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

“Y Combinator hackathon’s prize-winning designs”

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

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

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

Here’s a look at some of the winners.

Printing on whole wheat or white

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

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

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

Peripherals and apps for the IO Toaster

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

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

Touch screen toaster displays

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

Grand prize was a real grabber

Meet the Tactilus team

Fitness glove has something up its sleeve

Baby gets a robo rocker

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

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

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

From here to China and back

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

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

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

Registration will open in February.”

Mobile social communication is beginning to take center stage as the internet moves to real time communications. The recent explosion of interest in augmented reality is part of a wider concern to orchestrate a new landscape of contextually relevant information linked to location/place/time and mobile social connectedness.

The picture above, “Having an iphone has completely changed the way I poop,” is a slide from Gentry Underwood’s workshop at Web 2.0 Expo, NYC, “Social Interaction Design a Primer.”

Last month, I attended  three events starting with MoMo #13, Amsterdam, where I presented on, “The Next Wave of AR: Mobile Social Interaction, Right Here, Right Now!.  Then I caught the last two days of the Web 2.0 Expo, NYC, and finally, Real Time Crunchup SF (which I watched online).

New forms of real time mobile, social connectedness were central themes on all three occasions.

But, in terms of doing stuff that matters with mobile real time technologies, at the moment, we are still at the “hello world” demonstration (see my conversation below with Anil Dash and Mark Drapeau at Web 2.0 Expo below).

As Anil Dash noted,  “I think everybody starts with a train schedule…”

“I remember five years ago when Adrian did Chicagocrime.org. It was a revelation but I mean, that was five years ago.  And people still keep making that app over and over.”

Anil Dash announced at the Web 2.0 Expo that he will be the director of Expert Labs, a new nonprofit that will take the dot-com incubator model and apply it to new digital tools for the federal government:

“For me, in starting Expert Labs it’s been great just to tap into the desire people have to help and serve and to take the idea that you can work for your country without having to work for your government. What can you do to participate?”

The Gov 2.0 movement is attracting the best and the brightest, if you need inspiration check out Carl Malamud’s Gov 2.0 Summit presentation, By the People…..   Jennifer Pahlka is leaving her long time post as co-chair of Web 2.0 events for TechWeb to concentrate on Code for America. And Mark Drapeau is co-chair of the Government 2.0 Expo next May, that O’Reilly and TechWeb are also producing.  You can submit ideas about Gov 2.0, ICT, and cities (or other topics) to the upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo.  Mark says he will welcome them! Note there is a Free Gov 2.0 Online conf. Thursday, Dec. 10th

Tim O’Reilly has committed to Gov 2.0 work and “doing stuff that matters” with missionary zeal (see his keynote Web 2.o Expo, War for the Web).   Tim O’Reilly’s talk, also the article,  War for the Web, are a stark reminder of how the centralization and privatization of large parts of our communications infrastructure threatens the open web.  But “doing stuff that matters,” as it turns out,  is one of the best ways to win the war for the open web.

“Level playing Fields, Open access, Open APIs, Controlling our data, being able to move with it” (Anil Dash)

Slide above from Anil Dash’s presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo, NYC, “Listening to the Experts”

The Gov 2.0 movement is still in the idea and initiative phase, but the ideals and scope of the movement are a natural antidote to the fox in the social network chicken coop business model du jour (see the latest antics of Zynga).

Anil Dash notes the intrinsic bond between Gov 2.0 work and the open web:

“Because government has an inclination to creating openness by its nature. Right?  We don’t have an entirely toll system of federal highways in the states. We understand that the broadcast airwaves are a public good. And so government is inclined to think about creating public goods. It would be ridiculous to spend tax payer dollars on funding proprietary platforms.”

The Power of Government as a Platform for citizen involvement is just beginning to emerge from initiatives like Data.gov  “a collection of federal data housed on the www.data.gov Web site that’s open to public access.”

One of the most challenging aspects of creating in context mobile applications that do stuff that matters is the data curation.

Sean White, explained to me at ISMAR 2009, the challenges of data curation behind this beautiful example of augmented reality doing something that matters (pic below) -  a pollution meter, that “shows carbon monoxide levels projected over New York City.  The height of each ball reflects concentrations of the pollutant” (developed at Columbia University Graphics and User Interface Lab where Steven Feiner is Director).  Note Sean White and Steven Feiner will be at AR DevCamp NYC this weekend at The Open Planning Project office (TOPP) – see below for more information.

Open Data combined with Open Architectures of Participation are a Powerful Combination.

Scott Yates commented in his very insightful post on RT Crunchup SF that a “literny of fixes” for a broken web were “presented as  the state of the art”  in a “series of presentations from companies that have solutions that fix some subset of all the long list of annoyances” (annoyances arising from finding data and friends locked into a variety of different walled gardens).

And, Scott Yates writes:

“There have been presentations from companies who hope to be the future of socially connected communications, but not one of them has the economic or intellectual heft to be considered a true vision for the future.”

If you have been following my recent posts, you will already know that I agree with Scott Yates when he concludes: “Wave really has an opportunity to fix so much of what is broken in communications.”

I have been working on a project to create an open distributed augmented reality/mobile social communications framework based on the Wave Federation Protocol.

This Saturday Dec 5th there will be AR DevCamps held in Mountain View, New York City, Wave and Skype. There will be sessions on many aspects of open augmented reality, including Wave enabled AR.

AR DevCamp

I will attend AR DevCampNYC at the NYC location, The Open Planning Project office (TOPP) penthouse in Manhattan.  This will be an awesome opportunity to meet some of the key augmented reality thought leaders and innovators, including Sean White, Steven Feiner,  Steve Henderson, and many others (see the sign up list here).  Ohan Oda will demo the open Goblin XNA platform.   Thomas Wrobel will answer questions on writing AR Blips to PygoWave Servers and Sophia Parafina (@spara), Joe Lamantia (@mojoe) and I will be on hand to discuss the open distributed framework for AR project -  Wave enabled AR.   The PyGoWave crew will participate via skype (they will be introducing some of their latest work ).  Ori Inbar of Ogmento and Games Alfresco will lead a brainstorming session on the “Big AR NY Game”: The first location-based, social, augmented reality game designed for New York by New Yorkers.

We will continue the interesting discussion led by Marco Neumann (@neumarcx ) on the Semantic Web and Augmented Reality at the Semantic Web Meetup.  John C. Havens will introduce the Outernet Guidelines Initiative.  And Matthew Snodgrass @mattsnod, Lippe Taylor will lead a session on the future implications of AR.  Noah Zerkin, will share his brilliant work on AR software and hardware interfaces and exploring the idea of an AROS.  And Kate Chapman, from Washington, DC,  @wonderchook, and a bevy of local NYC geo geniuses, including organizer Sophia Parafina (@spara ), will explore ways to visualize government data through AR.  I am hoping we will have some projects for the upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo at http://gov2expo.com.

And there will be much, much more – keep checking and adding to the wiki. See you there!

“Hacking Human Behavior Within a City”

Picture from inspiring cities.org -shows some Amsterdam bicycle trends

At Web 2.0 Expo, Gentry Underwood, IDEO, gave a great presentation on how software changes community and communities change software from an ethnographic perspective – “Designing Web 2.0: Here Come the Anthropologists.”

And Baratunde Thurston’s,“There’s a #hashtag for That, was an inspired, brilliant romp through the “mini-grass roots movements” of hashtags - which are “quickly assembled/demolished malleable fun!” or “great ways to mess with people,” that reminded us the power of grass roots movements when it comes to “hacking human behavior.”

But my visit to MoMo #13 preceeding the Web 2.0 Expo showed me clearly “hacking human behavior within a city” is on home turf in Amsterdam, where smart phones and bicycles are the vehicles for the MoMoesque lifestyle.

Thanks to the foresight and generosity of the MoMo organizers, who make sure that the experience of  the speakers together goes beyond the few hours of the event, I had a three day, three night intensive on the future of mobile social interaction – living, thinking, and breathing mobile social connectedness, often into the wee hours, with Dennis Crowley, CEO of FourSquare (see his great MoMo 13 presentation here), Ted Morgan, SkyHook (a must see presentation on what SkyHook is doing with data), the MoMo crew, and many of Amsterdam’s enthusiastic Four Square community. 

And yes, Four Square really is an awesome way to enjoy a city and meet new people.  MIA in this particular pic are key MoMo organizers -  @samwarnaars @mdbraber and @vangeest

But what do fun times in Amsterdam and FourSquare have to do with doing stuff that matters?

Marc Fonteijn, MoMo chair and co-founder of 31Volts points out: “foursquare looks and feels like a game but what it’s actually doing is changing behavior in a playful way”

And Yuri van Geest, who co-founded not only Mobile Monday Amsterdam but also TEDx Amsterdam, added:

“in Holland we are working on using the FourSquare API for mHealth purposes also we see that smart venue owners reward all mayors/lead users/visitors with free meals/drinks/privileges/perks etc. and smart advertisers to boost their co-marketing deals based on FourSquare targeting capabilities of key influencers”

Dennis Crowley, seemingly immune to lack of sleep and jet lag, followed up his MoMo #13 talk with a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo.   I was sitting just behind Mark Drapeau, and I managed to catch up with Mark after Dennis’ talk.

Mark listed Foursquare in his big takeaways from the Web 2.0 Expo, pointing out the potential new forms of mobile social interaction have for “hacking human behavior within a city.”

“I had always been a little leery of trying FourSquare because I have a certain level of privacy I try to keep up. But listening to the CEO of Foursquare talk about it… I knew what it was. I have friends that use it.. but thinking about it as hacking human behavior within a city and social engineering of peoples’ behavior and what they can do, and really understanding what citizens are doing within cities, or other areas, and how they interact with each other.   I think could be incredibly valuable for government 2.0 and government understanding people better.”

And Anil Dash concurred:

“I think Foursquare is a good model in terms of having a game dynamic, being mobile from its default, having a great social experience, leveraging existing networks like Twitter and Facebook instead of trying to compete with them by building their own. I think those are all really, really smart leanings.

I think about if I were a government agency trying to meet those same goals, could I earn badges in Foursquare by doing things that help my community. Right? So when I volunteer at a soup kitchen is that one way to earn an exclusive badge? Is that going to earn me a discount at the bar? Those are all dynamics that we can set up very, very easily and I think that model…maybe it is a public-private partnership. That’d be great.”

Talking with Mark Drapeau and Anil Dash

Tish Shute: I was in Amsterdam speaking at MoMo#13 and I had a lot of fun hanging out with the MoMo crew and Dennis, CEO of Four Square.  I got to meet people and hang out  with Amsterdam’s new Four Square community. But unfortunately I missed the first two days of Web 2.0 Expo.

Mark Drapeau: I got here yesterday too. Yeah. So some big takeaways.

I had always been a little leery of trying FourSquare because I have a certain level of privacy I try to keep up. But listening to the CEO of Foursquare talk about it… I knew what it was. I have friends that use it but thinking about it as hacking human behavior within a city and social engineering of peoples’ behavior and what they can do, and really understanding what citizens are doing within cities, or other areas, and how they interact with each other, I think that could be incredibly valuable for government 2.0 and government understanding people better.

Also I really wanted to hear Tim O’Reilly interview Beth Noveck. I thought the most interesting thing about the interview were the questions and not the answers (also see Mark’s Posterous ).  I thought a lot of the answers were disappointing and political and vague.

But I thought Tim really got some important issues about how do people in the web 2.0 community, the audience of Web 2 Expo, interact in reality when you have a system that we nicknamed Gucci Gulch, where you have lobbyists and lawyers and special interest and councils and all these things that…developers and app builders are not really a part of.  So how do you break in?  I didn’t really hear good answers for that.

I really liked the presentation by the IBM researcher, if I can get his name. Forgive me. Ching Yun-Lin. Talking about putting a value on how many friends you have, how many connections you have and the fact that IBM can actually put a monetary value on the number of connections you have to managers. The number of email accounts you have in your inbox. Or your address book.

I thought that was just fascinating and that’s something I’m very passionate about is social networking for the sake of social networking and not merely for collaboration but making connections among diverse communities and using that to help your business or help your government agency.  Those are my big takeaways this morning.

Tish Shute: I was lucky enough to attend Gov 2.0 Summit.  I think a lot very important areas for Gov 2.0 were defined there, transparency, open data, getting developers into the public sector loop, and citizen-government interaction.  In what areas are we seeing progress and where are we stymied and why?  How do you see this Web 2.0 community connecting to the ideals and plans for action of Gov 2.0?

Mark Drapeau: I think there’s a lot of unanswered questions about Government 2.0 because there’s a lot of good talk and a lot of good ideas and initiatives but there’s still a long way to go before people in this audience, in this community who want to help the government or be a part of policy making or technology in the government can really in a meaningful way, interact with the government processes that, for the most part, are not going away.

And the people that are also part of the system, like giant contractors, they’re not going away. There’s a place for everyone. The question is how do the smaller people break in and I don’t think there are really great answers for that.

Tish Shute: What is the plan for the next Government 2.0 event?

Mark Drapeau: So part of the reason I’m here is to learn and be inspired as the co-chair of the Government 2.0 Expo next May that O’Reilly and TechWeb are also producing. And so there’s increasingly at the Web 2.0 events that they host, there are technologies and people relevant to government missions, or the public sector missions.

And so I think some of the speakers here will carry over in different ways to the Gov 2 Expo in May.

Tish Shute: Is the call for proposals for the Gov 2.0 Expo still open?

Mark Drapeau: There’s still an open call for proposals. Or people, if they know me they can talk to me directly.

(Anil Dash arrives and Mark introduces  me (Anil and I met briefly at Gov 2.0 Summit) – see Anil’s post, New York City is the Future of the Web I do agree but, of course, NYC is my hometown!).

Tish Shute: Anil you are moving into Gov 2.0 work full time now after being a key thought leader in Web 2.0.

Anil Dash: My perspective is probably unique in that I am very strongly from the Web 2.0 world, and new to the Gov 2.0 world and I think it’s telling that you can make the leap. I think that the profound thing is that these worlds are converging and it’s not where it was.

Five years ago the government technology was a bike with the training wheels on it. It was very much somebody’s old hacked up version of Drupel and crossed fingers.  And it looked a little homely and you thought, “well this looks like a run down office kind of thing.”

Now we have have institutions that have wonderful physical presences. You can’t stand in front of the Capital Building or the White House or Supreme Court and not say “that’s a majestic building.” We should have online institutions that reflect the scope and the scale of what they do.

For me, in starting Expert Labs it’s been great just to tap into the desire people have to help and serve and to take the idea that you can work for your country without having to work for your government. What can you do to participate?

Tish Shute: You and Mark had very interesting journeys  into Gov 2.0 didn’t you?

Mark Drapeau: Like the Hunter S. Thomson of Government 2.0

Tish Shute: I like that!

Anil Dash: Can you say that about yourself?

Mark Drapeau: I did the other night and people seemed to buy it, so

Anil Dash: People were feeling it..

Mark Drapeau: That’s right!

Tish Shute: And even if it’s controversial it’s good too!  I see Mark (and perhaps I am wrong with these characterizations) as coming to this via an interest in the social narratives of government and, Anil, you have come to Gov 2.0 work, as you point out, from a deep immersion in the cultures of technology and Web 2.0….

Anil Dash: And it’s also a little bit, I’ve had the privilege of seeing blogs and social media develop from the start and what I learned from it is cultural change and [not just] technology change. This is the same thing happening in government.

We’re calling it Government 2.0 and it makes it seem like it’s a version upgrade and it’s a software thing but it’s cultural change. And the interesting thing is many of the key players have a willingness to go through that cultural change, which means that the technology, therefore, has the opportunity to succeed.

Tish Shute: What did you think about Tim O’Reilly’s keynote and the warning he gave re the open web?

Anil Dash: The war for the web! He’s absolutely right. Honestly, before Expert Labs had started and I’d come on board, my initial plan for a talk at this event was exactly the topics Tim covered in the War for the Web.  That the centralization of vast parts of our communications infrastructure around privately owned, venture funded companies is a risk to innovation in some ways.

We have to make sure to set up our incentives for those companies, the Facebooks and Googles and Twitters of the world, to align with what our goals are as a society, as a culture, as entrepreneurs, and all those other goals.

So I think it’s good to have a voice like Tim’s articulating that threat and that danger so that we can respond to it. I agree completely that we are in the next phase of the battle between open and closed platforms that we went through ten years ago with AOL.

There was a time when AOL dominated more of the dial up internet, one-third of all dial-up users in the US were coming through AOL. People now say “oh, the iPhone is dominant.” The iPhone has 2 percent market share of all phones or something like that, and yet people are doing all their innovation on their platform.

Well, people used to do all their innovation on AOL’s platform and then they ended up having to rewrite it all for the open web.

This pattern is going to repeat. The choice is whether people want to encourage it or fight it or hope it goes away and ultimately there’s no great business that was built entirely within the walls of AOL’s garden. I doubt there will be a great business built entirely within the walls of Apple’s or Facebook’s or anyone else’s garden.

That’s not to say those companies couldn’t evolve to be open, I hope they do, but as it stands right now you would be foolish to bet your business either from a promotional standpoint, from a start-up standpoint, from a new technology standpoint, on any closed platform that you don’t control.

Tish Shute: I was mentioning to Mark that I thought it’s sort of ironic that we now understand how important the architecture of participation of the internet can be to government just as we are on the verge of another big battle to keep the web open…, a moment when walled gardens are seeming to dominate..will this be an obstacle for Gov 2.0?

Anil Dash: No I think actually they’ll get to skip the closed era.

You know I look at the rather famous example in India of never having landlines. They went directly to satellite phones, skipped directly to the wireless generation so they never had an old infrastructure to rip out.

I think you are going to see the same thing with government tech adoption is they are going to start in the era of recognizing the threat of closed platforms and move directly to open platforms.

Because government has an inclination to creating openness by its nature. Right? We don’t have an entirely toll system of federal highways in the states. We understand that the broadcast airwaves are a public good. And so government is inclined to think about creating public goods. It would be ridiculous to spend tax payer dollars on funding proprietary platforms.

Mark Drapeau: Universal accessibility for citizens.

Anil Dash: Right. It’s a fundamental tenant of government and we have an incredible history including the Internet itself, of embracing open standards to solve government problems in a way that helps all of society.

Tish Shute: So people who have championed open participatory architecture of the internet and open source approaches now have even is more incentive to team up with government 2.0!

