Blair MacIntyre is one of the original pioneers of  augmented reality and an extraordinary amount of creative work is coming out of his Augmented Environments Laboratory at Georgia Tech – see YouTube videos here.  The screenshot below is from, ARhrrrr, a very impressive augmented reality shooter game created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and Savannah College of Art and Design, (SCAD- Atlanta), and produced on the NVidia Tegra devkits – watch the demo here.

Blair has spent much of his career working on immersive augmented reality and more recently the integration of augmented reality with mirror worlds. Blair explains:

“I am interested in the intersection of mobile devices – whether they are head mounts or handhelds – and parallel mirror worlds…I think that parallel mirror worlds are a direct manifestation of the intersection of the virtual world we now live in (the web) and geotagging.  As more and more information is tied to place, and as more of our searching become place-based, we will want to do those searches about places we are not at.  A 3D mirror world may provide one interface to that data.  Want to plan your trip to London;  go their virtually and look around, see what is there (both physically and virtually), teleport between areas you want to learn about, and so on.  More interestingly, talk to people who are there now, and retrieve your location-based notes when you are on your trip.”

But, at a time when many augmented reality developers are focusing on AR apps for smart phones, including Blair (the picture on left opening this post is Blair’s augmented reality iphone app ARf), I was interested in finding out from Blair what the state of play was for the real deal Rainbow’s End style AR, as well as the potential he sees in smart phones to mediate meaningful AR experiences.

There is enormous amount of  innovation in mapping our world, see my post, “Location Becomes Oxygen at Where 2.0 and WhereCamp,” and  Ori Inbar’s  Where 2.0. conference roundup. But as Ori notes, to move augmented reality forward:

My point is not a shocker: all we need is to tap into this information and bring it, in context, into people’s field of view.

And this is what Blair MacIntyre’s work is all about.

Talking With Blair MacIntyre

Tish Shute: There do seem to be broader implications to augmented reality today than when this term was first coined. I am interested to have your perspective on how augmented reality may go beyond some of our early definitions?

Blair MacIntyre: I still think the original definition of the term is useful:  media (typically graphics) tightly registered (aligned) with the physical world, in real time.  Many people talk about many things that relate virtual worlds to places, spaces, objects and people.  There is room for many of them, and they don’t all have to “be” augmented reality.  I like using Milgram’s definition of Mixed Reality as everything from the physical world (at one end) to the virtual world at the other;  it’s a spectrum, and augmented reality just sits at one point.

The reason I like the old definition is I believe there is something special about graphics that are tightly, rigidly aligned with the physical world.  When things appear to stick to the world, and an obviously identifiable location, people can start leveraging their natural perceptual, physical and social abilities and interact with the mixed world as they do the physical world.  We’ve found this with the two studies we’ve done of tabletop AR games (Art of Defense and Bragfish);  one key to those games is that the graphics were tightly aligned with identifiable landmarks in the physical world (gameboard).

Art of Defense (pic on left) Bragfish (pic on right)

Tish: I know that you are involved with ISMAR 2009 which is the key US augmented reality conference.  What do you think will be the hot themes, applications, innovations at this year’s conference? Do you think this will be the year that AR really breaks out of eye candy into truly useful and sustained experiences?

Blair: Unfortunately, I won’t be involved this year.  I was supposed to be helping run the technical program, as well as the art/media program, but sickness in my family prevented me from having the time, so I am not helping this year.

First, I would not agree with the implication of the last question — I don’t think AR has just been eye candy up to now.  I do agree that the “high profile” uses of it have largely been that, which is mostly because of the limits of the technology.  I don’t think we’ll see huge changes in that regard by ISMAR this year.  However, we will hopefully see a mixing of communities that hasn’t happened at ISMAR before, and I do believe that this year (independent of ISMAR) we will see more and more AR apps.  Whether they go beyond eye candy is still a question.  I’m hoping that some folks (including myself and other ISMAR folks!) will help push AR in new directions.  But I also expect many folks new to ISMAR and AR to play a big role, because it is this new blood, especially those folks with real problems to solve, new art and game ideas, and a fresh perspective, that will open new doors.

Tish: You have been working on integrating augmented reality with virtual worlds. You mentioned that the way you use Sun’s Wonderland is really about pulling the virtual world into the real world, i.e., Wonderland, “is just a place to put data.”  How is your use of the persistent virtual space different from what we have become accustomed to call virtual worlds?

Blair: The approach we are taking in our project at Georgia Tech is to use the virtual world as the central hub of the information space, and allow the virtual world to be the element that enables distributed workers to collaborate more smoothly.  This is work we are doing with Sun and Steelcase (and the NSF), and is an outgrowth of a project (the InSpace project) that’s been going on for a few years.

What we are trying to do is use mixed reality and ubicomp techniques to pull as much of the physical activity into the virtual world, and then reflect that activity back out to the different participants as best suits their situation.  So, folks in highly instrumented team rooms will collaborate in one way, and their activity will be reflected in the virtual world;  remote participants (e.g., those at home, or in a cafe or hotel) may control their virtual presence in different ways, but the presence of all participants will be reflected back out to the other sides in analogous ways.  We may see ghosts of participants at the interactive displays, or hear their voices in 3D space around us;  everyone will hopefully be able to manipulate content on all displays and tell who is making those changes.

A secondary benefit, I hope, is that by putting the data in the virtual world and making that the place that gives you more powerful and flexible access to the data (e.g., by leveraging space and giving access to history), distributed teams will begin to have the virtual space become a place they go to work, bump into each other and have those casual contacts co-located workers take for granted.

Creating the Information Landscape of the Future

Tish: At the end of my interview with Ori Inbar he said, in order to have a ubiquitous experience “you’ll need to 3d map the world. Google earth like apps are going to help but it is not going to be sufficient. So let’s leverage people. Google became successful in part by making people work with them.  Each time you create a link from your blog to my blog their search engines learn from it.  So let’s find ways to make people create information that can be used for AR.” What ways do you think people can create information that can be used for AR?

Blair: I think the big part of that is the creation of models and environments, the necessary “baseline” for specifying experiences.  Google and Microsoft are clearly working toward this;  recent videos from Microsoft show them starting to move the photosynth work toward Virtual Earth.  Similarly, I came across a page where people are finally starting to mine geotagged Flickr [see my post, “Location Becomes Oxygen,” and here for more on the “The Shape of Alpha” project from Flickr]  images to create models.  It’s that kind of thing that will be useful first;  using the data we all create to enable modeling and (eventually) vision-based tracking in the real world.

After that, it’s a matter of time till more of what we “create” (e.g., Tweets and blog posts and so on) are all geo-referenced;  these will become the information landscape of the future, the kinds of things people think about when they read “Rainbow’s End”.   The big problem will be filtering, searching and sorting.  And, of course, safety and security.

Tish: You are working with Unity3D to research the integration of mobile location based AR with persistent mirror world like spaces.  What has attracted you to Unity? What is the difference between this and your Wonderland project? I know you mentioned. you will be using head-mounted displays are part of this Unity project. What are your goals for this project?

Blair: We started to use Unity3D because it gave us what we wanted in a game engine.  Most importantly, it’s very open and let us trivially expose AR technologies into the editor.  Similarly, it can target the iPhone, so we can begin to work with it on that platform, too.  The biggest problem with creating compelling experiences is content;  and a show stopper for creating content is not getting it into your engine.  Unity has a nice content workflow.

Unity3D is a front end engine, for creating the game;  Wonderland is both a front end, and a backend.  We are actually looking into using the Wonderland backend with Unity as well.  Wonderland also has growing support for doing “real work” in a virtual world, which is key to our other projects.

Eventually, we’ll be using HMD’s.  The goal for the Unity3D project, initially, was to explore what you can do with an AR/VR mirror-world; this is a project are working on with Alcatel-Lucent, and demo’d at CTIA this year.  It’s continuing to grow, though, and now includes a number of our projects, including some work on mobile social AR and soon, some performance and experience design projects in the area of AR ARG’s.  It’s really quite interesting to imagine what you can do when you have an “MMO of the real world” (which we now have for part of campus) that supports both VR-style desktop access simultaneously with mobile AR access.

Tish: Have you taken another look at OpenSim as a possible backend for augmented reality?  Recently I talked to David Levine, IBM and he is thinking about some possibilities to optimize OpenSim to dynamically load a large amount of objects at once (i.e how fast OpenSim can bulk load into an existing sim) and make it better suited to augmented reality/mirror world type projects.

Blair: I haven’t looked at OpenSim recently.  We will probably look at it this summer.

Tish: Why did you select Unity as a good client for augmented reality?

Blair: Unity is a 3D game authoring environment so at some level it is no different from using Ogre, if all the associated stuff was just as well done. It has integrated physics, scripting, debugging, etc. – you can write code in javascript or C# or whatever.   It has a good content pipeline, as well, and supports a range of platforms.

It has simple networking built in, so multiple unity engines can talk to each other but it is not a virtual world platform out of the box – there is no back end …

Tish: Someone described Unity to me as a great client waiting for a great backend? So what are you going to use as a back end?

Blair: There is no real processing except in the client right now.  We will eventually have to create a back end.  We are thinking of using Dark Star because someone on the Sun Wonderland community forums has already built a set of scripts connecting Unity to Darkstar.

But for us, we are not proposing right now to build a real product.  This is research to demonstrate what you could do if you actually had the back end.

Tish: What are the most important aspects of the backend from your POV?

Blair: We want to simulate a variety of the interesting aspects of the back end.  So I very much care about notions of privacy and security and how these sorts of AR/VR Mirror Worlds would work in practice.  But I care about how those things as they impact user experience, not really about how we would really implement them.

