ISMAR 2009 -  was an extraordinary mix of  high geek, academic eminence, gungho Dutch Cowboy entrepreneurial spirit, German engineering and industry, brilliant artistry, and invention, all fueled by a sense, and a very active presence in the case of Diamond Sponsor – Qualcomm, that the big technology players are waking up to augmented reality.

In the picture sequence above (click on photos to enlarge),  Noora Guldemond, Metaio, demonstrates Junaio (coming to an iphone near you Nov 2nd) to Dirk Groten, CTO of Layar (top left photo).  One of the nice social features of Junaio is that users can share the 3D augmented scenes they have created.  Noora is demoing this capability to Dirk, and as you can see he cracks up when he sees the  scene Noora has stored on her phone.  Dirk and I both recognize that this cute little dinosaur augmentation (close up above on bottom left) must have been created by Peter Meier, CTO of Metaio, during the Interoperability and Standards workshop earlier that day.  Metaio it seems were discussing standards while enjoying some 3D augmented back chat.

Both Dirk and I were active participants in the workshop too.  But little did we know that Peter Meier had introduced his little 3D dinosaur into our discussion while we diligently, and sometimes heatedly, debated the merits of XMPP, Wave Federation Protocol,  KML, ARML, VRML, X3D, and  more!  The photo I took is on the bottom right of the four pics above. It was probably taken very shortly after Peter’s augmented Junaio scene.  Of course there is no little dinosaur in my pic of  Dirk Groten with Joe Ludwig and Markus Tripp of Mobilizy who were discussing AR standards oblivious to Peter’s virtual pet in our midst.

I must say I had noticed an impish look on Peter Meier’s face (see photo above on the left – Peter is wearing glasses and holding a phone).  And Markus Tripp, of Mobilizy  revealed a little bit of gaming of his own, when he let out that, in part, ARML is a provocation.  But Peter was clearly unfazed and enjoying himself.  Dirk, tasked to summarize our discussion, stalwartly maintained an optimistic but serious tone fitting for a standards discussion:  “There is a willingness to standardize….,” he began (pic above on left – click to enlarge and read text).

But it was a little 3D dinosaur that, perhaps appropriately, had the last laugh. Fitting, as I am not sure whether anything anyone says about AR standards at the moment will hold up.  But, as Ori commented in his great post – an epilogue for ISMAR 2009, the vibe was “Peace and Love” in AR Browser land (although Chetan Damani of Across Air was not in the standards discussion because he attended the UX/content? workshop instead).  But as they say, “all’s fair in love and war.”  And it is my feeling the games have barely begun!  There are many players (virtual pets included) waiting in the wings. I met some at ISMAR, and they are just itching to join the frey.

Ori Inbar, Ogmento and Robert Rice, Neogence Enterprises, both founders of the AR Consortium, made great efforts to set our young industry off on the right foot -  in the  spirit of coopetition (a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition). See Curious Raven for Robert’s conference observations, and Ori’s post on Games Alfresco for more about Mobile Augmented Reality at ISMAR 2009.  The Mobile Augmented Reality Workshops were driven by an indomitable spokesperson for the new AR industry, Christine Perey.  Christine not only helped motivate discussion on the issue of oxygen to the system, i.e. business value, but also she was a very generous connector at the conference.

What’s Next From Augmented Reality’s Top Chefs?

As Ori pointed out, Kent Demaine, oooii (pic above is from the oooii web site), Minority report VFX designer was hanging out at ISMAR 2009 and he came to the panel I was on: “Augmented Reality in Sports,  Entertainment and Advertising.”  We chatted afterwords about instrumented environments and how this is such a key to development interesting augmented experiences.  Also I mentioned how back in the day I was involved in some of the early development of motion control software.  And it was great to hear Kent say they were still finding motion control cool at oooii.  As Ori notes, he is the “guy with the most enviable AR credentials in the world (the guy who designed VFX for minority report),” and oooii is busy and hiring.

One of the highlights of the Arts, Media and Humanities track for me was meeting Jarrell  Pair. He really brought the best out in panelists with his well tuned questions.  The recording of ISMAR was comprehensive and videos should be up next week.  I will post the slides on Ugotrade of my presentation:  “The Next Wave of AR: Shared Augmented Realities and Remix Culture.”.

“Mixed and Augmented Reality: ‘Scary and Wondrous’” – Vernor Vinge

“Imagine an environment where most physical objects know where they are, what they are, and can, (in principle) network with any other object. With this infrastructure, reality becomes its own database.  Multiple consensual virtual environments are possible, each oriented to the needs of its constituency.  If we also have open standards, then bottom-up social networks and even bottom up advertising become possible. Now imagine that in addition to sensors, many of these itsy-bitsy processors are equipped with effectors.  Then the physical world becomes much more like a software construct.  The possibilities are both scary and wondrous.” (Vernor Vinge -  intro to ISMAR 2009)

Vernor Vinge’s short intro to ISMAR 2009 (which can be downloaded with the ISMAR 2009 schedule here) captures the essence of the “Scary and Wondrous” dawn of the age of ubiquitous computing and mixed and augmented reality.  It is definitely worth a moment to download.  The future of augmented and mixed realities, as Vernor Vinge points out, is tied up in a “tension between centralized and distributed computing” that “will continue long into the future.” One of  my fascinations with Wave is that it offers a tantalizing opportunity to explore augmented reality in an open distributed architecture.

At ISMAR, I talked with as many people as possible about the AR Wave project – see my post here for more about Wave enabled AR.  Many people were very enthusiastic to join the AR wave and the only thing I really lacked was about 100 invites to hand out!

“Everything, Everywhere – making visible the invisible”

Some of the areas that I would have liked to see given more attention on at ISMAR were sensor networks, data curation, and user experience.  Not that these areas were entirely neglected with Pattie Maes, MIT as a keynote speaker, and Mark Billinghurst presenting on some fascinating work on social augmented experiences and user experience.  I highly recommend catching up on these and other ISMAR presentations when the videos go up.

And, I was very happy to meet and talk to Sean White whose work at Columbia University is one of my inspirations (for more about Sean’s work see here or click image above):

“the confluence of powerful connected mobile devices, advances in computer vision and sensing, and techniques such as augmented reality (AR) enables exciting new opportunities for interacting with this hidden network of dynamic information and shifts the locus of interaction from the desktop computer to the world around us”

And I had several very interesting conversations  at ISMAR about developing social augmented experiences that connect us to a physical world that is becoming “much more like a software construct” (Vernor Vinge).  Dirk Groten, CTO of Layar mentioned a few interesting projects Layar has up their sleeves, including something  Layar may be cooking up with The RoomWare Project.

The picture above is of RoomWare’s Social RFID Installation for Media Plaza in Utrecht (read more here).

Demos Galore!

In the demo rooms, Noah Zerkin (pic below left) pretty much single handedly carried the AR flag for a growing community of augmented reality Makers and Hackers.  But his presence was much appreciated, and he tirelessly demoed The Zerkin Glove. See the first of what may be several posts from Noah on ISMAR here.

And I got to try out the Vuzix goggles (picture above on right).   This was my first experience playing an AR game that was smart about real world gravity. It’s  “an augmented reality marble game that uses gravity as a game controller” – see Ori Inbar’s write up here.  It was a very compelling experience and I have to say I didn’t really notice the shortcomings of the Vuzix goggles while I was absorbed in the game. And  I turned out to be quite good at the game too. It is intuitive unlike the kind of  rule based games I never have time to learn properly.  But what is so special about this project is the tools that it is built with are open, and available for all, and affordable (see this list on Games Alfresco).

It was a great pleasure to meet Prof. Steven Feiner (picture on below the left) who heads Columbia University’s brilliant AR research team at The Columbia University Graphics and User Interfaces Lab.

Ori Inbar (pic below on right) also spent a lot of time in the demo room showing off Ogmento’s lovely AR learning game that delighted attendees, “Put a Spell: Learn to Spell with Augmented Reality.”

For a round up of  what’s next for augmented reality head mounted displays check out, Games Alfresco here, and Thomas Carpenter’s excellent review of the head mounted displays.

Ori Inbar on Games Alfresco asks is “Microsoft – the new big player to watch?”   “Georg Klein, inventor of PTAM-on-an-iPhone (and the smartest Computer Vision guy on the block)” has joined Microsoft to make Mobile AR.

The picture on the left above shows Georg trying out ARhrrr with Blair MacIntyre.   And on the right Blair is demoing his marker card pack to Senior Vice President of Cypher Entertainment, David Elmekies.  Yes ISMAR was abuzz with demos. See this post from Gail Carmichael for more video demos.

Next Year ISMAR 2010 in Korea!

At the banquet, I managed to find a seat at a table with Sean White (at left in photo above with Christine Perey to his right) and the Columbia University team.  The banquet culminated with the “Past and Future of ISMAR” Panel chaired valiantly by Jay Wright of Qualcomm.  We were asked to offer our input for ISMAR 2010.  I offered up an idea that I have been nurturing for a while now -  to stage a “Green Tech AR Competition.”  Perhaps, I suggested, we could base the competition around a conference (ISMAR 2010 in Korea?) and set up a target rich, instrumented environment for the occassion.  I think the Arduino open hardware community and AR developers have a synergy that is just waiting to be explored!  And, if we add the innovators of data curation to the mix, e.g., Pachube, AMEE, and Path Intelligence…(Markus Tripp left ISMAR to speak on a Web 2.0 Summit panel, “Humans as Sensors,” which also included Path Intelligence, Deborah Estrin on “participatory sensing,” and the brilliant work of Di-Ann Eisnor, Platial, on “Transactional Cartography”).  Anyway a big Green tech AR competition could get people working together across the broad spread of AR terrain on some of the sticky problems of user experience.  And, with a high level of support from Smart Phone companies, HMDs manufacturers and the chip makers we just might come up with some extraordinary magic.

The devil of course will be in the details.  But a competition like this could not only motivate key players to come together in the spirit of coopetition but also be an opportunity to show the world the power of AR to make visible the invisible ecosystems that are so important to the health of our planet.

One of the notable presences at ISMAR 2009 was the Qualcomm team.   Jay Wright’s presentation (an exclusive for ISMAR) not only outlined AR for 2012, but Jay also talked about some “close to the metal” innovation that we will see from Qualcomm very, very soon!  I had some time in the press room with Jay and his team prompted by MoMo’s Yuri van Geest.  When I twittered about Qualcomm’s presentation at ISMAR, Yuri replied:

vangeest “@tishshute: good stuff, hopefully you will integrate the neat new solutions and ideas in your talk in November ;)”

I will be presenting at MoMo #13 on AR, open AR, future of AR and GeoWeb,  and hopefully will bring some good news from Qualcomm too.  Anyway Jay seemed to like the idea of a Green Tech AR Competition, even though I did stress that I thought it needed some serious sponsorship and BIG prizes.

Where’s the beef? Tracking and Mapping at ISMAR 2009

On the flight from NYC to Orlando and ISMAR’o9 I dozed (I had been up late preparing my presentation) and I watched the Dew Tour Pro Skateboard competition and Top Chef on the Food Channel.  In this particular episode of Top Chef, the aspiring chefs were all given a brown bag of ingredients by an already famous chef who then judged whether the contenders managed to make a delicious meal with their allotment which was notably lacking in key ingredients of haute cusine.

This metaphor of  trying to cook up a great meal while perhaps missing the staples is apt for the current early stage of commercial augmented reality.  And when I arrived in Orlando, not only were the Dew Tour pro skateboarders staying at the same hotel as ISMAR, but ISMAR itself felt remarkably like an Augmented Reality Top Chef Coopetition.

Much of ISMAR was dedicated to the task of  providing the meat and potatoes of Augmented Reality, solutions to mobile tracking, mapping and registration, particularly in the Science and Technology track.