Anil Dash: Yeah it is an advantage. But also, I mean candidly, open source is almost incidental to it. I mean I think we have come to the point where open source is assumed as some element of any new tech venture. It is much more about level playing fields, open access, open APIs, controlling our data, being able to move with it, that I think is key.

And I go back to that AOL example, there was a moment where they opened their email gateways to standard Internet email. And so instead of the AOL users only being able to email each other, they could email anybody on the web and this is the moment in which all the value was created. You start to have email marketing companies, and open exchanges and open mailing lists happen when anybody could email anybody else, that is the sort of thing that government catalyzed just by being the example.

Tish Shute: Mark talked about Four Square and how that could be really interesting as part of a Gov 2.0 project. But mobile has followed a course with many complications re an architectural participation – I am thinking about the control exerted by the carriers and now Apple for example?

Anil Dash: No, I think it has revealed complications that have always been there. Right? There’s always been multiple platforms. There have always been user agents and web browsers that have different capabilities. There has always been a digital divide. Mobile is making clear that those realities existed.

But I keep saying this, like, I think if I am designing an application today, you design for mobile first, for a number of reasons. One, the digital divide is much less pronounced on mobile devices. Two, you are much more likely to have an experience that scales well from a small device to a larger one than vice versa. Three, you are able to target international markets or other developing markets where mobile is the default computer platform. And you become aware of constraints in bandwidth, in accessibility, in user experience, in general experience with computers, that a lot of people in the technology industry just completely ignore.

And you know you go to Silicon Valley and people think it’s normal to have a six hundred dollar phone that has a thousand dollar a year data plan. And without blinking they designed for devices like that. It’s myopic and ridiculous to think that people can live with that level of privilege all the time on all the devices that they have and that they have a brand new computer. And so that will be its own undoing.

Right? It’s the people that are thinking about open platforms and working with any device and I think FourSquare candidly is doing a good job of this because they did start with the assumption of iPhones and this thing but their initial target audience of hipsters in the east village probably did have those. But now they have an open API, anybody can access it, that’s the right evolution. And I think they’re smart enough, that was always on their plan.

Tish Shute: But in terms of mobile social interaction we basically have really a structure all of lots of different wall gardens?

Anil Dash: For now..

Tish Shute: How do you see mobile developing more interoperability and social interaction capabilities?

Anil Dash: By using the web. I think it doesn’t have to be full-fledged Ajax-y, html applications on the phone. But if we simply rely on the capabilities of the web as it stands today instead of developing for proprietary mobile platforms we can make a lot of amazing things happen. It’s a good constraint. We should embrace our constraints.

It’s not conventional wisdom yet that mobile applications should be developed for the web. But that’ll change in the next year.

Tish Shute: There is a lot of exciting new real time technologies coming to the Web, Pubhubsubbub, Google Wave Federation Protocol. How will these change mobile development?

Anil Dash: RSS cloud. I mean there’s a ton of real time technologies that are coming out together.

Tish Shute: What are your favorites in the real time area?

Anil Dash: I wrote a post about this .. called The Push-Button Web where I actually go into this…

Tish Shute: Oh yes great post!

Anil Dash: I don’t pick a favorite. I think all of them together will work. I think it’s similar to how the web itself evolved.

We have a tangle of different related technologies that get abstracted away when you use a browser. You don’t know if it’s a gif image or a jpeg image when you browse a page. You just know it’s showing an image in line.

I think we’re going to see the same thing happen to real time web. We’re going to very, very quickly settle into a stack of technologies that let us do real time. As a developer you might have to be aware of the subtle differences. As a user your experience is going to be, “I have real time and it works on whatever device I’m on.”

Tish Shute: Mobile seems like a vital part of government 2.0 because it can connect people and their government to their context/public infrastructure/environment that is a shared concern. The open data movement has shown that being able to mash up data and get that delivered in context is a very powerful kind of technology for government 2.0. Right?

Anil Dash: I don’t know. I think that’s there’s just been the “hello world” demonstration. I think everybody starts with a train schedule…

Mark Drapeau: I was just going to say that everyone is starting with the very low hanging fruit. The transportation, the crime. It’s not exactly clear where it’s going to go but I think it’ll go –

Anil Dash: I remember five years when Adrian did Chicagocrime.org. It was a revelation but I mean, that was five years ago. And people still keep making that app over and over.

I remember at the time I had just become friends with Craig Newmark and I said, “Craig’s List should show the crime around the neighborhoods where you have an apartment listing.” And he said, “Well, if I do that then neighbourhoods that are getting better, that historically had more crime, will never improve because people won’t rent apartments there.” And he came back with that answer immediately as soon as I suggested the idea and revealed one, why Craig’s List is the success that it is. But two, what the implications are of releasing data and having to think about the social implications of that.

Mark Drapeau: Well, it’s like Gentry from IDEO said that, “Social software changes the community, which changes the software.”

Anil Dash: Right. Exactly. We have to think about the social implications of the tools and technology we create.

That means that the reason…one of the reasons we have only had these, frankly, unambitious obvious applications of open data is because the people that have had access thus far have been people that are not socially oriented. Like geeks are very inwardly focused.

Tish Shute: Oh. Okay. Well Mark’s changing this..

Anil Dash: They’re in a very insular community.

Mark Drapeau: I think there’s a number of people that are trying to change that.

Anil Dash: Yeah. It’s starting to change but I’m saying that’s why we’ve seen that symptom in the past.

Mark Drapeau: I get a lot of mileage out of the fact that I’m neither sort of a career govie type that’s getting into the 2.0 stuff. Nor am I a lifelong techie who’s getting into the government and stuff. I’m sort of…I’m interested in these anthropological, psychological, animal behavioral, ecological questions about human behavior and networking. And that’s where I kind of come into this.

Anil Dash: And I think we’re going to need an ethnographic approach to looking at how people work with this data in their real lives. People are using this data already and don’t realize it. You know, when we grab a map in an unfamiliar city you’re using government data. We just don’t think of those behaviors as doing so, and we need to understand that to build applications that really solve people’s problems.

Tish Shute: So can you speculate on the next generation you’d like to see?

Anil Dash: I think Foursquare is a good model in terms of having a game dynamic, being mobile from its default, having a great social experience, leveraging existing networks like Twitter and Facebook instead of trying to compete with them by building their own.

I think those are all really, really smart leanings. I think about if I were a government agency trying to meet those same goals, could I earn badges in Foursquare by doing things that help my community. Right? So when I volunteer at a soup kitchen is that one way to earn an exclusive badge?  Is that going to earn me a discount at the bar?  Those are all dynamics that we can set up very, very easily and I think that model…maybe it is a public-private partnership. That’d be great.

Mark Drapeau: Or even doing things to help your internal community. Key people at work or within your agency or things like that. From my vantage point it does seem like local Government 2.0 types are thinking much more about mobile than the Federal government types. The reality is government employees all have BlackBerries and they’re running around all the time. But they’re in terms of government 2.0 type stuff they’re thinking about the Dell desktop they have and the Microsoft Windows system and whenever I mention something like mobile or pervasive videos…..people aren’t really there. They’re worried about cyber security on the traditional systems. They’re worried about desktop applications on a Dell.

Anil Dash: They’re still five years ago.

Mark Drapeau: Yeah. They’re still five years ago and so I think these kind of O’Reilly-Tech Web events, Gov 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Expo, etc., are really starting to get at these questions that are now and not five years ago.

Amphibious Architecture – “submerges ubiquitous computing into the water—that 90% of the Earth’s inhabitable volume that envelops New York City but remains under-explored and under-engaged.”

Toward the Sentient City, brought “architects and urban designers into a conversation that until now has been limited largely to technologists,” and created an extraordinary opportunity to investigate distributed architectures of participation of what we might call the “outernet.”  This is a timely conversation as “web squared,”  “smart things,” the “internet of things,” or the “outernet,” and their popular “ambassador” augmented reality are rapidly becoming everyone’s “business.” From “evil” marketers, to global corporations, environmentalists, artists and community activists -  everyone, it seems, is interested in the possibilities of this new frontier.

It is a challenging task to respond to, Toward the Sentient City, an exhibition whose backdrop includes a series of conversations on Situated Technologies – published by the Architectural League, from a circle of people who have been thinking, writing, and speaking on networked urbanism for many years now, including: Adam Greenfield, Mark Shepard, Matthew Fuller, Usman Haque, Benjamin H. Bratton, Natalie JeremiJenko, Laura Forlano, Dharma Dailey,  Philip Beesley, Omar Khan, Julian Bleeker, Nicolas Nova.  And the exhibition itself has a very thoughtful group of respondents, see posts from: Dan Hill, Martijn de Waal, Enrique Ramirez, and Mimi Zeiger.

But one of  Toward the Sentient City’s key accomplishments was to go beyond the rhetorical, and to put practical examples out into the world to organize a discussion on some of the ideas and possibilities of ubiquitous computing that have barely begun to emerge from academic research, and entrepreneurial blue skying.  As curator, Mark Shepard, explained:

“The aim is to provide concrete examples in the present around which to organize a discussion about just what kind of future we might want. Whether they’re prototypes or not, these commissions are concrete examples. They’re not abstract ideas. And we can go stand next to each other and look at and interact with something which is out there in the world behaving in the way it behaves, performing as it does, and we can then begin to have a discussion about it that is less dependent upon powers of rhetoric. So it’s not about me persuading you about an idea but it’s about us evaluating something that’s living and existing in this world. And that was really the intention of the show.”

The commissioned works - Amphibious Architecture, Breakout!, Natural Fuse, Too Smart City, and TrashTrack, that were the hub of Toward the Sentient City’s events, themes and texts, provided a unique glimpse at some of the possible dystopian and utopian futures of a “smart” city.  But, most importantly,  all the works questioned what might be new architectures of participation for a sentient city.

New Architectures of Participation: Hybrid Social Networks with Human and Non-human Participants .

Of the five works, Amphibious Architecture and Natural Fuse were particularly fascinating to me because they explored the possibilities of sensor networks to create new forms of distributed participation in networked ecosystems that connected the experience/trajectories of human and non human actors – fish, plants,  and people.

Both Amphibious Architecture, and  “Natural Fuse” – from Usman Haque and Haque Design + Research, gave exhibition attendees the chance to experience at a personal level our relationships with our non-human neighbors.

Amphibious Architecture from the 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, used a sensor array to “pierce the reflective surface of the water” that separates us from the underwater ecosystem below.  The sensor arrays just below the surface of the East River and  floating light array (see picture on left opening this post) create a new interface between people and fish whose movements and water quality are transmitted in light.

One could also SMS the fish and the single beaver that lives in the rivers surrounding NYC to find the conditions they were experiencing. But turning the city’s “back stories,” like the movements of “Yo beaver,” and the oxygen levels and water quality of the rivers into “fore stories,” is only one of the many ways Natalie JeremiJenko explores how we can engender the empathy necessary for humans and non humans to live in harmony and mutual benefit.

Toward the Sentient City also held workshops/presentations in conjunction with Conflux 2009. After her Conflux presentation, Natalie Jeremijenko of Amphibious Architecture (which is also a collaborative project between xClinic, The Living, “and other intelligent creatures on the East River”)  invited participants to enjoy a lunch of cross-species foods at the East River site. 

The cross-species lunch takes an existing interaction pattern through which people and fish are already communicating, i.e., people going to the river – the waterfront,  and feeding the fish Wonder Bread (which is bad for humans and fish); and transforms this desire to feed the fish into something which actually can remove the mercury content from the fish and our bodies by removing it from the food chain, so a previously inharmonious connection between people and fish, is redirected into a productive interaction benefitting both species.  As it turns out, food that is good for Fish (see pictures above), and removes mercury from their bodies can also be nutritious and tasty for humans.

Natural Fuse, from team members, Usman Haque, creative director, Nitipak ‘Dot’ Samsen, designer, Ai Hasegawa, designer, Cesar Harada, designer, Barbara Jasinowicz, producer, used sensors to  link humans and plants in network where we are accountable for how our behavior effects others in your ecosystem.

If you brought an ordinary plant to the exhibition, you could take home an electronically assisted plant and become part of a social network of humans and plants. This network of humans and electronically assisted plants is also a carbon sink and if  more energy is consumed than the total number of plants in the social network can offset, plants begin to die giving immediate feedback and consequences to being greedy about energy consumption. For more about joining the Natural Fuse network see here.

We are in the pre-dawn of  sensor networks like those Natural Fuse and Amphibious Architecture created – social networks  that link human and non human participants in entirely new ways are largely an uncharted territory. (Note: The upcoming Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6 – “Micro Public Places,” Marc Bohlen and Hans Frei, indicates it will continue the journey with an investigation of  “transparent and distributed participation.”)

Where Does the Social Negotiation of  Technology Happen?

Frequent questions that came up at the presentations given by the teams that produced the commissioned works were: Does this idea scale?   Does it close the loop in that you get answers to the questions asked?  How does the conversation gain agency?  And where does the social negotiation of technology happen?  (These last two questions were asked by Mike Kuniavsky at Mark Shepard’s presentation at Conflux: “Sentient City Survival Kit.” – see picture above)  I think it is fair to say that these questions for the most part remain unanswered. But Toward the Sentient city was alive with ideas and practical examples about ways we can explore these questions more deeply.

Usman Haque in response to the question, “Does this experiment scale?,” replied:

“it would, but at an individual level because it has to remain at the individual level because it is about the individual in relationship to the wider social context as opposed to building a forest to offset a city it is about each individual making choices of their own about what they do and  having some kind of knowledge about the effect they are having on other people because most of the time we are quite complacent – we are able to do whatever we want because we are not necessarily aware how our intrusions effect both human and non-human neighbors….’

So how does this close the loop?  Usman explains that one of the key aspects for him is that if you do take home a plant you become part of a system in which you are no longer anonymous and if a plant is threatened (plants get three lives) you have the opportunity to email the person in the system who has threatened your plant.  Usman noted that one of the interesting things that happened in the context of the exhibition, where there was a single unit, was that 90% of the time people switched it on to selfish mode – presumably because they were anonymous.  Another aspect of Natural Fuse that raises interesting questions is that as more people decide to join the network the risk of a plant being harmed by any particular individual’s selfishness lessens.  As Martijn de Waal, in his response that unpacks some of the deeper philosophical, epistemological, and ethical questions that Natural Fuse addresses, observes:

“The concept of a commons thus assumes cooperation and mutual accommodation. Could Sentient Technology play a role in the allocation of limited resources between citizens? Could it lead to the emergence of some sort of peer-to-peer governance model, that could prevent overusage of scarce resources?”

New Aesthetics of Distributed Participation

The works of, “Toward the Sentient City” point to possibilities for a new aesthetics of distributed participation in which users and system are no longer separated but instead “develop joint forms of observing and knowing that neither [...] is capable on its own.” (quote from upcoming, Situated Technologies Pamphlets 6: Micro Public Places, Marc Bohlen and Hans Frei).  Natural Fuse and Amphibious Architecture examine the new transactional realities of the Sentient City.

But there are many questions left unanswered.  We know a lot about the power of generativity from the internet (see Zittrain)-  the ur “architecture of participation.” As Zittrain points out, the “generativity” of the internet is “the engine that has catapaulted the internet from backwater to ubiquity.” Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase, “architecture of participation,” to “describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contribution,” such that “participants extend the reach/increase the value of the system.”  But as Tim O’Reilly put it in his recent talk, “State of the Internet Operating System:”

“Web 2.0 is about finding meaning in user-generated data, and turning that meaning into real-time user facing services.  “Web Squared” takes that same concept to real-time sensor data.”

We know little yet about what constitutes generativity for the “outernet,” particularly for the kind of  hybrid social networks that Natural Fuse and Amphibious Architecture present.  Social Networks that connect people and place, humans and non humans, challenge dichotomies of man and nature, and machine and user in new and unexpected ways.

At the moment, the internet is going through a metamorphosis with the emergence of real time technologies like XMPP, PubHubSubBub and Google Wave and the coming of age of mobile computing.   While these shifts were not investigated specifically in any of the commissioned works I think all the works  begged the question,  What is a common platform for social interaction in the “outernet,” or sentient city?  I was not entirely satisfied, from this point of view, with a web interface for Natural Fuse or SMS as a mobile interface for Amphibious Architecture.

David P. Reed points to the relationship between social mobility what he describes as the 3rd cloud  and the need for a common platform (see David Reed – Social Mobility and the 3rd Cloud. Hat tip to @srenan for pointing me to David’s presentation).

Slides above are from David P. Reed’s presentation,  Social Mobility and the 3rd Cloud

What is an architecture of participation for mobile, social interaction? This is something I am very interested in.

Recently I began a project with a small group of augmented reality developers and enthusiasts to use Google Wave Federation Protocol as a transport system for open distributed, social augmented experiences (lots more to come on this soon – you can see the back story in my posts here and here).  Wave has introduced an open federated architecture of participation that combines asynchronous & synchronous data,  bringing  together the advantages of real-time communication with the persistent hosting of collaborative data (like wikis).

Augmented Reality puts who you are, where you are, and what you are doing center stage, and is an interface for “communications embedded in context” and “enabled by identity” – two key qualities of what David P. Reed calls the 3rd cloud.  An open, distributed framework for augmented reality could create  an interconnected sense of AR, one that fuses augmentation, data overlays, and varied media with location/time/place and crucially, social networking.  Such an interface would open up many possibilities for the new transactional realities that could integrate real-time cloud based data with a human perspective and social networking.  I am using the term, transactional realities  to suggest an extension into social augmented experiences of  what, Di-Ann Eisnor, Platial, describes as,  “transactional cartography” – “the movement from map providing entertainment/information to map as enabling action” (see Human as Sensors).

We have only just got a glimpse of  how real time technologies and “communications embedded in context” will transform social interaction and our cities.  This post on Writing as Real-Time Performance that looks at the Google Wave playback feature is a brilliant example of how real time technology turns familiar practices like writing inside out, and catapaults us into new time trajectories. And, if you haven’t already seen Matt Jones of BERG’s, brilliant look at, “All the time in the world” - from the “soft time” and “squishy time” of  cell phone culture, to their anticedents in real-time computing, go now!  Also see Dan Hill’s work on “time based notation,” and Tom Carden’s work for mysociety.org

Transactional Realities Between the “Asynchronous City” and the “Synchronous Internet of  Things”

Out of Toward the Sentient City’s five commissioned works, only Trash Track focused on the “synchronized Internet of Things.” Trash Track asks what can we learn from the aggregated data streams of “smart” trash about the infamous path of trash from cities of privilege to rivers of want,  rather than exploring the the particular transactional realities of a social network that linked people with their trash

The goals of Trash Track were, Assaf Biderman explained during his presentation:

“to learn about the removal chain, to see if knowing more could promote behavioral change, and investigate if smart tagging could one day lead to 100% recycling.”