Tish: So looking at some of the big problems from the perspective of user experience? Are we are going to go through the same growing pains that the web and VWs have seen, for example, will we have to type in passwords to get into everyone’s little worlds….

Blair: Well you know the SciFi background to this, you’ve mentioned it in other posts on your blog.  Because when you look at the Rainbow’s End model where you have security certificates flying around, that is in effect what cookies and so on are now.  You can authenticate yourself once and then have those certificates hang around. So you can easily imagine how it could be done.  But the big question is how does that change user experience.  There are all kinds of things that start coming into play – like what happens if nearby people see different things – it goes on and on!

Tish: Sounds Like this is very valuable research.  It seems to me that there will be a lot of investment soon in putting the pieces together to do location based markerless AR and it would be nice if we knew more about it from the user experience POV.

Isn’t it vital for a productive intersection between mobile AR and persistent mirror world spaces for us to have markerless AR?  Aren’t we right at the beginning of people really saying yeah markerless AR is doable now? But it seems to me not many people researching or working on fully immersive AR and its integration with mirror worlds?

Blair: I think some of the AR community is thinking about this. There’s probably people who are doing stuff in some other non technical communities. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that people in the digital performance or ARS electronica world who are thinking a little bit about these sorts of things. Although not necessarily at the level of actually trying to build it, because they probably can’t right now.  But experimenting with the precursors.  My colleagues in digital media like to point out that this is often the purpose of digital art, to point out new directions and push the boundaries.

Obviously Science Fiction has explored the possibilities because that is what Rainbow’s End and the Matrix were all about.

Tish: and Denno Coil…

Blair: There has been some research – people like my adviser Steve Feiner up at Columbia, Mark Billinghurst in New Zealand, myself and people at Graz University in Austria .  But partly it has been so hard to do mobile AR up to now – so many people mock head worn displays and can’t get past current technology – you have had  to be willing to ignore the bulky back packs and cables and batteries and so on.  That is changing which is good.

My current response to the anti-head-mounted display people is if 5 years ago you told me you told me that fabulously dressed people who care about their looks and wear stylish clothes would have had big things hanging from their ears that blink bright blue light, so they could talk on the phone, many of us would have said you were crazy, because it would be ugly and so on.  But because there is an intersection of demonstrable need and benefit…Bluetooth headsets are really useful and the sort of early gestalt feeling that grew up around them – that people who use them are so important that they always have to be in touch, they wear these things – so people accept them.

It will likely be a similar thing with head mounted displays. And I don’t know if it will be that people wearing them so that they can read their mail while driving, god forbid. But it will be something.  And when we get the 2nd generation of the wrap glasses that look more like sun glasses and are not bulky and so on, we will have the potential for them catching on because you will look at them and you will think that the person is wearing because they are doing x…

X might be surfing a virtual world or reading their email or keeping in touch, or being aware. It will happen. But they have to get unbulky enough and there has to be more  than one important application, not just watching TV.

Picture above shows  an outside view of the KARMA AR system;  the knowledge based maintenance system Blair built in his first year of grad school (“first AR system Steve Feiner, Doree Seligmann, and I worked on”).  Blair noted, “The Communications of the ACM paper on it (from 1993) is a pretty widely cited AR paper.”

Tish: I think the need for  full on transparent, immersive, wraparound, Gucci stylish eyewear with a decent field of view are the elephant in the room in terms of realizing the full potential of augmented reality.  There are a few new players in the field Digilens,  Vuzix, others?  What is the progress in this area and what do you hope for in terms of near term solutions?

Blair: I agree with that sentiment.  I think that, in the near term, there is a lot we can do with handhelds, as we’ve been doing in the lab.  However, because it’s awkward and tiring to hold up a device, even a small one, for any length of time, handhelds will only be good for “focused” uses of AR.  Such as the table-top games we’ve been doing, or the constellation viewing app that I heard came our recently for the Android G1.  I don’t even see something like Wikitude as that compelling (beyond the “gee wiz” factor) for a handheld form factor.   Many proposed AR apps only really become compelling when users have constant awareness of them, and that requires a see-through head-worn display.

I’ve seen the mockups of the Vuzix ones;  they seem pretty interesting, and are getting to were early adopters could use them (they will be cheap enough, and will hopefully be good enough).  Microvision’s virtual retinal display is also promising;  the contact lens displays will be the most interesting, if anyone can ever make them work.   I don’t know of anything else out there.

“its not really a killer app you care about, it is the killer existence that all of the technology and small applications taken together facilitate”

Tish: While location based services are accepted now and people are understanding that it is something that opens up a new relationship to everything, we still haven’t found the experience that will get everyone holding up their mobile devices?

Blair: Well that is actually the killer problem.  Gregory Abowd is one of my colleagues who does ubiquitous computing research here at Tech.   Way back when we started the Aware Home project (Aware Home Research Institute at Georgia Tech) when I first got here about ten years ago, there was always this question of what is the killer app.  So Gregory comment in a meeting once that its not really a killer app you care about, it is the killer existence that all of the technology and small applications taken together facilitate. It is not that any one of these AR demos we see right, whether it is seeing your photos in the world or whatever, is important. Its that when taken together, there is enough of a benefit that you would use the whole environment.

In the original context we were talking about an instrumented home, but it is the same thing here with AR.

The problem with the mobile phone as a AR device is that problem of awareness. If I have a head mount on and I walk down the street and there is bunch of probably-not-useful-but-potentially-useful information floating by me, that’s a good thing, because I may see something that is useful or makes me think of something else.  But if I have to hold up my phone to see if something might be interesting nearby, I will never hold up my phone because at the time there is a high probability that there won’t be anything particularly important there.  You might imagine you can get around this by using alerts or something like that, but then you overload whatever alert channel you use.  For example, I forward maybe 5 or 6  people’s updates from Facebook to my phone – started with my wife, a few friends, my brother, and the net result of that is I never get SMSs’ anymore because when my phone buzzes, usually I ignore it because it is probably just somebody’s random Facebook update. So if we start overloading channels like that with “oh there might be something useful here in the real world, if you pick up the phone and look through it you will see it … and I will buzz you.” People  just start ignoring the buzzes.

So it is a very hard problem if you think about the kinds of applications that people always imagine with global AR — names over peoples heads and other random information floating in the world — until you have a head mount and all that information is around you all the time. That is when those sort of applications will actually happen.

Tish: Robert Rice notes: “AR is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.” (see my interview with Robert, “Is it ‘OMG Finally’ for Augmented Reality?). And I think the iphone experience has laid the foundation for the increasing desire to experience the network wherever we are – and not be stuck behind a pc.  We cannot perhaps do all we want to do yet. But even in the range of things we can do know, we are not even sure exactly what it is we want to do where yet is it?

“imagine your iphone Facebook client supports AR and that all data on Facebook might be georeferenced – pictures, status updates etc…….”

Blair: Yes that is a huge problem. I have been lucky to be able to teach two fun classes this year that let the students and I start to explore some of the potential that handheld AR might bring.  Last fall I taught a handheld AR game design class — coordinated with a class at the Savanna College of Art and Design’s Atlanta campus — and we had the students build a sequence of prototype handheld AR games, which was a lot of fun.   This spring I taught a mixed reality/augmented reality design class with Jay Bolter (a professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture here at GT).  Jay and I have been teaching this class off and on for about 9 years; this semester we decided to say to the students “imagine your iphone Facebook client supports AR and that all data on Facebook might be georeferenced – pictures, status updates etc…….” and have them do projects aimed at such an environment.

Tish: Not many of our favorite social media today have much sense of location do they? But Flickr  are  utilizing the geo-referenced pictures to create vernacular maps…..The Shape of Alpha

Blair:Yes that is because lots of cameras put geo location data into the exif data so they can extract it…

Some mobile Twitter clients like the one I use in my iphone will let you add your location.  But in general Facebook and other sites don’t have any notion of location. But if you look at all the things people do in Facebook, such as sending gifts and other games, its easy to imagine what these might look like with geo-reference data.  So, the high level project for the class is the groups have to design experiences people might have using mobile AR Facebook.  We told them to assume Facebook as it stands now, but add geolocation and AR to the client.  The class boiled down to “What would you imagine people doing?” So it has been kind of fun.

And we are using Unity for the class too – the same infrastructure I am working on in my research linking mobile AR to persistent immersive mirror world type spaces – and we having the students mock up what a mobile AR Facebook experience would be like.

Tish: Can you describe some of the ideas you class came up with that you think have potential? I know Ori mentioned that from the games class he liked Candy Wars.

Candy Wars

Blair: In the end, they had a nice range of projects in the Spring class.  One created tag clouds out of status messages over spaces, others looked at analogies to virtual pets and gift giving out in the world, one looked at leveraging geolocation to help with crowd-sourced cultural translation, and three groups did straight-up social games.

[See all of the projects from the handheld AR games class on YouTube here]

iphone, Android, or NVidia Tegra devkits or the Texas Instrument’s OMAP3 devkits?

Tish: Is anyone in the class working on Android?

Blair: Nobody is using Android because no-one in the class has the phones. We have ATT microcell infrastructure on campus.  Some ATT people joke that we are better off than them because we have a head office on campus so we can build in the network applications which people even at ATT research can’t do.  But because  we have this infrastructure on campus, and a great relationship with ATT and the other sponsors, we have the ability to provision our own phones without having to pay for long-term contracts, which is vital for research and teaching.

Tish: So does this lock you into the iphone?

Blair: Well the G1 is of course not AT&T but it is GSM so we could probably buy them unlocked and put them on our AT&T network. But the students I work with are much more interested in the iphone right now.

Tish: Is that because the iphone has the market?