Industrial and Military Augmented reality solutions I found out, typically, solve the tracking problems by using fixed mounts which clearly wouldn’t translate well into the AR everywhere with everything mobile consumer culture expects.

In the picture on the left Fabian Doil stands by the VW engine that provided some of the outdoor targets for the ISMAR tracking competition.  On the right is a picture from the VW’s presentation on their research and development of AR.

I followed the tracking contest, organized by Daniel Pustka and Fabian Doil of Volkswagen, quite closely. And I learned a lot in the process. While  it is clear there has been progress in AR mapping and tracking, we still have a ways to go.

But hanging around the Tracking Competition was a good way to find out the state of play of this crucial part of the AR dream.  For example,  a little tidbit I learned is that Michael Goesele who has been reconstructing “high-quality geometry models from images collected from the internet (so called community photo collections, CPC)” is soon to be at the Institut Graphische Datenverarbeitung where top contenders in the tracking contest – Harald Wuest  and Folker Weintipper (in the foreground of the photo at the left and right respectively) are also to be found. [update Harold and Folker were the winning team see here for details of scoring and results!] Otto Korkalo and Tuomas Kantonen of VTT, Finland, Augmented Reality team are in the background. They have been working on the joint IBM, Nokia and VTT project that brings, Avatars and People Together for Virtual Meetings in Physical Spaces.

The picture on the right is another team that were doing very well. If my notes serve me well (and please forgive me if they don’t. I came back with my card wallet overflowing!) the photo on the right showsChristian Waechter (on the left) and Peter Keitler (on the right) of the Technische Universitat Munchen.

Germany is certainly leading the way in industrial AR. And I learned how small businesses like Metaio get to work with top research institutions and big companies like VW, thanks to very strong German funding program for AR and VR. The current iteration of a series of funding programs is  called Avilus.  Avilus  is putting 42 million Euros into AR and VR this year alone (click on the slide below to see more about Avilus ).

I wish we had the equivalent of Avilus here in the US.  But there is no equivalent to Arvilus for AR here, and  no AR is  being developed by the US car industry either it seems.  But look at the slide above to get a taste of some of the cool stuff Metaio and other small AR and VR businesses do for VW through the Avilus project.

I also got to meet many people from one of the world’s most important AR hubs -  The Department of Informatics, Technische Universitat Munchen, including Prof. Gudren Klinker on the far right in pic above.  And from left to right, Fabian Doil (VW, co-organizer of contest), Sebastian Lieberknecht , Selim Ben Himane (Metaio), Tobias Eble (Metaio).  Prof. Klinker is the engine behind much of German innovation in AR.

Metaio was one of the few teams to rely mainly on markerless tracking which in this contest was very challenging because of the very different light conditions (see pics below) between the windowless interior and dazzling Florida sunshine outside (pic on the right shows targets under ideal lighting conditions).  Many people in the US may be  familiar with Metaio’s consumer applications, like Junaio,  but thanks to Germany’s efforts to nurture augmented and virtual reality they are also respected software developers in industrial AR.  And I suspect that Metaio will spearhead markeless tracking in consumer AR too.

This post as usual has already expanded to something much longer than I originally attended – pretty typical for me! There is much I have not been able to cover including some of the interesting contributions by augmented reality artists at ISMAR – again I recommend the upcoming videos.

But I cannot end without a hat tip to, Oriel, Nate et al. who won the best student paper award for AR Sketch – again please see Games Alfresco for more on this (pic below from Games Alfresco). AR Sketch, Ori notes, is featured “in our top post and popular video.” And

“Their work is revolutionizing the AR world by avoiding the need to print markers – or any images whatsoever.”

It is now nearly two weeks since the Google Wave preview launch and I am happy to say we have some AR Wave news. The diagram above shows Thomas Wrobel’s basic concept for a distributed, multi-user, open augmented reality framework based on the Google Wave Federation Protocol and servers (click on the image to see the dynamic annotated sketch or here).

Even in the short time we have had to explore Wave, some very exciting possibilities are becoming clear. Thomas puts some of the virtues of Wave as an AR enabler succinctly when he writes:

“Wave allows the advantages of both real-time communication, as well as the advantages of persistent hosting of data. It is both like IRC, and like a Wiki. It allows anyone to create a Wave, and share it with anyone else. It allows Waves to be edited at the same time by many people, or used as a private reference for just one person.

These are all incredibly useful properties for any AR experience, more so Wave is open. Anyone can make a server or client for Wave. Better yet, these servers will exchange data with each other, providing a seamless world for the user…..a single login will let you browse the whole world of public waves, regardless of who’s providing or hosting the data. Wave is also quite scalable and secure…data is only exchanged when necessary, and will stay local if no one else needs to view it.

Wave allows bots to run on it…allowing blips in a waves to be automatically updated, created or destroyed based on any criteria the coders choose. Wave even allows the playback of all edits since the wave was created.

For all these reasons and more, Wave makes a great platform for AR.”

There will be much more coming soon on Wave enabled AR because the Google Wave invites have begun to flow out to a wider community now. This week, many of our small ad-hoc group looking at the development challenges and implications of Google Wave for AR actually got into Wave for the first time.

Many thanks to all the people who have contributed to this discussion so far including: Thomas Wrobel, Thomas K. Carpenter, Jeremy Hight, Joe Lamantia, Clayton Lilly, Gene Becker and many others.

We will be setting up some public AR Framework Development Waves this week.  If you have any trouble finding them, or adding yourself to it, please add Thomas and I to your contact list.  I am tishshute@googlewave.com  Thomas is darkflame@googlewave.com  The first two are currently called:

AR Wave: Augmented Reality Wave Framework Development (developer forum)

AR Wave: Augmented Reality Wave Development (for general discussion)

The discussion so far has been in two areas. On the one hand, it is gear-heady and focused on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, code, development challenges, and interfacing to mobile, while on the other hand people have been looking at use cases and questions of user experience.

Distributed, “shared augmented realities,” or “social augmented experiences” – that not only allow mashups, & multisource data flows, but dynamic overlays (not limited to 3d), created by users, linked to location/place/time, and distributed to other users who wish to engage with the experience by viewing and co-creating elements for their own goals and benefit – are something very new for us to think about.

As, Joe Lamantia, puts it, now:

“there’s a feedback loop between which interactions are made easy by any given combo of device;/ hardware / software / connectivity, and the ways that people really work in real life (without any mediation / permeation by tech).”

Joe Lamantia whose term, “social augmented experiences” I borrow for this post title, has done some thinking about “concepts and models for understanding and contributing to shared augmented experiences, such as the social scales for interaction, and the challenges attendant to designing such interactions.” Check out Joe Lamantia’s blog for more on this later this week.

It is very helpful, as Joe points out, to shift the focus  back and forth between the experience and the medium.

It is super exciting to have clear evidence that shared augmented realities are no longer merely possible, but highly probable and actually do-able now.

I should  be absolutely clear about what Google Wave does to enable AR because obviously Wave plays no role in solving image recognition and tracking/registrations issues.  But, for example, Wave protocols and servers do provide a means to exchange, edit, and read data, and that enables distributed, social augmented realities.

Thomas explains how the newly named “AR Blip” works as:

“An AR Blip is simply a Blip in wave containing AR data. Typically this would be the positional and url data telling a AR browser to position a 3d object at a location in space.

In more generic terms, an AR Blip allows data of various forms (meshes,text,sound) to be given a real-world position.”

I have mentioned in other posts (here and here) that Wave can be used for AR as precise or as loose as the current generation devices can handle. And as the hardware and software for the kind of AR that can put media out in the world to truly immerse you in a mixed space, the framework  should  be able to handle this too.

(a note on the Wave playback feature – this opens up a whole new world of possibilities.  Check out this post on some of the implications of playback for writing!)

The use cases we have been coming up with are too numerous to go into in detail this post.  The open nature of an AR framework/Wave standard will lead to many new applications we have barely begun to imagine.  As Thomas points out, different client software can be made for browsing, potentially allowing for various specialist browsers, as well as more generic ones for typical  use. The multitudes of different kinds of data in/output that could be integrated in an open AR framework as it evolves are mind boggling.

But, for now, some  obvious use cases do come to mind:
eg.

- Historical environmental overlays showing how a city used to be/and how this vision may be constructed differently by different communities

- Proposed building work showing future changes to a structure/and the negotiations of this future (both the public and professionals could submit their own comments to the plans in context), seeing pipes, cables and other invisible elements that can help builders and engineers collaborate and do their work.

- Skinning the world with interactive fantasies

I asked Thomas to help people understand how Wave enables new interactions to data by explaining how Wave could enable citi sensing and citizen sensing projects (e.g. this one being pioneered by Griswold):

“Sensors, both mobile and static could contribute environmental data into city overlays;

Having these invisible aspects of the world made visible would create ways to improve sustainability, social equity, urban management, energy efficiency, public health, and allow communities to understand and become active participants in the ecosystems and infrastructure of their neighborhoods.

The key is reflecting this  kind of data back to people “making it not back story but fore story,” right where we are, right where it happens, as well as having it available for analysis.

As well as  creating new opportunities to interact/respond to/and enhance data, making visible the invisible as Natalie Jeremijenko’s work on Amphibious Architecture and Usman Haque’s project Natural Fuse shows, can also create new connections/understandings between humans and the non human’s that share our world, e.g. fish, plants, waterways.

At a more prosaic level  potential buyers of property could see more clearly what they are buying, city planners could see better what needs to be worked on, and environmental researchers could see more clearly the impact people are having on an area.

Also Wave can provide some of the framework necessary to begin to begin to address tricky problems of privacy. Sensitive data can be stored on private waves, e.g. medical data for doctors and researchers, but the analysis of the  data could still be of benefit to all, e.g., if it’s tied disease occurrences to locations and  relationships between the environmental data and health were…quite literally…made visible.

“The publication of energy consumption and making it visible as overlays, could help influence the public into supporting more energy efficiency companies and businesses. It could also help citizens to try to keep their own energy usage down, to try to keep their street in “the green.”

Thomas notes:

“With all of the above, it becomes fairly trivial to write persistent Wave-bots that automatically send notice when certain criteria are met (pollutants over a certain level, for example). On publicly readable waves, anyone can use the data in their local computers, process it, and contribute results back on a new wave. Alternatively, persistent remote severs could run Cron jobs, or other automated processing, using services such as App Engine to run wave robots.

All these possibilities become “free” when using Wave as a platform for geographically tied data.”

But of course this is just the beginning!

Recently, I talked at length with Jeremy Hight who has been thinking about, designing and creating shared augmented realities, that anticipate the kind of dynamic, real time, large scale architecture we now have available through Wave,  for quite some time now.   This is exciting stuff.

Modulated Mapping: Talking with Jeremy Hight about Layers, Channels and  Social Augmented Experiences

image from Volume Magazine (Hight/Wehby)

Tish Shute: I know you have been involved in locative media from its early days. Perhaps we can talk about how AR continues the locative media journey?

Blair MacIntyre gave me this distinction, recently: “AR is about systems that put media out in the world, and immerse you in a mixed space.  Even the current “not really registered” mobile phone AR systems are still “sort of” AR (e.g., Layar, etc).

Locative media/ubicomp/etc are very different, in that they tend to display media on a device (phone screen) that is relevant to your context, but does not attempt to merge it with the world.
The difference is significant, and making it clear helps people think about what they do and what they want to do, with their work. The locative media space though points toward future AR systems (when the technology catches up!).”

Jeremy Hight: The need is to finish the arc that locative media and early AR have started and to now truly return to the map itself, but as an internet of data, interactivity, channels of data , end user options like analog machines once were but in high end tools, a smart AI-ish ability for it to cull data for the user, and to allow social networking to be in real world places on the map both in building augmentation and in using and appreciating it..not hacks..which have their place…but a rhizome, a branched system with shared root,end user adjustable and variable..this is the key.

