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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9) We are entering a new area of social intelligence where people and algorithms are interacting in interesting new ways. OKCupid has been getting a lot of attention for offering social intelligence that can help us play better in our dating lives. And by connecting social graph, interest graph and location Meet Gatsby hopes to creates new opportunities in our daily activities beyond dating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Four Cylinders of Innovation

click to enlarge

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

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

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

But, he adds:

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

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

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

Data is the Gasoline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Challenge of Connecting people and environments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the beginning of our conversation:

Talking With Kevin Slavin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glympse – real-time, private location tracking

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

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

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

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

Shazam for Faces!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the Future of Social?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Consequences of Living in a World of Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do we avoid a data arms race?”

“Create more value than you capture.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking with Chris Arkenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Arkenberg: I think I have, actually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Arkenberg: Hmm, interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Arkenberg: Yes, yes.

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

Chris Arkenberg: Oh, really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: You got it. Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Arkenberg: You mean on the map?

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

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

Are you familiar with Earthmine?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: I agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today Metaio is holding Inside AR in Munich, Germany.   Metaio (the picture above shows Metaio co-founders Thomas Alt and Peter Meier), is behind some of the best known commercial and industrial AR experiences of recent years.  But as important as the many AR projects they have executed are the AR tools that Metaio has made available to developers.  Metaio’s AR products and tools have played an important role in bringing AR to a wider public, and given many developers the opportunity to explore AR.

Inside AR is a great opportunity to see what these AR pioneers  will be up to in the coming months.   I could not make it to Munich this year.  But, fortunately, I had the opportunity to talk with Thomas Alt, recently.   In this conversation – see below, I got a chance to discuss what was going on inside AR with Metaio.

The Fall season is always jam packed with great events, and I wish I could be in two places at once.  But this week, I will be in my home town, NYC, attending Web 2.0 Expo which, reflecting the heat in the NYC tech community, is a sold out event with a very exciting schedule this year (more on some of the presentations that I will be attending later in this post).  If you missed out on tickets to Web 2.0 Expo, all Keynotes will be Streamed Live: TUES 9/28 to THURS 9/30, and keep your eye on @w2e and #w2e on twitter.

Meanwhile, I am missing Inside AR, which had some great speakers lined up, including fellow New Yorker, John Swords, partner and Ringleader at Circ.us.  Hopefully, Swords will share his experiences at next month’s ARNY Meetup which will be “joining forces with another vibrant community – NY Gaming – for an unforgettable night of Augmented Reality Games” on Tuesday, Oct 19th, 6:30 PM at AOL Ventures in New York, NY.

At the most recent ARNY @swords gave a brilliant talk on the possibilities for AR Game development on the newly available opensource Parrot ARDrone platform.  It was great to hear from social game guru @swords on his plans for Parrot ARDrone games, and more.  The picture below of an ARDrone camera view is from John Swords Flickr set.  Swords was flying it inside his garage because the winds outside were too strong.

Also, I kicked off what will hopefully be an ongoing discussion on, “Story Telling with AR and the Big ARNY a collaborative AR Game for NY,” with a few slides.  I have opened up the presentation document for collaboration, so please ping me if you would like to be added as a contributor/editor, and are interested in getting involved.

Ori Inbar, CEO and co-founder of Ogmento, Games Alfresco, ARNY and my co-chair on Augmented Reality Event 2010, suggested The Big ARNY – A Collaborative AR Game Development Project modelled after A Swarm of Angels last year at the First ARNY Meetup – so let’s make it happen!  I will be catching up with Ori in October about what Ogmento has been up to since they became the first VC backed AR Game company!

“Games allow us to see each other, for a moment, in a way that living in a city prevents” – Kevin Slavin

I believe that, AR, to get beyond the stage of “interface du jour” needs to offer us new ways to relate to each other and the world around us so that we can actually improve  and deepen our engagement with reality not just create experiences that are primarily optical  (see James Turner’s interview with Kevin Slavin “Reality has a gaming layer” on not letting “the pleasure of a game and the meaning of a game and the experience of a game rest primarily in the optics.“  And see my recent post, Urban Augmented Realities and Social Augmentations that Matter: Talking with Bruce Sterling, Part 2).

Two of the most inspired creators of urban games,  Kevin Slavin and Kati London of Area/Code will be speaking at Web 2.0. Expo tomorrow.   And you can be sure I will be at both these sessions. Loitering on the Motherboard, Kevin Slavin, is 2:35pm Tuesday, 09/28/2010, and Games that Know Where you Live, Kati London – is a keynote that will also be live streamed – 4:55pm Tuesday, 09/28/2010

Recently Kevin Slavin was interviewed by James Turner, on O’Reilly Radar.   This, Reality has a gaming layar, is a must read piece about a “world where games shape life and life shapes games”  (see @timoreilly). 

Interview with Thomas Alt

Tish Shute: Perhaps you could just start with your background Thomas because I think there’s a lot of newcomers to AR but you are really one of the first movers in commercial AR. How long you’ve been involved in this?

Thomas Alt: Actually I’m an ex-researcher in augmented reality. I started with me actually after getting my master’s work in engineering from the Technical University of Munich working for a big company called Volkswagen. And at that time,1999, we got a research grant for researching how augmented reality could change manufacturing processes in the automobile industry.

And from the research work there, I basically went back to school, did my PhD about augmented reality. And while speaking at a conference, I met Peter Meier who is the co-founder of the company who was also a master’s student writing his thesis about augmented reality. That was in 2002.

And so it really was in the very early days of augmented reality. And both Peter and myself we got really excited about the technology; we saw endless possibilities. We said, ‘OK. Let’s just found a company. We actually founded the company in early 2003 with virtually no money. As a matter of fact the founding capital of the company was 25,000 Euros and this 25,000 Euros were won in a case competition in Germany – a business plan competition.

Tish Shute: So you won 25,000 Euros on this case competition and that’s where Metaio started….

Thomas Alt: Exactly. And to legally found a company in Germany it takes exactly 25,000 Euros so that was the founding capital. We started pretty much like good old SAP started.  It wasn’t in a garage though it was a very small office and we basically built up the business through work, so we don’t have any investors or whatever. Right now we are 66 people located in Munich where our headquarters have been for five years. We have some presence in the US, and we have a venture company in Seoul, South Korea.

