’re very interested to hear from developers and others that have ideas about how they would want to integrate with the functionality that we have to best enable those kinds of combined experiences.

Tish Shute: Well, I know Anselm has a lot of very important ideas on that.

Jay Wright: I’d be very interested in hearing those because we want to do everything we can to enable the maximum number of applications and best user experience for anything that people want to do.

Tish Shute: Let’s go back to some specific questions about the platform, right? For example Yohan Baillot asked, “Is it arbitrary image/tag recognition supported? Is the tag / image specifiable by user? Is face recognition supported?” Not yet, face recognition, right?

Jay Wright: Not yet.

Tish Shute: What are the plans with that?

Jay Wright: I think we’ve identified it as an interesting area and something that there’s some interest in, but have not made a decision on a particular technology direction.

Tish Shute: You’ve answered some of these but 3D model based vision tracking. Yohan’s question was, “Is 3D model based vision tracking supported (that is recover the pose of the camera using a known 3D model and a 2D camera view of this model)?”

Jay Wright: That’s something we’re looking at very closely, but again, don’t have a plan, or don’t have a future date for.

Tish Shute: And you said with the natural landmark tracking that’s not supported, right?

Jay Wright: I don’t know if I know what that means, Tish. But we don’t have any APIs that provide compass or GPS functionality other than already exists in the operating system. So if you want to take advantage of the compass or other sensors, you can absolutely do that, but the SDK does not currently provide anything different or anything more than already exists in the OS.

Tish Shute: This is an interesting question, “Is Snapdragon offloading some processing to the GPU, if any?”

Jay Wright: Certainly rendering functionality that utilizes OpenGL is being offloaded to the GPU. We’re currently in the process of determining multiple methods for offloading functionality between both symmetric and heterogeneous cores on Snapdragon. Which would include the GPU, the apps processor, and DSPs.

Tish Shute: No one has truly solved optimizing the GPU/CPU for mobile AR yet have they?

Jay Wright: That really gets to the heart of the optimization here. Which pieces ought to be operating on which cores and when, and why? And that’s something that we’re looking at very closely.

Tish Shute: Right. The only AR – that is truly 3D media tightly registered to the physical world has been done for military and medical (and that has often been with a locked of camera!). But to take mobile AR to the next level I think many developers would like access to the CPU/GPU, for example a developer interested in the future of eyewear like Yohan?

Jay Wright: We’re very interested in hearing what kinds of tools developers would like to see.

Tish Shute: What is the best forum for discussing feature specifics?

Jay Wright: To provide feature requests to us?

Tish Shute: Yes. And discuss them.

Jay Wright: if people go to qdev.net/AR there’s an application up there for the private beta program. So if people do have ideas about features or other things they would like to see, they’re welcome to submit [their requests and ideas] there.

Tish Shute: I also have some questions about the specifics of the competition. Some people are a little confused about some things. Yohan asked, “What is the expected form of the project? Lab demonstration? Specific capability? Complete end to end system?”

Jay Wright: The only requirement is that they submit an Android application that we can then get running on a device. So if it has a backend component or backend server that it works against, great. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But that’s really it. There’s no limit to the application category. It can be a game, it can be a museum tour, it can be a children’s learning game or learning experience. It can really be anything. The idea is we want to find experiences for which AR delivers some unique value. We’ll be announcing more specifics about the competition in the near-future.

Tish Shute: Right, because some people weren’t sure about the Unity being separated whether it was biased towards games. And it’s not really, is it?

Jay Wright: Unity is a bias toward just rapid development for 3D, I think. It’s most commonly associated with games, but there are also a lot of Unity customers that use it for medical simulations and other types of applications that aren’t really games at all.

Tish Shute: Yes. It’s very flexible, I know. You did bring up the backend services again. Are you thinking of offering any of that?

Jay Wright: There is a backend tool that we offer. And the backend tool is what you use to generate your targets. So if you want to create or use a particular image for a target in your application, you upload it to our target management application, and then it will evaluate that target and tell you how well it will work. So as you know, certain images are more likely to be recognizable than others. And so there’s metrics in that application that will give you some feedback.

And then you can download your target resource from the website that you can then incorporate into your application project.

Tish Shute: So this is available at the moment to people who are in the private beta and not to…you know, all of this information and documentation, right?

Jay Wright: That’s correct.

Tish Shute: So that’s an incentive. Now, just to encourage people to submit to the private beta is the other thing that people seem confused about. In one part you say 25 developers. And some people have thought that meant it was limited to 25 individuals. And some people have like maybe four people on their team, so they were going, “Well, are we going to be accepted because we have four developers, or do we count as one because we are all working at the same project?”

Jay Wright: it’s just 25 companies.

Tish Shute: OK. I think we’ve gone through the questions. Just to clarify and maybe give some incentive for people to apply to the private beta…the big advantage of getting in the private beta, aside from getting a month’s start on the competition, is that you get a chance to input, right?

Jay Wright: Yes. A chance to provide feedback, get early access to the technology. And then we are also providing a free HTC phone.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes. I forgot the phone. Yes, right. In the requirements, though, you basically seem to be asking for sort of a full app…some people get reticent about delivering their full application plan, right?