The team from SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT included – Carlo Ratti: Director, Assaf Biderman: Associate Director, Rex Britter: Advisor, Stephen Miles: Advisor, Kristian Kloeckl Project Leader, Musstanser Tinauli, E Roon Kang, Alan Anderson, Avid Boustani, Natalia Duque Ciceri, Lorenzo Davolli, Samantha Earl, Lewis Girod, Sarabjit Kaur, Armin Linke, Eugenio Morello, Sarah Neilson, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Jill Passano, Renato Rinaldi, Francisca Rojas, Louis Sirota, Malima Wolf.

However, Assaf,  in his presentation, presented another project from SENSEable City Laboratory in partnership with the City of Copenhagen, The Copenhagen Wheel.  This project seems to work brilliantly at the intersection of the “asynchronous city” (Bleeker and Nova) and the “synchronized internet of things”  The “smart” wheel – a low cost, open source, human electric hybrid is:

“an electric bicycle wheel that can be easily retrofitted into any regular bicycle and location and environmental sensors which are powered by the bike wheel and in turn provide data for a variety of applications.”

This project, that aims to promote urban sustainability through smart biking, opens up many possibilities for a bottom up architecture of participation for the sentient city (see video here).

Mark Shepard describes something he calls “propagative  urbanism:”

“a way of thinking about shaping the experience of urban space in terms of a bottom-up, participatory approach to the evolution of cities.”

And, in the most recent pamphlet in the Situated Technologies pamphlets series, #5 “Asynchonicity Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing,” Julian Bleeker and Nicolas Nova invert an emphasis in the so-called “real-time database enabled city” with its synchronized Internet of Things….  and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous city.”  They “forecast situated technologies based on weak signals that show the importance of time on human perspectives.”  They ask:

“why, besides ‘operational efficiency,’ would we want a ubiquitously computed environment?  What are the measures of ‘better’ that we want to count as meaningful?”

They explain:

..we are trying to think through what “urbanwares might be – urban operating systems – if they were less about synchronization, top-down construction and connected channels of information and databases and so forth, and more about asynchronized, decentralized things.  Software, data, time out of alignment, incongruities, tiles and imbrications of the geographic, spatial parameters into a delicious kind of lively peasant’s stew.”

One takeaway, perhaps, from Toward the Sentient City is that it’s at the intersection of  the  “asynchronous city”  and the  “real-time database enabled city” where many new transactional realities of the sentient city will arise.

I am excited about going to Where Week 2009 – Where 2.0 and WhereCamp, this week (for more see Brady Forrest’s post).  Where Week will be total immersion for five days in a think tank with creators of the information landscapes of the future.

As you know, if you have read my previous post – here, I think the “Mobile Reality” panel is a must.  And I have been looking forward to hearing more about The Shape of Alpha from Aaron Straup Cope, Flickr, since Etech 2009 when I was introduced to Aaron by Mike Kuniavsky (see my interview with Mike Kuniavsky at Etech here and more on Mike’s concept “information shadows” in his Etech talk).

Shape of Alpha is revealing some fascinating possibilities for mining geotagged Flickr images.

As Tim O’Reilly noted in a tweet, Aaron Straup Cope’s recent post, The Absence and the Anchor, describes, “some of the surprising things Flickr is learning about people from geotagged photos.” Aaron’s post also announces that the “donut hole shapes” are available for developers to use with their developer magic via the Flickr API.

“If the shapefiles themselves are uncharted territory, the donut holes are the fuzzy horizon even further off in the distance. We’re not really sure where this will take us but we’re pretty sure there’s something to it all so we’re eager to share it with people and see what they can make of it too.”

For more on shape files see Aaron’s blog post about “some experimental work that I’d been doing with the shapefile data we derive from geotagged photos.”

Creating the Information Landscapes of the Future

I have been thinking and writing a lot about augmented reality lately.  And key thought leaders in this space like Blair MacIntyre, Robert Rice (see my interview here), and Ori Inbar (see my interview here), have clued me in to how vital it is, for an ubiquitous experience, for us to find ways to allow people to fill in the stories that can be used for augmented reality.

As Ori noted in conclusion to our recent conversation:

“in order to have a ubiquitous experience like Robert Rice and others are striving for, you’ll need to 3d map the world. Google earth like apps are going to help but it is not going to be sufficient. So let’s leverage people. Google became successful in part by making people work with them.  Each time you create a link from your blog to my blog their search engines learn from it.  So let’s find ways to make people create information that can be used for AR.”

Jim Purbrick, another key thinker in this area (interview upcoming), also notes:

“you can imagine a crowd sourced set of hints for any location so, AR knows roughly where it is and can do photosynth style matching  to find out exactly what it’s looking at and get the extra data it needs about that thing (humans are really good image recognition systems, and are also pretty good at interfacing with networks) instead of marking up real objects with ids you take pictures of real objects, tag them and then search them based on images from your ar system.”

Ori Inbar suggested to me an idea that I really liked – the notion of bread crumbs where, “You don’t have a constant view of what is happening when you walk but you get images and text and all sorts of things from people who walked there before – like breadcrumbs.“  And as Design Under Sky points out about Shape of Alpha:

“The truly amazing part of this process is how the “community” has the authority to provide areas previously unmapped.  By uploading personal photos of areas not covered by mapping software, members have the power of further shrinking our world through greater visual access and understanding of locations one might not be willing or unable to visit.”

Aaron Straup Cope, Flickr, Todd E. Kurt, ThingM and Mike Kuniavsky, ThingM

The Locative Media Manifesto

@stamen’s tweet brought André Lemos’ brilliant, thought provoking, ” Locative Media Manifesto,” to my attention.  I am also looking forward to hearing about how old maps “can shed light on modern geography when placed in counterpoint to the state of art in modern maps from Google or Microsoft” from Michal Migurski, Stamen Design, who will present Flea Market Mapping at Where 2.0.

André Lemos writes:

“After uploading to Matrix up there – Internet 1.0 – now is the time to “download cyberspace,” information about things down here – Internet 2.0. We are not dealing with what is virtual up there, but of what to do with all this information about things and places down here! How can we relate to things and places? And now that these things and places are provided with digital information and Internet connections? Do we invoke Heidegger and Lefevbre?”

I will leave it to people smarter than I to invoke Heidegger and Lefevbre as Andre Lemos does so eloquently in Locative Media Manifesto. But by reminding us artists and activists created the term “locative media” to “question the mass use of LBS (location based services) and LBT (location based technologies,”  the manifesto delivers 30 principles to inspire creators of Locative Media and explorers of the, “current dimension of cyberculture, comprising the era of “cyberspace leaking into the real world” (Russel, 1999); an era of the “internet of things.”

I feel well primed for Where Week by my visit to the ITP Spring Show, 2009 last Sunday. It was an interaction riot, jam packed with brilliance and off beat explorations of locative media which I experienced through the senses of my 9 year old.  His pick for best of show is below. But he had many favorites and I have put some pictures up on my FLickr stream with links to the creator’s sites.  One of my favorite projects Alexander Reeder’s S Ring – “seducing people by talking with your hands,” is up on my Posterous blog.  You can see a list of the extensive media coverage the show got here.

Loose Interaction Topologies

The picture above is of a game of mud pong  in Tom Gerhardt’s Mud Tub.  The mud interface – “a smart tub with some mud” knows the topology of the mud and where your hand is. Mud Tub takes advantage of  a complex material – to explore loose interaction topologies, including as seen above a game of Mud Pong.  Loose interaction topologies are a way we can explore meaning in “the internet of things.”

Tom explained his own exploration of the internet of things to me very succinctly:

“I am not trying to make mud better. I am trying to make computers better with mud.”

He elaborates on the value of Mud Tub in this regard on his site, dirtycomputing:

“The Mud Tub occupies a space similar to other experimental human-computer interfaces, like, multi-touch surfaces, body controllers, augmented reality systems, etc, which push the boundaries of codified interaction models, and drive the development of innovative software applications. Beyond its role as a research topic, the Mud Tub also exists as an open-sourced hardware/software platform on which interactive artists and designers explore new methods for creating and displaying their work.”

Recently, I talked to Ori Inbar (above), formerly senior vice- president at SAP.  Ori is on a mission to make augmented reality commercially successful not in 5, 10, or 15 years, but now. Ori is the founder of Pookatak Games – a video game company, “with a vision to upgrade the way people experience the world.” Ori will be participating May 20th, in O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 panel, “Mobile Reality” -  an event not to be missed IMO.

The taste for computing anywhere anytime has entered human culture via the iphone and is spreading like chocolate cake and pizza at a preschool party (see why the iPhone changed everything).  And while the full flowering of the next step is yet to come – computing anywhere, anytime by anyone and anything (“the internet of things”), our love for these first devices capable of being mediating artifacts for ubiquitous computing (Adam Greenfield) is a vital first step to free us from our tethers to computer screens, and fulfill the promise of augmented reality.

If you need more convincing on the pivotal role augmented reality will play as the web moves into the world, check out Tim O’Reilly’s recent comments in this video clip posted on Augmented Times and here early last year.

From another perspective, the gloomy specter of economic and environmental catastrophe  is driving a movement to “infuse intelligence into the way the world work’s.” But the challenge for a smart planet is not just about making environments smart, it is about using smart environments to enable people to act smarter (see my interview with Adam Greenfield).

We need a rapid upgrade in both the way the world works, and the way we experience the world.

((Note:  It is time to read (if you haven’t already) Bruce Sterling’s Caryatids (Cory Doctorow’s book of the year for 2009) “as a software design manual” (see Julian Bleeker) because Caryatids reveals the Gordian knots of human folly, greed, compassion and desire entwined in near future designs for technologies to save the world.))

Ori Inbar, worked with Shai Agassi (Shai is now leading the world changing Better Place ) driving Netweaver from a mere concept to a “major, major business for SAP.” So Ori has already been through the cycle of working in a very small startup and growing it into a billion dollar business.  He has both the experience and the passion to realize his vision for augmented reality.

At Pookatak, he explains :

“We design “reality experiences” that make users’ immediate environments more significant to them. We wish to free young and old from getting lost in front of the screen. By delivering the world’s information to people’s field of view, and by weaving real world objects into interactive narratives, we help people rediscover the real world.”

Pookatak will release their first game this summer. Currently it is under wraps. But Ori gives us some glimpses of what is to come in the interview below.

In addition to founding Pookatak, Ori is involved in a broader effort to move augmented reality forward. On his blog, Games Alfresco – he recently welcomed a new partner, Rouli Nir, Ori has focused his eye of wisdom on every significant recent advance in Augmented Reality (check out this essence of Ori’s thinking in a fast paced video presentation for WARM ‘09).

Also Ori is one of the organizers of the interactive media track at ISMAR 2009.  At ISMAR this year, Ori explained, “we are trying to bring in people that develop interactive experiences for consumers, beyond the traditional attendees coming from a research perspective.”

In the interview below, Ori explains much of his thinking on how augmented reality will become commercially successful.  Enjoy it, think about it, and share it. And most importantly, if you can, get involved with ISMAR 2009.

Ori  has inspired me to participate in ISMAR this year.  Ori pointed out:

The call for papers is on, and this year it targets well beyond the typical research papers audience and into interactive media and art folks.

There are plenty of opportunities such as:

Art Gallery

Demonstrations

Tutorial

Workshops

It’s a huge opportunity to shape the emergence of augmented reality.

Interview With Ori Inbar

Making Augmented Reality Commercially Successful

Tish Shute: You are considered a key trail blazer in AR and you have the go to blog for augmented reality!  What are the most important lessons you have learned researching, writing, and developing AR in the last couple of years?

Ori Inbar: You need to have a vision. You need to know where this is going to go in ten or fifteen or twenty years. But you’ve got to start with something really simple that makes use of the technology you have on hand. And do something that is practical, that people will like, and something they would actually want to buy. Its as simple as that. I’m currently looking at what we could do with existing technology. First of all, you have to put it in front of people. Right now most people have never heard about the term augmented reality. Go into the street, and ask 100 people about it, maybe 2 would know about it. So you need to put it in front of people because most people think it’s still science fiction or a special effect you see in movies, not something you can experience in real life.

Tish: It seems to me to that for augmented reality applications to become popular with existing technology the key breakthrough would be getting people to hold up their phones. What are the obstacles to getting people to use their mobile devices like this?

Ori: There’s a really nice cartoon by Tonchidot (below) – the Japanese company behind the Sekai Camera. It’s an illustration showing the evolution of man, from ape to man (holding a cell phone looking down), to the developed man holding a device like a camera – in front of its eyes.

Which is exactly what you’re talking about. People ask, “are people going to walk with this like that all day long?” Probably not. I mean you have to build it in a way that doesn’t require them to hold it like that all the time. People are used to this gesture with the ubiquitous digital cameras. I tested one of my prototypes on a two and a half year old girl. She had no problem holding it just like she holds a camera.

Tish: Blair MacIntyre mentioned, “The problem with the mobile phone as a AR device is a problem of awareness,” i.e., you have to have a way of letting people know when there’s something interesting wherever they are. One of the issues regarding this is if you get too many alerts, then you tune them out.

Ori: First of all Blair is one of the people in academia that get it. Because he looks at it from an experience perspective. Not just as an interesting technical problem to solve. Let’s start with getting people to enjoy this new experience. The AR demos so far were mostly eye candies, and mostly for advertising – the GE AR ad created a lot of buzz; but you look at it for 10 seconds and you forget about it.  You need to build something that people would want to experience over time and would be willing to pay for. I think that’s the big test, right?

Now in terms of having a ubiquitous experience where you’re continously connected, it doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience. Just like some of the social media tools we’re using today, we decide when to connect, and we filter out the trash. You could get alerts only for things that really matter to you, not for everything that happens in your immediate environment.

There will be many layers of information, and it’ll be up to you to pick the ones you want to experience. The real benefit is that you get the information in your own field of view and in context of where you are or what you do.

Tish: So what are you working on these days?

Ori: We are working on a little app that targets a very different audience than what you’d expect: pre schoolers. We think we can encourage them to get away from a PC or TV screen and learn something while playing – in the real world. You’ll hear more about it as soon as this summer. Nuff said.

But, it is a small application that will run on the iPhone. People ask how many pre-schoolers own iPhones? Well, their parents do.

Tish: Yes there are certainly many New York kids with iPhones – my kid now has my old iphone.  He has pretty much switched from playing games on his DS to the iPhone. I noticed in your WARM video you place a big emphasis on AR as something that will get kids away from screens and engaged with reality.  This is something parents will approve of!

Ori: Yes I saw something really interesting at my kids’ party one day; they were all sitting around the room – looking down at their own DS screens.  You could play the DS anywhere, but kids would usually play it on the sofa, looking at the screen, isolated from the world. With an iPhone and a camera, and the application we’re producing, reality becomes part of the game. Yes that makes it all of a sudden much more interesting for parents. Because kids are spending so much time in front of the screen, all of a sudden they’re something that will encourage them to interact with real objects, real things. Every parent I’ve talked to loves that idea.

Tish: Yes that is what is cool about the work of Kati London – I think I saw someone say this on Twitter, “Kati puts the computer in the game not the game in the computer.”

Ori: Yes, kids are spending more time in front of games and the computer because it’s more interesting. It captivates them with “game pleasures ” that tap into their brain’s dopamine circuitry – constantly seeking reward and satisfaction. So you’re not going to be able to tell them to go back to playing in reality without these pleasures. We have to study these mechanics from games and bring them into reality. It’s about programming real life; and augmented reality helps you achieve that.

Here’s an example: cause and effect; in a game when you do something you always get an immediate effect. You’re good, you get a reward. You’re not good, you get a cue to improve. In real life you do things and you could wait 2 or 3 years until you actually get feedback (if you’re lucky). Augmented Reality allows you to bring these mechanics into the real world. I think that’s going to help kids rediscover reality, in a new sense, which is what every parent is dreaming about.

Tish: I don’t know how much you can say about your app. But in regard to doing augmented reality on the iPhone.. there’s no compass. Is this a limitation?

Ori: True, no compass yet. But the camera gives you a lot of information that you can interact with. When you run the application, you see the world in front of you, and if the app can recognize real life objects – it can put virtual elements on top of it.

Tish: But not with any accuracy unless you’re using markers. Are you using markers?

Ori: We’re using natural feature recognition. It doesn’t have to be an ugly looking marker. It can be any image.

Tish: So you’re using image recognition. Are you working with one of these image recognition startup companies (list here )?

Ori: We’re working with one of those. What’s unique about it is it runs very nicely on any cell phone, and on the iPhone it works the best. For this first app, it doesn’t really matter where you are physically; the geolocation is not part of the experience.

Tish: For a truly engaging AR experience we will need more of a backend than is currently available?

Ori: I call the backend the cloud, where you have all this information and ways to access it from anywhere. Actually I think it’s become pretty mature today. If you look at the different elements required to enable an augmented reality experience to work, you have – first – the user whose always in the center. Then you have the lens. The lens can be an iPhone, or glasses, even a projector. The lens allows you to watch, sense and track information in the real world: people, places, things. Then in the backend you have the cloud where you store and retrieve information.

So if you look at the maturity of these different elements, I think the cloud is in pretty good shape. Because there’s so much information we’re collecting and storing. Anything from Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, all that kind of stuff, it’s a lot of useful information you can access from anywhere using APIs. And a lot of it is also starting to include geolocation information. Take Loopt or Google’s friends service that allows you to see where your friends are and what they’re doing. There’s tons of information out there and it’s pretty easy to access it. Now what do you do with it is the question?

Wikitude is such a simple and brilliant application and nobody thought about doing it until this guy from Salzburg did. It doesn’t have any sophisticated visual tracking. It knows your position and it’s simply looking at the angle you’re pointing to. Based on these parameters it brings information from Wikipedia that pertains to your field of view. So most of it was already there. It’s just a matter of connecting the pieces in an experience that is valuable for people.

Tish: It is the uptake of even a very simple technology that puts the magic in it.

Ori:  Yes, take Twitter. If you go to its homepage it looks like a very simple boring app but it is something that is both enjoyable and very useful to people.

Why you should participate in ISMAR 2009

Tish: I know that you are involved in organizing  ISMAR (picture above from Ori’s post on “ISMAR 2009: The World’s Best Augmented Reality Event…,“) and there is a call out for papers and for volunteers, can you tell me more about it?