Tish Shute: Awesome. I just noticed how fast you’ve been growing. So right now, I’m going to ask a couple of questions about where you see the technology and the emerging industry going.

First, what are the platform of choice for Mobile Augmented Reality at the moment?

Thomas Alt: Obviously in the cellphone hardware space there’s a fierce competition going on. It’s yet to be defined what will be the prevailing platform right now, obviously it’s the iPhone is big now, right? But Android is catching on very, very fast.

Tish Shute: You have pioneered bringing a cross platform SDK for vision assisted AR to a wide community of developers with Junaio and with your partnership with Kooaba – a visual search company from Europe.

Thomas Alt: Yes, yes, and this is how we would, also in the future like to position ourselves with Junaio.  Junaio will be a platform, a technology platform, which will allow users to do whatever they want to do in augmented reality. The API of Junaio is huge in the sense you can do anything from outdoor gaming, to visual search, to normal, uh, lay out style, you know, find the next burger king a mile away kind of super impositions.

Tish Shute: The only licensing you pay is for unifeye right? When you want to use your tool kit right?

Thomas Alt: Yes and this is how we’re distinguishing it. Junaio is our consumer brand targeting newbie AR developers, with limited programming skills, while the Unifeye platform is really our B to B platform where B to B customers can create their individual AR experiences.

Tish Shute: Yes which is what my friend Patrick O’Shaughnessey, Patched Reality, did for the Ben and Jerry’s app he created using Unifeye.

Thomas Alt: exactly…

Tish Shute: It is a lot of work developing for so different mobile platforms isn’t it. Junaio is on Android and iphone but you havent moved Junaio to Symbian?

Thomas Alt: To be honest with you right now its a matter of priorities we have other things we want to do first. And from analyzing the user base, iphone was a big step Android was a big step and now we are pretty much seeing what is happening next. As you know Nokia going into different directions as far as their smart phone operating system goes, and so on and so forth.  There are also capacity constraints. And right now obviously the most – potentially not the most possible users, but the users most inclined to do AR on a day to day basis are the ones using the iphone and android devices. But obviously there are a lot bigger cellphone manufacturers out there.  But just you know even the mobile web users aren’t as strong as the users on the iphone and android devices?

Tish Shute: So what do you think the iphone 4 has that brought to the AR picture?

Thomas Alt: Very fast camera access, very good for marker recognition. If you go to the Metaio site you’ll find a movie where we show on the iphone 4 app for a real augmented reality Leggo peice – this is something which is very nice

Tish Shute: Yes I see that, yes that is nice, yes, yes very nice. The Unifeye SDK is really putting markerless AR into the mainstream.

Thomas Alt: Yesterday we launched the first, a err very nice shopping… shopping solution for , but that’s completely external.

Tish Shute: Oh yes – the augmented reality shopping for seventeen.com, i was going to ask you about that, because it is the first augmented reality online shopping using natural feature tracking.

Also I am very excited to see the gestural interface, awesome!

The seventeen augmented reality shopping app is a PC experience but are you working on developing gestural interfaces for mobile AR?

Thomas Alt: We are continually pushing the envelope of what’s possible with AR. Gestural interfaces for mobile AR is certainly the next step in taking what we’ve done on the PC and making it more portable by using the mobile platform. One thing to keep in mind here is the limitations of mobile platforms and size of the screen needs to fit and make sense for the user experience.

Tish Shute: I know you started off as an AR researcher (although as you mentioned earlier you have been working in commercial AR and building Metaio for a long while now.

So in addition to how we are progressing towards gestural interfaces for augmented reality, I would like to ask some questions about AR eyewear. We won’t really have hands free AR without eyewear. What is your projection on when we will see consumer AR eyewear? And, Do you have a any comments on those speculating that we will not see AR eyewear go mainstream for 20years?! What is Metaio doing to move eyewear technology along?

Thomas Alt: Well as you know, it’s always, you know on the technological roadmap, and we’re still doing research projects, in our AR research department. We have worked on things like calibrating eyewear for augmented reality. There is some nice development there.

But really, commercially, the whole thing with eyewear has never caught on on a level which would make it a valuable avenue, business avenue, at least for Metaio. So, I guess as an ex-researcher, it’s still a very interesting, a very good technology. And it would definitely change the marketplace radically when available. But as per right now, there are very few commercial applications.

Tish Shute: Are the obstacles to AR eyewear technological obstacles or is it just a question of a a business model. I mean is it realistic to see eyewear in the next 3 to 5 years at a price point affordable to consumers, where you really, truly can have eye tracking? You know, the whole problem there was with virtual reality and eyewear giving people a headache. How far have we come in terms of the technology?

Thomas Alt: Well, it’s not so much technological factors ’cause all fundamental problems are solved. It’s more a rather large corporation, I guess, would have to step up to the plate and say okay, do, let’s get all the state of the art in electronics and develop just a perfect HMD.

Tish Shute: Something Yohan Baillot’s company Simulation 3D is doing at is looking at is hooking up eyewear to smart phones.

Thomas Alt: Yes exactly that would be even better. Metaio has done a strategic move into this HMD space for augmented reality about a year ago by acquiring a bankrupt company. I mean, we had considerable IP around it from our research base but in the long term we still believe in it and we did a move about a year ago in buying what was left over from a bankrupt company including a lot of IP, which basically goes into the direction of mobile augmented reality but also mobile augmented reality in connection with head mounted displays.

There’s actually a press release about this but that’s about a year ago…

I know that the whole HMD thing… I mean, I’ve seen companies come and go. Metaio has worked previously, very closely, with Microvision of Seattle. We have worked with a German company, doing HMDs and we have worked with Vuzix.  We are still working with Vuzix, so we’re still consider it very valuable.  But right now, I mean, it’s just not a big part of our commercial pipeline, to put it that way.

Tish Shute: It was interesting what Bruce Sterling said in his keynote at ARE 2010.  He actually made a strong case for why smart phone augmented reality may be more interesting because it’s less immersive. I mean, he raised the question of the fact that if you really truly had AR eyewear and HMDs you’d re-enter the world of virtual reality or as he called it AR’s Gothic step sister VR would rise from the grave….

Thomas Alt: Yeah, well, that’s a cultural or even a philosophical question and we have discussed it a lot, especially in the industrial domain. Also will the deployment of HMDs come about from end consumers using it in their spare time, or from professional users using the idea in their work time?