Jay Wright: Yes. I understand that. People should just reveal what they are comfortable talking about. Just so you understand the constraint on this end, this is early technology and we’re trying to understand exactly what the support requirement is going to be. And we have limited supported resources at this time, so we want to make sure that we can focus the resources that we have on folks that are really going to use the technology and have a sound plan to actually build something. So that’s really the motivation behind limiting the size of the private beta.

Tish Shute: OK. Yes, it’s good to reiterate that. We’re down to the last question that I have, and then I’ll ask you if there is anything that I missed. You say you are partnering with Mattel. Who are the developers? Because I mean Mattel isn’t an augmented reality development team.

Jay Wright: Mattel used a subcontractor, Aura Interactive.

Tish Shute: Nice. But that’s your only partner that I saw, right? Why Mattel?

Jay Wright: Well, to launch a new technology, companies will often find showcase partners to demonstrate compelling uses of it. And we thought Mattel and the Rock’em Sock’em™ toy was a great example of combining augmented reality with an existing toy.

Tish Shute: And I think people agree with you on Rock’em Sock’em (see Chris Cameron’s RWW post).

Jay Wright: And there’s other showcase partners and applications that we will continue to work on to kind of spur the ecosystem and show what is possible.

Tish Shute: OK. Now, is there anything I’ve left out that you think? What’s the core of this narrative that we need to get across, and if I’ve left anything out that is a key piece?

Jay Wright: I think you’ve done an excellent job of covering all the bases, Tish.

Tish Shute: [laughs]

Jay Wright: I think the important overriding message to get across is that we really see ourselves in an enablement role here, and that we are trying to provide….we’d like to provide fundamental technology that helps all developers build content for the real world.

Shortly after Augmented Reality Event – are2010, I talked with Bruce Sterling on skype and in gdocs about his experience there.  I am posting the conversation in two parts to make it a more blog friendly length!

The picture above is the Auggie Award for the best AR demo (above) designed by Sigal Arad Inbar.  It was won by YDreams! See, Ivan Franco recounts the team’s ARE 2010 experience, and winning the event’s first-ever Auggie Award, for more.   The video below was shot at the YDreams booth by Bruce Sterling.

“The Hotness” – YDreams rocking it at ARE2010 from brucesflickr

Rudy Rucker, who was hanging out with Bruce Sterling, captured the are2010 buzz and some great images in his post, Augmented Reality, Painting, Twitter. As Rudy put it:

“AR is hoping to be a next big thing, a cozier and more commerce-driven cousin of the old VR, or virtual reality.”

Bruce Sterling’s opening key note is up, ARE 2010 Keynote by Bruce Sterling: Bake a Big Pie!, and also the ARE 2010 Keynote by Will Wright: Brilliant Inspiration for the Augmented Reality Community with more videos from are2010 on the way.  One must read post on are2010 is Chris Cameron’s post, Augmented Reality’s Next Steps: Sitting Down with the Titans of AR.

Talking with Bruce Sterling, Part 1

The Auggie panel, Bruce Sterling, Jesse Schell, and Mark Billinghurst inspect the award.

Tish Shute: In your keynote at the 9am of the augmented reality industry you asked some questions of the are2010 audience: “What’s the mission statement?  You’re the world’s first pure play experience designers, except that user experience it’s mostly futuristic hot air.  But run with that, right?  What are your tactical steps?  You should get dressed, have a coffee, have a to-do list.”

How much of that did you see going on in the next two days?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I wasn’t privy to any of the business discussions.  I didn’t think it was an accident that this standard AR enabled tag thing came up from Bruno Uzzan, Total Immersion.  That seemed to me to be a useful thing.  I was always interested in the Augmented Reality Consortium.  It struck me as remarkable that there was this group of people who clearly all knew one another and it had some kind of game plan.  I applaud them for that, because these are not the 1980’s.  [laughs]  You know, it’s just a different world for young startup companies.

Tish Shute: I think you’re right. There seem to be some VC conversations going on, we don’t know what went on in the meetings, but it was noticeable in the atmosphere of excitement, and remarked on by a few people. So I think that kind of was definitely going on.

And, of course, I was so busy I never even got to see the expo properly! You said you wanted to be surprised.

Did anyone surprise you in any of the talks, in any of the expo?

AR used as interfaces for devices

Italian augmented robot from SEAC02 from brucesflickr

Bruce Sterling: I have to say I was a little bit surprised to see Andrea Carignano demoing a robot. I happen to know him because he’s here in Torino. He’s the guy that came out of Fiat and went into AR. I am not a particularly huge robot fan, but I think it’s of great interest that AR is used as interfaces for devices, as opposed to the Jesse Schell idea that AR is all about a “man with the X-ray eyes.”

My suspicion is that a lot of surprises will come out of mashups of AR.

Tish Shute: I didn’t get to see Andrea’s robot.  So what did it do?

Bruce Sterling:  It’s basically a sister device to that little helicopter that those Parrot AR Drone guys were doing.  It’s a little autonomous robot and it runs around with a webcam on it.  You can place video into the acquisition stream coming off the robot.  You can play a game, and blow away imaginary monsters or whatever.

Tish Shute: It’s interesting, because did you notice Will Wright and Patrick O’Shaughnessey, Patched Reality, spend some time hacking the Parrot AR drone in the hallway?  Did you come across them?

Bruce Sterling: Rudy was there with them.  You know, I didn’t want to watch Will Wright hack a robot.