Blair: For me the reason I am not interested in the G1 is because you can’t do AR on it – there is Wikitude and a few other apps, but it is all hideously slow.  Worse, because the Java code isn’t compiled like it would be on the desktop, you can’t do computer vision with it, so you can’t do anything particularly interesting on the current commercial G1s.  We could probably take the NVidia Tegra devkits or the Texas Instrument’s OMAP3 devkits (both are chipsets for next gen phones — high end graphics, fast processing),  and install Android on those and we may actually do that yet.  But, it seems like a lot of work right now, for not much benefit.

Augmented Reality shooter game ARrrrr from Georgia Tech and SCAD Atlanta on the NVidia Tegra devkits – watch the demo on YouTube here.

Tish: Everyone seems very excited about the iphone OS 3.0 and the addition of compass. Compass is pretty essential for AR right?

Blair: It is necessary if you can’t do other forms of outdoor tracking, but the problem is that the compass on the G1 isn’t very good, relatively speaking and the iPhone one probably won’t be much better. It does not have very high accuracy, nor is it very fast (compared to, say, the high end 3D orientation sensors we use, from Intersense and MotionNode). As far as I can tell, it doesn’t even give full 3D orientation. I don’t have a G1 (although I have pre-ordered an iPhone 3Gs), but people have told me it only has absolute 2D orientation, so you can only line things up if you are careful.  Your can’t look around arbitrarily…

Tish: You can’t sweep your phone?

Blair: You can look left and right, but if it doesn’t have full 3D orientation, you can’t go up and down. You can’t tilt it in weird directions. It is not fast in the form that you would want to look around quickly.  So it is nice demo.  And it is good for what the Android people use it for which is to let you do your Google street view by looking around, which is actually really useful.

I think there are lots of really useful things you can do with such a compass.

And, it is clear that compass is a necessary feature if we want to do AR.  It’s just not sufficient.

Outdoor Tracking and Markerless AR

Tish: Isn’t it essential for markerless AR? I guess not I just saw this post about SREngine on Augmented Times!

This wasn’t up when we spoke so perhaps you have some comments about what it brings to the table?

Blair: Maybe. The folks at Nokia are working on outdoor tracking, they demoed some stuff at ISMAR last year on the N95 handsets that is all image based.  We are trying to do some work with them, one of my students is working on it.  And probably Microsoft is going to do more on this as well, they had a video up showing that they are also working on vision based techniques.  If you give the phone the equivalent of those panoramic Google Street View images (assuming they are up-to-date) and you are standing at the right place, you don’t really need a compass, you can figure out which way you are looking by looking at the camera video. Ulrich Neumann (USC) did some work on tracking from panorama’s years ago, I don’t know what ever became of it.

Regarding SREngine, that project appears to be a pretty simple first step, but is probably just a demo at this point, and limitations like “only works on static scenes” and “doesn’t work for simple scenes” means it’s probably extracting some simple features out of the image and then matching those to some database.  The trick would be getting this to work on a large scale, where the world changes a lot.   It’s not obvious how to get there.

Tish: So forget RFID for AR…

Blair: RFID is not really useful.

Tish: not at all?

Blair: RFID is useful for telling you what things are near you.  The problem is it doesn’t give you any directional information – it just tells you you’re in range of the tag. So can use it to tell you when you are near a certain product for example.  So it is useful in terms of telling you what thing you are near, and then you can load up a vision system or something else that will recognize that thing.

In that way, it could be useful as a good starting point.

Similarly for computer vision, the compass and the gps are very useful for giving you an initial guess at what you may be looking at that can then speed up the rest of the process.  But, computer vision by itself will not be a complete solution because if I have my panoramic Google Street view (or whatever image database I use for tracking) and you are standing between me and the building -  I am not going to see what I expect to see, I am going to see you.

So I think it is all going to be part of one big package – you are going to see accelerometers, digital compasses, and gps and then combine that with computer vision and other sensors, and then maybe we are going to start getting the things that we have always dreamed about.  I like to show this video from the U. of Cambridge (work done by Gerhard Reitmayr and Tom Drummond) of an outdoor tracking demo because it gives a sense of what will be possible.  Techniques like this will be an ingredient in the future of things.  It becomes especially interesting when you have these highly detailed mirror worlds.  It is sort of one of those chicken and egg problems where if I have an highly detailed model of the world then techniques like they have can be used to track.  But that mirror world needs to be accurate or you can’t use it for tracking, and why would you create the mirror world if you couldn’t track?

Tish: I noticed in your comment to “my interview with Robert Rice” that you said you thought that is was important not to collapse AR into ubicomp – “forgetting what originally inspired us about AR” is, I think if I remember correctly, the suggestion you made. But aren’t ubiquitous computing and AR basically coextensive?

The vision of ubicomp Mike Kuniavsky describes – “sharing data through open APIs and the promise of embedded information processing and networking distributed through the environment” demonstrates how much can be done with very little processing power.” In its most immersive form augmented reality requires a lot of processing power. I think we have all become very conscious about trying minimize levels of consumption.  Can you explain why you think people shouldn’t see AR as the Hummer (energy squandering indulgence) of Ubiquitous Computing?

Blair:  I think there will be a hierarchy of interfaces. You are going to have the rich Rainbow’s End like experience – you are totally submerged in a mixed environment, if you have a head mount on (its not going to be Rainbow’s End for while) but if you don’t have the headmount on that information might be available to you other ways, whether it is a 3D overlay using your handheld or just a 2D mashup with Google maps.  But there will be some circumstances and people who will want to get the compelling experience you can only get with the headmount.

Tish:  Are you doing any research on how all these hierarchies of experiences will fit together – what aspects of this are you looking at?

Blair: The thing that really needs to happen is you need to have this backend architecture that allows you to collect your data from different sources and aggregate it much like the web. Right now Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth are much like the old pre-web hyper-text systems that were all centralized. And what we really need is to have the web equivalent where Georgia tech can publish their building models and I.B.M. can publish their building models and their campus models, and your client can aggregate them, as opposed to Microsoft or I.B.M. puts their building models into Google Earth and then somehow you get them out with Google’s google earth browser. That’s just not going to fly.

Tish: so what does it take then to get us to this backend architecture, because I’m in total agreement?

Blair: The nice thing about augmented reality versus virtual reality is that you don’t need everything modeled. You can do interesting AR apps like Wikitude with absolutely no world model.

Tish: So that means we can start with what we have – utilize cloud services without a full blown backend architecture?

Blair: It may very well be that Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth act as a portal because people go and build models and link them with KML, and they can see them in google earth but they can also download the KML’s through some some other channel. So it may be that those things end up being something that feeds some of this along. Then people start seeing a benefit to having these highly accurate models so then you start integrating the Microsoft photosynth stuff and leveraging photographs to generate models.

It’s just keeping up with it and building it in real time is the challenge. A lot of folks think it will be tourist applications where there’s models of times square and models of central park and models of Notre Dame and the big square around that area in paris and along the river and so on, or the models of Italian and Greek history sites – the virtual Rome. As those things start happening and people start building onto the edges, and when Microsoft Photosynth and similar technologies become more pervasive you can start building the models of the world in a semi-automated way from photographs and more structured, intentional drive-by’s and so on. So I think it’ll just sort of happen. And as long there’s a way to have the equivalent of Mosaic for AR, the original open source web browser, that allows you to aggregate all these things. It’s not going to be a Wikitude. It’s not going to be this thing that lets you get a certain kind of data from a specific source, rather it’s the browser that allows you to link through into these data sources.

So it’s that end that interests me. It’s questions like “what is the user experience”, how do we create an interface that allows us to layer all these different kinds of information together such that I can use it for all my things. I imagine that I open up my future iphone and I look through it. The background of the iphone, my screen, is just the camera and it’s always AR.

I want the camera on my phone to always be on, so it’s not just that when I hold it a certain way it switches to camera mode, but literally it’s always in video mode so whenever there’s an AR thing it’s just there in the background.

When we can do that I can have little alerts so when I have my phone open I can look around and see it independent of the buttons and things that I’m tapping and pushing to use the phone. That’ll be a really a different kind of experience.

Of course it is not known yet if the next gen iphone will have an open video API.  And of course, the current camera is pretty low quality, so why would they give it an open API until they put in a better camera?  I am not expecting anything one way or the other until the 3Gs comes out and people start using it.

But there are many things about the iphone 3.0 OS that are hugely important, like the discovery API that allows people to play games with other people nearby, that don’t have much to do with AR.

Tish: You have an iphone AR virtual pet application ARf.

Macrumors wrote it up and suggested that the neg gen iphone will have compass and open video API.  What are your plans for ARf?

Blair: ARf is just a demo right now.  I know what we’d like to do with it, but it would require tons of work;  imagine what it would take to do a multiplayer, social version of Nintendogs?  It’s not clear what we’d really learn by doing that, but there are lots of other game ideas we have that we want to explore.

Tish: I think it was on Twitter where Tim O’Reilly said, “saying everything must have a RFID tag is like saying we can’t recognize each other unless we wear name tags. Look at what’s happening with speech recognition, image recognition et.al. and tell me you really think we need embedded metadata.” What would you say to that?

Blair: I think that whatever extra data is there will be used. So if we put machine readable labels on some objects then they’ll be used if they make the identification and tracking problem easier. But it’s pretty clear that people are already working on tracking and so on.

A lot of these mobile AR apps are clearly putting ideas in people’s minds things that won’t really be doable in the near future. Like being able to look down the aisle of the store and it recognize all of the products. Given the distances and complexity of the scene, the number of pixels devoted to each of those objects, and so on – you just can’t recognize things in that context. But if I’m standing in front of a small set of objects, or looking at one thing, or I’m standing in front of a building, or if I’m in the store and because of the location API — imagine an enhanced location API that can tell me within a few feet where I am, and then combine that with some use of the discovery API that allows the store to tell your device you’re in the toothpaste section. Now you only have to look for different brands of toothpaste. So now you can recognize the big letters “Crest” or whatever. It’s all about constraining the problem.