Tish Shute: Do you think it surprised people who have been working in augmented reality research how much people have engaged with the idea of smart phones as the mediating device for AR, and that rather than having the always on experience that eyewear would give us, we use smart phones as a magic lens of a smart phone when we need to or want to. Some people were skeptical that anyone would want to hold up a little window to look at augmentations of the world – a magic lens. I mean, it wasn’t self-evident that that would be an experience people enjoyed, and it turns out that it was.

Thomas Alt: That’s actually a very good analogy. And also in my view, I mean, certain behaviors just change also, right? I mean, this is exactly what Apple’s trying with the iPad, right? You’re taking the iPad, and all of the sudden you’re not constrained to a laptop or whatever. And it’s truly a companion of the couch, in-bed Web, in the kitchen, and so on and so forth. So digital usage with the iPad, which is a different market, and I’m aware of that but as an example, the iPad has changed our behavior. And obviously, the augmented reality guys are hoping that something similar happens with AR.

Tish Shute: Which of course brings up the question, I’m assuming that some of the next generation of slates/ipads are going to have front and back cameras, GPS, and compass, right?

Thomas Alt: Actually we know that.

Tish Shute: You know that, yes. I assume that you know that, because are you working on some prototypes, and have you got some plans?

Thomas Alt: You have to understand that I cannot talk as I’ve talked as a researcher. It’s the rules, so I have to be a little bit careful about what I say. We very much think that a webpad, or whatever pad, you would want to call it is on some occasions very good device for AR.

Tish Shute: Yeah. But it is an interesting point with holding up a larger device, because you hands aren’t free, but the neat thing about the phone for augmented reality is that you really can do a lot with your thumb, as we’ve found and just the position of the phone. But, how will this work it with the two hands on the larger device?

Thomas Alt: Keep in mind, everyone’s talking about mobile augmented reality, but really where the case for augmented reality, at this point, is the strongest is in the installation business, it’s in the web business… Not necessarily only commercially, but also use case-wise. There are tons of museums out there which are using our augmented reality system in an installation fashion, and to communicate products better, and more efficiently, and so on, and so forth.

So, I know that the hype is clearly on the mobile augmented reality side, but there are many examples augmented reality experiences where holding up a larger device is not a big obstacle.

Tish Shute: Well this brings me to some questions about the future of mobile AR. My interview with Jay Wright focused on how we are now in a new period for AR bringing together computer vision, visual search into a mobile stack that is really optimized for AR. What do you see emerging in mobile AR as we move beyond compass, GPS, camera, accelerometer based AR into markless image-based AR. What will the new use cases and where will we see mainstream users getting in AR. Will AR games be the first mainstream AR experiences?

Thomas Alt: My partner is actually, first of all, one of my best friends, second of all, very emotional, third of all, very intelligent, and he said the other day something I think very valuable in this area. He said, basically think about Mobile Augmented Reality, Thomas. There’s really a very limited number of use cases which you can do if you look at these classical Point and Find applications, ok? But there are almost unlimited number of use cases when Augmented Reality becomes a day to day companion, ok? So what he meant is, ok, I’m looking at my normal day… I’m looking at the city, I’m walking throughout this, I’m coming home, I’m having dinner basically. I can deploy Augmented Reality in a pure POI search fashion perhaps not even once. Ok when I’m travelling it’s a different story, but in an ordinary day I might use a POI search not even once.

But where this ultimately leads, you know, is even in the 15 minutes I’m having breakfast, I’m using AR – looking at the cereal box with my cell phone, I’m taking part in a sweepstakes or whatever. So from that we draw the conclusion that as a general strategy for Junaio, we should basically throw as much technology as possible into Junaio, make it halfway self-explanatory, and just give people the possibility to come up with ideas on how to deploy augmented reality continuously.

We have actually got a creative team from an Art School working on that, and just, you know, with very little programming skills coming up with things you can do with Augmented Reality on a day-to-day level. And it could be a scavenger hunt game, in the city, with monsters flying around, it could be the normal POI routine, it could be marketing purposes, and so on and so forth. And I think that’s really the roadmap, and this is a little bit similar on a more technical level, to what Qualcomm is doing, ’cause they’re floating out possibilities or capabilities I want to call them, and Metaio is doing that, but on a higher level [re the tools] meaning on a Junaio level.

Junaio is a capability platform. It is also a way for Metaio to demonstrate the capabilities of our technology. We will offer all the possibilities for AR and more that we have already demonstrated on PC augmented reality.

Tish Shute: What is the business model for Junaio? Are you encouraging developers to develop business on your platform ?

Thomas Alt: Junaio is our end consumer platform and our business model is similar to the way Google structures its business model. We work with OEMs, content partners, brands, and developers to offer free content to our end users. Where we do charge is on the advertising side, more specifically contextual and location based advertising. At the current stage, we are focused on building the content base, fostering our developer community, but in the near future, we will be introducing advertising channels.

First of all you have to have very good use cases in the platform basically. And then to put a business model on top of that from a technology stand point is not hard – its a pay channel. Its all prepared for this.

Tish Shute: You have quite a broad base as a company don’t you – you do everything from industrial AR, marketing to technology licensing and more?

Thomas Alt: Basically, there’s a lot of things people don’t see us. There is also the Unifeye PC SDK and we have a client base and partners who are sourcing software from us, and we are doing great pieces. I mean the hype of augmented reality is really coming to a peak. There are lots of pieces that are not even talked about any more. China’s GQ magazine launched with AR from Metaio, the biggest AR campaign anywhere – there are a lot of potential readers in China. And um, so that’s our business model… we have our IP, our patents and so on. And on this we can move on onto the mobile platform whenever it’s advisable or feasible.

Tish Shute: Right. Yeah. I mean uh, you’re very fortunate to have this base built on uh, years of developing IP. What are the most important areas of AR that Metaio holds IP and patents in, in your view?

Thomas Alt: there’s sleepless nights in that too…

So far we’re extremely excited about what’s going on with Junaio, it’s one of our big, big success stories. But we are sensible and trying to experiment because, you know, analogies from the past won’t really work in my view for Augmented Reality in a sense, that, you know, you better bring for a new system to fly, for a new technology to fly, you better bring a very concrete use case to the table, ok? And a well-defined use case. And we are, right now, with Junaio, in a state where we are checking out what could be such a very defined use case.