[laughter]

Tish Shute: They seemed to be having fun even though as it turned out the power supply was dead.

Bruce Sterling:  I’m sure Will enjoyed that.  As a game designer, you want to go out and get your hands dirty with a plastic gizmo.

[laughter]

My Swiss Army knife can’t get through airport security, so I really don’t want to strip anything down.  But yeah, what else did I see that was of particular interest?  I was pretty happy about the Korean guys because they are a difficult group to get close to.

AR companies are like mini-global micro-startups.  They’re “glocal”.

“Korean elegance at the Zenitum booth” – from brucesflickr

Tish Shute: Zenitum.  What did you like from Zenitum.  They were one of our sponsors, along with Qualcomm.

Bruce Sterling:  I know that Seoul is like the number one center for augmented reality discussion.  But it’s  difficult to get behind the scenes as a journalist there and  track what’s going on in Korea.  I’m fine with Italian “realtà aumentata.”   And I feel like I’ve got a handle on French “réalité augmentée.”   The Germans were not hard to find, and the Dutch all speak English!  But the Koreans, and whoever the hell it is in Kuala Lumpur…  I have no idea what’s going in Kuala Lumpur, and only the vaguest idea of what’s transpiring in Singapore!  But I know that people there are paying a coherent interest.

So the Koreans show up, and they had some relatively predictable anime style 3D avatar conversion stuff.  But they had a really nice display space.

“Anime figures become three-d smartphone animated avatars,” from brucesflickr

Tish Shute: Ah, So Zenitum created a hot spot at the exhibition?

Bruce Sterling:  Yeah.  The Koreans had  IKEA furniture and some nifty little woven baskets.  They’d really classed up their presentation.  Most Koreans in tech tend to be kind of muscular.  The Koreans are not known for their refined presentations.  On the contrary, they tend to undersell everybody else.  But I don’t know, maybe they’ve been hanging out with Samsung and upgrading their design chops. [laughs]

Tish Shute:  Did you take some photos you could send me?

Bruce Sterling:  I took a few, but  I don’t consider myself a photographer.  They’re all up on my Flickr set. It was interesting to see so many people from so many different nations in such a collegial atmosphere.

Tish Shute: Yes – there were many different countries represented at are2010

Bruce Sterling:  It’s the beginning… and so global at such a young stage.

Tish Shute: Yes. As you said, it was 9 AM, so everyone was actually super excited to be gathered together from across the globe to start a new day together.  As you mentioned, there was a very warm affirmative vibe – everyone sharing a passion.

Bruce Sterling:   They have an online commonality. They seem to be aware of one another’s work through the Internet.

Clearly they had all heard about one another.  That’s a departure from earlier models of tech startup, 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.

Tish Shute: It was the multinational garage, wasn’t it?

Bruce Sterling:  Yeah.  AR companies are like mini-global micro-startups.  They’re “glocal.” There’s something quite new to me about that.  I don’t find it’s shocking, because in Europe today it’s common to find startup teams who are multinational.  But to see such intense globalism at such an early stage of an industry is really different.

Tish Shute: Yes it made for a fun atmosphere?  It was wonderful running into Iguchi Takahito, Tonchidot.  You have a great rapport with each other despite the language barrier?

Bruce Sterling:  Yeah.  That guy from Tonchidot, he’s very charismatic.  He’s punchy.  That’s reflected in the very strong graphic design from his company.

Tish Shute: Using minimal English to make the case for Sekai No Camera at the Auggies, Iguchi Takahito still got through to the audience.

Bruce Sterling:  Well, his visuals were good.

What AR means for artistic practice…

Picture of Eric Gradman’s Cloud Mirror, from James Alliban post ARE2010 – Augmented Reality utopia in Silicon Valley – see for more on the are2010 ARt Gala

Tish Shute: So before I move on to wider themes, I’m going to wrap up on some of the different aspects of the conference.  I was chairing the technology track but you were more free roaming, was there anything that went on in the sort of hallway discussions and the presentation rooms that struck you?

Bruce Sterling:  Well, I did get collared by artists.   They really wanted to talk to me.  We got into some serious discussions on  what AR means for artistic practice.  How you can do this and reach that, how can one sharpen up one’s presentation?  I mean, they really wanted some art criticism.

Tish Shute: That’s very interesting.  Did you come up with anything that you hadn’t been thinking about already through the conversations?

Bruce Sterling: I’ve seen augmented reality installations before, and I certainly know many electronic artists.  But I don’t know.  People in the AR art space, they are looking for guidance and trying to find fellow spirits.  In their own way, they have the same pioneer spirit as the business people.

Helen Papagiannis shows Iguchi Takahito, Tonchidot, her AR Wonder Turner, an exquisite corpse inspired installation

Tish Shute: Yeah, it’s interesting, because we wanted the art gala to be even bigger, but it turns out, because of the logistics of putting up art in a conference space is fabulously expensive, because it has to be all installed and hung…

Bruce Sterling:  I’m keenly aware of that.  At Share Festival in Turin we bring in six installations, and it’s very heavy work.  It really takes a lot of logistics.  It was like a Battle of the Bands.  It’s like doing a rock concert.

Tish Shute: One of the installations I was really sad to not have there was Uber geeks’  “Steve” H.E.AI.D installation that Brady Forrest & Co. took to Burning Man.