That’s why I like that particular piece of Drummond’s work, the tracking web site I mentioned above. The general tracking problem of looking around and recognizing objects and tracking is still impossible. But if I know roughly what direction I’m looking in and I have a good estimate of my position, and I have models of what I should be seeing when I look in that direction, then it becomes a tractable problem. And so it’s not that a compass and a GPS are 100% necessary. But if you have them it certainly makes things possible that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.

Imagine for example  if there’s a new version of GPS, I just noticed that some of the new satellites going up have this new L5 channel. There’s the L1 & L2 signals  that the military and civilian ones use and they added this civilian L5 signal, which should make GPS more accurate. I haven’t found anything online that says how much more accurate.

But someday, hopefully, all GPS will get to be the quality of survey-grade GPS. Right now, if you get an RTK GPS from one of these companies that make the survey grade GPS systems, they give you position estimates in the range of two centimeters, and update 10 to 20 times a second. When you have that kind of positional accuracy combined with the kind of orientational accuracy you get from the orientation sensors we use in the lab from Intersense and MotionNode, everything is easier because you’ve pretty much got absolute position. You put that into a phone and now when I look up, it’s still not perfectly aligned because there will still be errors (especially in orientation, since the compasses are affected by metal and other magnetic noise). But it does mean if you and I are standing 5 feet apart from each other and look at each other, I can pretty much put a little smiley face above your head. Whereas now, with GPS, if I look at you and we’re 5 feet apart our GPS’s might think we’re on the opposite side of each other because they’re only accurate to two to five meters.

And that depending on the time of day and weather!

Putting RFID tags everywhere is easy; the problem is the readers – they currently require lots of power and they have a limited range.  Sprinkling RFID tags everywhere is fine. But you have to be able to activate those tags and read back the signal.  In certain contexts it works.

Tish: And one final question!  What do you think can be done re beginning to think about standards for AR.  Is there a meaningful discussion going on yet? Thomas Wrobel left this comment on my blog rcently and I was wondering what your position was on some of the ideas he raises?

Wrobel wrote, “The AR has to come to the users, they cant keep needing to download unique bits of software for every bit of content! We need an AR Browsing standard that lets users log into an out of channels (like IRC) and toggle them as layers on their visual view (like Photoshop).Channels need to be public or private, hosted online (making them shared spaces) or offline (private spaces). They need to be able to be both open (chat channel) or closed (city map channel) as needed. Created by anyone anywhere. Really IRC itself provides a great starting point. Most data doesn’t need to be persistent, after all. I look forward too seeing the world though new eyes.I only hope I will be toggling layers rather then alt+tabbing and only seeing one “reality addition” at a time.”

Blair: I agree with him, in principle.  But, I’m not sure there’s a point yet.  It can’t hurt to try, of course, from a research perspective, and I’m interested in the experience such an infrastructure would enable (as we’ve talked about already).

Neogence is on stealth mode with an immersive mobile augmented reality platform – “tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus some applications.” They are probably six months away from YouTubing anything according to CEO, Robert Rice.  But Robert rustled up this pic for me – a Google street view of Neogence R&D labs: “the patio on the lower left is where I do a lot of pacing and smoking my pipe and the porch and office upstairs is where  a lot of  meetings have been held.”

Robert Rice (@RobertRice ), CEO of Neogence, recently tweeted:

I’m changing my name to Robert Mobile Ubiquitous Geospatial Augmented Rice. I’m betting on radical changes in next 18 months.

Although Robert’s new AR platform is still under wraps, I think you will get a good idea of what direction he is going in from this interview (full text at end of  this post). Robert is the author of “MMO Evolution” and is a key developer and thought leader in persistent immersive environments, simulations, virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games as well as large scale communities and social networking.

It is OMG finally, at least, for minimally immersive but truly useful AR.

Since the launch of Android a new generation of useful augmented reality applications like Wikitude are emerging.

After the last NYC Tech Meetup, my  friend Nathan Freitas,  (@NatDefreitas),  or rather Nathan Mobile Meets Social Freitas, demoed for me a cool graffiti app  he has developed on Android.   You leave a marker for your graffiti so other people can find view/add their own – a nice primal experience like pissing on the lamp post to let your pack know where you’ve been.  Also the graffiti app taps into a long history of  NYC street culture around tagging and graffiti art.  For more cool mobile projects Nathan is working on – Vote Report and data collection for mass events, a guide to pubs and nightlife in New York City, and more, see his blog, “Nathan’s OpenIdeals. With Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer, and APIs on Android for temperature, light meters, (no hardware yet), Nathan says Android:

“seems to be the platform most likely to socialize the idea that sensor data could be a piece of every application.”

As Nathan is fond of saying:

The compass is a killer app enabler!

Also see OpenIntents for some interesting Android Sensor projects.

Wikitude was one of Thomas Wrobel’s two top AR milestones for 2008 (see Gamesalfreso):

Wikitude I think. Seems the first released, useful, AR software.

AR Geisha doll is also a remarkable breakout for AR – but useful, nah.

I asked Robert if he also thought Wikitude and AR Geisha doll as  significant breakthroughs:

Yes,  these are among the first attempts to get away from the novelty of simply rendering a 3D object based on a marker and making it interesting.

Remember, one of the biggest risks that AR has, is being branded as “novelty”, which means “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.” I think we have a ways to go before something is truly useful, but as 2009 progresses we should start seeing some effort here. I’d guess 2010 before something really useful comes out…at least something practical.

Now, having said that, I should say that I expect entertainment and games to take the lead (as usual), although there are a few companies really trying to leverage AR and video/graphics compositing for marketing (brochures) and location based methods (kiosks, large screen projections, etc.)

So when is it “OMG finally!” for massively multiuser augmented reality?

The picture above is from benjapo’s portfolio on istockphoto – also see the istock video here.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (who weighed in recently on the twitter-baby debates – see my KickBee Posterous blog) challenges design assumptions for augmented reality that take as a given the user’s desire for numerous private enhancements to their reality.

Alex points out less will probably be more so that enhancements do not impinge on shared experience.  See his write up of a talk he gave at the Royal College of Art, “and the end of my own private Shibuya.” Photo below by Stéfan, “Karaoke in Shibuya“

Part of the pleasure of these streetscapes is precisely that they’re collectively experienced, rather than individual visions: for even a brief period, we share with other postmodern, globe-hopping flaneurs and expatriates and temporary natives the light of the ABC-Mart sign and storefront.

It is collective experience of enhanced, augmented, virtual or real experiences that interests me too. This is one of the reasons I find Pachube and the EEML project of Haque Design and Research so interesting.

Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML), a protocol for sharing sensor data between remote responsive environments, both physical and virtual. It can be used to facilitate direct connections between any two environments; it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections as implemented by the web service Pachube, which enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world.

“Distinctions between virtual and real are as quaint and outmoded as distinctions between mind and body” (Usman Haque)

Usman Haque (founder of Pachube and Haque Design and Research) points out this is an underlying premise of his work – and augmented reality (full interview coming up soon!).

The pictures above show the Haque Design project, Remote:

‘Remote’ connects together two spaces, one in Boston the other in Second Life, and treats them as a single contiguous environment, bound together by the internet so that things that occur in one space affect things that happen in the other and vice versa – remotely controlling each other.

There was a discussion in twitter recently about how the terms like Second Life, Exit Reality, Virtual Worlds are misleading and outmoded. As Robert pointed out we need:

one word please…that sums up virtual and/or augmented reality, interactive, immersive, virtual worlds, mmorpgs, simulations, etc… also, I really don’t like the term “augmented reality” or “mixed reality”. Neither is all that great. And NO “matrix” or “metaverse” please

Robert argues strongly that there is a stultification both in virtual world technology – much of what we call virtual world technology was already, basically, where it is now in the mid 90’s. And MMOGs have devolved into gameplay design “that emphasizes the single player experience and does nothing to take advantage of the potential of the massively connected internet.”

Robert suggested I take a cruise through a new Virtual Space -  CoolIris to find some good pictures for this post (note the partnership between CoolIris and Seesmic to Streamline Video Blogging. I added the Cooliris Plugin to Firefox and typed Augmented Reality into search and soon I was cruising a highway of images and links. The Road Map image grabbed my attention (see below). It shows the continua that the Metaverse RoadMap authors thought are likely to influence the ways in which the Metaverse unfolds. It is “a map of the spectrum of technologies and applications ranging from augmentation to simulation; and the spectrum ranging from intimate (identity-focused)external (world-focused)”

Quite to my surprise, when I clicked out of CoolIris to the source for the image, I found it had been drawn from a post I wrote in May 2007, Hybridized Digital/Physical Worlds: Where Pop and Corporate Cultures Mingle. My post talks about a number of hybridization experiments that were bringing together lifelogging, sensors everywhere, simulation, virtual worlds, and augmentation.

The striking difference from 2007 to now is that we have definitely moved on from mere experimentation. And the poles of the continua intimate/extimate, augmentation/simulation as expressed in the Metaverse Roadmap are now becoming entwined (note the picture above seems to be slightly different to the one used in the road map as published here – perhaps I had an early version?)

“Augmented Reality is not just about overlaying data…” (Robert Rice)

The screenshot above is from TotalImmersions video demoing Augmented Reality with 3D Cell Phones. Also see video of their immersive games, and FutureScope kiosks here and here.