This takes AR and mapping and makes a possible world of channels in space and this eventually can be a kind of net we see in our field of vision with a selected percentage of visual field and placement so a geo-spatial net, a local to world wide fusion of lm into a tool and educational tool

VR[virtual reality] has greatly advanced, but in nodes as it has limitations…LM [locative media] is the same…AR [augmented reality] is the way.. it now has locative elements and aspects of VR integrated into its functionality and nodes…it is the best option with all of these elements, greater hybridity and data level potential a well as end user and community sourcing potential

I wrote an essay for Archis’ Volume, the architecture magazine on a near future sense of some of this….a visual net on the lens like ar but with smart objects and social networking and dissent.

I also wrote of these things for immersive graphic design, spatially aware museum  augmentation, education through ar and lm and nod to the base interface of eye to cerebral cortex in layered and malleable augmentation in my essay “Immersive Sight” a few years back

image [above] is simple illustration of a possible example on a screen or in front of eye where in a mondrian show..the graphic design of information actually builds as one moves

(key is calibrated spatial intervals and related layers of further augmentation which is logical due to location and proximity)

from immersive sight on immersive graphic design: “The design can work with this in a way that creates an interactive supplemental set of information that is malleable, shifts based on location, builds and peels away as one moves closer to a work and plays with the forms of the works and the elements of the space itself. The sequence can contain many different elements and their interplay (both in the field of vision and in terms of context and layers of information). This is the model of sections of augmentation turning on and off at key points as individual spatial and concepts moments and nodes.

Another interesting possibility is that individual points of augmentation don’t turn off, but instead are designed to build as one moves in a direction toward a specific part of the exhibit. The design can work in a sequence both content wise and visually in terms of a delay powered compositional development and style in which each discreet layer of text and image does not fade out, but builds on each other into a final composition. This can form paintings similar to Mondrian perhaps if it is a show of similar works of that era or it can form something much more metaphorical and open interpretation of the space and content but utilizing a sense of emergence spatially in terms of the composition (pieces laid bare until final approach for effect).

Each section will be well designed, but they build in layers as one moves until finally forming the final composition both visually and in terms of scope of information or building immediacy. The effect can be akin to taking a painting and slicing it into onion skin layers laid out in the air at intervals, each the same dimensions, but only one section compositionally of the greater whole. This has many semiotic applications beyond its potential aesthetically and as spatialized information possessing a sense of inter-relationship as one moves.“

Tish Shute: One of the things I found very inspiring when I read your papers was that your ideas are not all dependent on a model of AR that would necessarily require goggles, back packs and lots of CPU/GPU – not that that wouldn’t be nice, but that even using “magic lens” AR of the kind smart phones has enabled in an open distributed framework would open up a lot of new possibilities for what you call modulated mapping wouldn’t it?  What kind of social augmented realities might be enabled by a distributed infrastructure like this [AR Wave]?

Jeremy Hight: right….I see that as wayyy down the road…most important is the one you talk about as it is more immediate and thus more essential and needed. Eventually the goggles will be like a contact lens and a deep immersive ar version of  this will come, that to me is certain, but a ways down the road.  An incredible amount is possible now, and this is a more pragmatic move as opposed to the more theoretical of what is a few steps from here. Thus it is more important and essential now. Tools like Google Wave are taking what even 2 years ago was more theoretical discussions of what may be and instead introducing key elements to a more immediate, powerful, flexible level of augmentation. What have been hacks and isolated elements are to be integrated and social networking, task completion, shared tools and graphics building and geo-location.

Tish Shute: I think some people question what augmented reality has to bring to the continuum of location based experiences that other forms of interface/mapping do not?

Jeremy Hight: right….and the schism between its commercial flat self and tests with physics etc and in between …there are a lot of unfortunate assumptions it seems as to where ar and lm cross and how ar can be many things beyond deep immersion or the opposite pole of a hockey puck having a magic purple line etc….like lm is seen as either car directions or situationist experiments with deep data…..the progression to me is deeply organic….and now augmentation can be more malleable, variable and end user controlled.

Tish Shute: Yes, it is really exciting time for AR.  Historically AR research has gone after the hard problems of image recognition, tracking and registration because we have had available to us these dynamic, real time, large scale architectures like Wave available (until now!),  so less work has been done on exploring the possibilities for distributed AR fully integrated with the internet and WWW hasn’t it?

A distributed augmented reality framework such as we have envisaged on Wave would  allow people to see many layers from many different people at the same time. ‬And this kind of model has been part of your thinking and fundamental to your work for a while, hasn’t it? But it is a very new idea to most people to think about collaboratively editing layers on the world, and to be able to view  augmented space through channels and networked communities?  Could you explain some of the ways you have explored these ideas and how they could be explored further now to create meaningful experiences for people?

Jeremy Hight: right..exactly…modulated mapping to me can be an amazing tool for students…back end searching data visualizations and augmentations based on their needs…while they do something else on their computer or iphone…that can be amazing..and not deep immersive..The map can be active, malleable, open source fed, and even, in a sense, intelligent and able to adapt. The possibility also exists for this map to have a function that based on key words will search databases on-line to find maps, animations, histories and stories etc to place within it for your study and engagement. The map is thus a platform and yet is active. Community is possible as people can communicate graphically in works placed on the map and in building mode in the tool. All the tropes of locative media are to be in a mapping system of channels of augmentation and a spatial net. The software by design will allow development on the map and communication like programs such as second life but in mapping itself.

image from Parsons Journal of Information Mapping Volume 2 (Hight/Wehby)

I wrote an essay a few years ago for the Sarai reader questioning the traditional map and its semiotics and need to reconsider – then did work looking into it and what those dynamics were and they got into 2 group shows in museums in Russia…so it actually was my arc toward modulated mapping…an interesting way to it! But yes the map itself..this is a huge area of potential and non screen based alone navigation etc. I see now that my 2 dozen or so essays in lm,ar, interface design and augmentation have all also been leading in this direction for about 10 years now

Tish Shute: I  love immersive visualization but can we “return to the map – the internet of data” as you mentioned earlier and produce interesting augmentation experiences that go beyond locative media’s device display mode without having the goggles, for example, through the magic lens of or smart phones?

Jeremy Hight: yes, absolutely.  the map in the older paradigm is an artifice born often of war and border dispute and not of the earth itself and its processes…the new mapping like google maps is malleable, can be open source, can read spaces and can be layers of info in the related space not plucked from it as in the past..this is amazing. the old map also was born of false semiotics/semantics like “discovery of new lands” or ” pioneer”  while the places were there already and names often were of empire…now this is no longer the case

Tish Shute: So geoAR is an a better way to express a new social relationship to mapping? And how does this fit into the evolving arc of locative media that evolves into augmented reality?

Jeremy Hight:…early lm was mostly geocaching and drawing with gps..it took new paradigms to invigorate the field  a lot of folks focus on tools and what already is, cross pollination can ground ideas that are more radical…a metaphor in a sense to place what can be in a familiar context.

Tish Shute: one of the great disappointments in VR has been its isolation from networked computing and also, up to now, augmented reality – to achieve an immersive experience with  tight registration of media/graphics have to create separate system isolated from the internet and power of the web.

Jeremy Hight: yes….this will change. vr is to me an island but ar takes a part of it and shifts the paradigm and new things open this way. Do you know the project “life clipper”? friends of mine..doing interesting things..they are a clear bridge betwen lm and ar….and from vr

in ar augmentation and what is being augmented become fused or in collision or in complex interactions as a means to a larger contextualization and exploration of what is being augmented..this is true in immersive or non ar….huge potential

vr is a space, now can be surgery which is amazing. but not layered interaction, thus an island and graphic iconography on a location can use symbolic icons which opens up even more layers (graphic designer/information designer in me talking there I suppose..)

Tish Shute: Yes !  talk to me more about layers and channels I think this is one of the most interesting questions for me  in augmented reality at the moment – what can we do with layers and channels and the new possibilities on connections between people and environments that these can create?

The ability for anyone to post something is critical to the distributed idea but one of the reasons I am so excited by Google Wave is I am fascinated by the playback function. How do you think this will enable new forms of collaborative locative narratives (nice post on Wave playback here ).

Jeremy Hight: We are in an age of cartographic awareness unseen in hundreds of years. When was the last time that new mapping tools were sold in chain stores and installed in most vehicles? When was the last time that also the augmentation of maps was done by millions (Google map hacks, etc)? The ubiquitous gps maps run in automobiles while people post pictures and graphic pins to denote specific places on on-line maps.

The need is for a tool that combines all of these new elements into an open source, intuitive layered and rhizomatic map that is porous (like pumice, organic in form yet with “breathing room” ),ventilated (i.e: adjustable, a flow in and out), and open (open source,open access,open spatialized dialog).

I wrote of this in my essay “Revising the Map: Modulated Mapping and the Spatial Interface .”( http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/02/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf )

image from Parsons Journal of Information Mapping (Hight/Wehby)

Tish Shute: One mapping project I really like is Mannahatta.  How could distributed AR contribute to a project like Mannahatta?

Jeremy Hight: that is a good example..imagine taking manhattan and having channels of options to overlay, that being an excellent option, and imagine being able to even run a few at once with deliniating icons..you can augment a space with history, data, erasure, narrative, scientific analysis, time line of architecture, infrastructure, archaeological record etc….endless possibilities, and this agitates place and place on a map into an active field of information with end user control…and open options for new layers

Tish Shute: and do you think we could do interesting things with AR on a project like Mannahatta even with the current mediating devices we have available – i.e. our smart phones as obviously the rich pc experience of Mannhatta has built for it’s web interface would not be available as AR at this point?

Jeremy Hight: yes….k.i.s.s right?   these projects do not have to only be immersive and graphic intensive……take how people upload photos onto google maps….just make that on a menu of options, there are some pretty cool hacks already..
…options is key, a space can have a community as well, building on it in software, and others navigating it, i see it near future and down the road..always have with ar really

image from Volume Magazine (Hight/Wehby)

Jeremy Hight: and yes, a lot of people focus on ar as its limitations and processing power needs as a major road block

Tish Shute: so do you see AR on smart phones adding any value to a project like Mannahatta?

Jeremy Hight: yes…that it can be integrated into other similar works and even disparate but cloud linked ones…so a place can be “read” in diff ways on the iphone….beyond its map location, and more can be possible if you are there…others away, so it becomes channels of augmentation

Tish Shute: AR like locative media puts who you are, where you are, what you are doing, what is around you center stage in online experience but it also “puts media out in the world” – people I think understand this well as a single user experience but we are only just beginning to think about how this will manifest as a social experience – could explain more about modulated mapping as an experience of social augmentation?

Jeremy Hight: Modulated Mapping is a tool that will allow channels to be run along the map itself. This will allow one to view different icons and augmentations both as systems on the map and in deeper layers of information (photos, videos, animations,  visualizations, etc) that can be turned on and off as desired. The different layers of icons and data may be history, dissent, artworks, spatialized narratives, and annotations developed that are communally based on shared interests, placed spatially and far beyond. The use of chat functionality in text or audio will be open in building mode and in mapping navigation/usage as desired. This also allows a community to develop or augment in the spaces on the earth. These nodes can be larger and open or small and set by groups in their channel. The end result is an open source sense of mapping that will also have a needed sense of user control as one can select which layers of augmentation they wish to see and interact with at any time. It also will incorporate all the functionality of locative media in mapping software and mapping. In building mode and in map mode, icons will be coded to represent within channels (remember that the person using it has selected channels of augmentation from many based on their current interests and needs). Icons will be coded as active to show work in progress in cities and the globe to both invite participation and to further agitate the map from the sense of the static as action is visible even with its icons as people are working and community is formed in common interest/need .

locative media got a buzz for “reading” places…when I helped create locative narrative that was what blew me away back in 2001…that we could give places a voice by placing data from research and icons on a map……this meant lost history or augmentation was possible as kind of voices of a place and its layers…….I called it “narrative archaeology.” We now have tools that can push these ideas and concepts farther..much farther…and with a range beyond what was before, and then the map was just a tool….but now we are returning to the map itself…..and this as place as much as marker..this is where ar takes the ball to use a bad metaphor

also that project could only work if you came to our spot of a 4 block augmentation and with us there to lend you our gear…we are far beyond that now but it had its place

Tish Shute: How do you see “in context” AR and something we might call “context aware” cloud computing models interacting?