So I was very happy that we actually did get the number of artists we did.

Bruce Sterling:  Well, there aren’t a million AR artists in the world, so it’s hard to judge.   I didn’t see many business people rushing up to have me critique their business plans.

Tish Shute: [laughs]  They were all in the meeting rooms.

Bruce Sterling:  Maybe it’s for the best.

VC and AR Startup Action

The Zenitum Booth, are2010, photo from Chris Cameron’s Flickr stream

Tish Shute: Do you know that why your talk started a few moments late is because we had 50 people who arrived from the Silicon Valley neighborhood I guess!

Bruce Sterling:  Did they not preregister?

Tish Shute: No. They all stood in the line for the same day registration!

Bruce Sterling: It ‘ll be interesting to see what transpires there, if there is a little wave of startup action.  God knows they need some place to put their money, because the VC scene in the US is pretty much moribund.

Tish Shute: Ogmento is the first US AR Games startup to get VC, I think.  I think there was some VC action at are2010 for sure.  And Qualcomm obviously seems to have commercialization plans for their AR technology, and to be scouting talent  and ways to deliver new AR experiences.

Jay Wright, Qualcomm presents Joe Dunn, e23 Games, winner of the are2010 StartUp Launch Pad with a check

Bruce Sterling:  Some  people don’t need venture capital.  I mean, Google Goggles isn’t going to be hurting for VC money, obviously [ see Chris Cameron’s RWW post, Google Goggles Coming Soon to iPhone] .  AR may come up through other methods, like people allying themselves with Hollywood, or peeling off of advertising companies.   There’s a lot of outfits who might conceivably want in-house AR skills.  Then when people set up a specialty AR shop,  they  peel off the list of clients.  I don’t know.  Those old days  of Silicon Valley venture capital seem like a lost world.

Tish Shute: Yes.  I, again, didn’t see anything really of the business tracks and production tracks.  Did you get back and forth between the tracks?

Bruce Sterling:  I went to the Hollywood tracks.  I mean, to the extent that I could.

Is Hollywood stirring? Who’s going to have the first breakout AR property?

Tish Shute: So what did you see from…Is Hollywood stirring?  Is it waking up?  I mean I know Kent Demaine, Oooii,  and Brad Foxhoven, Ogmento, spoke about the Hollywood AR scene.

Bruce Sterling:  There were guys there from LA who were sort of saying, look…they are aware of us, but they just want AR to promote their properties to some particular niche.  They realize that AR is potentially a mass medium and that you could do some real AR entertainment.  So they were batting around some ideas as to where that might happen.  Like, could it come out of a console gaming scene?  Who’s going to have the first breakout AR property?  A popular hit AR property, as opposed to like a neat way to sell shoes, or whatever.   Really, anybody’s guess is as good as theirs or mine.  But at least they were actively guessing.

Tish Shute: I know the breaking the fourth wall discussion has been going on for a while and now the question is, whether AR is going to take down the fourth wall and bring interactive storytelling into the mainstream.  Did you hear any of that?

Bruce Sterling:  Well, I always shy away from discussions of that kind because I don’t think there’s any “final thing.”  Practically everything that AR is involved in right now is  a transitional technology. Also, because I am a storyteller, I get alarmed whenever people in technology start saying, “Oh well, it’s all about telling stories.”  Because obviously it isn’t.

People can tell stories perfectly well orally, and absolutely nobody does that.  AR is not at all about telling stories.  It’s about a great many other things, such as user bases, niche audiences,  media saturation, urban informatics,  convergence culture, and the language of digital media.   I could list these factors until the world looks level. It’s really becoming pretty chaotic.  As I was saying in my speech, AR companies are media startups who almost never use the old-fashioned word “media.”

Tish Shute: Oh, that’s interesting.  Yes.  So why do you think that has happened that way?

Bruce Sterling:  Well, it’s because they are trying to do a different thing than media does.  I mean, they are trying to “augment reality.”  They don’t want you to know that you are using a medium.  They don’t want you to realize that you’re watching computer animation overlaid on some video acquisition stream.  That would defeat the whole point of AR.  It’s entirely different from an analog medium like television, where you turn on the television and there’s a constant stream of station identification alerts.   That’s like: “Don’t touch that dial!  You’re on channel 13!  Stay with us!”  Then it’s like, “And now a few words from our friendly sponsors!”  That medium was engineered to keep your eyeballs locked to a single stream that they’re feeding you.

In AR, it’s much more participative, more geolocative.  I’m not particularly interested in station-identification branding from my AR provider. What I really want to see is the interactivity of the augments they’re bringing to me.  It’s like  FlickR, the photo sharing site. You don’t have any TV-style splash page for FlickR.  “Hi! We’re FlickR! FlickR, bringing your photos to you!” No, FlickR is all about “you, you, you,” your photos, your tags, your friends, your activity around you.   It’s immediately trying to be very participative.

Tish Shute: Will Wright got to that point, didn’t he. He was trying to move us into an idea of blended reality. That the game is about the world, not about the dragons or the overlays per se.