Tish Shute: So how many users does Junaio have now?

Thomas Alt: Let’s put it that way, we are, especially in the last 2 months, we are very satisfied. But we are not disclosing that, because users, and we’re seeing that from the competitive landscape, always needs 1 page of description what exactly a user is.

You understand what I’m saying? So this is why, ’cause we don’t want to up or downplay things, we are very careful saying, with users. Because I mean we have people who are actually also commercially very interested in Junaio…  We go through with them and discuss what exactly a user is. Cause there’s more then…a download is not a user. An app or something on your phone is not a user, basically, in my opinion.

Tish Shute: I am still waiting to see someone do something with AR and the Four Square API, or now the Facebook Places API. Do you see an interesting potential in the marriage of the rapidly emerging location based social networking space and augmented reality?

Thomas Alt: Definitely. Augmented reality offers a way for users to find information around them easily. Adding in the social networking component such as geo-tagging, rating, commenting can enhance the user experience and create engagement beyond just viewing the information. For example, within junaio, an average user can create their own personal channel and geo-tag photos or leave text messages at different locations. They can create a virtual tour of San Francisco and share it with their friends. By connecting the social side with good content, the augmented reality experience becomes more fun and interactive.

Tish Shute: And, of course, there’s the Junaio API. Are you beginning to see developers use that?

Thomas Alt: Yeah exactly, I mean if you go to Junaio.com, you can get a login, you have an API description. And the way it works is, that you bascially set up a call, which contains the information you would like to have in your individual channel. You submit it to us, it will get checked for profanity and other things, basically. And then we admit it to Junaio basically. The API is huge.   You can also use Junaio indoors.

This is very relevant. And there’s a tool chain for that, and so on and so forth. You can do mission-based search with Junaio. It’s in there, it’s called Junaio Glue. And there will be another very interesting feature coming up in a couple of weeks. And you can just do it, you can do a scavenger hunt, a game, normal POI search, and so on and so forth. And it’s all active. And that’s, what’s sometimes difficult for us to communicate, is it’s really a capabilities platform, but on the other hand it’s obviously very good to developers. And I mean on the developers side there’s huge interest.

I met Stowe Boyd, of Microsyntax.org at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference which convened in the middle of a perfect storm for the State of NOW (more mundanely known as the real time web) as thousands of tiny Twitter pipes became a vital conduit for the historic events occurring in Iran (picture on left, Stowe Boyd, from Brian Solis‘ Flickr here, and on the right, Bruce Sterling, presenting at reboot11 from scriptingnews‘ Flickr here).

But, as Clay Shirky pointed out, re Twitter and Iran:

“It’s incredibly messy, and the definitive rules of the game have yet to be written. So yes, we’re seeing the medium invent itself in real time.”

Stowe Boyd is managing director of Microsyntax.org, a non-profit investigating the embedding of structured information within microstreaming applications, particularly Twitter. It is a communitarian project so if you are interested you should get involved – see Stowe’s #140conf. presentation, “The evolution of Microsyntax.” Stowe is an architect of “flow” and a webthropologist of the State of NOW.  I had the opportunity to talk with him at the conference (see the full conversation below). We talked not only about some of the practicalities of implementing microsyntax but about how “the web of flow” produces a fundamental shift in how we communicate, and who we are.  As Stowe Boyd put it:

“You use these tools, and you are changed. And it’s just a question of how long you use them and the longer you use them, the more you use them, the more changed you are. When people shift to a basis of sociality around connection with other people as opposed to mass affiliation, it’s different. It’s completely different. Your whole system of ethics, the way you judge the world and decide what’s important is different. And not only different it’s better. It’s a better way to deal with the world.”

As Wyclef Sean (@wyclef) remarked at #140conf, “Twitter just cuts the middle man in everything.”

At the 140 Characters Conference it was hard not to be captivated by the energy and optimism arising from the successful use of Twitter by Iranians to communicate in the aftermath of the election.  But the subsequent repression in Iran, in which the regime took advantage of central infrastructure controls to silence Iranian twittering (we have similar network technologies in place here in the US), leaves a big question that came to the fore after the conference:

While these real time applications give us the ability to leverage network effects in totally new ways, and they have enormous potential to make our lives better, do we need to give more thought to the infrastructure they rely on?

The videos for the 140Conf are up now. If you haven’t already seen them, after watching Jeff Pulver’s intro to The State of NOW a great place to start is the “Twitter as a News Gathering Tool” (Part 2).  Also see Ann Curry Defends Foreign Correspondents, Twitter; Rick Sanchez Defends CNN and Brian Solis’ post on techcrunch. Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes), “Twitter and the End Of Music Criticism,” and Moeed Ahmad’s (@moeed), Gaza in Focus, are two of several must see presentations. The #140Conf was an extraordinary event.  Jeff Pulver orchestrated a brilliant cast of characters and a manifestation of social media “hybrid vigor” that was exhilarating to be part of.

A “Director’s Cut” of #140conf will be re-broadcast (Monday, June 29th and Tuesday, June 30th) at 11AM EST / 8AM PST – http://140conf.com/watchit. Some of the speakers will be tweeting while their session is being re-broadcast (see The Jeff Pulver Blog for more).

(picture above from Brian Solis’ Flickr here)

In a serendipitous convergence of events I found myself in the front row taking photos for Brian Solis (@briansolis) see Brian’s post, “Is Twitter the CNN of the New Media Generation.” I like my photo of Jack Dorsey (@jack) Twitter founder – the lens of my own camera would never have allowed for this one!

I was also sitting close to Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), who out of all of attendees at this jam packed event was one of the people I had most hoped to connect with.

Talking with Bruce Sterling about Squelettes, Twitter, Favela Chic, and Gothic High Tech

I have been following the microsyntax.org effort that Stowe has been leading since this post by Bruce Sterling (@bruces) on Pachube Feeds which contained this challenge:

“(((Extra credit for eager ubicomp hackers: combine this [pachube feeds] with Googlewave, then describe it in microsyntax. Hello, 2015!)))”

Stowe pointed out in our conversation at #140conf, that Microsyntax.org is in one sense a very narrow project but on the other hand it’s very broad, because every sort of information that you can imagine is going to be streaming through Twitter and related [real time] applications.

Or as Aaron Straup Cope put it to me: “This is ultimately the “magic word” problem, which is essentially the semweb vs. google-is-smarter-than-you problem.”