Gamesalfreso noted that Will Wright, delivered the best augmented reality quote of the year. When describing AR as the way of the future for games, Will Wright said:

“Games could increase our awareness of our immediate environment, rather than distract us from it”.

Robert points out in this interview the term Augmented Reality itself has become associated with a very limited understanding of what “enhancing your specific reality,” is really about. Robert notes:

it is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.

When I talk about AR, I try to expand the definition a little bit. Usually, when you talk to someone about augmented reality, the first thing that comes to mind is overlaying 3D graphics on a video stream. I think though, that it should more properly be any media that is specific to your location and the context of what you are doing (or want to do)…augmenting or enhancing your specific reality.

In this sense, anything that at least knows who you are (your ID, mobile phone #, etc.), where you are (GPS coord or a specific place like a cafe), and gives you relevant data, information, or media = augmented reality. Sure, you can make things more interactive or immersive, but that is the minimum.

So, in this case, yes, I think there will be networked applications in the next 18 months…mostly things that are enhanced by friends lists (you are here, your friend is over there). These will be *application specific*. My team at Neogence is already going beyond this, building a platform and infrastructure for other applications to be developed on…all networked through the same backbone. Now, in this context (the science fiction AR that we all dream about), no I do not see anyone else trying to leap a generation or two ahead of the industry to build a massively multiuser shared AR space. Expect to see things like multi-user AR games, virtual pets, kiosk marketing, magic book, “gee whiz” presentations (tradeshow booths, entertainment parks, etc.), and so forth.

Goggle’s Are Not The Secret Sauce…

AR Cat left and Robert Rice right

What has come to be associated with the term Augmented Reality, in the popular imagination – an idea of 3D graphics projected over markers that has been forever waiting for the advent of “wicked next generation transparent wearable displays” – nirvana for augmented reality. While such displays may be nirvana for AR (and they could be with us in less than twenty four months), Goggles are not the “secret sauce” of AR as Robert points out.

All the glasses are, is another display device. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you are looking at an LCD monitor, an IPhone, a head mounted display, or a pair of wicked next generation transparent wearable displays that magically draw directly on your retinas.

The real tricky stuff is what happens on the backend…making it all persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc.

There has been quite a buzz going around about the new Vuzix Eyewear, and recently Robert talked with Vuzix and checked The Wrap 920AV eyewear out:

Vuzix is not alone in pursuing the ultimate in hardware, at least as far as wearable displays. However, I think they are much farther than the rest of the pack in vision, roadmap, and execution. They have put together a team that has a sense of urgency and ambition that will blow the industry away. After talking to them, I got the feeling that they really know what they are doing and there is a lot of mind blowing stuff in their pipeline. I’m sure they are one of the few companies that really gets it and has a clear vision of the future. Definitely my first choice to work with.

Hybrid Augmented/Virtual Reality

Cory Ondrejka posted this picture of the anybots telepresence robot and “congrats to Trevor Blackwell and the rest of the Anybots team on the launch of QA at CES.”  Cory (one of the founders and former CTO of Second Life) also made some predictions for Virtual Worlds, some optimistic and some less so, including “the increasing need to be able to diversify the Second Life product offering to begin truly rebuilding the code base.”

Robert is unabashedly irritated with the state of play in Virtual Worlds and MMOGS:

Unless both industries (Virtual Worlds and MMOGs) have some serious upheaval or radical new approaches, they will quickly be eclipsed by AR, which will eventually evolve into something hybrid..AR/VR depending on your level of access and hardware.

I’d like to see someone grab an engine like Offset, Crytek, HERO, or Unreal 3, and smack on a fat MMO server infrastructure (Eve or Bigworld)…toss in the right tools, and you would see a revolution and renaissance occur at the same time in the virtual world space. All the puzzle pieces are there, just no one is putting them together the right way.

I did just find out that Nortel’s WebAlive is powered by the Unreal 3 engine. You can try WebAlive out here.

Robert points out how rare it has become to see people really push virtual worlds technology and MMOGs into entirely new directions.  Although, of course, there are exceptions.  I managed to engage some interest from Robert in the possibilities the opensource modular architecture of OpenSim opens up, and the augmented reality experiments from Georgia Tech with Second Life (screenshot below) got praise from Robert for trying to do something new. (Georgia tech have also put out a virtual pet app for the iphone ).

But while Robert clearly has zero patience for virtual world technology which he sees stuck in the mid nineties, he notes:

the innovative and wonderful stuff about SL isn’t SL, it is what people are doing and creating on their own with terrible tools *IN* SL [Second Life].

The immersive mobile augmented reality platform Robert is building, he hopes, will generate this kind of user creativity but with 21st century tools.

So is it “OMG” finally for the Augmented Reality we have dreamed about?

According to Robert:

It really boils down to a markerless solution and a good application.

In the interview below we cover a number of topics including business models for Augmented Reality, e.g., how business models based on micro-transactions and virtual goods will translate to Augmented Reality.

Many of the challenges to becoming mainstream faced by virtual worlds  are similar to the challenges AR must overcome. Robert discusses these including the interface/gui that is a critical element for AR, solving the riddle of one world or many, patent wars in Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality, the role of Augmented Reality in the future of sustainable computing, and what interoperability is about.

The Back Story for AR/VR…

In case you want to get up to speed on the required background reading for  Augmented Reality. This is Robert’s required reading list and Denno Coil is an absolute must see (feel free to add to this list in the comments, please).

“If you want to see the things that have inspired our vision of what we want to build, check out:

* Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
* Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
* Spook Country by William Gibson
* Halting State by Charles Stross
* The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
* Donnerjack by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
* Otherland by Tad Williams
* Neuromancer by William Gibson
* Idoru by Wiliam Gibson
* Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

and watch the whole anime of Denno Coil (subbed NOT dubbed!)”

Screenshot from Denno Coil from Concrete Badger.

Interview With Robert Rice

Tish Shute: I am glad to hear that you are working on this [an immersive mobile augmented reality platform]!

Robert Rice: We switched gears from MMO stuff about a year ago and we are finally getting some traction. It is very hard doing anything in this economy right now, but we found an opportunity to take AR to a new level beyond what you see on youtube. AR is still too “cute” and novelty. We don’t want to play around.

Tish Shute: I like Wikitude ‘cos it even manages to do something useful!

Robert Rice: Yeah, useful = traction. Now that we are getting near a prototype we are starting to get a lot of interest even though we are still technically way under the radar.

Tish Shute: r u funded?

Robert Rice: privately funded, some revenues from an early license, and ongoing discussions with several institutional investors. So, we have some funding, but nothing spectacular just yet.

Tish Shute: are you just developing an AR platform?

Robert Rice: hrm, sort of, but not just that. By platform I mean tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus some applications. The idea is to build something that facilitates everyone else making cool things and useful applications for different industries/sectors

Tish Shute: Yes that is the cool thing to do but isn’t that hard to fund!

(Robert grins) Well, that depends on the business model. We’ve got that figured out. I’d be absolutely happy if everyone and their brother were making applications on our stuff that gives us an edge on market penetration/saturation. There are plenty examples that prove the model. If you give people free and easy to use tools, they will run with it. ARtoolkit for example, has tons of people making nifty things and posting videos on youtube that has pushed them to the forefront as THE AR middleware to use right now, or heck, look at youtube free service, and they dominate video sharing.  Sure there will be a lot of “noise”, but there will also be a lot of “signal” that will rise to the top, facilitating and enabling is creating value in its own right.

Tish Shute: But how do you expect to monetize?

Robert Rice: There are a good half a dozen ways to monetize AR or an AR platform.

Tish Shute: What are your top 3?

Robert Rice: hrm, microtransactions, localized mobile advertising, and enterprise solutions (visualization)

Tish Shute: Do you think the consumer market will give the lead?

Robert Rice: I’m not sure. We are getting people from academia, intelligence, defense, border security, and some corporate types knocking on our door already, and pretty aggressively. It may be that those sectors push AR before consumer entertainment really kicks off.

But going back to a discussion we had earlier – yes working with “no markers” is a big deal.

Tish Shute: Can you talk about what you are doing there or is it still under wraps?

Robert Rice: I can say that between some university tech transfer and some of our own proprietary stuff, we are using some fairly common visual tracking technology. if you are really plugged into the AR scene, you will know there are probably half a dozen visual tracking methods out there. We just looked for the best one, licensed it for commercial use, and then started working our magic. This is a very small piece of the overall effort, but worth noting.

The downside with working with university tech is that it is usually based on research, incomplete, and not wrapped up in a nice commercial package on the upside, it can be a good start to build on.

Tish Shute: As you know I am very interested in “technology that matters” in particular tech that can help us accomplish the urgent goal of sustainable living.

Robert Rice:: oh, I’m pretty keen on sustainable living as well…after I sell off a few companies and have money of my own, I’m going to get into arcologies
❦
Robert grins

The interesting thing with the visual stuff combined with our other tech, is that we can make things multiuser, persistent, dynamic, and mobile.
The markers (fiducials) are really really limiting outside of basic applications. You can’t really plaster everyone and everything with a marker.  And they are, by nature, static (even if they are animated or whatever).

Also… our stuff works indoors and outdoors even without a GPS connection.
❦
Robert grins

Tish Shute: Now that does sound interesting!

Robert Rice: Yeah, with visual, you don’t need a compass or accelerometers either. Less hardware : )

You start with wifi triangulation or gps coord to get a “brute” location, and then you use the visual stuff for down to the meter accuracy and that by nature, gives you your orientation and positioning.

Tish Shute: Wow this is beginning to sound very interesting!