Bruce Sterling: Right. I think that’s true. But see, the world isn’t a medium. A medium is something like this interview,  where I’m connecting to you and there’s a video Skype channel between us.  Whereas AR is more about spatial 3-D,  about 3-dimensional impositions.  Pieces of media: sound, vision, information visualization, tags, floating tags, air tags, icons, arrows, warning signs, warning sounds, tactility, whatever, being brought into the environment around us.

That’s why it’s properly called “augmented reality” instead of just augmented media.   If you call your work “augmented media,” you’re really in trouble. Because if it’s all about augmenting somebody else’s media, why doesn’t that medium just buy you, and augment their own selves?    If you think that way, instead of augmenting the world, you’ll just be a modest little plug-in for old-school media.

The World as the Platform

Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Microsoft, Santa Clara, are2010, photo from Chris Cameron’s Flickr stream

Tish Shute: Yes, which is why Blaise so generously gave the technical underpinning  for augmenting reality in his tech talk – about the trellis and the grapes,  he really explained how the world can become a platform for augmented reality.

Bruce Sterling: I wish I could have seen that. I did not see Blaise’s speech.

Tish Shute: We’re going to put the videos up in better quality.  People in the front row have put it up on the web already.  He really went into some of the challenges of mapping for augmented reality.

Bruce Sterling: His visual-mapping technique is important.  Registration is super important for AR.

Tish Shute: I think it was a really generous talk actually because he went step by step on how we will do this.

Bruce Sterling: I rather imagine that Microsoft has patented those steps.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes, I guess so!

Bruce Sterling: I could be wrong. Maybe they’ll open-source it. You never know.

Tish Shute: You never know. Because the world as a platform isn’t something one company can own, or go it on their own to exploit.

Bruce Sterling: I expect there to be a thorny path, but sometimes I’m surprised. Sometimes people really do try to fertilize the tech field in the hope of getting a good corn crop before they start fighting.

Tish Shute: We’ll I keep hearing that we may even see the unlikely marriage of Apple and Microsoft  – maybe wishful thinking, but there are motivations beyond AR for this unlikely match, and certainly between them these titans have what it takes to realize the grand visions of AR ? [laughs] But who knows…

Bruce Sterling: Well, yeah, it depends on where the thing catches fire.

Tish Shute: Yes. You mean whether AR catches fire in the form of  AR and mapping..

Bruce Sterling: It’s hard to say, but I’m convinced now that there’s more going on than I once thought. I thought that Bruno Uzzan made a very good speech for his company when he talked about how he worked on AR for eleven years.  Eleven years is no flash in the pan.   He has his long list of clients and successful applications. I thought he was right in his impatience with the press for not catching on. It’s gone on for quite awhile. The mere fact that you’re not aware of it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

The Illusive AR eyewear

My are2010co-chair, Ori Inbar, CEO and co-founder of the hottest new AR game development start-up, Ogmento, donning his goggles to open are2010 – picture from Chris Cameron’s Flickr stream

Tish Shute: Yes. So, the other theme you brought up in your opening keynote and I would be interested to know if anything you saw at are2010 changed your view is the illusive AR eyewear, and  if we actually got AR Goggles that worked they would bring AR’s gothic sister, VR, back from the grave right? [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: It took quite a lot of work, but we pulled together a six-company HMD panel, right?

Bruce Sterling: Yeah. I was impressed to see so many of them there.  And I was chagrined to see how prototype-like all their gadgets were. But that doesn’t surprise me, because if any of those head-mounts were remotely working, they would be hyped out the wazoo. Everybody’s been waiting for them and hoping for the best. They’re obviously not ready for prime time. [laughs] Maybe in certain limited applications. Like maybe a diving mask. [laughs]

Tish Shute: No, I think what was nice though they got inspired and they all got together on the last day. I saw them having a meeting about standards. They got inspired to actually work together.

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, well, unless they’re going to invent mechanical eyeballs that those machines can fit onto, it’s going to be tough. OK, I’m a skeptic, but I’m prepared to be surprised. I’m also a skeptic in Artificial Intelligence, but as soon as they bring me an AI that can write a decent novel, I’m going to get it and review that book. [laughs]

Tish Shute: It’s interesting. Re AI, I’m totally in agreement with you. In terms of the way computers turned out, it wasn’t AI per se that they turned out to be good for, not in the way everyone had dreamed of it, rather it was the harvesting of human intelligence that turned out to be the big thing. But what is interesting is that despite all of that, AI or machine learning, as it is now called, permeates our whole society now from the stock market to how many businesses make many of their decisions.

Bruce Sterling: Well, there’s a lot of so-called collective intelligence.  But Marvin Minsky-style hard AI, no way. Alan Turing-style AI, forget about that.

Tish Shute: Yeah. So, that’s an interesting comparison with the HMDs.

Bruce Sterling: People stretch the definitions.  It’s like, well, my car engine is Artificial Intelligence. Yeah, so is your wall transistor. No, I don’t really think so.

And AR is a similarly big tent. I mean, Uzzan had to admit that he had denied that AR was AR, unless it was using his favorite technology. And he felt embarrassed to be rubbing shoulders with people who put AR into cell phones. And I can understand his feeling there, because, gee whiz, that’s certainly not what AR pioneers had in mind. But he had to admit he’d become more ecumenical about it. Obviously, they’re  there and doing business like gangbusters. You can’t very well ignore success, right?