There are a bunch of crystal ball posts up at the moment looking into the future of the real time web…. for example, this post on threeminds.organic (via @timoreilly and @buckybit) asking whether we need page rank for people and not just sites…..and this post on readwriteweb that asks is the state of now the harbinger of doom to walled gardens like Facebook. And there seems to be an arms race starting around real time search.

But Bruce Sterling (@bruces) in his cover story for Interactions Magazine examines some of the blinkering on “two inherently forward looking schools of thought and action [design and science fiction].” He writes:

“We have entered an unimagined culture. In this world of search engines and cross-links, of keywords and networks, the solid smokestacks of yesterday’s disciplines have blown out.”

While I was writing up this post, I found myself up at the crack of doom (4 am EST) with insomnia I attribute to a tweet from Mark Vanderbeeken @vanderbeeken which I (@tishshute ) retweeted:

“Internet of Things – An action plan for Europe,” (This EU Doc. cites @agpublic ’s Everyware) http://bit.ly/16uiu3 via @vanderbeeken“

(I wish I had used the new microsyntax in Tweetdeck RE (for more on RE see Stowe Boyd’s post here) then I would have been able to find @vanderbeeken’s original tweet just now.)

So after a quick scan of the EU paper on the internet of things, and in a “here comes everybody” pre-dawn state of mind, craving oracular pronouncement, I impulsively shot an email to Bruce Sterling.

[Note: the following is an asynchronous exchange – not synchronous as a Google Wave would have made possible. Also I have pulled the conversation out of the original email format. Lars and Jens Rasmussen of  Google Wave seem to have hit the nail on the head when they “set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?” (see this excellent post by Tim O’Reilly on Google Wave)]

Tish Shute: I shouldn’t be up at 4am EST sending you more questions but I began reading The “Internet of Things – An action plan for Europe,” http://bit.ly/16uiu3 before I went to sleep and woke up thinking: “How can we work on an action plan for everybody?” ((Another highlight of 140Conf. was Kevin Slavin’s talk on “Things that Twitter –  “sensor aesthetics are streamy”)).

Bruce Sterling: *Everybody?  What, all 6,706,993,152 of us?

Tish Shute: How does, “it’s all about the data,” and “google’s smarter than you” thinking versus “bottom up”/”personal informatics”/”sem web” get worked out in the internet of things?

Bruce Sterling: *I’d be guessing via mergers, acquisitions, lawsuits and police crackdowns, but you never know.  You might have a massive financial collapse where innovations like this start coming out of slums and favelas.  I heard such a great term at LIFT last week:  ”Favela Chic.”  That’s when you are totally penniless and without commercial prospects of any kind but still wired to the gills and big on Facebook.

Photo of Bruce Sterling at Lift 2009 by Centralasian

Tish Shute: Could you elaborate on your comment:

“Also, this stuff they’re discussing: this is like all kindsa trouble ten years from now.” (from your post http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/03/spime-watch-data-shadows/)

Bruce Sterling: *Okay: you know how much trouble SMS messages are in Iran right now, even though ten years ago, cellphones were only for foreigners and rich guys in Iran?  Kinda like that.

Tish Shute: You wrote here: “The idea of living in *abandoned prototypes* or giant failed larval  husks is very contemporary, very New Depression. Very “Favela Chic…”

And:

“Ocasionally squatters move into “squelettes” and bring in some breeze-block, corrugated tin and plastic hoses, transforming squelettes into high-rise favelas. This doesn’t work very well because it’s tough to manage the utilities, especially the water.”

Tish Shute: So what happens when we rely on Google & Twitter repurposed as our main means to access our government?  Not only repressive regimes can cut these utilities off, even though Twitter was asked to delay maintenance so that the Iranian Twitters could keep flowing, Michael Jackson brought Twitter down.

Bruce Sterling: *Google and Twitter aren’t going to last long enough to become main means of an access to government.  It’s not that Google and Twitter go away and we return to a previous status quo, however.  It’s that they are ramshackle digital expedients that get replaced by  even more ramshackle digital expedients.

In the meantime the stuff we used to call “government” gets similarly destabilized.  It’s been privatized, or offshored, or turned into a hollow shell.

Tish: Shute: So is Twitter a squelette (like all our favorite internet platforms, including Google Wave which we haven’t even had a chance to squat yet)? And is microsyntax our breeze-block, plastic hose and corrugated tin-  – very Favela chic but vulnerable to the vagaries of Michael Jackson’s life and death, and deadly shut downs and snooping by repressive regimes that control the underlying utilities? (Squelettes, as Bruce Sterling points out, are:  “one of those coinages like “Prada Goth” that spring out everywhere once they are pointed out.”)

Bruce Sterling: *We can draw a distinction here:  “Gothic High Tech” is the top-end version, while “Favela Chic” is the low-end.  “Gothic High Tech” would be the likes of a “repressive regime” which finds itself forced to conduct cruel, secret, spooky, Guantanamo cyberwars… it’s pretending to transparency, accountability and open elections, while below that surface is a weird, torchlit, Gothic hall of mirrors where invisible hands wreck banks, impoverish the civil population and kidnap people.

It’s “Gothic” because of its magnificent, elaborate appearance — very “Castle of Dracula” — but that no longer maps onto its panicky, extremist, transgressive behavior.

Gothic High Tech doesn’t live in “squelettes.”  Gothic High Tech lives in fancier, more respectable structures called “stuffed animals.”  A stuffed-animal used to be a functional building. From the outside it looks pretty much like it always did, maybe even “conservative.”  Inside it’s half-retrofitted with aging, Frankenstein machineries, already outmoded, rapidly decaying.

A “stuffed animal” might, for instance, be a “savings and loan” where the behavior of the present-day inhabitants involves no actual saving and no actual loaning.  Instead the inhabitants are on television negotiating a position in a crisis narrative and living on bailouts, while, every day, the cobwebs get a little thicker.  “Regulatory capture” is stuffed-animal activity.  “Failed states” and “hollow states” are stuffed animals.

“Favela Chic” is the same basic activity, but with much less money and institutional clout.  In “Favela Chic” nobody bothers to ask for bailouts.  They know the state has failed, or they themselves are engaged in weird activities they prefer to hide from the authorities.   “Favela Chic” lives within openly failed structures, or else in half-structures that are in “permanent beta” and falling down as rapidly as they can be erected.  Favela Chic is bottom-up, open-sourced, heavily networked, subversive and piratical.