Jeremy Hight: sure…and I must add that I have issues with cloud computing as much as it is a good idea...

Tish Shute: because of loss of autonomy?

Jeremy Hight: tivo is simply a hard drive…but it keyword reads and gives  suggestions..that is the is cro magnon link to what can be

Tish Shute: The nice thing about Wave is because of the Federation model, the cloud model and local store ur own data models should work together.

Jeremy Hight: yes..that is better…..loss of autonomy also opens up the arbitrary which is the flaw of search engines as we know it…even Bing fails to me in that sense

Tish Shute: how do you mean, could you explain?

Jeremy Hight: spiders  cull from words  but cull like trawlers at sea …. tested Bing with very specific requests.. it spat out the same mass of mostly off topic results….
I wonder if there is a way to cull from key words and topics from a user…not Orwellian back end of course…but from their preferences, their searches etc..

Tish Shute: did you see the discussion on search in the AR Framework doc? AR search will be a massively important thing that will take a lot of intelligence and all sorts of algorithm development won’t it?

Jeremy Hight:It also has one area of key functionality that moves into more intuitive software. Upon continued usage, the mapping software will “learn” and search based on key words used and spheres of interest the user is mapping or observing as mapped and will integrate deeper data and types of animations, etc. into the map or will have them waiting to be integrated upon user approval as desired. Over time the level of sophistication of additions and of search intuition will increase dramatically. The search can also, if the user wishes, run in the back end while working in the mapping program, or in off time as selected while doing other tasks. It also can never be used if one is not interested. One of the key elements of this mapping is that it is not composed of a closed set or needs user hacks to augment, but instead is to evolve and deepen by user controls and desired as designed. Pre-existing data,visualizations and augmentations can be integrated with relative ease.

Tish Shute: One of the things that Joe Lamantia points out about social augmented experiences is that they will operate across a number of different scales – conversation > product design & build team > neighborhood / town fixing potholes > global community for causes. How do designs for channels and layers change across these different social scales?

Jeremy Hight: quote myself …”The “frontier” is often defined as the space just ahead of the known edge and limit, and where it may be pushed out deeper into the previously unknown. The frontier in the world of ideas is not the warm comfort of what has been long assimilated; and the frontier in the landscape is not of maps, but of places beyond and before them⁄

The border along what has been claimed is not only that of maps – it is of concepts, functions, inventions and related emergent industries. Ideas and innovations are like the cloud shape that briefly forms around a jet breaking the sound barrier, tangible yet not fully mapped into measure. It is when things are nailed down into specific entities, calibrated and assessed, that the dangers may inflict themselves – greed, competition, imitation, anger, jealously, a provincial sense of ownership either possessed or demanded”. (from essay in Sarai reader). Otherwise channels and augmentation do not have to be socio-economically stratifying or defined by them. We built 34n  for almost nothing on older tools.

image from 34north 118west  (Spellman/Hight/Knowlton)

The ar that is not deep immersion can be more readily available and channels can be what end users need like the diversity of chat rooms or range of Facebook users among us.

I had two moments yesterday that totally fit what we talked about.  I went to west hollywood book fair and traditional directions off of mapping for driving directions were wrong and we got lost…our friend could only get a wireless signal to map on itouch and we had to roam neighborhoods then we called a friend who google mapped it and we found we were a block away….so a fast geomapping overlay with an icon for the book fair on some optional grid service or community would have made it immediate.  Then at the book fair talked to a small press publisher who is trying to map works about los angeles by los angeles authors on a map..she was stunned when I told her it could be a kind of google map feature option

it also has great potential to publish and place writing and art in places..both for commentary and access. imagine reading joyce in chapters where it was written about and then another similar experience but with writers who published on a service into their city.

Tish Shute: The challenge of shared augmented realities is not just a matter of shipping bits around, but also of how it we will use channels and layars – to create and negotiate different, distributed perspectives, understand a shared common core/or expressions of dissent (this came up in an email conversation with Simon St Laurent).

Jeremy Hight: well my example earlier could have been communal in a way too..a tribe sort of augmentation channeling ….like subscribing to list servs back in the day but of augmentation communities/channels, and for folks to build and use in shared live form, coordinating too

Tish Shute: one good thing though about building an open AR Framework is that as bandwidth/CPU/hardware gets better shared high def immersive experiences could be supported by the same framework..

Jeremy Hight: excellent

Tish Shute: were you thinking of the image recognition and tracking with this example?

Jeremy Hight: yeah….like scanning across a multi channeled google map augmentation with diff icons and their connected data…and poss social networking and fle sharing even in that mode…and rastering etc….could be cool with google wave - on the map..then zooming in a la powers of ten..(eames film).

-I have pictured variations of this for a few years now in my head like the example of my friends and I yesterday…we could have correlated a destination by icons in diff channels..one being lit events within lit channel in l.a map…maybe things streaming on it too…remote info and video etc… that would be awesome

Tish Shute: So many of the ideas in you paper on modulated mapping (see here) are brilliant use cases for shared augmented realities. Perhaps you could talk more your ideas about locative narrative because this is something I think is at the core of the kinds of experiences that a distributed AR Framework would make possible?

Jeremy Hight: on the project “34 north 118 west” we mapped out a 4 block area for augmentation of sound files triggered by latitude and longitude on the gps grid and map and the map on the screen had pink rectangles that were the “hot spots” where the augmentation had been placed.

image of interactive map with map based augmentation connected to audio augmentation on site for 34north 118west (Spellman/Hight/Knowlton)

We researched the history of the area and placed moments in time of what had been there at specific locations ….I called this “narrative archaeology” as it allowed places to be “read” by their augmentations…info that was of the place beyond the immediate experience (diff types of info) that otherwise would be lost or only found in books or web sites elsewhere. there now are locative narratives around the world but they need to be linked.  from humble origins “narrative archaeology” went on to be recently named of the 4 primary texts in locative media which is pretty amazing to me…but it is growing

- the limitations then were what I called the “bowling alley connundrum” – the specifc data had to reset like pins…..and was isolated….this led me to think about ar back then and up to now.  How these could lead to much more from that point, data that would be more layered, variable , fluid..yet still augmented place and sense of place and social networking within data and software

lifeclipper to me is a bridge

Tish Shute: But Life Clipper is isolated from the internet currently is it?

Jeremy Hight: yes…ours was too.. that is what google wave makes possible.. our project only ran on our gear..in 4 blocks…with additional auxiliary info online, and not malleable..but hey 2001 and all..

Tish Shute: so the sites for 34 north 118 west are still active though?

Jeremy Hight: oh yeah!

Tish Shute: nice I really like sound augmentation – have you seen Soundwalk?

Jeremy Hight: yes, very cool.. we chose sound only as it fought the power of image..instead caused a person to be in a sense of two places and times at once

Tish Shute: and in 2001 that was definitely a visionary project!

You must be very excited that finally the pieces are coming together to make this stuff scale!

Jeremy Hight: I can’t even tell you!! it is funny..i have known that this would come..just waited and waited…

..knew it needed the right people and tools..

..so the bowling alley connundrum led me to develop my project shortlisted for the iss (international space station)  as I thought a lot about how points and works are not to be isolated…but connected  and should be flowing in diff parts of a map….to open up perspective and connected augmentations , but also to think about the map again…not as a base only. then moved into my work with new ways to visualize time and it all really began to gell.  The ideas first were published as an essay (http://www.fylkingen.se/hz/n8/hight.html) and later my project blog (http://floatingpointsspace.blogspot.com/)

Tish Shute: One thing I noticed when I was reading your paper is how you have been exploring non-euclidian geometries.  Could you explain how this is part of your idea of modulated mapping?

Jeremy Hight: Yes, this first came to me when my wife was reading to me from a book on the Poincare Conjecture and I was hit with a new way to measure events in time and after months of sketches, schematics and research came to see how it could also be connected to a geo-spatial web of projects and augmentations.  It was published in the inaugural issue of Parsons School of Design’s Journal of Information Mapping which was an exciting fit. I call it “Immersive Event Time”(http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/01/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf)

so the last 3 years I have been working on how it could all work as channels of augmentation, and building and navigation as open and community in a sense as well as ai capability that was the time work especially. how time as experienced within an event is not a time “line”  but points on and within a form….and how this model is better for visualizing events in time and documenting them. it actually sprang form reading a book on the poincare conjecture, popped a bunch of other stuff together so one could visualize an event in time as like being in the belly of a whale..with time as the ribs..and our measure of time as the skin…and moving within it….hoping this will be used as educational tool

and this also can be tied to ar and map again…how documentation of important events can be kept within icons on a google map..then download varying visualizations based on bandwidth and desired format

Tish Shute: I have been thinking about is the new forms of social interaction/agency that these kinds of augmentations of space/place/time will create.  it seems there are two poles – one is the area Natalie Jeremijenko explores of shifting social relations from institutions/statistics to real time/location based/interactions and new forms of social agency.  The other pole completely is more like the cloud based AI and perhaps crowd sourced machine learning.

Your ideas explore the possibilities of both these poles.  And certainly one of the big deals of distributed AR integrated with would be the possibilities it opened up both for new forms of networked social relationships and for new ways to draw on network effects.

Jeremy Hight: and cross pollinations within …that is what my mind goes to

Tish Shute: The other night I met Assaf Biderman, MIT, from the Trash Track team. Trash Track doesn’t utilize AR but I could see that there are possibilites there.
What do you think?

Jeremy Hight: yes, absolutely, there can sort of skins on locations that user end selection can yield …like channels of place….and can range from pragmatic core to art and play and places between….how this recalibrates the semiotics of map…more than just augmentation as seen as a kind of piggy back on map..map becomes interface and defanged platform if you wil, interestingly my more poetic/philosophic writing led me here too

Tish Shute: I know they are at very different poles of the system but I do wonder how AR can bring some of the level of social agency/interaction that Natalie Jeremijenko works on into a productive interaction with the kind of innovations in Machine learning that Dolores Lab style machine learning!!and others are pioneering?

Jeremy Hight: Natalie’s genius to me is in practical functional tech that also opens deeper questions and even new openings of what is needed..amazing layers in her work that way.. succint yet deep..very deep

Tish Shute: Yes – I a just writing a post about her work – I find it deeply moving the way she has delved into the possibilities to using technology to open us up to our world.  One of the reasons I find distributed AR so interesting is because it will make it possible for all kinds of people to create and use augmentation in their lives and communities.

So to return to how a distributed AR framework could contribute to a project like Trash Track?

Jeremy Hight: what about using it for community, dissent and awareness raising then?  like Natalie’s work but building like a communal work of multiple points, like the old adage of the elephant and the blind men  sorry..metaphor – like one of my points in immersive sight was how one could take augmentation as multiple works sort of turning the faces of a thing or place…and how this would make a larger work even in such a flow so people moving in a space could also build..

what of ar traces left as people move calibrated to user traffic and trash as estimated in an urban space…like it goes back to chris burden in the 70′s making you know that as you turn the turnstyle you are drilling into the foundation and may be the one that collapses the building?

so their movements leave trash. Natalie is all about raising awareness to cause and effect and data , space and ecology. love that.  so maybe …
a feedback loop , artifact and user end responsibility can leave traces …trash…

.. cybernetics vs ecology and human waste

Tish Shute: could you elaborate?