I had a similar feeling about the goggles. Obviously, the goggles would be great, should they work. But if they did work, I rather think virtual reality would come very strongly to the fore.  You’d see people doing all kinds of elaborate immersive-style stuff.   A truly immersive technology doesn’t need to “augment” much of anything.

Tish Shute: Yeah, you’re right.

Social Augmented Experiences

Bruce Sterling: I think many of the most interesting AI aspects are not personal in the way goggles are.  They’re not about guys walking around with personal tech. They’re about big, communal, social-media experiences, like stage shows, and urban informatics, things where large numbers of people can interact with the same augmented reality. The projection mapping, which I go on and on about. Augmented public spectacles.

Tish Shute: Yeah, projection’s our best example of a social augmented experience right now because we are yet to have an easy way to do networked social augmented experiences easily – but that is of course the thrust of my interest in ARWave [see the slides for my presentation, AR Wave:  Federation, Game Dynamics, Semantic Search, Mobile Social Communications here].

Bruce Sterling: I think of Edison’s early days, when he wanted to sell movies to people for a nickel a clip.  You had to bend over and put your eyes on this visor and turn this crank. That coin-op device was easy for Edison to monetize, as opposed to getting a bunch of people to sit in theater seats. But people laugh at movies when they’re together in the seats.   Cinema is a more social, involving experience in a crowd situation.

Tish Shute: But it started with them, didn’t it, Hollywood – the movie biz? Basically Nickelodeons, right?

Bruce Sterling: That’s right. They were Nickelodeons. They were a lot like the goggles because they isolated the user.

Tish Shute: Yeah, that’s a really important point that the goggles are not Nirvana because of this question of whether they actually detract from the social augmented experience and blended realities, by drawing us into VR experiences?

Bruce Sterling: I’m tempted to claim that they’re more a VR technology than an AR technology.

Tish Shute: That’s a very interesting point because…

[thunder]

Tish Shute: Wow! What was that?

Bruce Sterling: Thunder storm.

Tish Shute: Oh, my God, how very Gothic! [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: It can get pretty loud up here in the mountains.

Tish Shute: Oh, you live in the mountains, better still!

Bruce Sterling:  Torino is in the foothills. This is Piemonte. So the Apennines are over there. The Alps are over here. We do get some rather spectacularly unstable weather.

Tish Shute: It sounded like a bomb to my NYC ears. [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, it didn’t hit the building, but it was maybe half a kilometer away. I saw the flash.

Tish Shute: Oh, you did?   Well, I hope you don’t lose your power midstream here.    I was really happy to hear of that connection between Rudy Rucker and Layar  [Rudy was touched when Maarten Lens-FizgGerald from Layar said that he met the Layar co-founder at a Rudy Rucker lecture].

Bruce Sterling: That was very fun, yes.

Tish Shute: Wasn’t that wonderful? What was that experience like going around the conference with Rudy?

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, Rudy’s very into graphics. He’s a mathematician, so he understands the underpinnings of this stuff. But he’s a skeptic. He thinks they’re kid toys. He’s not a gamer. He’s a good old-fashioned computer-science hacker. So he wanted to tell me all about his new eighth-order, fifth-dimensional fractals. He showed me a great many of them. They’re psychedelic. Rudy’s fractals are considerably trippier than most apps that help you find a barber or a train station. [laughs] Rudy really is a visionary. He’s into some very weird stuff.

Gamer Guys at are2010

Brad Foxhoven, Chief Marketing Officer, Co-Founder, Ogmento at are2010

Tish Shute: At are2010 there was a lot of discussion about how game dynamics and AR are going to intersect, right? Anything that you saw of interest there?

Bruce Sterling: Well, obviously, there are gamer guys there. Ori’s a gamer. The gamer guys are getting some money. The big buzz right now in gaming is, of course, social gaming.  Farmville has kicked everybody’s ass because it’s not even a game and yet it has more users than the entire gaming industry.

Tish Shute: I know, right! [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Obviously that’s kind of humiliating. For a long time, I’ve seen people trying to do giant multiuser games on cell phones. It’s difficult to do because the interface on cell phones is crap, right? People aren’t going to run around responding to SMSs.

I can imagine people running around with little Wii-style bats that have audio and visuals on them. It makes a very large native AR game seem more plausible.

Tish Shute: Yes. that would be cool!

Bruce Sterling: Again, it’s not very gamelike to use those little fiduciary markers.

Tish Shute: No.

Bruce Sterling: Moving little cardboard chips, around like with card games…. It would be pretty easy to set up a little AR chess game.  Star Trek style hologram chess pieces,  and so forth. But it’s just cumbersome.

Tish Shute: And also, from what we’ve seen from things like Foursquare, the proximity based social gaming doesn’t have to offer very much [a crown badge, a mayorship] to get some mind share.. the social is the primary game dynamic…

Bruce Sterling:  I’ve seen a lot of different philosophies of gaming over the years. Who’s to say that Second Life doesn’t have the best idea? They built a little scene and then slammed their gate shut behind them.  But at least they’ve got a really nicely-paying little cult stuck in there. It’s different. And it’s manageable and it’s really theirs, theirs, theirs.  They don’t have to call in outside experts to try and run the monster.   They haven’t blown it up to the scale of Yahoo! where they’ve lost control of the enterprise, and gone into a tailspin of management overhead. Second Life has a very intense, almost a cultish atmosphere among the player-slash-developers.