Ori: Yes, we hope to have the first ISMAR where we practice what we have just discussed: let’s build on all the research invested so far and instead of thinking only about 5-10 years from now, let’s see what we can do today. So we are bringing people in from other disciplines – artists, interactive media developers and people from the entertainment industry.  The goal is to use the technology to make something interesting for people – again, something that people would buy, and making it commercially successful.  Many people either don’t know about ISMAR because in the past it was a pure engineering-orientated event and people  from a commercial perspective of AR weren’t attracted to it.  The Chair of the Event this year is based in Florida and he is going to bring in a lot of people from the entertainment industry such as Disney. I think this will transform this event into something more like SIGGRAPH – more of an industry event.  As one of the organizers of the interactive media track we are trying to bring in people that want to build applications for consumers.

Tish: In terms of AR applications what are the flagships today?

Ori: There are very few because it’s just the beginning. There’s one tiny studio in France called Int 13 . They’ve created maybe the first commercial game running on a mobile device using AR technology. It’s called Kweekies. It was one of the contenders for the Nokia Mobile innovation awards. They were one of the ten finalists, but they didn’t win it. It’s looks really cool. It’s somethng that runs on your desk, with a marker. Many AR folks say markers are the past, markers are ugly. But it’s still a cool experience. I think people will go for it.

Tish: Yes I think we will have to look to small companies that are free to think creatively to lead the way.  It seems many games companies are tied up pulling off huge big budget projects and enterprise is still catching up on how to use social media!

Ori: Yes, last year I was in the game development conference (GDC); there was no mention of augmented reality – not on the exhibition floor, none of the sessions, nobody talked about it. I was stunned. Then this year, there was a little a change. There were like three demos on the exhibition floor, Metaio, Vuzix and a Dutch company called Beyond Reality.  And then there was Blair’s talk, which was very very cool. The room was packed with people. And after the talk there were dozens of people lining up to talk with him about the topic. There was definitely interest, but still on the very edge. The video game industry is still a hit driven business and publishers spend upward of 20-30 million dollar to create the best AAA game possible. They just can’t take the risk. So it’s going to come from smaller companies, from outsiders coming in with a vision and understanding on how to put the AR pieces together to create a totally new experience.

Tish: But the basic tool set is there isn’t it?

Ori: I talked to some folks at the games developer conference, many folks with MMO background, and they have great ideas about AR. It’s great to see different people with different views on what’s needed first. “Joe the Programmer” had this idea of creating a small piece of hardware that you can put in every house and provide accurate geospatial information in your home. That could  open up many opportunities for AR experiences in homes.

Tish: Don’t you think we have enormous resources in terms of image databases that provide a great basis for augmented reality.  I was talking to Aaron Cope at ETech about The Shape of Alpha – Flickr’s vernacular mapping project using all the geotagged photos in Flickr. That is such cool project. Aaron will be speaking at Where 2.0 also.

Ori: Think of Google Earth. Google Earth leveraged communities to basically map all the major cities around the world into 3D models. And that is an essential step to be able to do augmented reality outdoors. Because if you had to model everything from scratch, it wouldn’t be realistic.

Augmented Reality and Becoming Greener.

Tish: I am really interested in how AR interfaces might be useful to some of the emerging energy identity/metering projects like AMEE and WATTZON because I think it is very important that people have very intuitive, immediate, and enjoyable ways to relate to energy data so they can make greener choices.

Ori: Back in the day I had an idea to build an Augmented Reality application to become greener. You look at things around your home with the camera and it  recognizes its green gas footprint and makes recommendations to reduce it.  I guess it was a bit too early to do that based on visual recognition alone…you’d need  additional sensors that would provide related information about what you are looking at.

Tish: Well as there is more interest in Green technology do you think we may see VC interest in some green AR projects now?

Ori: I talked to some of the investment folks, Angels as well as VC’s about AR and they had no clue what it is. There’s a need for a whole lot of education. And there are no proof points (as in successful investments in this domain), and counter to popular belief – they don’t like risk so much…

Tish: And consumer adoption must lead the way, right?

Ori: Just like with every emerging technology in history, people never bought the technology, they bought the content, the apps, the benefits that came on top of the technology. Whether it was VHS winning over Beta Max, or BluRay winning over HD. It’s always because of more/better content. Look at the video game console war: Xbox, and Nintendo did better than Sony just because they had more and better games. Even Windows was a success thanks to its applications. People bought it for the applications not the OS. The content is the first to drive demand.

Tish: One of the challenges to giving people new ways to relate to their energy consumption is that you can just have them looking at graphs of how bad they have been in the past you – that may make them feel bad but that doesn’t necessarily give them ways or motivation to change. There perhaps needs to be more immediate relationship to the data to facilitate change. I think the mantra for optimization of anything from energy usage to supply chains is timely, actionable data?

Ori: There are a lot of ideas about measuring information and displaying it to people. For example, the Prius hybrid car, one of its interesting features – which is kind of game like – is a constant display of your current fuel consumption. That alone changes how people drive because they try to beat the “Score” and as a result conserve more fuel. That model can be applied to our homes…

Tish: Yes that is something I am very interested in. I have been following several projects in this area – one of my favorites is the Arduino, Current Cost/Tweetawatt, Pachube integrations I saw at Homecamp.

You joined a start up with Shai Agassi which was bought out by SAP right? He has a brilliant approach with Better Place.

Ori:  I think what’s really unique about Better Place’s approach is that he doesn’t require people to change their behavior. People are still going to have their own cars. They’ll be able to drive as far as they want, and for the same (or lower cost). Its not necessarily about a new technology, electric cars have been around for a long time but there was no way people were going to be limited by the 50 or 70 mile range and Better Place is solving that problem. With its infrastructure of charging spots and battery switching stations, drivers are going to be able to drive anywhere. And it’ll be similar to having to stop once in a while to refuel your car. The price maybe even lower than what you pay today for your transportation needs – and you’ll stop generating green gas. It’s a clever way of taking technology to a whole new level without changing the behavior of people.

Tish: Better Place is a classic example of things as a service isn’t it?  It is basically a utility company.

Ori: It is similar to a phone carrier model.  You pay for a membership that gives you access to the car (equivalent to the phone) and electricity (equivalent to the phone line) for the same price of fuel cost today. And as bonus you get to save the world.

How the iphone changed the game for AR – and the iphone versus Android

Picture from Ori’s post, “GDC 2009: Why the iphone changed everything”

Ori: And back to AR, you have to take the same approach, because nobody’s wants to don those huge head mounted displays or backpacks. You have to take advantage of people’s current behavior: they already carry their iPhones or similar devices.

Tish: As we discussed, you just have to get people raising up their phones and looking through them when that is a useful thing to do. Both Wikitude and Nathan Freitas’s graffiti app were enough to get me interested in the evolutionary step of raising my phone! Nathan’s graffiti app is nice. You leave a marker for your graffiti so other people can find view/add their own – a nice primal experience like pissing on the lamp post to let your pack know where you’ve been.  Also the graffiti app taps into a long history of  NYC street culture around tagging and graffiti art (see my interview, “Is it OMG finally for Augmented Reality?”).

Ori: The app store has fundamentally changed the mobile gaming industry. Last year they were in shambles. There was no growth. Everybody was complaining, “we can’t handle it, there’s a million phones, and you have to test it on each phone. And carriers suck, they don’t care about sharing and promoting your content. Everything was bad. This year mobile gaming is the hottest thing. And it’s all because of the iPhone. It changed the game.

Tish: How do you think Android is going to get traction against the iphone?

Ori: Well the number one thing is the form factor – the iPhone is just much cooler than the G1. Its OK but it doesn’t have the same feel. People thought it was going to be easy to clone the iPhone but none of the attempts succeeded so far.

Tish: How much does it matter for AR not being able to runs things persistently in the background on the iphone?

Ori: Actually they have add a such a capability in OS 3.  You can now make use of a background service.

Tish: OS 3 will open up new possibilities for AR?

Ori: The access to the video API is still not public.  But there is a new Microsoft application – Microsoft Tag that makes use of that API which means it is probably OK to use it.

Tish: (I ask Ori for his card and he shows me how to read it with my iphone.) Oh nice you have an AR card, of course!

In Search of Pong for Augmented Reality

Tish: So how will AR begin to, as Blair’s friend put’s it, “facilitate a killer existence,” particularly as we are probably looking at some new and perhaps pricey hardware?

Ori: You could take the Better Place approach. We’re going to give you a great experience and we’ll include the devices as part of that experience for the same price. Let’s say you subscribe to an AR experience  which offers access to multiuser, support, and all the information you need wherever you go – exactly according to the vision. You pay for a subscription on a monthly basis and included in that cost we give you a better device that offers a  better AR experience. It’s following the phone carrier approach, but in a good way.

But first of all we do need our Pong! I was sitting with a couple of AR game enthusiasts at the GDC and we were asking ourselves, “how do we create the first pong for AR?”

Was Pong a multiplayer game? Not necessarily! Did it connect to the network? No! We have to create the first dot in a long line of dots that will bring us to our destination.

Tish: You haven’t seen a Pong yet have you?

Ori: Not yet. I mean there’s maybe a handful of games and apps out there, but I don’t think any of them is a Pong yet. Still, it’s getting closer.

Tish: Kati London is doing some very interesting work on bringing games into reality, isn’t she?

Ori: Yes, she works with Frank Lanz at Area/Code. He teaches at NYU and has designed games for the “Come Out and Play” festival here in Manhattan. And a lot of these games are actually low tech.

Tish: Yes I have a big alternate reality game blog brewing that I haven’t had time to write yet!

Ori: The city is the gameboard is their slogan. It’s going to be a great playground for AR games. The city becomes a theme park. The city could become an even bigger touristic attraction. People will come to the city to be part of these games. So you’re having thousands of people running around the city playing all sorts of games from laser-tag style to history adventures, to treasure hunts.

Composing Reality

Tish: So why haven’t you focused on one of these kinds of games with your company?

Ori: We have a couple of scenarios along these lines that we’re planning for 2010-11. But first focus on what’s possible today.

Tish: And what’s stopping you from doing those kind of games today?

Ori: Many things. The devices are not there yet, location services are not accurate enough, ubiquitous sensors are not  there yet.

Tish: You think alternate reality gaming needs more “ubiquity” than is currently available?

Ori: Not necessarily. People are doing alternate reality games with no “ubiquity” at all. But my interest is to add the visual aspect. I believe humans are mostly driven visually.

Jane McGonigal said in a talk at GDC, that AR would allow us to program reality, which is exactly how I look at it. Once you can recognize things, some of it with WiFi and RFID and all sorts of sensors. But visual sensors is always going to be the ultimate way to recognize things. And once you recognize things and know what they are, and can pull information about those things (or people and places) from the internet, you can program it (visually). You could program it to be fictional, like in a video game, or it could be programmed as non-fictional, like a documentary. And that allows you to do things that before were unimaginable.

Tish: But you can’t forget the visual, it is primary the connection to peoples’ primary sensory relationships.

Ori: Yes, it’s like you go to a grocery store and you pick your vegetables, a lot of it is by sight and by touch. And what if you could also see just by looking at it that it’s from a local store, and that it’s organic?

Tish: It goes beyond overlays really?

Ori: By the way, I don’t like the term ‘overlay’. I know that’s how it looks: you either overlay or superimpose, but I’m still searching for a better term. A term I prefer to use is “composing reality”. Just like painters, they use brushstrokes and colors and compose a painting. We need to take the real element and the virtual element and compose them into something new. It’s not just about slapping one on top of the other.

Tish: yes I think the idea of dashboards is not so appealing.

Pookatak Games

Tish: Do you want to explain the evolution of your company? You have an interesting history of success with high end enterprise applications.

Ori: Since I was a kid I wanted to invent and create things. When I discovered software, that was a really cool way of actually creating things from nothing. From thin air; and you can do it very quickly. That’s what brought me into software. But I was always looking for the intersection between technology and art. Looking for ways to bring these things together. In the early nineties virtual reality was doing it. It had the appeal of cutting edge technology that can be combined with art. But then, as we all know, it crashed. So I joined Shai Agassi’s startup (who is now doing Better Place) back in the early nineties. I was one of the first employees in his startup which was developing multimedia products. I was leading the development of one of its flagship product. At some point we realized the technology could be great for an enterprise environment.

It was a really great experience. First going through this cycle from a very small startup and growing into this multi billion dollar business. I was responsible for defining and marketing SAP’s platform, which was called Netweaver. It was just an idea when we joined SAP and by the time I left it was a major, major business for SAP. I learned about the challenges of building a platform. No matter what purpose you’re building it for, it typically has similar rules. It’s definitely not just about the technology; the content that comes with it is really key to making a platform successful.

The third part of this platform trifecta is the community. If you don’t build a community, you won’t get the critical mass required for adoption. It may be your own platform but it’s not necessarily the people’s platform. That experience is very key to what we’re doing today. Now, a new industry is being born on the basis of a remarkable technology. But to drive adoption, first we’ll need good content. The content will be created using today’s technology with internal tools developed to simplify the process. Next step would be to make the tools used internally – available to other developers. Help scale the industry, enable innovation on a larger scale. That way we have a chance to create a platform. So it isn’t really just about my company. I’m so passionate about augmented reality, I want to it to become a healthy and successful industry for the next 5, 10, 15 years.

Tish: Yes I am so ready to be liberated from the sitting behind a computing screen! And I know that all this hardware is murdering the environment.

Ori: There’s ‘s the book by Rolf Hainich which is called “The End Of Hardware. ” It’s about hardware for augmented-reality. Once you use goggles or other AR interfaces you eliminate the need for screens, laptops, etc. It’s going to be great for the environment. You have read Rainbow’s End, right? According to the book in few years there will barely be any (visible) hardware. At least it’ll have a much smaller footprint for the environment. And it’ll touch every aspect of life, everything you do. It’ll change the way you interact with the world.

The Illusive Eyewear for Immersive AR.

Friend of Ori’s in San Francisco wearing retro AR goggles (from Games Alfresco, Ori’s roundup of GDC 2009)

Tish:OK lets talk about goggles.

Ori: Goggles are going to happen, we want to be hands free.

It’s going to happen because it’s just a more intuitive way to use this technology. But above all it has to look cool. Because if it’s not, if it’s a big headset, then maybe a small percent of the population might use it, but most people won’t. It has to look like an accessory, like new cool eyeglasses that you just must wear.

I recently talked to a friend, who runs an industrial design firm, and has experience in designing such glasses for companies like Microvision and Lumux. He says that when you try to bring the images so close to our eyes – there are some really hard problems to solve. Otherwise it can become really annoying and cause dizzyness.

But I’m optimistic. I believe it’s going to happen 3 to 5 years from now. It’s already starting now: Vuzix announced goggles that will be available this year. Some AR apps that are going to take advantage of next year. Initially only a fraction of the population will use it. And that’s going to help advance it and make it better and better. But it’s going to take time until it reaches the mass market.

Tish: In virtual worlds we have seen, I think, a lot of mistakes in terms of reinventing the wheel and producing too many proprietary versions of the same thing and not enough concerted effort on standards and open platforms that could create a vibrant ecosystem.  How can augmented reality not make the same mistakes?

Ori: There are some early AR open source efforts ARTookit, ARtag but it is not a movement yet.  One of the things we’re trying to do at ISMAR this year is to put together  discussions around key industry issues, such as standards. Some people say it’s too early, you have to have a defacto standard to start from. But pretty soon it’s going to be too late. Just like with virtual worlds, all of a sudden you have all these islands that don’t talk to each other. Why get to that point if we can plan to avoid it? Let’s start thinking about it right now. On the other front there are devices. There are pockets of people working on adapting devices for AR, second guessing the hardware companies. Why not get them together with the Intels and Nvidias of the world, and discuss what this device should be able to do. And then compete to make it happen.

Tish: How much luck are you having with this discussion part?

Ori: People are very interested in doing this. We proposed these panels for ISMAR. And I’ve got some key people already on board. They have tons of input, they want to get involved. We’ll see how much we can actually get out of it.

Tish: In virtual worlds it was a while before vibrant opensource communities developed.  OpenSim has I think been the breakthrough community in this regard.

Ori: You have to think about the elements up front. The dream job is to architect the industry. Say we agree on the required pieces. Then we could help the right companies succeed in delivering the pieces. Next, we have to collaborate so that these pieces talk to each other. And eventually these communication methods will become defacto standards and most developers will adopt it.

Tish: So I’m going to put you in the role. You’ve got your dream job. You’re going to architect this community. So what are the key pieces and where would you like to see the open source communities take hold first?

Ori: Open source will not be exclusive. It’s going to live side by side with proprietary technology.

The key pieces? You have the user at the center. And the user interacts with a lens. The lens includes both the hardware and the software. And then the lens senses and interacts with the world, which includes people, things and places. And these people-things-places emit information – about who they are, where they are, what they’re doing, etc  – which is then stored in the cloud.

And then you have the content providers, the people and companies, composers who weave AR experiences through the pieces we mentioned before. These composers need a platform that glues these pieces together. Pieces of the platform will be on the lens, and in the world, and in the cloud. If you manage to remove the frictions, and connect these pieces into an experience that people like – then you have a platform. What the platform does it reduces the overhead and accelerates innovation.

Tish: Another problem virtual worlds faced in their development was their isolation from the world wide web.  Will augmented reality avoid this plight?

Ori:  Yes, I believe the key, like you said before, is not to reinvent the wheel. The cloud is already there.  Take Wikitude for example, all Mobilizy had to do is build  a relatively simple client app, connected to wikipedia, and all of a sudden it offered a wealth of information in your field of view.

I think we can learn a lot from web 2.0. For example, in order to have a ubiquitous experience like Robert Rice and others are striving for, you’ll need to 3d map the world. Google earth like apps are going to help but it is not going to be sufficient. So let’s leverage people. Google became successful in part by making people work with them.  Each time you create a link from your blog to my blog their search engines learn from it.  So let’s find ways to make people create information that can be used for AR.

Ori Inbar directed Wiki Mouse – a WIKI Film co-created by a swarm of movie makers around the world.

Adam Greenfield’s new book, The City Is Here For You To Use, is coming soon (photo above by Pepe Makkonen is from Adam Greenfield’s Flickr stream). Adam told me:

“I’m aiming at a free v1.0 PDF release on 05 June 2009, with the book shipping as quickly thereafter as humanly possible. There will be a version zero or public alpha in about six weeks.”