Jeremy Hight: brain fart…that the mass of trash people leave is a piece at a tiime….and how like the space shuttle mission when it was argued first true cybernaut occured….one cord to air for astronaut..one for computer on their back to fix broken bay arm…if there is a way to build on that and in relation to the topic…..how this can go further, that machines do not waste as much…as ar is a means to cybernetic raise awareness..eh..In a sense it is like  the space shuttle mission when arguably the first true cybernaut occurred….one cord to air for astronaut..one for computer on their back to fix broken bay arm…if there is a way to build on that and in relation to the topic…..how this can go further, that machines do not waste as much…as ar is a means to cybernetic raise awareness..eh.. hmmm... sensors etc…wearables too – could be eco awareness with data and machine and human

what about a cloud computing system with a slight ai in the sense of intuitive word cloud and interest scans…..so as one moves through say new york they can be offered new ai data and services as they move ? could also be of eco interests? concerns about urban farming, eco waste, air pollution etc….perhaps with (jeremijenko element here)  sensors placed in locations and these also giving data reads in public areas  with no input but hard data itself……hmm..could be interesting

it can also give info of the carbon footprints (estimated prob unless data is public record somehow) of chain businesses  and data on which are more eco friendly as well as an iconography color coded and icon coded to the best places to go to support greening and eco friendly business?  and the companies could promote themselves on this service to attract eco aware customers who would be seeing them as kindred spirits and helping the
larger effort?

kind of eco mapping..and ar on mobile app

what about sensors that read air pollution levels, levels of solar radiation (to aid with skin protection in shifting light values in a city space..ie put on some skin cream now…), light sensors that detect density and over density in public spaces…to use the old trope in art of reading crowds in a space..but instead could indicate overcrowding, failing infrastructure in public spaces (which is a congestion that leads to greater pollution levels as well as flaws in city planning over time..), and perhaps a tie in to wearables……worn sensors  on smart clothes….this could form a node network of people in the crowds ….and also send data within moving in a space…

here is a kooky thought… what of taking the computing power and data of people moving in a space..and not only get eco data and make available to them levels of
data..but make possibly a roving super computer…crunching the deeper data of people open to this……a hive crunching deeper analysis of the space, scan properties from sensors, and even a game theory esque algorithm of meta data if say 40 people out of 50 hit on a certain spike or reading…and even their input…..I worked in game theory for paleontology in this manner for a time as a teen….a private project……   the reading can lead to a sort of meta read by what hits most consistently..as well as in their input..text of what they experienced, observed,postulated,analyzed even…. this could be really interesting…even if just the last part from collected data and not from any complex branching of servers..

I thought at 19 or so that the flaw in paleontology was in how so many larger theories were shifting exhibitions and larger senses of things like were there pre-historic birds that were mistaken for amphibean and then back again….so why not make a computer program and feed all the papers published into it and see what hits were counted in terms of an emerging meta theory…and landscape of key points being agreed upon…this data would be in a sense both algorithmic and a sort of unspoken dialogue …came from a lot of study of game theory one summer…

hope this makes some sense…I forgot to mention that I originally planned to be a research meteorologist and my plan in middle school or so was to get a phd and develop new software to have a global map and then run models of hypothetical storms across it in real time animations of cloud forms, radar and wind analysis/fields, barometric pressure spaghetti charts etc….and to also do 3d cut away models of storm architectures…so been into visualizations of complex data and mapping for a long time!

Tish Shute: Wow let me think about this one!

Above is an image above  from Total Immersion’s augmented reality experience developed for the “Networked City” exhibition in South Korea, – “a fun scenario created for a u-City’s infrastructure and city management service”

“To the naked eye, the exhibit looks like a bare bones model of a city. But when visitors put on the special AR goggles a whole new world unfolds – as graphics overlaid on the city model.” (Games Alfresco)

“The Networked City,” is a large scale augmented virtuality of a scenario for a networked city. But my guess, reading the     Korea IT Times, is the plan is to move from an augmented virtuality to an augmented reality as Incheon Free Economic Zone  (IFEZ) realizes its vision to become a leading u-City – where reality is turned “inside out” (see Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality ).  If you are not familiar with South Korea’s u-Cities, check out this post for a short primer (and note Google Trends search on Augmented Reality shows  South Korea leaving everyone else in the dust).

Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality are like adenine and thymine – a DNA base pair.

A sky view of Incheon Free Economic Zone (from Korean IT Times). For more on the IFEZ vision to become a leading u-City see here.

Korea IT Times writes about the u-city concept:

“Korea began using the term u-City after accepting the concept of ubiquitous computing, a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction created by Mark Weiser, the chief technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California, in 1998. There have been a lot of research in this field since 2002. As a result, many local governments in Korea have applied this concept to various development projects since 2005 based on a practical approach to it.”

The back story to many of my recent posts, including this one, is an understanding of a relationship between ubiquitous computing and augmented reality that emerged, for me, in a February conversation with Adam Greenfield, Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield.  In cased you missed it, here is the link again because I think it holds up very well considering the rapid developments of recent months.  Also, importantly for this post, it includes a discussion of  moving on from Weiserian visions.

Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird is one of my key sources for understanding “networked urbanism,” and the list he makes of the elements of networked urbanism here (also see the comments) – is my mantra for thinking about the DNA base pair relationship of augmented reality and ubiquitous computing.

Adam Greenfield’s, “summary of what those of us who are thinking, writing and speaking about networked urbanism seem to be seeing” is:

1. From latent to explicit; 2. From browse to search; 3. From held to shared; 4. From expiring to persistent; 5. From deferred to real-time; 6. From passive to interactive; 7. From component to resource; 8. From constant to variable; 9. From wayfinding to wayshowing; 10. From object to service; 11. From vehicle to mobility; 12. From community to social network; 13. From ownership to use; 14. From consumer to constituent.

Augmented Reality – Making Visible the Invisible

The screenshot above is one of  the coolest “making visible the invisible” AR applications. It was developed at Columbia University Graphics and User Interface Lab where Steven Feiner is Director (see the deep list of projects from the lab here).  This app “shows carbon monoxide levels projected over New York City. The height of each ball reflects concentrations of the pollutant.” Credit: Sean White and Steven Feiner  (via Technology Review).

The recent emergence of “magic lens” augmented reality apps for our smart phones – Wikitude, Layar, Acrossair, Sekai Camera, and many others now, have given us a new window into our cities. But we are yet to realize the full potential of the AR/ubicomp base pair that can “make visible the invisible” and give us new opportunities to relate to the invisible data ecosystems of our cities, not merely as a spectator experience,  but as an interactive, in context, real time opportunity to reimagine social relations.

Mark Shepard says in his curatorial statement for, “Toward the Sentient City:” (Much more soon on this very significant exhibit which runs from Sept. 17th to Nov. 7th, 2009.)

“In place of natural weather systems, however, today we find the dataclouds of 21st century urban space increasingly shaping our experience of this city and the choices we make there.”

Augmented Reality, as Joe Lamantia points out, is becoming the great “ambassador of ubiqitous computing.” AR is. “…mak[ing] it possible to experience the new world of ubiquitous computing by reifying the digital layer that permeates our inside-out world,” and we are only just glimpsing the razor thin end of the wedge in this regard.

I am still working on my Gov 2.0 Summit write up  and, amongst other things, I will talk about how an emerging new social contract around open data, here in the US,  will put augmented reality  apps center stage  – “doing stuff that matters.” At Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase Tim O’Reilly tweeted:

Tim O’Reilly Really enjoyed @capttaco (Digital Arch Design) @ #gov20e: “Augmented Reality could be a new public infrastructure” http://bit.ly/18iCx

Also see Tim O’Reilly and Jennifer Pahlka on Forbes.com discuss the The “Web Squared” Era -  “the Web Squared era is an era of augmented reality arriving (like the sensor revolution) stealthily, in more pedestrian clothes than we expected.… …our world will have “information shadows.” Augmented reality amounts to information shadows made visible.”

Again there is back story to how I came to think about Information Shadows in relation to augmented reality.  So in case your missed it the first time, here is the link to a conversation that began in a hallway meeting between Tim O’Reilly, Mike Kuniavsky, ThingM, Usman Haque, Pachube, and Gavin Starks, AMEE, at ETech earlier this year,  “Dematerializing the World, Shadows, Subscriptions and Things as Services: Talking With Mike Kuniavsky at ETech 2009.”

Slide from Augmented City Lab @ Picnic ’09

So What’s Next for Mobile Augmented Reality?

These videos from Daniel Wagner’s team from Graz University of Technology showing Realtime Panorama Mapping and Tracking on Mobile Phones and Creating an Indoor Panorama in Realtime, as Rouli from Games Alfresco points out,  indicate that there is a lot in store for us at ISMAR09.

We may not be so impressed by directory style/”post it” AR anymore, as these applications have become common place so quickly!  But while these early mobile AR apps may be disappointing in relation to some futurist visions of AR – merely AR/ubicomp appetizers,  there are still good implementations of this model coming out (see new comers to the app store Bionic Eye and RobotVision). And Layar, always on the ball, has upped the ante for the new cohort of AR Browsers with Layar 3D.

But as Bruce Sterling notes here:

*In AR, everybody wants to be the platform and the browser, and nobody wants to be the boring old geolocative database. Look how Tim [creator of RobotVision] here, who is like one guy working on his weekends, can boldly fold-in the multi-billion dollar, multi-million user empires of Apple iPhone, Microsoft Bing, Flickr, and Twitter, all under his right thumb

(watch video here)

But if  you looking for something more from AR, you probably won’t have to wait too long.  The two pioneering companies in AR, Total Immersion – founded in 1999, and Metaio – founded in 2003 are both coming out with “mobile augmented reality platforms” in a matter of weeks (see press releases here and here).  And both companies, it seems, will deploy much more sophisticated AR rendering and tracking than we have seen to date.

I approached Bruno Uzzan, founder and CEO of Total Immersion, for an interview as part of my look at the new industry of augmented reality through the eyes of the founding members of the AR Consortium. These consortium members are some of the first commercial augmented reality companies.

The interview below with Bruno began early this summer and then we both went on vacation and it picks up after the announcement of the partnership between Total Immersion and Int13.

The significance of this announcement is that Total Immersion is now positioned to take the augmented reality experiences they have developed for a number of top brands onto multiple mobile platforms with, “Int13′s very clever embedded solution that allows our [Total Immersion's] solutions to work across many [mobile] platforms,” while Int13 gets to extend their reach.

Total Immersion has a 50 person R&D team and their two main focuses have been, firstly getting:

“Augmented Reality to work with as many platforms as possible – PC, Mac, Mobile, Game Consoles, all those are the platforms that we are targeting. We are currently doing lot of work in the R & D team in cross platform compatibility….”

and, secondly:

“Our R&D guys are working on the real world interacting more with the virtual world.  And I have started seeing some results which are pretty much crazy and this will be ready for next year.”

Pandora’s Box – Shared Augmented Realities

Spes or “Hope”; engraving by Sebald Beham, German c1540 (see Wikipedia article on Pandora’s Box)

There are many weaknesses to the mobile smart phone AR experiences we have now, and the lack of near field object recognition (to date), and difficulties with accurate positioning aren’t the only ones.  Note re solving positioning problems in mobile AR, we are yet to see AR  leverage public libraries for analyzing scenes like Flickr’s geo tagged photos, see Aaron Straup Copes’s work on “The Shape of Alpha.” And for more on this my post here.

But, as Joe Lamantia points out:

“One of the weakest aspects of the existing interaction patterns for augmented reality is their reliance on single-person, socially disconnected user experiences.”

In my view, The Pandora’s Box of Augmented Realities is an open, distributed, multiuser augmented reality framework, fully integrated with the internet and world wide web.