Robert Rice: Once you have that, it doesn’t matter where you go, it continues to track and continually refines areas you have been before. We’ve spent the last year figuring all this out. There are so many problems and obstacles that are going to be developing in the future for anyone trying to do what we are, but we have already discovered solutions.

oh, visual tracking = gesture based interfaces too that’s going to take some work, but its doable.  The real pain in the ass there isn’t the actual tracking, it is in the interface design.

That’s something that almost every AR company, venture, and research program is missing out on entirely. They are so focused on making cute things with markers.  They are missing the larger problems of AR Spam, interface, iconography, GUI, metaphor, interoperability, privacy, identity.

Tish Shute: So how are you dealing with all that!!

Robert Rice: We took the backwards approach of trying to think where we want things to be in ten years (and we read all the cool books…Vinge, Stephenson, Gibson, etc.) and then we spent time trying to think of what the potential problems are….like AR spam. Its bad enough when a giant penis flies by in second life, we don’t want that to happen in a global wireless AR platform.

Tish Shute: Do you have a prototype yet?

Robert Rice: hrm, 6 months away from youtubing something. Problem has been slow funding, which equals slow development. We also don’t want to show our cards too soon…too many potential competitors out there.

❦
Robert grins

Tish Shute: when you say microtransactions what is the business potential there?

Robert Rice: hrm last year I think, $1.5B was spent on virtual items. That’s games and virtual worlds. That should hit $5B in a couple of years. That’s basically people buying and selling things like WoW gold or items in SL or whatever. microtransactions, is basically the same thing, but in AR space.

Why couldn’t a 3D artist make a wicked animated 3D dragon, and then sell it to someone else? With AR, you could sit it on your shoulder. With a good scripting engine, you could train it to do stuff. Thats what I want to enable.

tools + sdk + platform = enabling people to make and create. Add in a commerce level (microtransactions) and wala.

Tish Shute: At the moment all of these virtual goods are very platform specific, is that a problem for you?

Robert Rice: Not at all. This is at a higher level. You have to switch mental models when you talk about what AR could or should be. For example, lets contrast the web and virtual worlds. For every virtual world you go to, you have to download a whole new client. Imagine if that model was applied to the web… you would need a brand new browser for every website you went to. That is just so…wrong.

It’s the same thing for AR…people are thinking about it with the same mental and business models and development philosophies as virtual worlds or web.  There are some things and aspects that work fine, but not everything.

Virtual worlds, are, by nature, necessarily different and walled gardens. The idea of 100% open and interoperable virtual worlds is a red herring…it sounds good but in practice it is a really dumb idea.

Tish Shute: I was wondering if you had a way to leverage all the 3D content already created ‘cos that would jump start things in AR wouldn’t it?

Robert Rice: Oh yeah, that’s easy. They all use the same polygons. Any virtual item in any game or virtual world is likely created with 3D studio or maya or something similar would be easy to convert and use.

Tish Shute: So people could bring their WoW weapons into your system?

Robert Rice: Not legally, but sure. Its just a 3D model with a texture.  It doesn’t matter if you use corel draw or photoshop or paintshop pro….or one screwdriver or another. Part of my team’s advantage, is that we are all experienced in MMORPG and virtual world design and development. We know the tools, the tech, and what works and what doesn’t.

Tish Shute: But some of the 3D content created in the social worlds is what has most value to people.

Robert Rice: Right, and that can be exported out easily.

Tish Shute: But back to “real” life applications. Is you platform really markerless?

Robert Rice: Yes.  marker = printed icon or glyph, also known as a fiducial

Tish Shute: But u must have some marker?

Robert Rice: hrm, more accurately, you need a point of reference.

Visual tracking has been around for more than a decade.  Lots of work for robots and other sectors.

Robert Rice: But isn’t the specificity of reference n terms of RL applications a vital key, for example, for a database of things?

Robert grin That is a different problem…tracking, registration, mapping, positioning, etc. That question has to do with mapping which is related to visual tracking, but not the same thing. We have a rather unique approach to some of this that I can’t discuss (patent pending).

Tish Shute: But for example, to create an augmented natural history of food – say I want to point at the slab of meat on my plate and know where that cow came from, what feed lot how it was treated etc

Robert Rice: That is not possible without ubiquitous nanotechnology. Shall I explain?

Tish Shute: Yes please!

Robert Rice: Ok, lets step back a minute and turn that burger back into a cow… the first problem (of this particular situation) is differentiating from one cow to another since most cows look alike, you can either attempt to discriminate visually (cow patterns) or use a much simpler option, like giving each cow a rfid chip in their bell, or hoof

Now, most people would try to figure out how to jam all sorts of info in the rfid chip, which sounds like a good idea, but isn’t, the trick would be to simply use the rfid to store a unique identifier with is then linked to a database elsewhere, or hoof.

That database should continually be updated with whatever relevant information you need so as you get close with your AR laptop, wearable displays, or embedded brain chip, you get the identifier broadcast, then you get the info downloaded to you, and it “sticks” to the cow with the generic visual tracking (object following, even simple bounding box is sufficient for a slow moving cow)

So, up to that point, you can get tons of information about that specific cow, that cow population (remember, AR is not just about overlaying data…it is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.) Tie in data visualisation and some farmer tools and all sorts of other things happen. Now, lets move the timeline ahead a bit.

The butcher gets the cow and does his handiwork…because we know all the info about the cow, all of the meat can be properly labeled and marked. Ideally, with a UPC code or a unique glyph (somewhat problematic depending on how many unique glyphs you can create) so, while you are in the grocery store, you can access the relevant shopping data…age of cow, state of origin, type of feed, how many spots, how much body fat, which butcher, whatever not because of what is inside the package, but the package itself.

Getting back to your hamburger, the problem is that it is a burger…there is nothing to distinguish that burger from another one at the table…unless you stuck a rfid chip in it or splattered it with ink and a unique glyph, or maybe a special one of a kind plate.

However, a properly designed AR system could say “hey! that/s a hamburger! and I know I am at Fat Daddy’s Burger Joint in Raleigh North Carolina on Glenwood Avenue, and I know that they cook their burgers this particular way, and their meat supplier is those guys over there, and they usually get their cow meat from a farm out in Utah”

With ubiquitous nanomites or whatever, then its not that far out to consider edible nanos that are in the meat and that broad cast info so a slab of meat can tell you about itself and broadcast that to the general public.

Tish Shute: What useful scenarios can we create without the nanomites?

Robert Rice: If it wasn’t a burger or a consumable organic, the scenario changes.

Tish Shute: What is the time scale on nanomites?

Robert Rice: ehhhhhhh 20 years minimum if we are lucky. They sound good on paper, but there is a whole book worth of problems and why they are so far off…as consumer grade, all over the place, type of stuff.

Tish Shute: Did you see the Nokia Home Control center?

Robert Rice: Yes, I saw the Nokia stuff.

AR for sensors, like security systems, temperature control, etc. all become “sources of data” that a AR system can visualize. So yes, thats easily doable. You could do that in a short period of time with some half decent engineers.

The trick of what Nokia is doing is aggregating sensor data from a building/home/facility, mashing it together, and sending the mobile device alerts and data visualization conceptually rather simple, but no one has done it right or well yet.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Nokia pulled it off.

Tish Shute: yes and if they do and someone does an AR interface to it that would be an inflection point for AR?

Robert Rice: In a roundabout way, yes. You could get data directly from your house, or get it through your mobile device and in either case, use the AR for visualization and control.

The interface/gui is a critical element for AR. That is one of the areas where it, as an industry, risks doing a bad job and turning into just a fad or another novelty like VR.  Virtual worlds have been struggling with that for a while, but MMORPGs have had the effect of extending their life cycle

Tish Shute: Yes VWs have not solved the interface problem.

Robert Rice: The interface is one of their problems yes. Most virtual worlds are stuck in 1996/98

Tish Shute: If AR  is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc. seems that it is the ideal interface for home control?

Robert Rice: Well for home control, you must know:

1) Who am I? Am I authorized to know this information? Am I a guest?

2) Where am I? Is this my house? or someone elses?

3) What am I doing? Do I want to make all the doors lock? Turn on or off lights? Open the garage door? Trigger the security alarm?

So the same questions apply

I’d say that all virtual worlds are stuck in the mid 90s. They are at least a decade behind the game worlds…in technology, design, implementation, architecture, etc. etc. In my opinion, things like Second Life are shameful in how they are presented as state of the art, innovative, ground breaking, new, wonderful, and world changing.

But thats another topic of conversation : )

Tish Shute: Well for me the contribution of VWs is the presence enabled real time interaction with application (as 3D info machine) and context with other people.

Robert Rice: Oh,there is no doubt that they are greatly useful and have a phenomenal amount of potential.

They *could* be all those things I just said that SL isn’t…the problem is that they are either just existing, or they are meandering around without any real focus or direction. They aren’t evolving.

Even MMORPGs are losing their way and beginning to stagnate terribly

Tish Shute: yes I agree

Robert Rice: But, AR has the potential to change a lot of things.

Im sure you have seen the yellowbook commercials? The technologies you are seeing here are doable in hrm, a year or less maybe. The tricky part is the interactivity and AI…that is, the content. Everything else isn’t a problem. The avatar there could be photorealistic or stylized like a WoW character.

You could do that to some degree with markers for registration but dynamically changing the content linked to those markers is a little weird

(by the way, for the record, I like markers just fine, I just don’t think they are useful for real-world mobile applications)

I also think that the guys that want to dust the planet with miniature rfid chips are on crack and are going about it the wrong way

Tish Shute: A high level of interactivity is hard though. Isn’t it? Even in VWs it is very limited.

Robert Rice: it depends if you can track what the user is doing, and interpret that properly. Interactive is also a very lose term.

Clicking a button and making a light blink could be considered interactive.