Tish Shute: One thing that helped them was the thing they were always criticized, that the barrier of entry was so high. But once they got people they never left, right?

Bruce Sterling:  That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.

Tish Shute: One of the best features!

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, it’s like being in Mensa. Why don’t you lower your barriers to entry and get in some interesting stupid people?

Tish Shute: [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: In Mensa, we’d rather sit here making puns about neutrinos and fourth-order quadratic equations. [laughs] OK, that’s a business model, if that’s what you want.

The Man With the X-Ray Eyes!

Jesse Schell’s during his keynote, “Seeing,” at are2010, picture from Chris Cameron’s Flickr stream

Tish Shute: Ok!  Now to unpack the man with the x-ray eyes idea, Jesse Schell’s keynote theme.  This is a root metaphor for AR – making the invisible visible, seeing through walls. To me. I think you kind of wrote the book on this because all my ideas on what radical transparency might be come from you – your idea of Amazon.org is key to how I understand this..

Bruce Sterling: Oh, really? That’s funny.   I was touched that Jesse brought up that famous Corman film, because I was a judge in a fantasy film conference in Trieste earlier this year.  And Roger Corman was there.  He was the guest of honor.   “X: the Man with the X-ray Eyes” was one of the films shown during the conference, and I saw it.  I even had dinner with Roger Corman.  I had never met him before, so that was quite amusing.  The difficulty with a film of that kind is that what we science fiction writers call a “House of Cards Ending.”  In that story structure,  you ramp the thing up until the protagonist sees God, and then he has to be destroyed by the falling pillars of the temple.  That’s a classic science fiction structure:  like Frankenstein.  For the sake of the drama, Corman evades the issue of what’s really going on. For instance, let’s just suppose “the Man with the X-ray eyes” is not in fact a psychopath.  Let’s say he gets a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, and he acts like a real scientist, not a stock B-movie “mad scientist.” So he has, like, backup guys, and some placebos, and a large group of people to test it on, trusted colleagues, and so forth.  You wouldn’t get any of that movie’s wild activity out of that.  What you would get is like a 5% improvement to people’s vision.

Then, in a year, there would be a 10% improvement in people’s vision.  There would be a  classic industrial story.  A rising star, you know, a cash cow.   Real tech isn’t done by a single guy as a divine curse.  It’s created by classic  tech startup culture.  So a runaway technology really behaves in the way that personal computers do.

Tish Shute: The things that get me all Utopian and happy about this are the ideas like those you first outlined with the notion of Amazon.org.

Bruce Sterling:  It would be easy to do an entirely different kind of film than “Man with the X-ray Eyes.”  Something much less B movie,  much less pat.  I mean, at the end of the film,  he destroys his own hardware and blinds himself.  Why?  For what rational reason would he do that?  Why doesn’t anybody else know the big secret of what he’s doing?  Why aren’t there Koreans doing it?  Why aren’t there Austrians doing it?  Why aren’t there Italians doing it?  Why?  AR doesn’t behave like that.  It’s not one lone guy with magic eye drops.  It’s entire teams of people that have been working on stuff for 17 years.  They all approach it in different ways.

Now, they are going to get scandals in AR.  I can guarantee you that.  They are going to get into  hot water eventually.  At least some people will surely come out and accuse them of being Roger Corman B movie monsters.  But unless they accidentally discover atomic fission or destroy the Gulf of Mexico with an oil spill [laughs], I don’t think they’re going to be particularly badly off!   The trouble I imagine  for AR people is very typical new media trouble.  It’s like movies being accused of corrupting our morals, or comic books being accused of leading to violence, or Google being accused of making us stupid and warping our brains.

I’m not an alarmist in that sense, but at least I’m concerned about real threats.  Roger Corman is a B-movie director who’s trying to sew up his lost plot ends by destroying his hero and his hardware. That’s not very plausible. It’s a nice science fiction movie device, but technology isn’t a movie.

Tish Shute: Yes. Well, the other thing that you always remind us of with AR is not to be saying it’s going to be this glorious moment when it’s no longer gimmickey, no longer pop culture. You always emphasize that’s actually part of what’s good about it.

Bruce Sterling: It’s not an accident that practically everybody in that audience knew about Roger Corman.  Nobody looked surprised; not the Austrians, not the Koreans. They were all like: “Oh, yes! Roger Corman!  Love him!”

Tish Shute: There were so many Rudy Rucker fans. Were you watching Twitter? People like Eric Gradman were succumbing to fanboyz moments..

Bruce Sterling: “Yeah. Rudy Rucker, he’s the best.”

“Rudy Rucker gripping an Augmented Reality shoe” from brucesflickr

Tish Shute: [laughs]  I noticed you inspired him to join Twitter..

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’ve got 8,000 followers and, obviously, a lot of them are Rudy’s fans.  Of course he’s going to be gang-rushed on Twitter. That’s not really any more surprising than two motorcycle stunt guys at the same attraction. And I’m a big fan of his Rudy’s blog.   He’s always got interesting things to say.

Tish Shute: Yes. AR does seem to bring out some of the coolest smartest people!  This morning I had breakfast with Joshua Kauffman in Central Park.  He is an advisor and entrepreneur working on design in the public sphere.  I was feeling rather brain dead and jet lagged.  I told Joshua I was wondering how to get the cottonwool out of my brains for this interview and he suggested,  the All Souls College one-word question interview!  Have you ever heard of that? – although apparently they recently scrapped it.