As Yochai Benkler has pointed out many times, and argues again in, Capital, Power, and the Next Step in Decentralization, it is “open, collaborative, distributed practices that have been at the core of what made the Internet.”  We have to try to make sure that open, collaborative, distributed practices are at the core of mobile augmented reality.

Can Google Wave be the basis for an Open, Distributed, Multiuser Augmented Reality Framework?

I have been exploring the idea of using Google Wave protocol as the basis for a distributed, multiuser open augmented reality framework with a small group of AR enthusiasts and developers. And I am happy to say the proposal is beginning to get fleshed out a little.  New collaborators are welcome both for “gear heady” input and use case suggestions (but re the latter, you can’t just say everything you see in Denno Coil..!).

This effort started with Thomas Wrobel’s  proposal for an Open AR Framework prototyped on IRC – see here, and click to enlarge the image above of, “Sky Writer: Basic Concept for an Open Multi-source AR Framework.”

But recently we began looking at the Wave Federation Protocol.  And, if you check out this post, and this post, you may get a glimpse of why Google Wave protocol might be a good basis for an open, distributed, AR Framework.  You will notice, if you study what Google Wave has done with the XMPP protocol, that many of  the elements of networked urbanism that Adam Greenfield describes resonate strongly with what is being attempted in Wave.

But enough said for now!  Regardless of the details of implementation,  Google Wave or an AR protocol built from scratch (phew! the latter does seem like a lot of work) -  an open, distributed, multiuser AR framework integrated with the internet and web would explode the potential of AR, creating new possibilities for data flows, mashups ,and shared augmented realities.

And we are excited by Google Wave because, as Thomas puts it:

“The really great thing wave does ….(aside from being an open standard backed by a major player…hopefully leading to thousands of worldwide servers )….is that it allows anyone to create any number of waves, set precisely who can view or edit them, and for them to be able to be updated quickly and continuously (and even simultaneously!) Better yet, changes will (if necessary) propagate to all the other servers sharing that wave. It does all this right now. From my eyes this does a lot of the work of an AR infrastructure already.

I cant see any other protocol actually doing anything like this at the moment, although correct me if I’m wrong, as alternatives are always welcome :)”

Also, Thomas notes, “even the playback system (that is, the ability to playback the changes made to a wave since its creation) …this could give us automatically some of the ideas Jeremy Hight has mentioned in his visionary work here,  and here on “the geo spatial web, interlinked locations and data, immersive augmentation and open source geo augmentation.”

One of the many reasons why an Open, distributed AR Framework would be so cool is it would open up all kinds of possibilities for GeoAR by providing the over-arching standard protocol for communication of updates necessary for the substandards that will facilitate GeoAR.

Also important to note is the  Wave Federation Protocol allows anyone:

“to run wave servers and become wave providers, for themselves, or as services for their users, and to “federate” waves, that is, to share waves with each other and with Google Wave. – “the federation gateway and a federation proxy and is based on open extension to XMPP core [RFC3920] protocol to allow near real-time communication between two wave servers.” See Reuven Cohen’s blog for more here and here, “HTTP is Dead, Long Live the Real Time Cloud.”

Still some people have expressed concern that an AR Framework using Google Wave protocol would give Google disproportionate influence.   Will Google-specific functionality be an issue?  How much stuff is Google specific just because no one else is using it (yet)? And how much is Google specific because it holds no value to anyone else but Google? These are some of the questions that have come up.

You are going to see a variety of suggestions for standards and specs for open AR coming out out in the next few months which as, Robert Rice of the AR Consortium points out is: “a good thing, we need that competition early on to settle down on best case.” Recently,  Mobilizy have offered up an ARML (“an augmented reality mark-up language specification based on the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML) with extensions”) for consideration see here.

So it is, perhaps, also important to note, that an Open AR Framework should be neutral/transparent to techniques of  “reality recognition,”  and methodologies of registration/tracking, allowing various ones to work on the system as new techniques evolve, and to support as many evolving standards as possible.

Augmented Reality developers, like Total Immersion and others with powerful rendering/tracking AR software, should be able use an Open AR Framework to exchange the data which their tracking will use. And the tracking/rendering problems they and other researchers have solved are much harder than figuring out data exchange on on a standard infrastructure or protocol!

So I pricked up my ears when I heard Bruno Uzzan, CEO of Total Immersion -  the first and currently the largest augmented reality company, with a 50 person R&D team in France and offices in LA, where Bruno himself is now based, say: “Total Immersion is  only months away from launching shared mobile augmented reality experiences using near field object recognition/tracking across multiple platforms” (for more details read my conversation with Bruno Uzzan below).

I was happy when I asked Bruno about the possibilities for developing an open, distributed, multiuser augmented reality framework fully integrated with the internet and world wide web (possibly using Google Wave protocols), and he replied:

“I think this is feasible. I think that’s doable, that’s just  in my opinion. I mean some people might have another kind of opinion but I think that that’s definitely doable.”

Total Immersion – working with the “symbiosis between augmented reality and brands”

Total Immersion has created many of the best known and most ambitious augmented reality experiences for major brands to date, including Mattel’s new AR toys to be released in conjunction with the James Cameron film Avatar, and AR baseball cards for Topps, video here (or click screenshot above), and the UK’s first augmented reality books.

Bruno founded Total Immersion 10 years ago when he was just 27. And the kind of conviction it took to survive as an augmented reality business in the decade before augmented reality captured the world’s attention is remarkable.

AR’s first steps out into the world after 17 years as predominantly a lab science maybe “wobbly” (what new technology isn’t), and sometimes gloriously kitsch – check out this riotus video of the 3D Interactive Live Show Total Immersion produced in Korea (also see the Total Immersion Augmented Reality Blog for more on the TI’s turn key  Interactive 3D Live Show Solution).

As Lamantia points out here, ” projecting mixed realities into public, common, or social spaces makes them social by default.”

However, the potential for shared location based augmented reality experiences is as yet untapped.  So I see the entry of the most experienced commercial augmented reality company into mobile as pretty interesting.   While  smart phone AR still has significant limitations, and it certainly does differ from some of the futurist dreams of AR (see Mok Oh’s post here on his disappointment in this regard), it is significant that Total Immersion is committing to becoming a leader in mobile AR.

Our smart phones, the powerful networked sensor devices that so many people carry in their pockets, have proved themselves a “good enough for now”  mediating device for early manifestations of the ubiquitous computing and augmented reality base pair.  And now AR and ubicomp is mixed in the  rich, messy soup of everyday life, commerce, business, marketing, art, entertainment, and government, we should get ready to see these technologies grow up fast, and unfold in some surprising ways that lab science didn’t necessarily predict.

And, perhaps, the new dialogue between scientists and entrepreneurs may spur both communities to outdo themselves.

Particularly, as Joe Ludwig notes: “It seems to me that the biggest disconnect between the academics and the entrepreneurs is that they disagree on how far we are from the finish line.”

See the comments’s on Ori Inbar’s post, Augmented Reality Entrepreneurship: Natural Evolution or Intelligent Design?, for  a courteous but spirited discussion on the potential benefits and frictions of the newly expanded AR community of  researchers and  entrepreneurs.

As Blair MacIntyre (see my long conversation with Blair here) notes:

“not all academics and researchers are only interested in the traditional models of impact. Case in point: I wouldn’t be building unpublishable games, nor investing so much time talking to the press, entrepreneurs and VCs if I did not believe strongly in the value of the impact I am having by doing that — and I know others with the same attitude.”

In this vein, check out the Marble Game (video here) developed by Steve Feiner and his team at Columbia U. It’s enabled by Goblin XNA, an open source AR framework built on top of Microsoft’s XNA, which powers XBox live games, Zune games, and some Windows games. For more about Goblin XNA and AR from Columbia U see here.  (Hat tip to Brian Jepson for this link)

While we are still waiting for the kind of sexy AR specs – nothing totally game changing in Gigantico’s AR eyewear rounup (maybe note this Apple patent), that might get wide adoption. But at least researchers are not afraid to explore the possibilities of AR Goggles.

But how far are we now, with or without sexy goggles,  from a fuller expression of the base pair DNA of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality?

We may have a LAN of things before we have an Internet of Things

The picture above is a workshop I attended at Conflux last weekend – Fish ‘n microChips, with Natalie Jeremijenko. We are at the site of the Amphibious Architecture project (a commissioned work for Toward the Sentient City) and “a collaborative project with xClinic, The Living and other intelligent creatures.”

We are probably as far off some grand futurist visions of ubiquitious computing as we are some of the futurist visions of augmented reality. But as it turns out that may not be a bad thing! Recently, @mikekuniavsky noted in a tweet:

“Another argument for the LAN of Things before the Internet of Things: http://tinyurl.com/lgp9uq”

Bert Moore, in the article Mike linked to points out, the grand vision of an “internet of things” with everything connected to everything  can “distract people from thinking about the benefits of RFID in smaller, more easily implemented and cost-justified applications.”  The same argument I think applies to sensor networks and augmented reality.

In New York City, a series of commissioned works for the Architectural League of New York’s exhibit, “Toward the Sentient City” are giving us the opportunity to dip our toes into the ocean of a “networked urbanism.”   For only a small budget, two of the five commissioned works, Amphibeous Architecture and Natural Fuse demonstrate how sensor networks can allow us to explore new kinds of communities – connecting people to environments in interesting ways to create new forms of social agency.

“Amphibeous Architecture” -  from The Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Directors David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang) and Natalie Jeremijenko, Environmental Health Clinic at New York University, uses a skillfully built (electronics and water are notoriously hard to mix) array of partially submerged sensors to pierce the blinding, reflective surfaces of the rivers  surrounding Manhattan and to create a new two way relationship with the ecosystem below – the water, our neighbors the fish and even a beaver that lives in the water surrounding Manhattan.

Image from Toward the Sentient City

In a similar spirit, “Natural Fuse” – Usman Haque, creative director, Nitipak ‘Dot’ Samsen, designer, Ai Hasegawa, designer, Cesar Harada, designer, Barbara Jasinowicz, producer, creates a network of people and electronically assisted plants to explore what it takes to work together on energy consumption and to experience the consequences of “selfish” and “unselfish” behavior interactively before it is too late to modify our actions.

The “Greedy Switch“ from Natural Fuse on the left. On the right “The System” – click to enlarge.

Much more to come in another post on these works, and “Toward the Sentient City.”  Also an update on how Pachube – an important part of both these projects and a very important contribution to ubiquitous computing because it creates the opportunity to connect environments and create mashups from diverse sensor data feeds – has matured since my interview with Pachube founder, Usman Haque, “Pachube, Patching the Planet,” in January this year.

In the picture above Natalie Jeremijenko, and Jonathan Laventhol give the Amphibious Architecture sensor array a last look over, as it will soon be lowered into the East River. Jonathan is on a busman’s holiday to help out at the pre launch of Amphibious Architecture, nr Manhattan Bridge, NYC.

I was very happy to get  a chance to talk to Jonathan Laventhol - more on our conversation in another post. Jonathan Laventhol is CTO of Imagination – one of the world’s leading design, events, and branding agencies. We talked about the importance of  Pachube, which Jonathan called the “The Facebook of Data,”  and  how the symbiosis between brands and augmented reality, and healthcare applications, would  be key to augmented reality emerging into the mainstream.

Natalie Jeremijenko’s workshop at Conflux on the social negotiation of technology and how “everyware” can give us the chance to experience new forms of agency and connection was a totally inspiring.  And I will cover this too in another post.  I have so much awesome stuff  to write about at the moment!

None of the projects in, “Toward the Sentient City,” included a mobile augmented reality, or “magic lens” component, but they all pointed to why “enchanted windows into our newly inside-out reality” are going to be so important. And why the DNA base pair of ubicomp and augmented reality can really do stuff that matters.