There’s a certain amount of class-transition between Gothic High Tech and Favela Chic — like, Twitter was Favela Chic and is heading straight for Gothic High Tech.  But there’s much less transition than there used to be, because of income differentiation — the tiny faction of Gothic moguls “own” what’s left of most of the wealth, which they themselves are rapidly destroying.  The general trend is not toward increasing global prosperity.  The precarity is becoming general.  The Favela beckons for everybody.  That’s where most of the planet’s population lives already, and it’s certainly where most of the young people live.  The idea of a “developing world” needs to be reversed; the end game is in the “developing world” and the rich nations are heading there.

Tish Shute: It seems to me that Twitter and the real time web of flow is a revolution in our means of communication presenting awesome opportunities.  But, are we squatters in an infrastructure that is hard to manage?

Bruce Sterling: *Yes. I’d go farther and say that we are squatters in an infrastructure that methodically destroys previous systems of management.  Especially itself: the closer you are to a revolutionary real-time web flow, the faster you have to reboot.

Tish Shute: And what is the answer to the question at the end of your cover story for Interactions:

“The winds of the Net are full of straws. Who will make the bricks?”

Bruce Sterling: *I frankly have no idea.  The storm-gusts are rising in a hurry and we are in for a whole lot of straws.

*I would point out that, if we could make up out minds about what kind of bricks we wanted, we could make them at tremendous speed.  We’re not helpless: our productive capacity is frankly fantastic.  Clearly we’ve lost the thread and can no longer explain what we’ve done to ourselves or how we get out of our fix.  But we might surprise ourselves.  21st century Favela Chic is no mere favela, and Gothic High Tech isn’t just Gothic, it’s also very high tech.  We’re in a Depression and it’s gonna last, but this is no 1930s Depression.

Talking with Stowe Boyd

Photo from Stowe Boyd’s Flickr stream, “Little” Tower Of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Younger. It is also a slide from his presentation, “The evolution of Microsyntax.”

[Note: Most of this conversation took part in a busy foyer at #140conf and various people joined in the conversation at different points.  I have cut out these other conversations and tried to maintain the thread of my own questions in the transcription.  But this may have resulted in a sense of choppiness and discontinuity in places.]

Tish Shute: You have been on the front-line of so much web innovation, but, perhaps, you could give me a little back story on how you came to take the lead with microsyntax.org.

Stowe Boyd: Well, I’ve been on twitter 990 days or something. But long before Twitter became a commonplace household word, I’ve been advocating what I’ve been calling flow application, based on the streaming metaphor – the notion that you’d have a stream of updates coming from people that you chose to follow, which is now being called the asymmetric follow model. Years and years ago I postulated that that model was going to come along and completely change all future significant social applications. Back in the late nineties, I introduced a term “Social tools” and said social tools were going to come along and change the way the web worked. So I have a history of being 4 or 5 years ahead of what actually happens.

Microsyntax is sort of an interesting outgrowth of that. In a way it’s a very narrow area, in the sense that it’s focusing on these information patterns, the way that people want to encode information in the twitter stream or in the realtime stream of other apps. So it’s very narrow in the sense that it doesn’t immediately include all sorts of other things like these sports figures talking about how to market their services or whatever. But on the other hand it’s very broad, because every sort of information that you can imagine is going to be streaming through twitter and related applications.

We saw examples today of plants demanding water or DJ’s posting their set lists as they’re playing them, devices or equipment talking about its status, video stream from surveilance cameras. Everything you can possibly imagine will find it’s way in that stream. It’s all going to be encoded in different ways and grappling with that is actually an interesting problem. But more importantly it’s better for us as a community of users if we try to approach it in some systematic fashion. That’s the purpose of Microsyntax.org – this nonprofit. The concept of microsyntax is immediately evident to people who use Twitter, and that is we have a whole bunch of conventions that have emerged, and we have some places where it would be nice if conventions did emerge, but we don’t have them yet. And the idea of creating a nonprofit to do it is a sensible thing to do. So I decided I’ll go along with the request that others have made, because other people asked me to do this. So that’s a little unusual for me.

The Web of Flow

Tish: What first attracted my attention to Microsyntax.org was Bruce Sterling’s post suggesting combining pachube feeds with Googlewave and then describing this in microsyntax. Why do you think Bruce Sterling posed this particular challenge?

Stowe: Well, because he sees that everything is moving into the web of flow. Everything is moving out of the web of pages. In the next ten years we’re going to cease to experience the web as we do now, which is as a bunch of pages and we move around from link to link. And that’s what browsers are about. They help us move from page to page on the web. But Twitter, and before it the minifeed and instant messaging and a handful of other really interesting applications, have suggested a completely different web where information flows from other people to you through streaming mechanisms.

And the really interesting stuff that comes to me now on a daily basis is streaming to me through Twitter, not through my RSS reader, not me wandering around figuring out what to google, news or something. And that’s an indicator of the fact that that’s the hottest, coolest way to do it now, and means that in the future it will be “the way” that it’s done. So there will still be a web of pages out there, but it’ll exist like an archive. And we won’t experience the web that way in general because, “why would I go to the web page and see the guy’s blog post on his page, when it’s been served up to me 16 other ways?” And most importantly I’ve found it initially in some client, because somebody recommended it to me, and I resolved it in a hover window in my Twitter client. I’d never go to the page. I comment on it here…

Tish: I like your framing,  “the web of flow…”

Stowe: Well it’s also that one of the characteristics is the tempo is different. I actually wrote a post about this, that I think it’s fundamentally important. It’s not really gotten much drift yet. I think it’s too hard for people to think this way. They just can’t get it.

The dimension that’s really most interesting is the transition from secret to private to public. The fact that Twitter is inherently public as a default is a breakthrough. I mean there’s nothing else like this. The first time that the idea, except for the blogosphere itself which is the concept it’s built on,  the inherent notion is that you’re publishing stuff and anyone can get access to it. But the tempo thing really matters, the fact that it’s near synchronous so your perception of what you feel like you’re doing is you feel like you’re in a stream of updates from friends. We know that. But the sensation is dramatically different than your close personal relationship with your inbox, which is email. Email is secret, closed, and the sense is the context is that it’s an inbox, like the one on your desk. And you are boxed in by that, and you’re not actually feeling like you’re dealing with people. You feel like you’re dealing with the inbox.

