I have been so busy working on Augmented Reality Event, Jun 2nd, 3rd, Santa Clara, CA, in recent weeks that I have barely had time to post!  But it’s getting hard to contain my excitement about ARE2010.  If you haven’t already seen the sneak preview of the schedule  – see here.

Augmented Reality Event will be an unique opportunity to see how the complete vision of AR is emerging, one that will include visual recognition of real life objects, sensors to enable interaction with physical objects, and the long anticipated, comfortable, sexy, AR eyewear.  Six companies with be presenting and exhibiting AR glasses and HMDs at Augmented Reality Event.

Keynote luminaries will include: Bruce Sterling, “AR Prophet,” Will Wright (Spore, The Sims & now AR and The Stupid Fun Club), Jesse Schell (who will give the AR follow up to his now viral Dice talk), and Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Microsoft, Bing), whose talk on augmented reality maps was one of the most popular talks at TED this year.

Over 40 AR companies from all over the world are represented, and there will be speakers from Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Intel, and Nvidia.  Over 80 augmented reality experts and entrepreneurs are presenting, including a AR titans, Total Immersion and Metaio.   Mobilizy, Layar, Ogmento, TagWhat, Tonchidot, and Zenitum (just to name a few of the stellar augmented reality start ups coming – for more, and a list of speakers see here) will demonstrate AR is not just a vision, but actually drives significant businesses today,

Five Augmented Reality industry start ups will be on the hot seat in a Launchpad competition with $10,000 prize for the winner, thanks to the generosity of  Qualcomm, a leading developer and innovator of advanced wireless technologies, and the featured sponsor of Augmented Reality Event.  Zenitum, a leading augmented reality company, with a technology portfolio that includes both location and advanced vision-based sensory input is the Gold sponsor for ARE2010, and Adobe are sponsoring the ARt Gala & Reception.  Many thanks to the sponsors for making ARE2010 possible.

Readers of this post can use my discount code TISH245 to register here for a $245 price for the whole 2 day event.

But just to add some balance to my total enthusiasm for the rocket like trajectory of augmented reality in recent months, this post will also look at an area that has been, to date, disappointing for AR developers.   While Nokia will have a couple of speakers at ARE2010, and certainly they have a very impressive history in augmented reality research, they have not delivered the magic brew to attract the augmented reality developer community.   Will this change with the release of the N8 (see video opening this post)?  I wanted to find out if AR developers see a light at the end of the tunnel with N8 as a platform for AR.  So I asked some AR developers and entrepreneurs, “How attractive is the N8 for the AR community?”

Nokia’s apparent nonchalance about augmented reality is in sharp contrast to the bear hug shown in this Verizon Droid Augmented Reality Ad featuring Layar!  As Bruce Sterling notes,

*Hollywood-up for Layar by cooking up some o’ those big-time sci-fi production values.
All magic, all the time, Mr. Roboto.

And it is clear that everyone has high hopes that iPhone SDK 4 delivers fully for AR developers this time! For more on this listen to @chrisgrayson’s 3rd video on Mobile AR here.

But before I get back to my question about the AR community’s thoughts on N8 as a platform for augmented reality, let me crow just a little more about the upcoming awesomeness of Augmented Reality Event.  As the chair of the technology track, ARE2010 is on my mind night and day at the moment!

The tools for the kind of augmented reality we have always dreamed of  – the zero click interface to a heads up, hyperlocal view, bringing you computing anywhere, anytime, with anything, are evolving fast.  Powerful algorithms for search, and machine learning, combined with cooperating cloud data services, will soon be bringing apps that learn by context accumulation to your AR view (see Siri).  Google Goggles, who will have a speaker at ARE2010, have already announced their intent to open APIs, putting a vital tool of visual search in developer’s hands.

A bunch of technologies are maturing these days and helping bring AR to consumers.  Mobile devices that pack all the ingredients for AR, location-based services, see thru video goggles, visual search, innovations in 3D mapping, Simple Geo’s innovative a approach to aggregating geo data, and the next generation of “Street View” such as Earthmine, and, very importantly, open standards and software for AR that will bring many new opportunities for creativity, and monetization.   These are just some of the aspects of this energetic technology convergence that will be represented at  Augmented Reality Event.