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’ve heard of All Souls College there in Oxford. What was their interview question?

Tish Shute: They used to use only one word, so they would only give you one word. It’s not a question. Basically, they throw out the word and then you had to spin off from there.

Bruce Sterling: You’re supposed to free-associate on a single word?

Tish Shute: I guess so. I hadn’t heard about it, but Joshua suggested it.

Bruce Sterling:  Well, it’s possible..

Tish Shute: Joshua came up with some good words..

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: We were talking about these proximity-based social work networks like Foursquare and Gowalla and how they may influence the emergence of social augmented experiences.

So Joshua’s suggestion for the first word was “territorialization” e.g. how do these new mobile social experiences like Foursquare,  and the observation that actually rather than breaking down territorialization, which would be a good thing, tend to support territorialization…but perhaps new forms of territorialization?

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, they’re re-intensifying it in a very odd, electronic fashion.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Bruce Sterling: I have noticed that.  It’s not true of stuff like projection mapping or the webcam fiduciary display stuff. But with the handheld stuff, and especially the urban informatic stuff, it really can’t help but take on a local flavor. Layar is like “Augmented Dutch Reality.”

And TonchiDot really is “Augmented Japanese Reality.” It’s hard to imagine a Layar interface going gangbusters at Tokyo.  Whereas the TonchiDot interface, which is very clearly influenced by Anime and cartoon graphics…. Maybe it could find some niche of hipsters in Amsterdam hash bars…

…to be continued in Part 2

The Augmented Reality Event: Bruce Sterling’s keynote from Ori Inbar on Vimeo.

Bruce Sterling’s keynote (aka the prophet of the augmented reality industry) set the bar high on the opening day with a keynote address reminding us all of how awesome it is to be the “world’s first pure play experience designers,”  but also not to forget “whose reality needs to be augmented most,” and “to cut ourselves a space of our own.”

“It’s 9 am in the augmented reality industry…without vision people perish…it’s your chance to build a big pie before you start slicing it up…it’s time for you to get dressed…good luck to you, I’ll be watching you”

Wow! Augmented Reality Event was hotness.  I know, as one of the chairs, it is not like I am a neutral observer.  But, if you were there, and you didn’t pick up on the “warm, affirmative feeling,” as Bruce put it, and the optimism, fun, and cool uber geekery, of are2010, I guess I will have to hear from you in the comments ‘cos the feedback has been incredibly upbeat, so far.

Anyway,  I am still basking in that rare glow of a geekgasm at 9am – the augmented reality industry embracing lovers whose dreams are in still in full flight – no burst bubbles, betrayals, train wrecks, or tragedies in sight yet?  Although Roger Cormanesque horrors were threaded through  Jesse ‘the man with the x-ray specs” Schell’s  closing keynote, “Seeing.”  So keeping watching Ori’s Vimeo stream for Jesse’s keynote  -  it will be up soon and it’s quite a ride!

I leave for England tomorrow to celebrate my mother’s eightieth birthday, so this will be a brief post for now.  But I am looking forward to posting soon a long interview with Bruce Sterling on his experience of are2010.

Bruce Sterling hung out with with Rudy Rucker (see Rudy’s post and pics on are2010 here), attracting fans wherever they went, visiting the expo, going to sessions,  talking generously with all – their table always crowded.  Bruce said he hadn’t had so much fun in a while.  And, apparently, Rudy was touched when Maarten Lens-FizgGerald from Layar said that he met the Layar co-founder at a Rudy Rucker lecture. Awesome!

As Ori says here:

“are 2010 is over. It was a blast.  Many thanks to 400 AR enthusiasts who joined us for 2 days of AR goodness.

Special thanks to our 90 speakers from 40 augmented reality companies, our exhibitors, sponsors, and above all – for Qualcomm.”

People’s slides will be up on the are2010 web site soon. My presentation, AR Wave: Federation, Game Dynamics, and Mobile Social Communications, is already up on slideshare.

You can catch up on some of the highlights of are2010 in Rouli’s linkfest, and check out these pointers he gave to following the event for more.

• Chris Grayson’s twitter account
• Patched Reality’s Patrick O’Shaughnessey and the augmented citizen Dan Romescu are also doing their share on twitter.
• Sophia Parafina ( @spara ) live blogs the event using Google Wave.

I will have a mega post up soon.  But for now here are a few photos that will give you a taste of some of the #are2010 magic.

Bruce gets a t-shirt from tonchidot CEO, Iguchi Takahito ( @iguchi ), after checking out Helen Papagiannis’ AR art

If  an event with Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Jesse Schell and Blaise Aguera y Arcas there wasn’t already enough awesomeness, check out how Sophia Parafina, Locatively, and Patrick O’Shaughnessy of Patched reality got to hang out with Will Wright – hacking the Parrot AR Drone.  And then, when a dead power supply stopped that adventure in its tracks, Will played some of Patrick’s AR games and gave him feedback.  OMG!  Will’s only the most important game designer the whole world.  There is already some videos shot from the front row up of Jesse Schell’s, Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ and Will Wright’s keynotes up, but the hi res versions are coming soon!