I am not good at waiting for books I really want to read to arrive. But, on the upside, it brings out my already pretty highly developed investigative instinct. So when Adam very generously agreed to do an interview, impatience turned into delight in tasting what is to come. And Adam is encouraging this kind of engaged anticipation. He writes (see post) that The City Is Here For You To Use, is shaping up:

“as something of an unbook avant la lettre. It’s why we’ve [Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield] always insisted on keeping you in the loop as to the book’s fitful progress, it’s why I take every opportunity to test its ideas here, it’s why I make explicit the fact that your response to those ideas is crucial to their evolution and expression. And it’s why, even though the process is inevitably going to result in a static, physical document as one of its manifestations – and hopefully a very nice one indeed – we’ve committed to offering a free and freely-downloadable Creative Commons-licensed PDF of every numbered version of The City, from zero onward.

You buy the book if you want the object. The ideas are free.”

I found the opportunity to ask Adam questions about some of his subtle renderings of technology, culture, and being in urban environments challenging and very illuminating.  Although I definitely get the feeling I am asleep at the wheel on some of the critical areas he is thinking and writing on.

Knowing the depth and range of Adam’s thought in his seminal book, Everyware, and his blog, Speedbird, before I began the conversation I asked Adam to point me to some of his posts that reflect key ideas he is working on at the moment (Adam has recently posted The City Is Here: Table of contents).  Adam directed me to these three posts.

Antisocial networking

More songs about context and mood

Messenger, space, messenger body, messenger mesh

I may ramble and diverge, as is my nature, but these posts inspired many of the questions I ask.

Adam is currently head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia and living in Helsinki, so I did not have the opportunity to do the interview in person. But I have glimpsed Adam’s world through his Flickr stream and some of these images have found their way into this post. But I suggest you browse Adam’s photography for yourself. I cannot do justice to the thousands of nuanced perceptions of cities, networks and publics you will find there. In the meantime, here are three glyphs of Adam Greenfield that I liked a lot.

“My favorite shoes,” “My favorite chair” and photo by Adam Greenfield, “Favoriteplace”

A Conversation (in gdoc) with Adam Greenfield

Tish Shute: Could you explain a little about the evolution of your thoughts on urban environments, ubicomp and interaction design? What shifts in your thinking have taken place over the last few years re the dawning of the age of ubiquitous computing? It is a couple of years now since Everyware, what aspects of the uptake of Everyware have most surprised, disappointed or inspired you? Which of the many thesis you discuss in Everyware have become the most crucial for The City Is Here For You To Use?

Adam Greenfield: You know, there’s a little passage in the liner notes to the second Throbbing Gristle album that I always think of when I’m asked questions along these lines. As part of their stance, they’d adopted the dry tone of a corporate annual report, and the preamble began by saying, “Since our last report to you, many things have changed. Indeed, it would be foolish to assume that it could be otherwise.” And I think that’s just exactly right: the world keeps moving, and the positions we’d staked ourselves to not so long ago may no longer be correct, or even relevant, to the one we find ourselves inhabiting now.

So, first, I think it’s important to cop to all the places in Everyware where I just outright got things wrong. There’s a passage in Thesis 50, for example, where I unaccountably mock the idea that “the mobile phone…will do splendidly as a mediating artifact for the delivery of [ubiquitous] services.” OK, this was admittedly written in a pre-iPhone world – and was correct for that world – but you can really see my parochialism showing here. It took the iPhone to make the proposition as blazingly self-evident to me in North America as it had been for quite some time to folks in Europe and Asia.

Having said that, though, I think I’m justified in taking a little pride in what the book got right. The broader trends the book set out to discuss – the colonization of everyday life by information processing – well, take a good look around you. And so one of the points of departure for the new book is taking everything posited in Everyware as a given: the urban environment, and most everything in it as well, has been provisioned with the kind of abilities you mention. So what now?

How do you go about designing informatic systems so they don’t undermine the wonderful things about cities? How do you design cities so they can incorporate networked informatics to greatest advantage? How, especially, do you accomplish these things when the disciplinary communities involved barely speak the same language? And how do you keep everyone’s eyes on the prize, which is the ordinary human being asked to make sense of these new propositions? These are the questions The City Is Here For You To Use sets out to address.

Adam talking about the “Le Long Ici” in Paris (also see Adam’s post, “The long here and the big now”)

TS: You mention that the hardest parts of  producing The City Is Here For You To Use wasn’t “keeping on top of all the emergent manifestations of urban informatics, or even developing a satisfying spinal argument about their significance” but getting the voice right.  It seems that now is the perfect time for a book that would really speak to a wide audience.  But also it seems that the city that is here for you to use is manifesting quite differently in different parts of the world?  You seem to be somewhat of a nomad, Japan to NYC to Helsinki.  Can putting together different views of urban informatics give us more depth perception on the emergence of ubiquitous computing?

AG: There’s no question in my mind that the long-term experience of everyday life in Tokyo, New York, and now Helsinki has been an invaluable asset to me, as I imagine it would be to anybody interested in thinking or writing about the networked city. It’s given me a certain amount of parallax, you know? And that, in turn, throws a really interesting light onto how the selfsame technology can appear in substantially different guises in different social contexts.

But explaining those things – those complicated, delicate negotiations – getting them right, doing them justice, doing so in a way that doesn’t dumb anything down, and still remaining accessible? It’s a challenge, let me tell you. You want to remain approachable and humane, but you also want to explain things like different jurisprudential takes on property, or how advocates of RESTful architectures think that REST is the reason why Internet adoption spread as rapidly as it did. If you want to enjoy even one chance in a hundred of getting your message across, you’ve got to start with an understanding that those subjects are MEGO territory for most people – whether they hail from Shibuya, Shoreditch or San Pedro.

Everyware icons: Information processing dissolving into behavior (Icons inspired by Timo Arnall; design by Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim).  [Adam notes on his Flickr page that he tweaked these icons as section headers for Everyware]

TS: Could you explain more about what you term “onto” and “ontome” and how this differs from spimes and spime wrangling?

AG: You know, I never did get to develop that idea as much as I would have liked. In my mind, at least, “ontome” referred to the totality – the global environment of addressable, queryable, scriptable objects. (An “onto,” then, would be any given such object.) I guess I was looking for words that would do two things: allow us to distinguish between the instantiation and the class, and leave us with a better word than “spime.”

TS: When you say better word than spime this is this because….

AG: Euphony, primarily. : . )

TS: When I first used the Android app,  Wikitude, on Broadway, NYC – a street I have traveled thousands and thousands of times, and it offered up new information about itself, it was definitely an “OMG this is big!” moment for me. Like the first time I clicked on a screen and Amazon sent out a book in the early nineties (something so ordinary now it seems impossible that it was exciting but I remember it was to me!). But if I understand your post here correctly, isn’t Android with compass the first easy-to-use context-aware mediator for wrangling onto, ontome and spimes?

AG: Wikitude sure looks pretty impressive, and maybe even useful. But I would never, ever call it “context-aware.”

To my mind, at least two more things would need to happen before we could comfortably think of it a “context-aware spime wrangler.” First, the buildings and other public objects around you would actually have to be spimy – they’d have to report something of their past and current state to the network. And then, some application running on your phone would somehow have to cross-reference that state information with some fact about your current state of being, and deliver you relevant information.

So, let’s take your Wikitude example. You’re walking down Broadway and you pass an unfamiliar building, and for whatever reason you want to know more about it. Your phone pings the building’s dynamic self-description, and it replies to the effect that Andy Warhol had his Factory there between 1973 and 1984. If Wikitude chooses to share this particular piece of information with you, and not some other potentially germane factoid from the building’s history, on the strength of the fact that “The Velvet Underground and Nico” was in your last.fm playlist? That would constitute some small measure of context-awareness.

But you see how hard we had to try just to come up with an example, how forced it is, how so-what. And I have to say that – short of some infinitely supple system that really could model your innermost desires ahead of real time, and present appropriate responses to them – most so-called “context-aware” applications and services are like this. They’re either trivial, or wildly overambitious.

Maybe we don’t need for things to be context-aware for them to be useful, anyway. Certainly a great many objects in the world are starting to report their own status, and many more will do so in the fullness of time. And for the most part, all you’ll need to avail yourself of them is a Web browser running on a device that knows where it is in the world. An iPhone or an Android device will work splendidly – I called the iPhone “the first real everyware device” the day it came out and I was able to play with it for the first time – and in that way, the answer to your question is “yes.” Not to be longwinded or anything. ; . )

This Object has imperceptible properties. [Adam notes on his Flickr page: “This is a custom RFID-enabled transit pass that Timo Arnall had made up for me here in Seoul. I’ve (clumsily) tagged it with the icon that Nurri and I developed to represent just such emergent situations as this in the everyware milieu – that there’s no way for anyone to understand that this object has puissance beyond the obvious simply by examining it.”]

TS: It seems that  we are just at the beginning of understanding how to create networks of spimes (e.g. Pachube). Gavin Starks of AMEE (”the world’s energy meter”) once suggested to me that AMEE could be described as a facilitator of networked spimes (everything will have an energy identity). I think you may be familiar with AMEE because you keynoted next to Gavin at Xtech 2007.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on AMEE?

When you discussed onto and ontome in this post, you noted:

“The greater part of the places and things we find in the world will be provided with the ability to speak and account for themselves. That they’ll constitute a coherent environment, an ontome of self-describing networked objects, and that we’ll find having some means of handling the information flowing off of them very useful indeed.”

Is the idea of “energy identity” that AMEE proposes an ontome? 

AG: See below for a précis of my feelings regarding environmental/sustainability initiatives, AMEE included. Uh…is AMEE an ontome? No. There’s just one ontome, and it’s coextensive with what folks now call the Internet of Things. It sounds like individual AMEE sensors would be “ontos.”

But I think the difficulty we’re having is a pretty good indicator that the terminology is more trouble than it’s worth. Sometimes a coinage, as satisfying as it may be lexically, just doesn’t work for people. These days I’m trying to get out of the neologism trade.

TS: I know when Usman Haque talks about Pachube he talks about spimes and spime wrangling. I asked Usman for his thoughts on spimes and onto/ontome and he gave me some comments.

Usman Haque: I think I had somehow missed the conversation about onto and ontome but backtracked through blog posts to piece it together (unfortunately some posts at v-2 and Studies & Observations no longer exist!). There are a couple of things that have made me uncomfortable about the word ’spime’: (a) the fact that it might be too easy to confuse with an “object”. A ’spime’ should also encompass relationships between things, and not just the “thingness” itself. (b) the sound of it (as Adam noted above). But then I am reminded of that horrible gooey interface used to plug into people in eXistenZ – it somehow seems appropriate that it should be a horrible gooey word, and not something that can disappear politely… So I like onto/ontome because it speaks to my first concern about ’spime’; but my second concern, it turns out, is not the problem I thought it was, and so onto/ontome might be… ahem… too euphonic! On the question of this thing people are calling the “Internet of Things”, I’ve tried in lectures to reframe it as the “Ecosystem of Environments”. Further, Vlad Trifa makes a delicious point that just as ‘web’ is different from ‘internet’, so too should we consider the “Web of Things” rather than the “Internet of Things”, something I agree with.

TS: It seems like this point about the difference between “the web of things” and the “internet of things” is pretty important?

AG: The parallel distinction between Web and Internet sure is! They’re two completely different things, right? And http is far from the only protocol that runs over the Internet. Now, as to what Vlad means by extending this particular distinction to the domain of networked objects, I don’t yet know, I haven’t had time to check it out. But sure, in principle I’d totally be willing to go along with the idea that there’s a meaningful distinction between two environments named that way.

No information is collected here; network dead zone

TS: I was just going over Greenfield’s principles of ubiquitous computing.  I am not sure that I see any current manifestations of ubicomp that hold to these priniciples yet?

AG: Oh, sure there are. Look at the work Tom Coates has done on Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle; look at Dopplr. And look at some of the steps other, less compassionate developers (e.g. Facebook) have been forced to take by their own users.

Look, those principles are just codifications of common sense and basic neighborly virtues, expressed in language appropriate to the domain of application. The best, smartest and most ethical developers have never needed guidelines to do the right thing. But especially inside companies and other complex organizations, people who want to implement compassion in their design of a technical system may occasionally find it useful to have some color of authority to invoke in their struggles. That’s all those five principles are there for, and I’m well satisfied that people have been able to use them that way.

Boffi’s take on the smart home- photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: In your post, More Songs About Context And Mood, you suggest a direction for interaction design that you point out is not far from Yvonne Rogers’ ideas in “Moving on from Weiser” about a switch in goal of ubicomp from Weiser’s vision of calm living (”computers appearing when needed and disappearing when not”) to engaged living – ubicomp technologies not designed to to do things for people but to help people engage more actively in things that they do (ensembles, ecologies of resources).

You also suggest interaction designers should be:

“parsimonious about the interaction design challenges our organizations do take on, with an eye toward reducing the complications of context (and the attendant opportunities for default, misunderstanding, misfire, time-wasting, and humiliation) to some manageable minimum.”

As you have pointed out, “we don’t do “smart” very well yet.” But paradoxically smart grids, smart homes, smart products etc. etc. are ubiquitously coming to market right now.

Yvonne Rogers suggests interaction designers should be:

moving from a mindset that wants to make the environment smart and proactive to one that enables people, themselves, to be smarter and proactive in their everyday and working practices

What areas might interaction designers most productively direct their attention towards?

AG: You note that things called “smart homes” and “smart products” are coming onto the market, and that sure would seem to be the case. But as to whether or not these things are genuinely smart, we don’t have anything more to go on than the marketing department’s word. I think you can already see that I tend to take language very seriously, and I really don’t uses like the “smart” here, or the “aware” in “context-aware.” They overpromise, they cannot help to set us up for failure and disappointment.

You know what I’d really like to see interaction design wrestle with? I would love to see a rigorous, no-holds-barred examination of the complexities of the self and its performance in everyday life, and how these condition our use of public space (and personal media in public space). I would love to see the development of ostensibly “social” platforms informed by some kind of reckoning with issues like vulnerability, dishonesty, the fact of power dynamics. In other words, before we deign to go about “helping” people, wouldn’t it be lovely if we understood what they perceived themselves as needing help with, and why?

I’d also pay good money to see talented interaction designers turn their efforts toward tools for the support of deliberative democracy, for the navigation of complex multivariate decision spaces, and for conflict resolution.

Locative is a mood – photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: I know you said this would take too long to explain but I couldn’t help noticing that you seem to be, perhaps, skeptical about the role of everyware can play in sustainable living and yet, it seems at the moment, in the hacker and business communities at least, the role of everyware in reducing carbon footprint/energy management etc, is the great green hope?

Will everyware enable or hinder fundamental changes at the level of culture and identity necessary to support the urgent global need – “to consume less and redefine prosperity?”

AG: I’m not skeptical about the potential of ubiquitous systems to meter energy use, and maybe even incentivize some reduction in that use – not at all. I’m simply not convinced that anything we do will make any difference.

Look, I think we really, seriously screwed the pooch on this. We have fouled the nest so thoroughly and in so many ways that I would be absolutely shocked if humanity comes out the other end of this century with any level of organization above that of clans and villages. It’s not just carbon emissions and global warming, it’s depleted soil fertility, it’s synthetic estrogens bioaccumulating in the aquatic food chain, it’s our inability to stop using antibiotics in a way that gives rise to multi-drug-resistance in microbes.

Any one of these threats in isolation would pose a challenge to our ability to collectively identify and respond to it, as it’s clear anthropogenic global warming already does. Put all of these things together, assess the total threat they pose in the light of our societies’ willingness and/or capacity to reckon with them, and I think any moderately knowledgeable and intellectually honest person has to conclude that it’s more or less “game over, man” – that sometime in the next sixty years or so a convergence of Extremely Bad Circumstances is going to put an effective end to our ability to conduct highly ordered and highly energy-intensive civilization on this planet, for something on the order of thousands of years to come.

So (sorry again, Bruce) I just don’t buy the idea that we’re going to consume our way to Ecotopia. Nor is any symbolic act of abjection on my part going to postpone the inevitable by so much as a second, nor would such a sacrifice do anything meaningful to improve anybody else’s outcomes. I’d rather live comfortably – hopefully not obscenely so – in the years we have remaining to us, use my skills as they are most valuable to people, and cherish each moment for what it uniquely offers.

Maybe some people would find that prospect morbid, or nihilistic, but I find it kind of inspiring. It becomes even more crucial that we not waste the little time we do have on broken systems, broken ways of doing things. The primary question for the designers of urban informatics under such circumstances is to design systems that underwrite autonomy, that allow people to make the best and wisest and most resonant use of whatever time they have left on the planet. And who knows? That effort may bear fruit in ways we have no way of anticipating at the moment. As it says in the Qu’ran, gorgeously: “At the end of the world, plant a tree.”

Biowall! - photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: In your post “Antisocial Networking,” you make some telling comments on the sorry state of social networking systems.

But you do also state:

Which of your concerns is social networking more central to than you might wish and why?

AG: Well, you know I’m interested in social interaction, interpersonal behavior, and in how these things play out in networked environments. There’s virtually no way for me to avoid dealing with Facebook, as wretched as I think it is.

Facebook is pretty hegemonic, in that its reach and influence extend further than the universe of people who use it. I bump up against it constantly, in a few different ways. People send me links I can’t access, because I’m not on Facebook. People spend time and energy trying to convince me that I’m really missing out, because I’m not on Facebook. The last few months, there’s even been a few people who feel justified in expressing some kind of exasperation, that they’re really pissed off…because they can’t find me on Facebook. It’s become the sovereign interface to any kind of life in public, and as a result a great many people don’t question its modes, tropes and metaphors.

So when it comes time to build some kind of situated interpersonal mediation framework, some kind of intervention in the fabric of the city, those are the tropes they reach for: accounts, profiles, friend counts, friendings and unfriendings, nudges and pokes. And as a member of a team tasked with the design of such systems, as a potential user of them, and certainly as someone exposed to the social rhetoric flowing downstream from their use, you bet these tropes become central to my concerns.

But what if we admitted that Facebook and the whole paradigm it’s built on are broken? What would things look like if we started from a more sensitive understanding of the interaction between self and others? Say, the understanding Erving Goffman was offering us as far back as the late 1950s? Then you’d understand the need for provisions like a “backstage,” a place to swap out one mask for another, the ability to present oneself differently to different communities and networks. That’s what I’m interested in exploring.