Tish: This was only present in boxes as you say – chat rooms, IM, IRC, MUDs, Virtual Worlds but they all had that realtime experience going on.

Stowe: Yes instant messaging, chat rooms, etc. they were private. You had to invite people. The update paradigm on instant messaging was backwards. It said I want to follow this guys updates, but you had to get his permissin to do it. That seemed like a sensible thing in the mid ’90s when people worried about privacy and so they made it private. And private is not good, actually.

Tish: IRC is exactly like twitter but it’s off in closed worlds…

Stowe: Yes you have to know about them. You can’t just stumble across them, you have to be invited or give the password. It’s another closed model. But instant messaging is the father of all this, or the mother, depending on which way you look at it. But that fundamental last thing, it’s based on a quote by Gabriel García Márquez which is, “All people have three lives. they have a public life, a private life and a secret life.” And we are philosophically moving from a time where things were primarily secret (pre internet) to a time where things were primarily private which is web 1.0 into this new web where things are going to be primarily public and open and immediate. So we are building the scaffolding real fast to allow that to happen. And it’ll take us away from the old web. The old web will go down there. Everything’s built on dirt right? Do you see very much dirt in cities? No. No. The dirt is all concealed. It’s down there. If you want to go find it you can dig underneath the floor, and there’s dirt under there. But most people don’t spend very much time down there we send professionals down there to put plumbing and pipes underneath and we experience the world like this.

Tish: I met Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Researcher) at Where 2.0.  He is interested in community sensing and ideas about how people can share data in a win win way (see here). Do we need to work out ways to make sure people’s relationship to their data is not just to have it harvested by others for profit or repression?

Stowe: I’m interested in this actually. I recently wrote a piece about the governance of Twitter and for the purpose of your question let’s just go along with the premise that Twitter’s going to continue to be benevolent, and everything will be open, and everything will be public and everyone can do whatever they want with it. Well there’s a tremendous amount of things that people will want to do, but most of the things that they will set about doing to begin with will turn out to be irrelevant.

People will want to measure sentiment and all this other stuff, for example. And they’ll do that and they’ll coerce a lot of big brands and so on to pay money for these services. But the thing that’s going on with the now web, my web of flow is that people are disconnecting from self identity based on mass affiliations. So ultimately the more you spend your time doing this, you don’t give a s**t about brands. Nike – I could care less.

So there is defection from the mass media. We heard it today. There’s people here who were like booing these media guys, who think they should be held up as gods because, “Oh I’m one of the first to use Twitter on TV.” Well F*** you, I don’t give a s***. I don’t watch television. Every hour that people spend on the internet is an hour they do not spend watching television. It’s a direct and one to one correlation. Sure people still want to get their fill of whatever, the NBA playoffs, but significantly less than ever before. Which is why they’re increasingly irrelevant.

So the idea that some magicians are going to come along, figure out how to mine this data to find out how I feel about my automobile? I do not have a close personal relationship with an automobile. I don’t. And increasingly people won’t affiliate that way. They won’t bond with their stuff like that. That’s why I say most of this information won’t be helpful. It’ll be interesting sociologically. Webthropologists will be able to make it interesting – and marketing people, who are trying to figure what’s going on, might be able to do the right thing. But if they’re trying to take it and make it do something for them… They’re going to try to take it and use it to change us? To control us? It’s like that line in The Labyrinth,  “you don’t have any power over me anymore.”

Tish: You are actually saying something much more radical than say community sensing or that we need to store our own data. You seem to be saying that in some ways it doesn’t matter whether you store your own data or your data’s in the cloud (although Iran seems to be showing how centralized network control can be a powerful tool of repression).

Stowe: Most of the things that they’re going to try to use it to do won’t work because we’re not the same anymore. It’s inevitable. You use these tools, and you are changed. And it’s just a question of how long you use them and the longer you use them, the more you use them, the more changed you are. When people shift to a basis of sociality around connection with other people as opposed to mass affiliation, it’s different. It’s completely different. Your whole system of ethics, the way you judge the world and decide what’s important, is different. And not only different it’s better. It’s a better way to deal with the world. And these guys are still hoping that the old rules hold, but they don’t. They just won’t.

Tish: This is  rather a broad question. But one of the things that Kevin Slavin brought up in his talk is about things that tweet – your plant is tweeting, your shoes are tweeting, your house is tweeting. Twitter is a natural medium for the internet of things and what Kevin Slavin calls the “streamy aesthetics of sensors.” But with all these things that are tweeting people have had a lot of problems with filtering that kind of flood of tweets.  For example, I may want to listen to a tweet from my plant telling me it needs water when I am actually at home and can do something about it. But I may not want to listen to my plant whining about being thirsty all the time. Can microsyntax help? Or is this a place for those appliances you mentioned earlier?

Stowe:  There’s a whole other category of stuff having to do with priorities – this isn’t really a microsyntax – of different times of day when you’re involved in different activities. You may be more or less interested in different collections of Twitter streams. And the notion of how you go about dealing with that is – it could semi-microsyntactical, but maybe it isn’t at all. Maybe it’s all just having to do with the way that clever client apps work. So maybe if you have a super duper Tweet Deck, and you say it’s evening time and I’m in my evening mode, so a whole bunch get blocked and a different group of people, for example, your Parcheesi evening friends get enabled, and at the weekend when you have time to do house care you listen to your house.

I don’t think this is a microsyntactical issue. I don’t think this is an issue of what’s embedded in the stream except as a notion of priorities. There’s a lot of people who would like to have a mechanism to indicate priority. But I can’t think of any effective way to do it that wouldn’t immediately be abused. Of course anything can be abused. This guy thinks that this is high priority, but maybe once again it’s one of these sort of mutual dimensions where they want to indicate it’s high priority but I say I only believe in priorities from certain people.

But still there might be a case to be made for allowing people to put some kind of indication of priority in a tweet, so that there is a hope that it could rise out of the clutter. I talked about some things that I’m interested in that are just purely operational. One of these things I want to get people to build, in Tweet Deck, but it could be in any kind of a client, I want to be able to say don’t let this tweet go away. So I’m getting them to build the pushpin. So I can put a pushpin in the thing and it’ll stay at the top, or stay at the bottom, wherever I put it. And then I can respond to it later, because if I don’t respond to it right now, in most places it goes bye, and then you’ve got to go search for it – a pain in the ass.