Tish Shute: In VWs a high level of interactivity would  be to wield a virtual hammer and have a real nail go in! is physics part of the problem?

Robert Rice: physics aren’t difficult, plenty of middleware out there for it. The problem with that isnt so much the physics as much as it is the scale and purpose

Tish Shute: well for robotics?

Robert Rice: that gets into a conversation about meshes, textures, and volumetric collision detection and stuff

Tish Shute: virtual robotics?

Robert Rice: You mean teleremote/telepresence of real robots?

Tish Shute: yes!

Robert Rice: ah, for that, you need some tactile feedback and some other stuff – doable, but insanely difficult. That’s why you don’t see a whole lot of remote controlled surgery robots all over the place.

They do exist…

Tish Shute: Will AR contribute to sustainable living by freeing us from some of our energy hogging devices?

Robert Rice: AR will ultimately encourage energy saving and recycling. where did I leave a light on at? where is the nearest trash can? what is the UV index outside today?

Yes, computers are energy hogs, but as we start seeing larger SSD drives, more efficient CPUs (even if the number of cores increases in multiples), and so on, the power will go down.

Also, think about this…wearable displays potentially use less energy than LCD monitors on your desk.

Tish Shute: Yes I should pick the brains of my intel chums on energy saving!

Robert Rice: Getting rid of the monitor and switching to solid state drives will save an assload of power. Yes, I said assload.

Tell your intel chums to quit screwing around with single core mobile CPUs. We need multiple cores, that are smaller, faster, and use less power.

Tish Shute: Is AR is the sustainable future of VW and MMOGs?

Robert Rice: The fun stuff will happen when they are both integrated in some fashion.

Tish Shute: So perhaps this is why the Georgia guys are thinking in trying to combine AR and SL (see video here).

Robert Rice: That first video was pretty damn cool. It just pains me that they are using SL for it. And omg, all those markers on the table.

Although, I could care less about seeing my SL avatar on my coffee table. I would rather see an avatar representing ME in the real world, moving around in a virtual world that is a “to scale” replica of the real world. That is MUCH more interesting and innovative.

But even if I don’t like where they are going, or that they are using SL, the important thing is that they are doing something and forging ahead. I have a massive amount of respect for anyone, private, government, or academic, that is doing that.

And yes, the door (or window, or looking glass) has to work both ways for maximum potential, at least, that’s what Id like to see. They don’t *have* to, but it would be rather cool.

And going back to sustainability, AR has the potential to make monitors generally obsolete, laptops too. That’s a lot of power hungry devices with all sorts of metals and batteries inside.

But, even if the tech was absolutely crazy awesome right this minute, it would take a little while for consumer adoption.

Tish Shute: But AR unleashes the mobile device?

Robert Rice: Yes, AR is going to be built on powerful mobile devices for the near future, eventually embedded comps in clothing and whatnot. But that is a ways off

Entertainment is going to be the first huge driver.

Tish Shute: So people will get used to having a pet virtual dragon on their shoulder first?

Robert Rice: Yes, virtual dragon is way cool, easy tech for games, and can eventually be leveraged into a smart agent which becomes a practical application…agent based contextual search, etc. Yes, entertainment will also drive people to get used to the tech

Tish Shute: Oh thanks for turning me on to gamesalfresco!

Robert Rice: Ive noticed that the good stuff usually gets linked to there. They don’t list my blog, but that’s what I get for staying under the radar and not posting often. But anyway, gamesalfresco is the first place I send people that need a crash course in AR. Great site, great owner.

Tish Shute: So are you in agreement with Thomas Wrobel’s positioning of  Wikitude and AR Geisha doll as being significant milestones for AR?

Robert Rice: Yes,  these are among the first attempts to get away from the novelty of simply rendering a 3D object based on a marker and making it interesting.

Remember, one of the biggest risks that AR has, is being branded as “novelty”, which means “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.” I think we have a ways to go before something is truly useful, but as 2009 progresses we should start seeing some effort here. I’d guess 2010 before something really useful comes out…at least something practical.

Now, having said that, I should say that I expect entertainment and games to take the lead (as usual), although there are a few companies really trying to leverage AR and video/graphics compositing for marketing (brochures) and location based methods (kiosks, large screen projections, etc.)

Tish Shute: Many people would say SnowCrash (metaverse) is now and Halting State (AR) is ten years from now. But you are seeing a development timeline for some popular AR apps in the next 18 months?

Robert Rice: Anyone that says SnowCrash is -now- is living in a box. Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality, and immersive tech in general stopped innovating in the mid 90s. I’m continually flabbergasted at the number of people that think that things like Second Life are state-of-the-art or innovative. You might as well try to market a walkman as cutting edge, even though we have IPods out there.

Id like to see someone grab an engine like offset, crytek, hero, or unreal 3, and smack on a fat mmo server infrastructure (eve or big world)…toss in the right tools, and you would see a revolution and renaissance occur at the same time in the virtual world space. All the puzzle pieces are there, just no one is putting them together the right way.

Tish Shute: Why doesn’t anyone do that?

Robert Rice: Its not cheap, people will only fund a copy of something that exists already, people fear change and innovation, etc, The list goes on. The right money goes to the wrong people all the time.

Alternatively stated, there is a lot of “right idea, wrong implementation”

MMORPGs carried the torch and have made huge strides on the technology front, but have devolved in design. More often than not the gameplay emphasizes the single player experience and does nothing to take advantage of the potential of the massively connected internet.

Unless both industries have some serious upheaval or radical new approaches, they will quickly be eclipsed by AR, which will eventually evolve into something hybrid..AR/VR depending on your level of access and hardware.

But yes, I’d say that the next 18 months are going to be very interesting with a lot of money being thrown around, new ventures, and plenty of content/applications. I expect most of this will be centered on single user AR experienced through a mobile device with a screen (iphone, android, etc.). I expect that there will be a significant boost after Vuzix releases some of their wearable *transparent* displays, putting Microvision back into the “has potential but is too quiet” position.

Tish Shute: AR conjurs an image in many people’s minds of dreadful head gear!

Robert Rice: Yes, it is either transparent wearable displays (in eyeglass formfactor) or nothing. HMDs with miniature LCD or OLED displays are good for streaming video, but for the mobile ubiquitous AR we all dream about, it has to be something that looks and feels like a pair of Oakleys.

I should also mention that several different types and modes of AR are going to find themselves being defined and refined over the next two years as we continue to blaze new trails, establish a lexicon (we keep borrowing terms from games, VR, virtual worlds, mmorpgs), and really work out the how as well as the why.

Even though the idea of AR has been around for a long time, the technology is just beginning to emerge, and very few people are even looking far enough ahead to figure out the problems and solutions that the tech creates. Really, who is thinking about how to deal with AR spam right now?

Tish Shute: Do you see any successful networked AR applications emerging in the next 18 months?

Robert Rice: Yes and no.

When I talk about AR, I try to expand the definition a little bit. Usually, when you talk to someone about augmented reality, the first thing that comes to mind is overlaying 3D graphics on a video stream. I think though, that it should more properly be any media that is specific to your location and the context of what you are doing (or want to do)…augmenting or enhancing your specific reality.

In this sense, anything that at least knows who you are (your ID, mobile phone #, etc.), where you are (GPS coord or a specific place like a cafe), and gives you relevant data, information, or media = augmented reality. Sure, you can make things more interactive or immersive, but that is the minimum.

So, in this case, yes, I think there will be networked applications in the next 18 months…mostly things that are enhanced by friends lists (you are here, your friend is over there). These will be *application specific*. My team at Neogence is already going beyond this, building a platform and infrastructure for other applications to be developed on…all networked through the same backbone. Now, in this context (the science fiction AR that we all dream about), no I do not see anyone else trying to leap a generation or two ahead of the industry to build a massively multiuser shared AR space. Expect to see things like multi-user AR games, virtual pets, kiosk marketing, magic book, “gee whiz” presentations (tradeshow booths, entertainment parks, etc.), and so forth.

The big thing I’m worried about is AR becoming the next silicon valley trend…once they realize the potential, an enormous amount of capital will flow to a bunch of startups with half baked ideas, weak business models, ten year old tech, and a lot of overhyped marketing. That is the very thing that will kill this technology as something that has true power and potential to literally change the way we interact with each other, our surroundings, information, and media.

Tish Shute: Do you think AR has value for a project like Pachube that helps us connect dtat from lots of different environments and sensor actuator data?

Robert Rice: I think that AR has value as an interface to this data (essentially data visualization based on information streaming from a sensor or source that is interpreted in some dynamic graphical manner that has meaning). This is one of the “big areas” where ubiquitous augmented reality and wearable computing will really shine. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Pachube .

Tish Shute: I can’t help it! I am really interested to hear more about the Vuzix glasses?

Robert Rice: Yeah, everyone is getting hung up on the glasses as the end-all be all and having markers everywhere too.

All the glasses are, is another display device. At the end of the day, it doesnt matter if you are looking at a lcd monitor, a iphone, a head mounted display, or a pair of wicked next generation transparent wearable displays that magically draw directly on your retinas.

The real tricky stuff is what happens on the backend…making it all persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc.

I think that we are within 24 months of the magic wearables (these new ones by vuzix are probably the real first generation attempt at doing it right). They wont be perfect, but I expect they will be functional…and once we have functional, we can start doing the good stuff.

Tish Shute: You mentioned you disappointement with VWs and MMORPGs earlier.  Could you tell me more about that?

Robert Rice: Yeah, there was an evolutionary divergence between virtual worlds and mmorpgs a while back. One stagnated almost completely, and the other leapt ahead in one sense and devolved horribly in the other sense. Neither is where the state of the art should be.  That is a whole other conversation, and probably a second book.