TS: Social networking systems in their current form are crude and express a very narrow bandwidth of human relationship. But already people are connecting everyware’s networked social acts to existing social networking systems. At the ITP winter show there was kickbee – networked fetal communication (and tweetmobile which used twitter as an acctuator for an ambient display) and green everyware (energy monitoring) is showing up in a number forms on existing social networks. But rather than just hooking up everyware to these existing flawed social network systems, does everyware require a reimagining of networked social interactions and social networking systems?

AG: That’s a great question, and I think the answer is clearly “yes.” It’s one thing to confine the consequences of that brokenness to the Web, and entirely another to let it bleed out into the world.

Does that mean any such reimagining is going to happen, that people will somehow refrain from plugging real-world outputs into these terribly flawed frameworks? Not a chance in hell. It’s too late to put a fence on that particular cliff. But maybe there’s still time to park an ambulance in the valley below.

“A graphic representation of a portion of the Earth’s surface, as seen from above” – photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: I saw you tweet that you met Usman Haque from Pachube recently. What do you find most interesting about Pachube and EEML? Will you design a project for Pachube to push the conversation further?  Did Usman ask you to take a role in the future of Pachube. How does Pachube enable the vision of The City Is Here For You To Use? I could go on for ever with questions,  so please do tell!

AG: OK, I should probably reiterate that my fundamental interest is in people, and in what they choose to make and do with technology, not the technology itself. For the last few years, I’ve particularly been trying to understand how people interact with each other and with the urban environments around them when those environments have been provisioned with the ability to gather, process and take action on data. And this is how I come about my interest in what Usman is up to with Pachube, because those “gather,” “process” and “take action upon” functions are generally accomplished by different systems, designed by different groups of people, at different times and to different ends. What Pachube aims to do is make the difficult and not-particularly-glamorous work of connecting these pieces a whole lot easier.

Think of it as a step toward enabling the ontome, this so-called Internet of Things we’ve been talking about, the same way basic protocols like HTTP and HTML enabled the wildfire spread of the Internet we’re familiar with. What Pachube offers is a way – a relatively straightforward and self-explanatory way – to plug any given compatible input into a similarly compatible output. So if you’ve got an air-quality sensor or a soil-pH sensor or a personal biometric monitor, you can plug it into Pachube, and someone else can grab the data those things generate and use it to drive a visualization, or the state of a physical system like a window, or whatever else they can imagine. It’s as close as anyone’s yet come to providing a plug-and-play backbone for the creation of responsive environments.

And I think it’s absolutely brilliant that it’s designed to work with Arduino and Processing, two lightweight, open-source frameworks that hobbyists and researchers (and even one or two more serious developers) around the world are already using to build things. (Arduino’s a kit of parts for doing basic physical computing – using data to drive lights, motors, and other actuators that have effect out here in the world – while Processing is a very accessible language to do dynamic and interactive graphics for screen-based media). Given both its openness and modularity, and its willingness to build on top of the very popular frameworks that already exist, I’m very excited to see what people make of and with Pachube.

I have to be honest and admit that personally, I couldn’t really care less about the environmental angle, for reasons that I went into at embarrassing length above. What I’m engaged by in Usman’s work is the idea that Pachube is helping to create an open platform for people to share data more readily. And while, no, he hasn’t explicitly asked me to take any particular stake in things, I’m always happy to lend a hand in whatever way would be most useful. I think it’s a project worth supporting.

As to how Pachube enables some of the ideas in The City Is Here, the answer has to do with the book’s call for every “public object” – every lamppost, bus shelter, commercial façade, and so forth – to support an open API. Something’s got to string all those objects together, present them to people as resources to be taken up and used, and Usman’s offered us a critical first step in that direction.

TS: Usman suggested, it might be interesting to ask you about “the tension between ‘could’ and ’should.’

Usman Haque: There are a whole bunch of things that we “can” do, technologically speaking; how do we decide what we ’should’ do, as we find ourselves in an age where we can build almost anything we can imagine…? particularly with reference to technology/privacy/security triumvirate. e.g., leaving aside that the majority of the world is *not* in the technology ‘paradise’ that we’re in, here in the west, only a small fraction of people are currently producing the technology that the rest of us use; one aim is to get people more engaged in the productive process, but, in a sense that will also mean the whole wide ecosystem of technology will be even bigger, both “good” stuff and “bad” (that qualification firmly placed on how it’s used), as opposed to now when we can focus on quite specific things that government & industry are doing and saying “that shouldn’t be happening….”. part of this relates to something adam said on his blog  in the comments (see here).” 

AG: I think the first part of answering that question has to involve figuring out who “we” are in any given situation. A “we” composed of seven Helsinki-based Linux developers would most likely arrive at very different answers than the United States Air Force Materiel Command or Samsung’s board of directors, right? So clearly, a first challenge is getting to some kind of pragmatically useful alignment between those local and occasionally even painfully parochial perspectives with what’s best for the Big We. And this challenge is only going to become more vexing as the ability to imagine, design, build and deploy informatic componentry gets more and more widely distributed. In this respect the spread of simple, modular, low-barrier-to-entry tools only makes things worse!

The primary issue that I can see here is that the inherent clock speed of technical development is so very much faster than that of any meaningful deliberative process “we” might bring to bear on it. A concomitant concern is that the sources of technical innovation and production are now so widely distributed that you can be reasonably certain that somebody, somewhere will implement any given technically feasible idea, no matter how offensive, poorly thought-out, socially disruptive or frankly stupid. A public toilet you have to SMS to unlock and use? A “Friend Finder” visualization with high locational precision and no privacy features whatsoever? A first-person rape-simulation “game”? A clunky brown iPod knockoff? Somebody thought each one of these things was worth the time, expense and effort to actually go about making it. They exist.

But I’m pretty old-fashioned in some ways, in that I think the good old Habermasian idea of the public sphere still has some life left in it. And I think it should be self-evident by now that there’s no necessary contradiction between even the newest (cough) “social media” and the formation of such a sphere. So you’ve provided a forum, and in it I get to express my belief that these things are stupid and pointless and probably should not have been built. And if somebody gets all het up about that, they can argue right back at me in comments. And eventually one or another of these positions begins to tell, in terms of regulation, legislation, and other tools of the juridical order, in terms of protest campaigns or organized boycotts or litigation…in terms of nonexistent sales!

There’s nothing new in any of this, of course, though indubitably some of the dynamics are amplified or accelerated by e-mail, Twitter and YouTube. My main contention is that informatic technology now has such deeply pervasive implications, and for things like presentation of self that previous waves of technical development barely touched, that “we” as societies need to be very much more conscious of the consequences before committing to any one course of action.

I should also point out that I do not, at all, believe that we’re “in an age where we can build almost anything we can imagine,” though I might buy “…two or three of almost anything we can imagine.” On the contrary, as I implied above, I think the global constraints on our ability to operate freely are already becoming quite evident, and will continue to grow teeth over the next few decades.

TS: Also Usman  added …

Usman Haque: ..where Adam said: in this regard, I very much *do* have a problem with “just showing up.” — something I feel that as well. but i always wonder: What happens when one appears to be mandating participation…?

AG: Look, I happen to have a strong – maybe some would say obnoxious or hyperactive or overdeveloped – sense of personal responsibility and accountability. I think one is basically committed to some measure of responsibility for the commonweal simply by surviving to the age of majority. The choice of how, particularly, to discharge that responsibility can only be yours and yours alone, but it can’t be ducked or gotten around without severe and entirely predictable consequences. So to Usman I’d respectfully suggest that I’m not the one mandating participation. Life is.

TS: It seems we have grown accustomed to striking a Faustian bargain on the internet today -  in order to share and distribute parts of our identity we are expected to give up key information to one site to store and disperse our data. I took part in a discussion with David Levine, IBM and Eben Moglen on privacy last year.  And Eben Moglen gave a succinct description of the elements of privacy and how they have been treated in the American Constitution that is, I think, relevant to unpacking some of the challenges of ubiquitious computing. Here are some extracts from that conversation where, Eben notes:

there are three elements that are mixed up in privacy and we tend not to notice which one we are talking about at any given moment.

There is secrecy – that is the data should not be readable by or understandable by anybody except me or people I designate. There is anonymity which is the data can be seen by anybody but about whom it is should be knowable only by me or people that I designate. And there is autonomy which isn’t about either secrecy or anonymity but which is about my right to live under circumstances which reinforce my sense that I am in control of my own fate. And this form of privacy is actually the one we talk about in the constitutional structure when we talk about the right to get an abortion or use birth control.

“Anonymity” is a condition that is a deep structuring characteristic of the internet as you, Lessig and others have commented on.  And frequently we are promised (questionably) “secrecy” or anonymity as privacy protection by services handling our data on the internet.  But Eben (one of the US’s great constitutional lawyers) points out that “autonomy” is a key form of privacy in the  US constitutional structure that is often compromised in situations where our digital selves may constrain our non-digital selves.

The real issue here is about the forcing of choices on us…digital aspects of identity can quickly acquire an inflexibilty that constrains our non-digital selves.

I see again and again the ways in which people now find themselves unable to make certain life choices easily because there digital self has acquired an inflexibility that constrains their non-digital self.

As we go beyond the end to end internet and we lose the structuring characteristic that has privileged anonymity: How do you see these three elements of privacy, anonymity, secrecy and most importantly autonomy, being worked out in a networked world beyond the end to end internet?

Are there any new structuring characteristics that could privilege autonomy? (which Eben indicates is linked to having a flexible identity).

AG: If we accept for the moment a definition of autonomy as a feeling of being master of one’s own fate, then absolutely yes. One thing I talk about a good deal is using ambient situational awareness to lower decision costs – that is, to lower the information costs associated with arriving at a choice presented to you, and at the same time mitigate the opportunity costs of having committed yourself to a course of action. When given some kind of real-time overview of all of the options available to you in a given time, place and context – and especially if that comes wrapped up in some kind of visualization that makes anomaly detection and edge-case analysis instantaneous gestalts, to be grasped in a single glance – your personal autonomy is tremendously enhanced. Tremendously enhanced.

But as to how this local autonomy could be deployed in Moglen’s more general terms, I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone does. Because he’s absolutely right: Bernard Stiegler reminds us that the network constitutes a global mnemotechnics, a persistent memory store for planet Earth, and yet we’ve structured our systems of jurisprudence and our life practices and even our psyches around the idea that information about us eventually expires and leaves the world. Its failure to do so in the context of Facebook and Flickr and Twitter is clearly one of the ways in which the elaboration of our digital selves constrains our real-world behavior. Let just one picture of you grabbing a cardboard cutout’s breast or taking a bong hit leak onto the network, and see how the career options available to you shift in response.

This is what’s behind Anne Galloway’s calls for a “forgetting machine.” An everyware that did that – that massively spoofed our traces in the world, that threw up enormous clouds of winnow and chaff to give us plausible deniability about our whereabouts and so on – might give us a fighting chance.

TS: The concept of autonomy is signaled clearly in the title you have chosen for your next book, The City Is Here For You To Use, and is a theme of all your writing!  While you talk about many of the possible constraints to presentation of self and potential threats to a flexible identity that ubicomp poses, your next book signals optimism. What are your key grounds for optimism?

AG: It’s not optimism so much as hope. Whether it’s well-founded or not is not for me to decide. I guess I just trust people to make reasonably good choices, when they’re both aware of the stakes and have been presented with sound, accurate decision-support material.

Putting a fine point on it: I believe that most people don’t actually want to be dicks. We may have differing conceptions of the good, our choices may impinge on one another’s autonomy. But I think most of us, if confronted with the humanity of the Other and offered the ability to do so, would want to find some arrangement that lets everyone find some satisfaction in the world. And in its ability to assist us in signalling our needs and desires, in its potential to mediate the mutual fulfillment of same, in its promise to reduce the fear people face when confronted with the immediate necessity to make a decision on radically imperfect information, a properly-designed networked informatics could underwrite the most transformative expansions of people’s ability to determine the circumstances of their own lives.

Now that’s epochal. If that isn’t cause for hope, then I don’t know what is.

Newson Obamanook – photo by Adam Greenfield, “The fact that it was one of the happiest days of my adult life may have colored my appreciation of this space. A bit, anyway.”

TS: In your writing you seem to imply that we will not find answers to our new relationship with Everyware by transposing the internet onto things for convenience’s sake but rather like the bike messengers -  we must explore the rich and complex terrain of the city that is ours to use in a give an take relationship.  Through our own exertions we find- how “anything reasonably smooth and approximately horizontal can become a thoroughfare,”  rather than be served up the city as something for us to consume.

You seem to be suggesting our city becomes ours to use because of the way we use it in our personal journeys -like “the messenger subconsciously maps the contours of an economic geography – known sources and sinks of courier assignments, or “tags” – and a threat landscape, this latter comprised of blind corners, cable-car and metro tracks, and traffic lanes.

But bike messengers are the lone ranger of our big cities. Others surf the city in tribes that ride the roiling tides of highly networked information together. How are the “natural” gestures of these tribes, e.g. day traders, who yoked to the tracings of a hive mind, part of the city that is here for us to use?  I thought the comment @ginsudo made shortly after joining Twitter and setting up TweetDeck particularly poignant:

“watching Tweetdeck is like watching stock market of your personality ebb and flow. needs analytics to maximize inherent self-involvement.”

But, for many of us our work has more in common with the day trader than the bike messenger, and are we pretty hooked on the ever growing possibilities for “contact” and identity sharing/construction, social media has produced  (with all the”Here Comes Everybody,” C. Shirky, benefits and risks).  Early theorizing of a “calm,” invisible” ubicomp seems out of synch with the excitable, active, engaged, contact driven, “users” that are watching stock market of their personality (or personal brand) ebb and flow.

How will these excitable/exciting processes of contact and identity sharing that have captured of a pretty large segment of popular imagination (not confined to the West -services like Gupshup does much of the same curating, linking and distributing of identity that web based social media does in SMS) be/ or not be part of The City Is Here For You To Use?

AG: Let’s remember that ubicomp itself, as a discipline, has largely moved on from the Weiserian discourse of “calm technology”; Yvonne Rogers, for example, now speaks of “proactive systems for proactive people.” You can look at this as a necessary accommodation with the reality principle, which it is, or as kind of a shame – which it also happens to be, at least in my opinion. Either way, though, I don’t think anybody can credibly argue any longer that just because informatic systems pervade our lives, designers will be compelled to craft encalming interfaces to them. That notion of Mark Weiser’s was never particularly convincing, and as far as I’m concerned it’s been thoroughly refuted by the unfolding actuality of post-PC informatics.

All the available evidence, on the contrary, supports the idea that we will have to actively fight for moments of calm and reflection, as individuals and as collectivities. And not only that, as it happens, but for spaces in which we’re able to engage with the Other on neutral turf, as it were, since the logic of “social media” seems to be producing Big Sort-like effects and echo chambers. We already “maximize inherent self-involvement,” analytics or no, and the result is that the tools allowing us to become involved with anything but the self, or selves that strongly resemble it, are atrophying.

So when people complain about K-Mart and Starbucks and American Eagle Outfitters coming to Manhattan, and how it means the suburbanization of the city, I have to laugh. Because the real suburbanization is the smoothening-out of our social interaction until it only encompasses the congenial. A gated community where everyone looks and acts the same? That’s the suburbs, wherever and however it instantiates, and I don’t care how precious and edgy your tastes may be. Richard Sennett argued that what makes urbanity is precisely the quality of necessary, daily, cheek-by-jowl confrontation with a panoply of the different, and as far as I can tell he’s spot on.

We have to devise platforms that accommodate and yet buffer that confrontation. We have to create the safe(r) spaces that allow us to negotiate that difference. The alternative to doing so is creating a world of ten million autistic, utterly atomic and mutually incomprehensible tribelets, each reinforced in the illusion of its own impeccable correctness: duller than dull, except at the flashpoints between. And those become murderous. Nope. Unacceptable outcome.

Uncanny Valleys - Adam comments,”Our apartment in NYC as rendered in Google Earth, with realtime traffic, weather, daylight and shadow as well as geodetic, street grid and service overlays. Camera view is South; that’s First Avenue just left of center-screen.”

TS: Smart phone’s are now drawing everyware data into the system and the net is reaching into who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc..

Nathan Freitas says Android: “seems to be the platform most likely to socialize the idea that sensor data could be a piece of every application.” (Android APIs for a wide range of sensor data.)

What in your view will be the most likely platform, Android or what?, to socialize the idea that sensor data could be a piece of every application?

AG: An open platform. A platform with lots of hooks and ways to plug things into it, a strong developer community, a shallow learning curve and/or an easy-to-use, high-level development environment.

I don’t have a dog in this race, mind you. I couldn’t care less who gets there first.

TS: New location based services, e.g., Xtify and ViaPlace, are offering us ways to share location data across lots of different applications (eg Xtify and a dating application like MeetMoi ). In return for services that allow us to share information, we must give up key information up to one site to store and disperse (although there are many differences in approach to our data, from the Twitter stance “show but don’t own” as opposed to Facebook’s stance – “in order to show we must have rights to it”). But the basic model of Twitter – to provide a white noise platform for people to build service on top off seems to be being transposed to location based services. Obvious questions arise like what happens to our data in a start up like MeetMoi if they go belly up?  Apparently in the dot.com bust data was the first thing to go on the auction block in bankrupcy cases.

Also, I suppose it is hardly surprising (if disappointing to me) that some of the early location based services are trying to get mindshare by picking up on the glue celebrities give to mass culture. At the last New York Tech Meetup, OMGICU demoed a rather terrifying new pre-launch location based “participatory celebrity gossip application” which seems to combine all the worst features of social media with celebrity stalking, plus a narrative to change the notion of celebrity itself by “turning D listers into A listers.”

Hopefully location based applications  will not get stuck on “stalker, stalker, stalker” apps like OMGICU .

David Oliver, Oliver Coady gave me a good question: “How does timeliness and location-independence change our ideas of social media?

And how can we design new architectures that can reinforce the sense that I am in control of my own fate?

AG: But we’ve already come so far in terms of turning D-listers into A-listers! On a daily basis, I’m exposed to almost as many cues insisting I attend to nonentities and dullards like Robert Scoble as those insisting I attend to nonentities like Madonna or Thomas Friedman. It’s gotten ridiculous.

Now, how does timeliness and location change our ideas of social media? It makes them dangerous!