Shangri- La – “Transfigured City”

Screenshot from Shangri-La episode Transfigured City

In my AR Consortium founder member interview series, I have found that, understandably, the visionary founders of these first augmented reality companies are a little reticent about sharing their full vision.  They are basically on stealth mode in this regard.  So as you will not, from my interview with Total Immersion founder and CEO, Bruno Uzzan, get a fully drawn scenario of his vision for a next generation of shared augmented reality experiences, here’s a really interesting anime episode from the anime Shangri La called, Transfigured City, to mull over instead.

As you can tell from this rather long and circuitous intro to my my conversation with Bruno Uzzan, I  have been investigating shared augmented realities pretty intensively recently. And Mike Kuniavsky pointed me to Shangri-La, and Transfigured City, in a conversation with Mark Shepard, after Mark’s presentation at Conflux, Sentient City Survival Kit.

Mike Kuniavsky with Tod E. Kurt is founder of ThingM, a ubiquitous computing device studio. Also Mike Kuniavsky researches, designs and writes about people’s experiences at the intersection of technology and everyday life – see Mikes blog Orange Cone.  And I interviewed Mike at Etech- see here.

In Transfigured City, the “Metal Age” group has to figure out how to share and communicate in a city transfigured by augmented realities/virtualities, where no-one sees the same place in the same way.  Only one character can figure out from her previous experience of the city the relationship between the transfigured city and how it used to be.

The conversation I had with Mike Kuniavsky on The Transfigured City continued at a picnic in Washington Square Park the next day with Elizabeth Goodman, who I met at Etech when she gave a brilliant presentation, Designing for Urban Green Space.  We covered so many areas at the picnic related to ubiquitous computing and augmented realities that this conversation probably deserves a post of its own (my writing to do list is growing longer!).

The Plot Synopsis for Shangri La:

“In the mid-21st century, the international committee decided to forcefully reduce CO2 emission levels to mitigate the global warming crisis. As a result, the economic market was transferred mainly into the trade of carbon. A great earthquake destroys much of Japan, yet the carbon tax placed on the country is not lifted, so Tokyo is turned into the world’s largest “jungle-polis” that absorbs carbon dioxide. Project Atlas is commenced to plan the rebuilding of Tokyo and oversee the government organization, which the Metal Age group opposes due to its oppressive nature. However, Atlas is only built with enough room for 3,500,000 people and most people are not allowed to migrate into the city. The disparity between the elite within Atlas and the refugees living in the jungles outside of its walls set up the background of the story.”

Talking With Bruno Uzzan

Tish Shute: We won’t have fully opened the Pandora’s Box of Augmented Realities until we have ubiquitous, shared augmented realities, will we?

Bruno Uzzan: Yes. The most important for augmented reality is the experience we want to share. Now we are working on the cell phone, we can potentially do some marketing components that we already have developed now on cell phone. Done. It’s working.

But the most interesting part of it is how these new components [cell phone AR] will be used for marketing campaigns by brands. And we are also pretty much well positioned to transform some of the AR that we currently have working on Mac and PC and to transform these to applications working on mobile devices.

Tish Shute: We haven’t really experienced yet what it means to actually share mobile AR experiences?

Bruno Uzzan: It’s hard — we did a Facebook app. It’s a first try, it has a way to go.  But to go more and more into social, is the way forward for us – to share and expand AR experiences. But yes, I mean what you’re seeing is how two people on two different applications can share that same expanse.  For sure we are going in that direction. We are currently working on those kind of solutions. How people can share and experience together at the same time. That’s how we start creating excitement in augmented reality, and it’s coming up.

It’s a new market and there’s so much more in store for augmented reality. You know, some people are telling me, don’t you believe that augmented reality is a gimmick? It will be a trend for a few weeks or a few months and then gone? I say, you’re kidding me. This is only the beginning. I mean I can assure you that the applications that are on the market today are one percent of what we will have five years from now.

Tish Shute: I agree.

Bruno Uzzan: And I’m sure that augmented reality will be a part of a lot of components that we are currently using today – GPS, web browser, glasses, I mean there are so many applications that will come up shortly. This is only the beginning. I’m completely convinced that augmented reality will be in three years from now what virtual reality is today, which is a billion dollar market.  I know that it’s not just a gimmick of a few weeks or a few months, because so many brands are jumping into it, spending money, exploring solutions.  I know that it’s not just short term -what they are willing to do and we are willing to do, but also middle and long term. And that’s what makes this adventure pretty much unique and what makes creating a cutting edge technology, very, very much exciting for us.

Tish Shute: First could you explain more to me about your partnership with Int13. I am not sure I understand what is in the arrangement from Total Immersion’s POV. I mean what happens re your own mobile software development? Haven’t you only been licensed the Int13 SDK for a limited period of time and have limited access to all it’s power? Stephane from Int13 said to Ori on Games Alfresco, here, “we have licensed the SDK4 for two years,” and then Ori asks, “but you have basically kept the power to yourselves, right?” So if they are the only ones that can enhance it and develop the software, where will  TI be in two years in mobile if you haven’t really had the chance to develop your own software .

Bruno Uzzan: Actually it’s a real win-win situation. Int13 is a very small company and they have so many requests they can’t possibly fulfill them all. So  this is a way for both of us to be, as quickly as possible, the first mobile provider for all the requests we have. Also they give us exclusivity so nobody else can use INT13 SDK for such applications.  I think that it is a good partnership,

And concerning our own mobile application… First of all we have currently some mobile applications working. But with Int13 we have a mobile solution that can work on many different devices. That’s a fact and that’s working. And, believe me you will hear from us a lot more about this soon. We are fully independent on our mobile development. The reason we closed the partnership with Int 13 is  to be able to deploy mobile in a broad way.

I mean you know that the difficulty with AR mobile is that each separate device needs some customization. Working on the iPhone is different from working on the Nokia, different from working on the Palm; it’s different from working on the Samsung. Each of them have their own operating system inside and so we were interested in Int13′s very clever embedded solution that allows our solutions to work across many platforms.

The reason we are working with Int13 is that we are able to work on so many mobile devices, thanks to Int13. And in the mobile AR race that we are currently in, the next two years will be extremely important to us…

Tish Shute: OK, that definitely clarifies it a lot. So Int13 has done an embedded solution to allow TI developed AR solutions to work easily across many devices?

Bruno Uzzan: Yes  they have kind of an embedded solution, a way to address extremely quickly new cell phone… But, currently on our side, we are in discussions with a mobile company… and that only refers to some very specific mobile devices.  And what they have is also a way to embed deeper our technology into mobile, so that we can have quicker… applications that work on a large number of cell phones.

Tish Shute: So, basically it means you don’t have to go through some complicated negotiations with each of the cell phone companies, is what you are saying?

Bruno Uzzan: Not only negotiations, but also hard development. You know? Working on the Windows mobile is completely different from working on the Palm OS. You know, that’s different! Its a big work, to have a mobile application working on many other devices. So, INt13,  provides us a way for us to save some time and some development cost too.

Tish Shute: And Int13 doesn’t have powerful AR development tools like D’fusion right?

Bruno Uzzan: Right! That’s right. That’s why we say it’s a true win-win solution. They can benefit from our work too. And we can benefit from their work, in order to deploy quicker and faster mobile solutions.

Tish Shute: Now, the second thing is… there is a lot of debate and disagreement about how far mobile augmented reality is from delivering something more that the “post it” approach that has been much publicized in recent months, via all the AR browser apps.

But from my understanding from the conversation we had earlier this summer (see below), Total Immersion is targeting a much higher level of mobile augmented reality than we’ve seen to date?

Bruno: Yes the browser apps we have seen are a kind of augmented reality, but not exactly the way we see it. Let me explain you why. With this kind of application it’s true that you can overlay 3D-information and video. That’s a fact. So, in a sense, that’s augmented reality. But the way that they are working on the position of the 3D on that video is that they are using compass and GPS-information.. so it means that this AR solution will work only on some building and some physical objects that are FIXED. In a fixed and known position.

So you want to go to a theater?

The theater is here, for sure it will not move, so you know the position of the theater, and that’s a fact that you can superimpose an object on the theater. That’s what can be done currently. What we are achieving and what we are doing on mobile is more than that. We want to be able to port our solution with trading cards, with brands, into a smart phone.

I’m assuming that you want a can, a drink can, to be able to trigger an experience. The only way you can do it is to be able to understand what the can, it is. And the current solutions that are out there can’t do that, it’s impossible.

Tish Shute: Right, yes. There’s no near-field object at all in these early browser apps.

Bruno Uzzan: And the solution we have is that we can recognize a can and then — in a very, very precise way and that activates geo-location, so we can superimpose 3D. I mean in that case, it opens up all the applications that we currently have, so they could work on mobile.

Tish Shute: So for example, if you’re working with a soft drink company, people can trigger that experience wherever they see that can?

Bruno Uzzan: Correct.

Tish Shute: Yes. Yes, I assumed that was what you’re doing

Bruno Uzzan: We believe — and maybe that’s not the case, but we believe that our marker-less tracking technology is pretty much unique on the mobile devices.

I haven’t seen yet, from anyone, a full augmented reality mobile solution working.

I really see AR being part of the Web 3.0 next generation. I mean the vision I have is that, you know — today, when you want to have information, you go on a website and then you find your information. AR — and the future is that I think it will be part of the opposite. You want to have information about a product, you just show it to your computer and the information will automatically pop up. I see here a new way to market some key messages, a new way to get information is that some physical product by themselves could be a way to get information, and you don’t have to search anymore for them, it’s coming out to you.

AR is definitely for me, one of these components. Another thing that AR is a solution, another thing that AR itself will create these kind of results in how information is being displayed. But I’m seeing  here a way that could be part of a new way to have access to information. And that’s part of the vision I have. Whatever, if it is through mobile phone or web or PC, Mac, whatever, I really believe that now this kind of new generation of receiving information will come shortly and could be a kind of a new — could be part of the new 3.0 generation of the web.

Tish Shute: My friend Gene Becker did an interesting post recently on some of the current limitations of mobile AR where he pointed out the problem of:

“Simplistic, non-standard data formats – POIs, the geo-annotated data that many of these apps display, are mostly very simple one-dimensional points of lat/long coordinates, plus a few bytes of metadata. Despite their simplicity there has been no real standardization of POI formats; so far, data providers and AR app developers are only giving lip service to open interoperability. Furthermore, they are not looking ahead to future capabilities that will require more sophisticated data representations. At the same time, there is a large community of GIS, mapping and Geoweb experts who have defined open formats such as GeoRSS, GeoJSON and KML that may be suitable for mobile AR use and standardization.”

Bruno Uzzan: That’s interesting. I mean — I know exactly what his is referring to. He is mainly referring to a localization and how you can have a quick, accurate localization.  If you look at current solutions, and you look at this 3-D superimposing on the video, the 3-D is shaking a lot. I don’t know if you see that in some of these early efforts.

It’s hard to use because the 3-D, you know, is  part of the magic of augmented reality, that is when the 3-D is being inserted in a very easy way and smooth way in your solution. Here, when you see this overlay, 2-D or 3-D overlaid on the video, it’s shaking a lot. One reason for this is that the GPS compass is not accurate enough to coordinate the perfect location of the user. And here, what Gene says is interesting. I think we are addressing this localization issue in a pretty smart way.

But to be frank with you, I don’t believe mobile augmented reality in the extremely short term — I’m talking about three weeks, one, two months is mature enough for good AR applications.  It will be shortly.  But for now it is more proof of concept than a true and easy application to use.

But we are starting to see a lot of new application coming out, but I really believe that marketing and entertainment are the two key markets for AR right now.

I’ve been working ten years in augmented reality. And, eight years ago, when I was talking about augmented reality, I was E.T., you know? Nobody understood what I said, and I thought it was crazy. And now, today, yes it’s completely different.