Tish Shute: So making AR persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc. that is where your efforts are going?

Robert Rice: Yes. I fully expect that the hardware is almost ready for it. You can cobble together some amazing things in the lab right now, and I think commercial viability is imminent. The real value (as far as I’m concerned) is in making it mobile, wireless, persistent, and massively multiuser. You could argue that augmented reality will take over where virtual reality failed and become internet 3, internet one being the internet, internet two being the web…

mmorpgs are nothing more than single player games in a multiuser environment these days. I’m more than a bit bitter about it. All the right money went to the wrong people, and the best games we have are barely shadows of what we could have had by now.

Tish Shute: Are there any open source AR platform dev projects?

Robert Rice: open source? hrm, Im sure there are multiple ones out there

if not entirely open source, there are plenty of things to experiment with that are generally free if you aren’t trying to sell something, DART and ARTOOLKIT come to mind as very accessible applications.

Marker based AR is very important right now…it is easy, low tech, understandable, highly customizable, and most importantly, accessible to the average joe. Ultimately though, we need a method of pure tracking…no markers glued to everything on the planet, no “billions of RFIDs” embedded in every square inch of every object on the planet, etc.

Tish Shute: What do you mean by interoperability in AR? And what do you think about the development of standards?

Robert Rice: Ooh, good question.

Ok, so the internet is basically computers communicating with computers, and the web is mostly pages linking to other pages (I’m greatly oversimplifying here). Hold this thought for a minute.

Switch over to MMORPGs. If you want to play in one (or a virtual world), you need to download a client that is specific to that world. One client does not work with another world. There are plenty of efforts to change this, but they are all barking up the wrong tree. The specific uniqueness of each world defeats the need and purpose of true interoperability, unless you completely reinvent the whole thing with a common backbone, features, functionality, etc. The very nature of virtual worlds and mmorpgs rebels against this.You absolutely do not want an avatar from second life running around in world of warcraft (for reasons that should be obvious).

On the other hand, with the web, you can use just about any client (browser) to access nearly any website (some requiring plugins or whatever).

The thing with augmented reality, is how do we go about making this? I’ve seen a few people thinking about this from the wrong perspective. There was a question at the last techcrunch to the Sekai Camera guys (a conceptual AR application for the iphone) where someone on the panel wanted to know how website owners would convert their content for augmented reality. BZZZZZT! That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what AR is, or could be, and it falls into the same trap I see a lot of people doing…and that is looking at AR through the web 2.0 lens or the virtual world lens. It is absolutely fundamentally different at the core…sure there are similarities: it has social networking/media applications and properties, and it has 3D graphics, but it stops there.

Ubiquitous augmented reality will be dramatically different depending on which standards, approaches, and philosophies get the most traction first. Will you walk down the street with your AR glasses and have a pop up every 30 feet asking you if you want to access the AR content on another server? Will you then have to register, subscribe, or whatever?

Or will all AR content be mediated by one sole master control server deep in the bowels of google? What about some other option? Will you need different sets of glasses to access different features and content from multiple sources?

At the end of the day, it should not matter what brand of glasses you are wearing, you should never have to deal with AR server popups to join/subscribe, and so forth.

Interoperability, in the context of what I was saying earlier, is the sense of how to build the infrastructure so all of this is seamless to the end user, but still maintaining the features/functionality necessary for all of what augmented reality promises us…I dont want to see everything in AR space, I want to be able to tune in or filter out some things, and I want to customize the snot out of what I see (perhaps changing metaphors or “holoscapes”), and so on. It all has to work together and simplify the end-user experience or it won’t get anywhere

Tish Shute: So what caused the stagnation of new development and devolution of MMOGs in you opinion?

Robert Rice: yes, look at all the hope and hype for the mmorpgs released in the last 12 months really, what is different or better? Now, what is worse?

I bet any decent mmorpg gamer could give you a list of 2 or 3 things for the first question and 20-30 things for the second.

And, VWs seem to be stuck in a feedback loop

Tish Shute: feedback loop?

Robert Rice: Imagine nailing one of your feet to the ground and then trying to run ’round and ’round and ’round.

Tish Shute: Why do you think this happened to VWs?

Robert Rice: Men in suits and flashy watches.

actually, hang on…..

I saw a video clip the other day from a conference about using various virtual and game technologies for simulations and other real world applications several people were talking about “avatar technology” and how theirs was better than their competitions and what not.

Now, can you tell me what “avatar technology” is? Avatar technology is a red herring. Avatar technology is the same thing as calling a toaster a new “fire technology.”

Robert Rice: The problem is that a lot of people that don’t have a clue about what they are doing are selling the tech to other people that have no clue what they are buying, but they feel like the should for some unknown reason.

That is happening all over the government, academic, and industrial sectors now with a few companies selling virtual worlds (again, mid 90-s tech) as the ultimate solution to all problems.

Anyway, getting back to your question

Once virtual reality started getting some buzz, some people got greedy and jumped into the avatar/virtual world thing and tried making it commercial too soon half of the 3D chat worlds were being jammed into platforms for virtual shopping malls.

Most of the money funding tech R&D started funneling towards VRML, and doing 3D in web pages, etc.

Tish Shute: yes horrible idea trying make web pages 3D IMHO

Robert Rice: The money people got involved too soon, and then the greedy people jumped in and tried patenting everything possible. Take a look at the worlds.com patent for 3D worlds.

They filed it back in 2000 or so and it was awarded in 07 (it shouldnt have been in my opinion) now they are suing everyone they can.

Tish Shute: Will there be patent wars in AR?

Robert Rice: Yes, the AR patent wars will be legendary once people start waking up to the real potential here.

The only solution is for everyone to band together and pre-emptively patent or make public domain every possible patentable concept, technology, or implementation for AR otherwise, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Tish Shute: Is the AR community organized enough to do that yet?

Robert Rice: That depends on how my company fares in the next six months.

Tish Shute: Will you patent or make your tech public domain?

Robert Rice: I plan on patenting the snot out of everything we can possibly think of, and then giving away our content creation tools and SDK stuff for free. The whole goal of what we are trying to build is to empower the end user and facilitate the creation of a wonderful world of augmented reality.

There are some things we will make public domain for sure, on top of that

Tish Shute: So back to my question on networked real time experience. Will we have networked Real time AR experiences in the next 18 months

Robert Rice: It is possible, yes. Other than what we are doing, I am not aware of anyone else taking the same approach we are, but the potential for an “under the radar venture” (much like my own company) is definitely there.

Tish Shute: Will you use cloud computing?

Robert Rice: I think that’s overrated and probably another attempt at the whole “thin client” model that some companies have been pushing for the last 20 years.

It sounds good on paper, but ultimately takes power and control away from the end user.

Tish Shute: cloud computing?

Robert Rice: Yes. You know, we aren’t playing around, We are totally building “THE AR” that everyone keeps dreaming about. None of this cute stuff you see on youtube. Actually, if you want to see the things that have inspired our vision of what we want to build, check out:

* Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
* Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
* Spook Country by William Gibson
* Halting State by Charles Stross
* The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
* Donnerjack by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
* Otherland by Tad Williams
* Neuromancer by William Gibson
* Idoru by Wiliam Gibson
* Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

and watch the whole anime of Denno Coil (subbed NOT dubbed!).

Tish Shute: So scaling the real time experience won’t be a problem in your project hehe

Cos no sharding allowed in AR right

And if you have lots of API calls?

Robert Rice:: haha, sharding is one of the dumbest things to happen to the VW/MMO industry

It is a solution to a technical problem that was relevant 15 years ago.

Tish Shute: so why did it stick (i know men in suits)

Robert Rice: it stuck because “thats what the other guys did” and the mmo designers are too lazy to reconcile gameplay for PvP and RP gamers

However, there is a curious problem between dealing with “one world” and “anyone can start their own custom AR server”

Tish Shute: Now that is a very interesting problem the one world and own AR server

Robert Rice: It took me a few weeks of not sleeping to figure that one out. It gets back to the interoperability issue

Tish Shute: What did you come up with?

Robert Rice: a solution. Thats all I can say for now on that.

Tish Shute: eeextra seeekrit!

Well I will definitely have to bug you on that.

The problem has produced some creativity in OpenSim with people coming up with hybrids of p2p and oneworld

Robert Rice: As far as virtual worlds are concerned, they need to look at the problem from a different perspective. They are trying to make all virtual worlds interoperable intead of creating a new model for interoperable worlds that new ones will be created to adhere to.

Tish Shute: well some people are. I would say most OpenSim developers see their modular approach doing this.  And you choose to interoperate based on what modules you have activated and then social agreements…

Robert Rice: hrm, thats a start, but that only works on a functional and social level – doesn’t account for content (story, mythos, game rules), unique data (my +3 sword), or the concepts of commerce, inherent value, and intellectual property

Enabling my WoW avatar to run around in SL and vice versa creates more problems than it solves.

Its like two alien races working hard to make sure that their two spaceships can dock but no one is paying any attention to the fact that race A breathes nitrogen and race B breathes sulpher.

Its technically possible, but they are missing the boat on the content side of the problem.

Tish Shute: Yes but don’t you think when a modular open source tech for virtual worlds  becomes pervasive, what will happen is that those interested in a similar genre will increasingly use the module in ways that allows their content to interoperate if they want it too

Robert Rice: everyone has to use the same backend tech, and the front end clients need to adhere to the same standards. Bu I have to admit, I haven’t been paying much attention to the vw space in the last 9 months or so.

Oh I have to run now.  But download and install cooliris. I promise you will be blown away and will start using it to search for images and videos

Its frigging awesome.

Tish Shute: Will do!  Thanks so much great talking to you. I can’t wait for your launch.