Look, even a proud Z-lister like myself – I’m a public person only in the most debased and degraded meaning of that word – I’ve had experiences that shook me up, like having someone approach me while I was quietly hanging out in the back of St. Mark’s Books, and wanting to strike up a conversation based on some talk they’d seen me give a year or so previously. Now part of learning to deal with this kind of thing is shrugging it off, being grateful and flattered that someone thinks you’re interesting enough to single out for that kind of attention, or chalking this up to Sennett’s observation about the constitution of urbanity. Or doing all three at once.

But let’s remember that at the end of the day, a “social network” is nothing but a group of arbitrarily distributed human beings joined by a communications channel, and those people have eyes and ears. The degree to which they recognize some shared interest gives them significance filters. If social capital accrues to those in the network who are able to claim some connection with a “celebrity,” no matter how fleeting, then such connections are going to be mobilized, made explicit. And now say the network has been provided with the tools allowing it to plot the appearances of those putative celebrities in space and time, and what do you get? You get a circumstance in which it is very, very difficult to maintain any membrane between the private self and the world, for anyone who’s even remotely a public figure, whether they particularly want to be a public figure or not. You get network effects that amplify those locational traces, and further undermine any possibility of anonymity, even anonymity-by-suspension-of-interrogative-awareness (which is a clumsy way of referring to that blasé matter-of-factness around famous people that most big-city folks eventually develop).

Am I letting myself off the hook? Not in the slightest. I passed Terence Stamp on the street not so long ago, and you bet I Twittered it. My only excuse was that I Twittered it to a closed loop of no more than a few dozen people. But then, who knows what those few dozen people will turn around and do with that fact, on the open networks to which they in turn belong? And that, too, is my responsibility.

I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about any of this but cultivate our own urbanity, learn to say “so what” when we happen to find ourselves next to Philip Seymour Hoffman in the line at Whole Foods.

TS: Zittrain in The Future of the Internet: And How To Stop It, foregrounds “generativity” and a generative devices (as opposed to appliances) as the most fortuitous starting point for: “tools to bring about social systems to match the power of the technical one.”

Are appliances a threat to the city that is here for you to use? How can generativity ensure The City Is Here For You To Use as Zittrain argues it has ensured, even if imperfectly, that the internet has been here for us to use?

AG: You know, I haven’t read the book, I’ve only heard him give the talk, so it’s certainly possible there’s a subtlety to the argument that I’m missing. But I’m not sure Jonathan isn’t simply wrong about this notion of generativity. Not that the concern is misplaced, but that he’s insufficiently trustful in human agency. Is a car “generative,” by his definition? Certainly not. And yet look at all the cultural production that goes on around “the car,” look at all the assemblages people make with cars, from Beach Boys songs to ghost riding the whip, from J.G. Ballard novels and Herbie the Love Bug to Tokyo Drift.

Or probably more to his point: look at the Japanese mobile-phone market – seemingly one of the most locked-down and unpropitious circumstances imaginable for the production of culture, in technical terms and Zittrain’s both. And yet fully 50% of the bestselling books in Japan last year were written on mobile phones. Not read, which would already be impressive enough (if “impressive” is indeed the word): written. What does that imply for his argument?

So, yes, I think there are grounds for concern in that we don’t allow technologies and frameworks to appear that unduly limit the scope of human creativity. Code is still law. But I also think people are quite amply able to reach into what would appear to be the least propitious technologies and tell their own stories with same.

TS: One aspect of Everyware that seems in need of some visionary yoga is the how we will relate to pixels anywhere.

In Urban Computing and its Discontents you mention how our technological trajectories often make it seem as if we seem to get fixated on particular scenes in movies, e.g., Minority Report. You point out that so many ambient informatics projects seem simply “to expand the reach of signage and advertising in dense urban spaces….as if we’ve become transfixed by the scene from Minority Report where heterosexual cop John Anderton is on the run from his colleagues.”

Ideas from the Minority Report continue to hold sway in designs as we saw in the recent MIT demo of SixthSense at TED.

But visions of augmented reality were pretty high profile in this years Super Bowl commercials this year (including a highly anthropomorphic imagining of ubicomp that was a kind of WoW mashup with a Pixar movie).

What recent movies/commercials have produced scenes mostly likely to be are new fixation fodder for ubicomp and why?

AG: I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that, actually. We don’t have a TV, so I don’t see much in the way of commercials, and most of the films I wind up seeing are the kind that play at Anthology Film Archives. What I can say is that science fiction is currently suffering in toto from an inability or disinclination to posit future scenarios that are any weirder or more visionary than those emerging from other sectors of the culture. And that would be fine, except sf has traditionally been the place where we wrestled with the imaginary.

We need that set of tools, badly. If for no other reason than something I glean from personal experience: essentially my entire professional career has simply been the leveraging of ideas and concepts I originally wrestled with in the encounter with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling when I was 16. Today’s visionary sf means tomorrow’s halfway-competent generalist.

Nurri Kim in the waiting zone – photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: My AR friend, Robert Rice, who is working on a markerless AR platform, notes that data visualization is one of the critical elements of AR in terms of “make or break.” Robert says, “even with the ultimate in ubiquitious data from everything, without good data vis it will all be useless”

Also something Cory Doctorow said to me last year has really stuck in my mind. When I asked him what happens when Cyberspace everts, he talked about a reverse surveillance society:

Cory: Well this is like Spook Country the new Gibson novel – What happens when cyber space everts – hmmm? I’m not sure I have anything very pithy to say on that EXCEPT………
Apart from all the traditional kind of overlay reality stuff, if there is one thing I am actually interested seeing from a virtual world migrating to the real world its instrumentation.
I think lot of things that are characteristic of very successful internet based business is that they are extremely finally instrumented so like Amazon knows in aggregate on a second by second basis how their site is being used by people and they can twiddle the dials in real time.

As users of the world we have very little access to that kind of instrumentation. We don’t even know how the tube is running. The tube knows how the tube is running and we kinda of don’t. I would be really interested in seeing that. You’ve seen Joi Ito’s WoW interface right. Have you seen it …

Joi Ito’s WoW interface seems a long way from the calm, invisible imaginings for ubicomp by early ubicomp visionaries?

AG: Well, he’s got a particular kind of neural wiring. And there’s not a thing that’s wrong with that, except that I’d never, ever want to assert that what’s appropriate for Joi Ito necessarily is or should be understood to be appropriate for anybody else. The point of calling for open systems and frameworks is to allow us maximum scope of diversity in the ways we choose to interface with the world’s richness and complexity.

TS: What new imaginings/possibilites do you see when pixels anywhere are linked to everyware?

AG: Product placement. Commercial insertions and injections, mostly.

Beyond that: one of the places where Mark Weiser logic breaks down is in thinking that the platforms we use now disappear from the world just because ubiquitous computing’s arrived. We’ve still got radio, for example – OK, now it’s satellite radio and streaming Internet feeds, but the interaction metaphor isn’t any different. By the same token, we’re still going to be using reasonably conventional-looking laptops and desktop keyboard/display combos for awhile yet. The form factor is pretty well optimized for the delivery of a certain class of services, it’s a convenient and well-assimilated interaction vocabulary, none of that’s going away just yet. And the same goes for billboards and “TV” screens.

But all of those things become entirely different propositions in everyware world: more open, more modular, ever more conceived of as network resources with particular input and output affordances. We already see some signs of this with Microsoft’s recent “Social Desktop” prototype – which, mind you, is a very bad idea as it currently stands, especially as implemented on something with the kind of security record that Windows enjoys – and we’ll be seeing many more.

If every display in the world has an IP address and a self-descriptor indicating what kind of protocols it’s capable of handling, then you begin to get into some really interesting and thorny territory. The first things to go away, off the top of my head, are screens for a certain class of mobile device – why power a screen off your battery when you can push the data to a nearby display that’s much bigger, much brighter, much more social? – and conventional projectors.

Then we get into some very interesting issues around large, public interactive displays – who “drives” the display, and so forth. But here again, we’ll have to fight to keep these things sane. It’s past time for a public debate around these issues, because they’re unquestionably going to condition the everyday experience of walking down the street in most of our cities. And that’s difficult to do when times are hard and people have more pressing concerns on their mind.

Citywarecrash – photo by Adam Greenfield, “An occupational hazard for urban screens.”

TS: I know in Everyware you mentioned that architects have play an important visionary role in imagining ubicomp and I know you work closely with your wife, artist Nurri Kim.  Robert Rice asked me the following question – which I will in turn ask you: “In terms of augmented reality do you think virtual worlds and virtual reality experts / leaders / are good pioneers for thought and guidance on AR? Or, should we look for new leaders, or where are new leaders emerging? Is the tech similar enough for the old crowd to be useful or is it different enough to be a disadvantage coming from the old models?.”

AG: I should make it clear that I have absolutely no interest in virtual worlds or virtual reality. The so-called virtual worlds I’ve experienced seem sad and really rather tatty – eversions of the most predictable adolescent fantasies of unlimited power, reinscriptions of all the usual politics – and completely lacking in just about everything that makes life resonant, meaningful and awe-inspiring. And anyway, to paraphrase J.G. Ballard, ordinary, everyday life is now far more vividly and fantastically weird than anything you’ll see in Second Life. I mean, Garry Kasparov was heckled by a radio-control dildocopter, Joe the Plumber’s off to Gaza as a war correspondent, a sea of dust-covered BMWs waits in the long-term parking lot at Dubai International for owners who are never, ever coming back.

Look to virtual worlds for insight into the hard work of negotiating the actual, with its physics, its entropy, its suffering, with all its constraints? Oh my goodness gracious, no.
And look to leaders? Never. Leaders are for followers, and who wants to be that? I don’t mean you can’t take inspiration and insight from the work of others – not at all – but use your own imagination, take some personal risk, do your own damn work.

Now, having said that. This opposition of virtual and physical worlds strikes me as increasingly a false one, as it does many people. The hard-and-fast distinction between “the real world” and virtual environments make less and less sense, as righteously satisfying as making it can sometimes seem. There may be attributes of this physical environment that are impossible to see or make use of without access to the networked overlay, and those attributes may in time come to constitute the primary wellsprings of a given place’s meaning. And if you’re offering me some insight that I think could be of utility in resolving the challenge of making this overlay accessible to all, equally, I’ll gladly accept it, no matter what domain or disciplinary background you claim as your own.

Am I aware of any such insight coming out of virtual worlds? No. As Bryan Boyer notes, “If you want to start talking about some serious cross-disciplinary pollination then you better take both sides of that disciplinary divide seriously. When your ubi- runs into my building with its boring HVAC, mundane load paths, typical finished floors, plain old foundations, etc., the transformative powers of comp are bracketed pretty seriously by the realities of the physical world.”

The Cloud Gate has landed – photo by Adam Greenfield, “Tell me this doesn’t look *just* like the descriptions of “stasis fields” in 70s SF. In fact, the picture looks practically CGId to me.”

TS: Some people thought the whole world would have been plastered with RFID by now.  But before that has happened markerless AR seems to be in our sights.

If I understand it correctly marker versus markerless AR has quite different implications for how the cyberspace of ubicomp evolves?  I asked Robert Rice (he is developing a markerless AR platform) to explain some of the differences.  He said:

Robert also pointed out to me that markerless AR may prove even more problematic for privacy:

Do you have any thoughts about the different roles that markerless versus marker techinologies will play in AR and Ubicomp?

AG: I need to admit that I’ve never until this moment heard the phrase “markerless AR,” although I’d think it’s more or less self-explanatory to anyone who’s been following this stuff. Let me make the distinction explicit, shall I, for anyone who hasn’t been? And you or Robert can correct me if I’ve gotten it wrong.

Augmented reality means that I have some mediating artifact that provides me with a visual overlay on the world. This could be a phone, it could be a windshield, it could be a pair of glasses or contact lenses, doesn’t matter. And you’re going to use that overlay to superimpose some order of information about the world and the objects in it onto the things that enter my field of vision – onto what I see. So far, so good: that’s AR 101.

Now where does that information come from?

What you’re calling marker-based AR implies that there’s some reasonably strong relationship between the information superimposed over a given object, and the object itself. That object is an onto, a spime, it’s been provided with a passive RFID tag or an active transmitter. And it’s radiating information about itself that I’m grabbing, perhaps cross-referencing against other sources of information, and superimposing over the field of vision. Fine and dandy.

But there’s another way of achieving the same end, right? Instead of looking at a suit jacket on a rack and having its onboard tag tell you directly that it’s a Helmut Lang, style number such-and-such from men’s Spring/Summer collection 2011, Size 42 Regular in Color Gunmetal, produced at Joint Venture Factory #4 in Cholon City, Vietnam, and packed for shipment on September 3, 2010, you’re going to run some kind of pattern-matching query on it. And without the necessity of that object being tagged physically in any way, you’re going to have access to information about it. But this set of information isn’t, necessarily, what the object itself, or its creators or merchandisers, want you to know about it; it could be derived from online discussion fora or review sites, or blog posts, or whatever. All there needs to be is a lookup table, essentially, that tells you where to find information about any object in the field of vision whose identity can be established.

Do I have that right? And if I do, then as I understand it, the distinction is primarily a pragmatic one: it’s just easier to get to an augmented world, by far, if we don’t actually have to go to all the trouble of tagging everything in the world with its own dedicated RF transponder. Easier, and cheaper, and quicker, and more environmentally sound besides, because the relevant traffic is in bits not atoms.

Unless I’ve missed something, you don’t, then, get the distinction between classes of objects and instances of same. Sometimes, when there’s a 1:1 correlation between the two, that’s not going to matter: I’m walking down the street in Madrid, and my glasses or whatever can easily recognize that this building is the Caixa Forum. There’s only one of it, and I can get a positive ID via pattern recognition. But for some edge cases – twins and lookalikes, mostly – the same thing is generally true of people.

But other times it will matter. Is this specific watch a real, $10,000 Panerai or a $50 Kowloon fakery? How has this black 1998 Honda Civic over here differ from this other one in terms of its use and maintenance history? Does this O-ring gasket need to be replaced? I don’t see how you extract data from specific instances of things without the necessary sensor instrumentation, transmitter, etc., being coextensive with the object in question or very closely colocated with it over time – in the terminology you’re using, a “marker.”

So using these terms, I’d say that “markerless” AR comes first, is relatively easy to deploy, and generates not-insignificant value. But – again, unless I’m missing something – there are some things that it won’t ever be able to do, and for those things you need some provision for self-identification and self-location.

Ultimately I think it’s a distinction without a difference, from the user’s point of view. People will care much more about the source of whatever information shows up on their overlay than the precise technical means used to get it there.

The surrender to cynicism – photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: Much early thinking around ubicomp seems to have come from visionary architects and engineers but recently I was at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (publishing in the Digital Age) and I met several book futurists.  It struck me how ubicomp from the perspective of the book created some interesting questions for how particular material cultures will shape and be shaped by Ubicomp differently.

I noted, Google seemed well down the path to holy grail “converting images to original intent XML.” And Peter Brantley talked about machine parsed books.

At TOC there were many suggestions about how books might manifest as everyware. (Although it did not seem that many people felt books had a special relationship to time and history and would not vanish as one of the great metaphors of calm and solitary enjoyment in our culture soon).  Books as everyware will, it seems, include, amongst other things:

books that read books

books that read context

context that reads books

books that read me

books linked to mobility – timeliness and location independence

books that are not books

books becoming babble

books bubbling up from the babble

There is an Institute of the Future of the Book. Will all former material cultures require their own institutes of the future to guide their cultures into everyware?  Do you think books transition into everyware is especially significant and why?

AG: But all objects have a relationship to time and history, no?

TS: Yes! What I meant to convey really was the idea that many people expressed at TOC that books had a privileged relationship to knowledge in our culture that was valuable and related to some aspects of their current form, and that books as everyware, e.g. machine parsed books, and more sociallly generated forms would not replace that entirely.

AG: Gotcha. Well, I certainly agree that books constitute an interesting category unto themselves – I’ve held onto my physical books, and in fact still spend a fortune buying new ones, where I stopped buying music on discs a long, long time ago. But I don’t think this state of affairs can or should obtain forever.

Lately there’s been a good amount of thought around the notion of “unbooks,” which I regard as a container for long-form ideas appropriate to an internetworked age. By building on some of the tropes of software development, mostly having to do with version control, open-endedness and an explicit role for the “user” community, unbooks can usefully harness the dynamic and responsive nature of discourse on the Web. At the same time, you preserve the things books are really good at: coherence, authorial voice and intent.

The important part is in acknowledging two points which have usually been understood as contradictory, but which are actually nothing of the sort: firstly, that the expression of ideas in written form has something to learn from the practices that have evolved around the collaborative creation of dynamic, digital documents over the half-century-long history of software; and secondly, that certain ideas require elaboration in the reasonably strongly-bounded form we know as a “book,” and cannot meaningfully be shared otherwise. A third point, concomitant to the second, is that despite recent technical advances, screen-based media still cannot, and may not ever fully be able to, deliver the extratextual cues and phenomenological traces that support, inform and extend the meaning of written documents.

The unbook lets you have your cake and eat it too. So, for example, when we publish The City Is Here, one of its manifestations will be a static, physical document – and hopefully, if we do our jobs well, a very nice one indeed. But even before that, you’ll be able to download a Creative Commons-licensed PDF of every numbered version of the manuscript, from zero onward. Bottom line: you buy the book if, and only if, you want the object. The ideas are free.

TS: David Brin sees two futures:1) the government watches everybody, and 2) everybody watches everybody (the latter he calls “sousveillance”).  My friend Ben Goertzel says “hooking AI up to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp is the first step toward sousveillance?” What do you think the role of AI in ubicomp will be?  Is it worth thinking about what is the first important “AI meets AR” app is?

AG: I don’t believe that artificial intelligence as the term is generally understood – which is to say, a self-aware, general-purpose intelligence of human capacity or greater – is likely to appear within my lifetime, or for a comfortably long time thereafter.

Having said that, your friend Ben seems to be making the titanic (and enormously difficult to justify) assumption that a self-aware artificial intelligence would share any perspectives, goals, priorities or values whatsoever with the human species, let alone with that fraction of the human species that could use a little help in countering watchfulness from above. “Hooking [an] AI up to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp” sounds to me more like the first step toward enslavement…if not outright digestion.

Sousveillance - the term is Steve Mann’s, originally – doesn’t imply “everybody watching everybody” to me, anyway, so much as a consciously political act of turning infrastructures of observation and control back on those specific institutions most used to employing same toward their own prerogatives. Think Rodney King, think Oscar Grant.

TS: I have one last question from Usman Haque.