Then I say if I’m going to have pushpins I want to have a record of all the things that I’ve push pinned – a history of pushpins. But it’s all client based. It’s got nothing to do with what’s in the text.

Tish: And knowing how many of your followers had already got a particularly tweet from somewhere else which would be very useful has to be done as an appliance…

Stowe: Yes that’s sort of a downstream metrics kind of thing.

Microsyntax is not the answer to every kind of thing. Like, appropriately dealing with hash tags in a sensible fashion is not purely a function of how we use them. But some of it is the structure itself. That’s why I came up with the subtags model. So everybody at South by South West tagged everything southbysouthwest, so if you searched for it there were 150,000 hits a day. So it was useless. But if people had used the subtags model, or something else like that, you could have searched for the subtag. So you could have searched for south-by-southwest.parties or south-by-southwest.thirtytwo-bit which was a particular party.

And so if you have sensible tools that are doing a better job of aggregating information around more complicated ways of structuring hash information, then we can get past the fact that brute force search just isn’t going to work. It just won’t work. For example somebody going through the stuff from today all the stuff that says #140conf but they want to find just the stuff that had to do with media, they wont be able to do it. They’ll have to do it manually. So some of that is better syntax. But some of it is better tools. I mean somebody should go build a better hashtags.org.

Tish: And in terms of creating a web of flow not all of what we need can been done within the Twitter messages – it has to be done in the client and external applications…

Stowe: Yes, there’s this class of applications that listen very diligently to what you’re doing in Twitter. The primary mechanism of how you influence the app is doing stuff in Twitter. You can always go to the app and look at it and fool with it. But, if in fact, the preponderance of your interaction is, it’s listening or talking to you in Twitter – I call that an appliance, to distinguish it from these other apps. Any external application might provide you with the mechanism to dump information into Twitter, but you have to go to the app to do the primary kinds of interaction. In fact major functionality may not be available at all in Twitter or maybe no functionality, except for like Brightkite allows you to dump stuff into Twitter. But the idea is that primarily you do it there. Or there’s a very limited thing like you get with Brightkite, you can send a message saying, “I’m somewhere.”

Tish: Should location be put into tags?

Stowe: I don’t think that location should be put into tags. In other words, if I talk about Paris, then using hashtags is sensible. Or I’m talking about Sherlock Holmes and his relationship to London. It’s a conceptual thing – like talking about Heaven. It doesn’t actually have to exist on the planet somewhere. But it’s really different if you say I am in New York City right now or the more interesting case I think really is, “I am going to be in Boston colon next week” or June 15 dash 17. And I want that information to be available to everybody or a select group of my friends, or just to myself and have it find it’s way into my calendar. But that’s really different than saying “I’ve always enjoyed it when I visit HASH New York.”

Tish: I liked Kevin Slavin’s  phrase “the streamy aesthetics of sensors.” I guess streamy aesthetics is something you have given a lot of thought to?

Stowe: First of all I read a lot of poetry, so I believe in poetics in reading and writing. But I don’t think punctuation marks really degrade that dramatically. I mean it’s OK to have periods and exclamation marks and commas, and things can still be poetic. I think it’s important to try to dream up microsyntax that doesn’t take your eyes off the content, the stuff that people are really trying to say. So that’s why for example I hate L: as a location queue because anything that has letters in it, if you’re not supposed to say them, – if you’re not mentally supposed to say them, or if you’re not supposed to say them if you read it aloud, causes you to do a stutter step when you’re reading the tweet.

But if you use punctuation marks, special characters at various points or placement conventions, like where do things appear in order in a tweet, those things don’t have the same toe stub, that I think really ugly syntactic conventions would. So it’s possible to make these things pretty. For example I’m testing out trying on various conventions for what do you do with a re-tweet. If you want to re-tweet it, if you actually want to have people see it, and then you want to make your own comment. So the question is how do you separate the two? So, RT – guy’s name and then text. Well then how do you know where his text ends and my text begins. So certain things don’t work for me. I mean like a comma is not enough because there might be a comma in the text. And a period doesn’t work because there might be multiple sentences. So it has to be something else.

Tish: And aren’t there confusions that arise because there are already conventions of usage…

Stowe: Yes, I have problems with angle brackets, for example. Sometimes when the tweets wind up in not particularly smart rendering systems, it gets confused because it thinks they’re html. For example, somebody was using the open angle bracket, and even though it’s just text, and it’s not html, when I took that tweet and put it in a blog post, it thought it was the start of an html tag, and so it disappeared. You could use an html escape character but that’s the kind of thing that causes problems. The other problem is there are other ways that it’s been used a lot. People have used this as the thing to introduce the comment that they’re making after a re-tweet.

Tish: There must be very few characters not being used for other things?

Stowe:  Yes but for example, when we use geoslashes there’s a blank in front of it, or it’s the first character in the tweet – so in that particular example  it is similar because slash is used for other things. But, in all the places where it is used, generally there’s a character that precedes it – like “w/o” for without or a fraction or a long list list of  these options. [Geoslash is microsyntax for user location using slash (‘/’) — as in ‘just arrived /SFO’ or ‘heading to /New York: tomorrow/’ for more see Stowe’s post here.]

When I was rooting around for a character I looked for a long time.  And also I wanted to make sure that the slash was easily reachable on cell phones, which, for example, angle bracket isn’t. So if you’re on a phone and you want to say I’m here – I don’t know how far you have to go on your phone, but it isn’t in the first eight characters of Symbian. I looked carefully to make sure it wasn’t a common character that people use widely in everyday speech like commas and semicolons and exclamation marks, but was still easily used. There are still other alternatives. It’s not the only one. There are cases to be made for all of these things – pros and cons for all of them.

Anyway I was making the case of experimenting with different things for this re-tweet, “Here’s my comment.” And I was trying all sorts of stuff like double colon, I tried all kinds of things I wanted to see what it looked like. So starting this week I used the solid bar, the upright bar. It sets it off. It really feels like there’s a divide. There’s a cleavage point, and that’s that guy and this is this guy. So I’m going to write it up as one of the candidates. Some people use square brackets and many other things. There are many personal conventions but nothing has become a real convention, accepted as the norm.

[ Note: Our conversation ended here as the presentations had resumed at 140 Characters Conference ]