Tish Shute: The Pandora’s Box of Augmented Realities, in my view, is an open, universal and standard, distributed, multiuser, augmented reality framework fully integrated with the internet and world wide web. I have been looking into Google Wave protocols as a basis for this would you be interested in this? Do you think it is feasable?

Bruno Uzzan: I think this is feasible. I think that’s doable, that’s just  in my opinion. I mean some people might have another kind of opinion but I think that that’s definitely doable.

Tish Shute: Yes I suppose an open AR Framework involves cooperation and collaboration, it is more about business and politics than technological problems.

Bruno Uzzan: Yes!  Actually the Web is politics. Business is politics.

Tish Shute: I would be interested if anyone in your R&D team would be interested in looking at some of the ideas that are emerging in our little discussion of Google Wave and an Open AR Framework  to offer feedback. it is an interesting time now to input on the Wave Federation Protocol docs because nothing is set it stone right now.

Bruno Uzzan: Just shoot me an email, I’ll try to put you in touch with the right person and, and a team member that can input on this.

Tish Shute: For mobile augmented reality the best thing we’ve got now is the phone, right?

Bruno Uzzan: Right.

Tish Shute: And the only way we can use the phone is by holding it up, right?  Isn’t this a bit of an an obstacle as you introduce better object recognition and tracking?  People are going to have to stop moving to use their phone. What do you feel about that experience? Isn’t AR eyewear and essential part of a tightly registered AR experience?

Bruno Uzzan: We don’t do hardware and we don’t have the current solution for eyewear that would do all we need for a good mobile AR experience, so I guess we don’t have the current answer for that.  But we are beginning to see the next generation of this — of these glasses.

Tish Shute: But you’re happy enough with the mobile experience of augmented reality on smart phones that you’re investing in this next generation of software for this.

Bruno Uzzan: Yes, I know. We know that some application will not work on the iPhone. And yes, whatever you do, you still need to hold the iPhone, so it means that you can’t play with your hands anymore. So we know that partially, some AR solutions  we have on other platforms will lose the magical effectivities on just the iPhone.

But I’m starting to see on the market some glasses that could perhaps be not too expensive — that’s a challenge!  And easy to use — that’s another big challenge. And, that could fit on anybody’s faces and head — there’s another big challenge. So yes, I’m starting to see that, but so far AR glasses are only applicable for some very, very specific application, like design or theme park or, you know, some specific location where it makes sense to move forward with glasses.

I don’t believe that kids will use glasses for — in our toys and for games in the next months or maybe othe next one or two years. But maybe something will come out shortly and that could be a big breakthrough, and enable us to think another way. But  from what we have seen so far and from what we know in this hardware market, I don’t believe that currently there is a workable solution.

Note: The following section of the interview took place earlier in the Summer.

Tish Shute: You are the first commercial AR company  – you started in 1999 right?

Bruno Uzzan: Yes you are right. We started the extremely early in this augmented reality market. We were the first company worldwide to start doing augmented reality and to start promoting augmented reality. So it’s true, we are pretty old players although the market has been getting bigger and bigger for the last year and a half. So for a long time we were only in the market, and the market was not really there.

But for the past 8 months, the company has been growing really fast.

Tish Shute: Yes I’m sure. Congratulations for hanging in there long enough to get the pay off!

Bruno Uzzan: You know, my background is Financial. So I have been driving the company for many years in a very cash efficient way. So we have been waiting for the markets to reach maturity before starting make some investments. So that’s the reason we are still here, and that’s the reason I think we managed pretty smartly the cash that we raised for the company.

Tish Shute: Yes there is a saying that when a market takes off you can tell a pioneers because they are the ones with the arrows in their backs. But I am glad you are dodging the arrows!

Bruno Uzzan: You know, I’ve always driven the company with revenue. And because revenue was not there at the beginning I was extremely cautious about the cash. So now that the company is getting some revenue, for sure we are making more and more investments, and taking advantage of our situation as a worldwide leader of augmented reality.

This situation is not easy as it appears today but it’s now getting better, as you can see, AR, Augmented Reality, has very good momentum and we are benefiting a lot from all this momentum for augmented reality right now.

Tish Shute: You’ve been very involved in researching developing augmented reality tools. Are you still as active in the research area, or are you too busy keeping up with work for hire now, to be working on research and building new technology for Augmented Reality?

Bruno Uzzan: Both. First of all, we are part of lot of projects either directly with clients like Mattel or with some partners that are using our technology to promote and develop other AR projects. From what we he have seen, many, many, many, projects augmented projects have been done currently with our solutions.

To continue with your previous question. So we are being perceived as this leader in that space, and we  have some pretty heavy demand for our services. But we are coming up with new technology, of course, still connected to Augmented Reality.  But, our R & D is working in two different directions, which of course also bind together.

The first one is platform developments. So we want Augmented Reality to work with as many platforms as possible – PC, Mac, Mobile, Game Consoles, all those are the platforms that we are targeting. We are currently doing lot of work in the R & D team in cross platform compatibility.

Tish Shute: Robert Rice said recently, “markers and webcams equal Photoshop page curls…”

Bruno Uzzan: Yes. There are so many concerns with markers. The quality is extremely bad. As soon as you hide a part of the marker, a slight part of the marker, you’re dead. You can’t track any more of the object. So compared to our solution where I want to say play with cards or where you are going to play with a Mattel toy, even if you hide a part of the toy, it’s still working.

Tish Shute: But you haven’t offered the public an SDK to your engine right? Basically the way people get access to your tools is working in a partnership with Total Immersion right?

Bruno Uzzan: Correct.

Tish Shute: Do you think in the future you might open your SDK? Are you considering that?

Bruno Uzzan: Yes, it would be interesting.

Tish Shute: So that is something we can see coming soon?

Bruno Uzzan: Maybe, because it’s true that Total Immersion is starting to be mature enough for these kind of tools. The only thing is that we have to respect good timing for that.  It’s a big decision. You know what I mean?  It is a big, big decision. We would then compete with others using our technology.

Tish Shute: Oh I know, it is a big decision when you have so much skin in the game! But it would be nice to have your SDK being THE platform for AR, wouldn’t it?

Bruno Uzzan: It is a really big decision that we can’t just take like that, you know.  There are a lot of friends who told me you have to be extremely careful about timing. This timing is pretty much connected to the maturity of the market. For sure, we see the market being more and more mature. But, there are a lot of low hanging fruits we still want to address

To get the best value possible for all the publicity we have and all the clients we have now.

Tish Shute: Yes, I know. You’ve been in this game so long. Now, there is an interesting question here though about tools and platforms because you know, A.R., augmented reality has already expanded  beyond its kind of original purist definition. And when I talk to people  about augmented reality, there are actually lot of different ideas and priorities of where the tools should go right now. You know, obviously we have these kind of browser-like applications, but these browser like applications are not dealing with recognizing near field objects yet.  What are your priorities for tool development and what are your priorities for AR development in the future? What areas are you going to focus on? Oh dear that is a rambling question!

Bruno Uzzan: [laughter]  So, one of our first priorities is we need to create our software with one development, one installer, one software that can be spread on different platforms. The same application, the same software can be used either on a PC, Mac, phone or console. So that’s a lot of work, because that means that our platform has to address many many different devices and that’s a big priority for us because we received this request from our clients. We want to be able to use one application on many different platforms and devices. So, that’s the first one.

And the second one is to add more and more interactivity between the real and the virtual world. So, we are working on some improvements to add some real components that will interact with virtual, and that also part of our big strategy and direction and these two worlds can more and more be bridged together, linked together so they can interact  one with the other.

Our R&D guys are working on the real world interacting more with the virtual world.  And I have started seeing some results which are pretty much crazy and this will be ready for next year.

There are so many different directions for interaction between the real world and virtual world to develop.  I’m sure ten years from now you’re going to have AR applications everywhere.  Its not just temporary fashion stuff or a gimmick for few months. I mean we are getting there, its getting stronger and stronger and we are getting a good adoption rate from our consumers. They like it, they test it, they play with it and brands wants more, people want more and its getting bigger and bigger.

Tish Shute: Yea and I totally agree, its not a gimmick because the interaction between “virtual” and “real” enhances the magic of both. Another question about you RandD operation. Is your R&D still in France or have you moved totally out to LA.

Bruno Uzzan: We are 50 people in France and I started this LA office two years ago and I moved permanently two years to LA. So I’m now permanently located in the US to take care of the US office, knowing that revenues are really getting bigger and bigger in the US. So it means that we are getting a lot of traction, working with large company and now I’m currently located in the US.

Tish Shute: My sister lives in Paris. Could I visit your R&D lab at some point? I’d love to visit!

Bruno Uzzan: Yeah sure sure sure. I mean if you want to go. You won’t have access to all the research. But if you want to go out and meet all the team please do.

Tish Shute: I’d love to.

Bruno Uzzan: No problem. Shoot me an Email you and I will introduce you to Eric Gehl, COO, he is the COO of the French team. And he can definitely take care of that.

Tish Shute: That would be fun. Thank you!

Recently, AR browser applications have really caught the imagination of the web community, eg., Layar and Wikitude?  Where do you think the most important market for AR is at the moment, entertainment,  green tech, business, education?

Bruno Uzzan: I think that all that you mention will be important. The first one that did grab my attention is entertainment particularly dual marketing, because they always searching for new ways to interact with players or the consumers.  But it’s just the tip of the iceberg, you know, I mean medical applications could be huge using augmented reality. Education, and edutainment is definitely using more and more augmented reality components.  And I will just be submitting with big companies – that are considering using augmentation for education. Museums are very important too. Also augmentation as a kind of free sales tool, you know there are so many applications, design, architecture – so many directions that it’s hard to say today which one will take the lead.

But I do believe that on the short term the ones that are really really moving fast are the entertainment business and the digital marketing business.

Tish Shute: What do you think are the biggest shortcomings with current augmented reality and what are the obstacles that no one has solved yet?

Bruno Uzzan: I think the cell phone is not fully ready for augmented reality – a lot of people are working on that but there are still a lot of constraints to get the augmented reality working on a cell phone and I think that from what I heard a lot of manufacturers and a lot of companies are working from direction that are going to help us a lot to develop some great cell phone applications.

And I think that’s one of the biggest part of the game. All the applications that you see on cell phones so far are just gimmicks – the next big key is how to transform some gimmick cell phone application to a real, industrial, robust application that’s going to work on a cell phone. So I think that’s a big challenge for this year.

Most of what we see now is just matching and overlaying some 2d components in a video. This is not what I call AR.  You’re far away – with this kind of application, you are far away from doing the registration that we need to do – you can’t do it. So here’s the challenge: “how can you get a Topps is an application working on cell phone. That’s the big challenge  How we can make that work!” You can’t today get a real AR Topps application working on cell phone because there’s no cell phone  that’s actually ready. But we are working on it and the first one that can make that work, it’s going to be huge.

When you are working with good AR components you need a lot of CPU and GPU programs. So today new cell phone have started to be more and more ready for augmented reality but you need a really good cell phone to make it work. You can’t choose an old cell phone to make it work because you have some recognition, you have some tracking, you have some rendering, so you can’t choose a Nokia cell phone two years old to make that work. For sure the newest iPhone is the one that can make it work, but that’s it for now. There is a lot of research – from large cell phone companies – to get more CPU and GPU into their cell phone.  But so far we are also waiting for these devices to be released to consumers.

Tish Shute: And the current economic climate has put a damper on MIDs hasn’t it. But who can tell? It depends what price points some new MID came out at right?

Bruno Uzzan: Correct.

Tish Shute: Yes,I agree. But basically what’s interesting, the interesting thing is, the iPhone can deliver so much of what is necessary and even if Apple hasn’t given access to the full power of the iphone to AR developers yet, there is really no going back now – the mobile augmented reality cat is out of the bag!

Bruno Uzzan: You’re right, you’re fully right.