Usman Haque: insofar as a lot of what adam describes as desirable could be said to constitute pretty radical socio-political change (or perhaps… “adjustment”) i would be really interested to know how his current work @ nokia is or isn’t able to gel with the themes of his writing. in some senses there’s quite an undercurrent strongly challenging corporate practices, in other senses it could be seen as gentle nudges. how does adam see it? and how about the nokia behemoth? does he have success nudging nokia towards the kind of world he would like to see (i imagine the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise he wouldn’t be doing it…) but i’d love to know more about the limits/challenges.

AG: I am told that Henry Kissinger, on his first trip to China in 1971, asked Zhou Enlai whether he thought the French Revolution had or had not advanced the cause of human freedom.
Zhou thought for a moment, pursed his lips, and replied, “It is too soon to tell.”

Tim O’Reilly has outlined some of the world’s big problems in his talks, and urged technologists to “work on stuff that matters.” I was one of O’Reilly’s listeners at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC (see my post here).

But, I found out at the Head Conference in London, recently, that O’Reilly is doing more than just talking about solving the world’s problems. The O’Reilly VC company is investing in technologies that tackle these big problems, for example, a very interesting startup, AMEE.

AMEE is a new company with a VERY big, world changing idea – “to create  a neutral technology platform to aggregate all the energy consumption data in world ” – “to be the world’s energy meter.”

I was fortunate, when I was in London, to get an opportunity to chat with Tim O’Reilly about AMEE, Web 2.0, and the role of virtual worlds in positive global development. Also, I met the CEO of AMEE, Gavin Starks.

We are still, just, in the pre “Internet of Things” era.  But, soon, as Bruce Sterling puts it, we will be able to “Google our shoes” or find out which super market shelves are out of sandwiches at any particular point in time! But for now, it can still be very hard to find a sandwich, even in central London. So, I had plenty of time to talk to Tim O’Reilly whilst searching for a hand held bite to eat.

We journeyed past several sandwichless restaurants (Tim picked up the Financial Times under his arm in the picture above in one of them), and super markets with shelves stripped bare except for some end of the day sushi (it looked scary so we passed on that).

Finally, McDonalds came through for us with the sandwich in the top left corner of the photo above.  The full interview is later in this post.

First, more about AMEE.

Tim O’Reilly says he doesn’t like predicting the future. But the future comes to Tim O’Reilly in very powerful ways.  And AMEE asks us to play a new proactive role in our own future. AMEE’s call to action is:

“If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build?”

AMEE, to me, is a quintessential example of an effort to harness the key paradigm shifts of Web 2.0 (see O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?“) to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

AMEE’s mission is to be a neutral technology platform, using open source and standards, and an architecture of participation, to address the need to standardize measurement, encourage collaborative development, and create a market place for energy data.

AMEE’s goal is to enable us to understand energy consumption from the level of the individual to the scale of whole countries.

This would address the need O’Reilly notes here his son-in-law Saul Griffith argued at Emerging Technology Conference earlier this year:  “to pick a target CO2 concentration and work backwards to get to an energy policy, rather than guessing at an energy policy with fingers crossed, hoping for a climate outcome that is tolerable.” AMEE is also involved in Saul’s Wattzon initiative.

Gavin Starks, CEO, AMEE, (pictured above standing under the Head Conference banner – a recording of his talk is here), explained:

AMEE’s vision is to aggregate all the energy data on Earth. By energy I include electricity, gas and all types of fuel, water, waste, you name it: everything we do is energy consumption, which means really building towards our sustainability footprint rather than just our carbon footprint. The initial thing we’ve focused on is Carbon and CO2, because that’s the most pressing issue we have to face: but it’s quite a thin layer on top of the whole sustainability question.

AMEE is not building the front-end applications to harness this energy data. Gavin noted:

We’re aggregating all the standards. This is a massively complex area, so we’ve got a science team whose job is to harvest all the scientific research and methodologies. That’s not something developers tend to want to go anywhere near: it unpacks itself into enormous amounts of complexity very quickly (e.g. building methodologies that have 700 data points).  Our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Andrew Conway, is ex-NASA and has worked on massive scientific data analysis.

We aggregate government standards and other international standards, so that you know when you’re integrating with us, that you’re working to those standards. But much more than that we actually publish those standards on an open Wiki (the Wiki and the API actually talk to each other). As these standards emerge and evolve, we’ll be tracking them, ensuring that we are up to date, and granularity is added as needed.

We were very fortunate that one of our first clients was Defra which UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Defra is currently restructuring into DEC – the Department for Energy and Climate Change. So in the UK they’re actually fusing Energy and Climate Change into a single government department. I think this is quite remarkable: a giant step forward.

We were contracted by them because they were building a national campaign to raise the awareness of every citizen’s personal and household footprint, and they were looking for an Open Source solution – which AMEE is. Defra/DEC now use AMEE for two purposes: they make their standards available through the AMEE platform, so that everybody else can use them, and as the back-end solution to their national campaign, “Act on CO2″.

AMEE is SaaS – a web-service API – we’re not trying to compete with anyone on the front-end development and delivery. Because we aggregate two moving targets: standards and consumption, we enable those integrated with us to be current at all times.

Who Owns the Data?

But, if AMEE hopes to harness global network effects as a neutral aggregator of energy consumption data from individuals, businesses, and governments, one of the key questions that AMEE must answer (also a key question for Web 2.0 in general) is: Who owns the data?  I have delved into this question before on Ugotrade. See David Levine’s conversation with Eben Moglen on privacy here.

Gavin told me that this is a question AMEE has given a lot of thought to.

How AMEE answers this question, Who owns the data?, will probably determine the success of their mission as an ethical endeavor,  and their ability to scale and leverage the network effects of the internet as a platform while still allowing ” a very granular level of energy activity to be tracked.”

Gavin explained where AMEE is going re their approach to this issue. And, how this relates to AMEE’s business model – software as a service (SaaS).

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to approach this, from both a commercial perspective and an ethical perspective.

We’re in a position where we’re aggregating vast amounts of personal and business information, on an ongoing basis. If we were to integrate with your credit cards, your smart meter, your supermarket, and your vehicles: we actually know everything about your life. Aside from the Data Protection issues we felt, “How could we protect everybody around ‘excessive’ exploitation of that data and ensure the user has long-term control?”.

As the saying goes, “we don’t know what we don’t know”: when it comes to predicting what our privacy issues will be, and as the data around our physical lives becomes digitally available, we wanted to err on the side of caution. Danny O’Brien, the EFF and MySociety have certainly helped to shape our thinking in this respect.

So if you’re a Google user and you go into the Google and you kick off a calculation, all your answers to the questions are stored in AMEE – but we don’t know who you are. We’ve got an anonymous key, Google’s got the anonymous key. Google will have your user name and so on and so forth. In AMEE we’ve got the aggregate of the responses to the questions. It’s up to Google’s Privacy Policy to determine what they and their user’s can do.

However, this doesn’t preclude us from enabling data-portability on behalf of the user. The anonymous key is not dissimilar to an OpenID, but applied to a specific data set. We are heading towards allowing you to control your data’s portability, as an individual.

It’s a fragile space. We want to give you the opportunity to glue together your AMEE IDs with your OpenID, or whatever login you choose, so that you’re in control. We aim to enable this to be both cloud and edge-based, which while fragile, is in the interest of the user. The more value we can provide, we believe, the stronger the value of our proposition.

But, because were dealing with a range of different massive organizations … imagine credit card companies sharing data with energy companies sharing data with petrol companies, sharing data with airlines etc. That’s a massive challenge from a business and political perspective – almost impossible to navigate.

We can enable people to collaborate, by making it opt-in all the way through the chain. We don’t undermine peoples existing databases: we can actually add value to them, or we aim to add value to them. We think this has got a huge amount of potential to stimulate new business for our clients.

It’s very “web” in its execution: we are part of an ecosystem. Part of our imperative is to be commercially enabling to everybody else. If we’re not being commercially enabling to other people, we’re not going to get the kind of scale of change that we need.

This was another design feature. We felt, “how could we create something which other people could build businesses or platforms on top of”?  And, how could that scale incredibly quickly? If we’d gone beyond our boundaries as an API, we would have been competing with people we want to work with.

While many services have taken similar strategic approaches, most seem to start with a form of lock-in, or evolve quickly to the point of lock-in, which satisfies a current trend in their valuations. We believe this trend will change and adapt to a more “privacy-based” intelligence, which has substantial value.

Tim O’Reilly in The Magic Circle

The motto of The Magic Circle where the Head Conference was held, “Indocilis Privata Loqui,” can be roughly translated as “not apt to disclose secrets.”  One of the wonderful displays of memorabila there was Robert Houdin’s Mystery Clock (picture below).  Luckily, for me, I was was treated to a full explanation of the “Mystery Clock” by another attendee during the Head Conference cocktail party.

As Tim O’Reilly pointed out, in his interview with Aral Balkan, he felt it was a privilege to be talking in this theater and center of magic.  Capturing the magic, spreading the magic, and sharing the magic is at the heart of what he has spent his career doing.  He explained:

I guess this is kind of a root idea for O’Reilly…… When I look back on my career….What did we really do?  Find cool people who were doing cool shit. They didn’t really need any help from us. But then there were a bunch of people who were saying, “How did they do that”? Those are the people we help.

We find the people who are doing what appears to be magic. The Arthur C. Clarke kind of magic you know…. We document – we teach people how to do it.

It is such a great  privilege to be here in a theater devoted to magic – The Magic Circle. This is really what we try to do.  We try to capture the magic, spread the magic, share it with other people.

Interview With Tim O’Reilly

Tish Shute: I was interested in your comment on Chris Brogan’s blog post the other day.

Tim O’Reilly: Actually it wasn’t Chris Brogan’s post. Dennis Howlett was a guest blogger. I was reacting to him saying there is nothing new in Web 2.0. My reaction was: “Well gosh it’s very easy to make a straw man out of Web 2.0 and say, ‘What’s new?’”

Howlett was specifically reacting to the Web 2.0 start ups that are superficial and not really what the trend is all about.  For me, Web 2.0 is about the internet becoming a platform. Does he think that is over?

And, it is about understanding that the rules of business change when the internet is a platform. I think a lot of people do that with Web 2.0 [make it a straw man].

They don’t like the term Web 2.0 and they attach ideas to it that reflect the most superficial elements. And then, they say these aren’t interesting. And, what he was saying was that there is a lot of superficial social media stuff – consumer apps, and what really matters is what will bring ROI to business.

I just said that he is totally missing the point because learning how to use the network as a platform matters very much to business. The same rules that apply to everyone else apply to businesses.

So, for example, I have made the point in my talk in New York, just a few months ago, that in many ways you can think of Walmart as a Web 2.0 company. They are infused with IP – they are taking the data that the users give them by buying things and making themselves a more responsive organization by using that data.

That is the heart of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Not, do they use social media or not, or the social media buzz words.

Tish Shute: I am going to do an interview with Gavin Starks, CEO of AMEE. Could you tell me about your role in this project?

Tim O’Reilly: My role is as an investor. Our venture firm, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, has just finished closing on investment in AMEE. We think global warming is a really important issue to come to grips with. And, a big part of it is actually keeping track of all the carbon we’re emitting. AMEE helps with that problem.

Tish Shute: What is the potential, now we are beginning to break virtual world technologies down into basic open source building blocks, to create useful mashups with sensor technology, Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds? Could Virtual Worlds play a key role in this work of instrumenting the world?

Tim O’Reilly: First of all, I don’t think that Virtual Worlds in the Second Life style will have this role …while I like the concept of Second Life, in that we have a Second Life in a virtual world, I am not sure that 3D avatars are [the way to go]…. at least they are certainly not my Second Life.  My Second Life is in other types of media.

But, when I look at this idea of instrumenting the world, one of the things that is very, very clear is that we are turning all the millions of consumer cameras into sensors.

For example, Microsoft’s Photosynth demonstrates how these consumer sensors can be used to build 3D models. We are starting to build a 3D representation of the real world, not a separate virtual world. And, we are all going to be part of that world. So I think that the real Second Life will be ………..well I think the first layer is going to be….to get the 3D models of the world as it is, and then we will have doorways into additional rooms and additional spaces.

That’s when its going to take off because people are going to get used to it through navigating the real physical world with maps – with 3D imagery of buildings and spaces.

And, another piece of this… I talked recently with Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk……and he was talking about how much even the Autodesk workflow is shifting to scanning things first.

He was describing how they have built this new demo center in an old building.  The first thing they did was photographs and measure it exactly. Then they go and make stuff that fits in the exact space.

Also, he was talking about how in his own hobbyist work, he found this shark’s jaw and he loved the curve of it.  So he scanned it and made it into the arms of a chair.

Tish Shute: I think the two important pieces that might come out of virtual worlds technology are the real time interactions where people can view the same application or context as and when you do, and the rapid prototyping.

Tim O’Reilly: Yes rapid prototyping, no question. But, as I said, the idea of moving an avatar around isn’t very compelling to be quite honest.

Tish Shute: But the web doesn’t do real time interaction very well does it?

Tim O’Reilly: Well Twitter is doing a pretty good job!

Tish Shute: Yes I love Twitter. But, in terms of if you want to get a 10,000 foot view and gather around and interact with data with other people…..what about that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well that’s true. I am using that example of the Squeak based virtual world that Fidelity is using. And, that is exactly what they are using it for – business interaction.

Tish Shute: What about the role Virtual Worlds might play, for example, in instrumenting the world through facilities management?

Tim O’Reilly: Yes, SAP did a very interesting project on property management – and that is interesting.

Tish Shute: Yes, on my way back to New York City tomorrow, I am going to stop off in Zurich and visit Oliver Goh who worked with Denis Browne, SAP, on that project. In fact you showed a picture of Oliver’s Goh’s avatar demoing the virtual counterpart to his instrumented Playmobile house in Second Life in your post, “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” (see the picture below).

Tim O’Reilly: I make no attempt at predicting the future.  So you could well be right that Virtual Worlds will be a very powerful tool.  But, I think with the pace that other technologies are progressing, we will get there with photorealism and video, etc.  I think the fundamental problem in most virtual world stuff is the idea of the avatar.

Tish Shute: Why do you say that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well just imagine if when interacting with people in the real world you had to look at yourself interacting with someone else.  First person point of view is our fundamental experience.  And, you are being forced to see yourself in the third person.

Tish Shute: I have always been more interested in avataring the world than in my avatar identity.

Tim O’Reilly: There is something very interesting in having an avatar that you don’t ever see.

[At this point there were less than ten minutes before Tim's interview for the Head Conference, so it was time to concentrate on eating!]

Virtual Worlds: Where Web Meets World

As Ian Hughes, IBM, notes in a recent post on Eightbar:

The last few days have seen a plethora of virtual world pitches, reports, articles and blog posts around certain types of virtual world platform. The first was over at @monkchips a.k.a James Governor analyst blog around a visit to Microsoft to see about the ESP platform. This appears to be a high fidelity simulation platform and toolkit. The second was widely reported. But Wagner’s New World Notes is the one most of the metarati will have read on the matter. This centres around some statments by Craig Mundie that avatar based interaction was of limited interest and really it was photosynth that was the way forward, modelling the real world from photos…….

I agree with Ian when he says:

the interesting thing here is that all the discussion is not about why would anyone want a virtual world, but instead what sort is best.

Tim O’Reilly was not questioning, in my view, that we are moving towards new understandings of virtual spaces or virtual worlds but whether avatar based virtual worlds will be the most useful model.

I began my questions to Tim O’Reilly by bringing up his comment on Dennis Howlett’s post not only because he succinctly states there what is really important about Web 2.0, i.e., “internet as platform, and the rise of applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”

But also, this comment caught my attention because Tim used virtual worlds as one of the examples of the value of Web 2.0 to enterprise.  He wrote:

Guess what : they [SAP] understand that harnessing users is good for their business. At O’Reilly, our InPractice division is working with them to actually turn their documentation into an open source, crowdsourced project. They are doing fascinating experiments at SAP Labs with how to integrate virtual worlds into property management. They have built a great internal social network for employees that has already affected their HR practices.

It is Oliver Goh’s instrumented virtual house in Second Life that Tim mentions in his post “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” to make the point that:

This prototype is also very on trend with one of the big ideas we have about where Web 2.0 is going, towards Web 2.0 applications that are fed directly by sensors, so that “participation” no longer just means typing on a keyboard, but the accidental information we create “merely in living as and where we live.”

I have been blogging Oliver’s work prototyping various use cases for virtual worlds in facilities management and energy optimization, e.g., virtual operations centers, in Second Life and OpenSim, since its inception (see here and here).

Now, Oliver has developed a complete solution for sustainabililty in the real estate industry that optimizes energy consumption through the entire life cycle of properties - see here for more.

Also, look out for some interesting intersections between AMEE’s mission – ” to create the world’s energy meter,” and Oliver’s mission to “optimize the world’s energy usage” in the future!

I visited Oliver in Zurich on my way back to NYC from the Head Conference.  In the picture below, Oliver is standing by the Playmobile house that is RL counterpart to the virtual control center house pictured above!

The ability of virtual worlds to play a role in solving the world’s pressing problems is, in my view, linked both to their ability to fully integrate in Web 2.0 and “real” world  data.

I have been blogging a lot on these issues!  Rob Smart, IBM, (see my recent interviews with Rob here and here – “Web 2.0 to OpenSim Made Easy”) has been doing some very interesting work recently integrating JSON support to OpenSim. This is one of the recent important steps forward in virtual world to real world communication.  See this cool video, “OpenSim Meets MQTT jedi mind numbers.”

The powerful value add that virtual worlds, even in a basic form, have shown in the realm of social media that “the people with you can view the changing states of that application or context as and when you do” can also play an important role in the front end applications for projects like AMEE and Oliver’s work.

This is not to discount the role of social media virtual worlds in the participatory work of instrumenting our planet. There is already  a nice integration of AMEE  with Second Life. See Jim Purbrick’s Carbon Goggle’s for Second Life here.

Carbon Goggles from Jim Purbrick on Vimeo

But, if virtual world technology is going be part of the evolving power of the internet to help us solve the big problems facing humanity, there must be an evolving vision for virtual worlds and their relationship with the “real” world.

Most likely, many of the dichotomies, e.g., the notion of avatar based or non avatar based, or simulation versus augmentation, and mirror worlds versus virtual worlds, will increasingly dissolve as all these aspects of virtual reality are woven together into the fabric of everday computing to form new digital/physical realities. And, while I’m not trying to predict the future, perhaps, this will happen sooner than we think!