In the area of open standards, I am especially excited about the debut of Polaris at Augmented Reality Event.  Polaris is an AR browser, from Blair MacIntyre and the Georgia Tech team, based as much as possible on existing standards and tech.  More on this and ARWave in another post!  Also, I am excited to be demoing ARWave at the Com.Geo 2010 conference, June 21 – 23, in Washington.  Again more on this later.

But for now back to my question opening this post:

“Are Nokia back in the AR?”  and “How attractive is the N8 to the AR community?”

First I asked, my co-chair on Augmented Reality Event, Ori Inbar of Ogmento – one of the augmented reality start ups who’s star is on the rise, and Ori (also known for his writing on Games Alfresco) is one of the key thought leaders in the emerging augmented reality industry.

Ori Inbar:

“Well, the hardware spec is impressive – but that’s not what makes it a good AR device. What’s really important is reach, distribution, and ease of development – areas in which the N8 still has a lot to prove.

- Will the N8 become as prevailing as the iPhone or lead Android phones or will the Nokia landscape remain fragemented with too many variants of phones to support?

- Will the Ovi store pick up steam and become a lucrative chanel for selling apps?

While we wait for these questions to be answered – we’ll keep developing games for Android and the iPhone “

So there you go.

Ori is right that augmented reality developers like the hardware specs.  Here are some comments from Patrick O’Shaughnessey of Patched Reality, Peter Meier, Metaio, and whurley of Chaotic Moon and Robert Rice, Mirascape.

Patrick O’Shaughnessey:

“Looks like it has everything one would want to make both looking glass and magic mirror AR, and built-in face recognition software to boot!  I wonder if they allow you to use both cameras at once making AR video conferencing possilbe?”

“Dedicated graphics processor with OpenGL 2.0 enables 3D graphics” nice!

“Looks like it also does Flash (Flash Lite 4.0, anyway). Not sure if Flash Light provides access to the camera. Could be a nice way to do quick and dirty POC’s on the device”

Peter Meier:

“Metaio thinks the N8 is a very promising device for AR. Especially in Europe we expect a lot of reach.  Symbian is hard to develop for, but on the other hand is much more efficient in terms of real time performance than Android and less restrictive on APIs than iPhone.”

whurley:

“It looks really great and perfect for ar in many regards.”

“clarity of a 12 MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics will give the Nokia N8 some clear advantages in the AR world.  The clarity of this camera will allow for more advanced applications of augmented reality such as image/object recognition”.

“At first glance this is definitely very impressive from a hardware specification. I am surprised though, at the lack of buzz about the device. I have heard virtually nothing about it in the usual sources I monitor, and I wonder about the marketing.

Given the technical superiority and the difficulty Nokia has had penetrating at least the North American market, maybe something catchier like the GR-8 (Nokia Great) or M8 (Nokia Mate) might be a bit more user friendly and easier to market. I particularly like “Nokia M8″…take it with you wherever you go, can’t live without it, etc.

Anyway, as awesome as the specifications are, I would like to echo some of the other comments here…tools, community, ease of development, etc. are critical parts of the ecosystem that would make this ideal for AR development, above and beyond the pure hardware specs. I think Nokia has to really re-think some of its strategy to engage consumers, attract the developers, and establish a new beachhead in North America.”

Talking with Michael Halbherr at Where 2.0

I talked to Michael Halbherr briefly at Where 2.0 before the release of details on the N8, so, of course, he was unable to be as explicit as he might have been about the N8.  Below is a lightly edited transcript.  At Where 2.0, Michael Halbherr  gave a clear explanation of  Nokia’s emphasis on a global strategy.   And, as this blow by blow account on the Google Earth Blog noted, “They’re doing some cool stuff with their handheld maps. In particular, their Ovi Maps (turn-by-turn navigation) are now completely free and becoming very popular.”

But the question remains:  Where is AR is on the Nokia roadmap?

Michael Halbherr (Nokia) on stage at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference 2010 in San Jose, California. Photo by James Duncan Davidson. See Where 2.0 Flickr set here.

Tish Shute: Can I ask you a few questions about Augmented Reality?

Michael Halbherr: So for me augmented reality and mixed reality is essentially a way you search.  So when you look at where we come from, as the company that acquired Gate 5, we believe the phone is essentially the gate that basically combines or connects your virtual and your real world in both ways.  So we can have virtual overlays on top of reality, and you can also record and push it back.

But when you look at the way we do it, I think it is actually an extension of mapping, right?  So you will have the map, which is an abstraction of reality, and then basically with a flick you can go to real reality.  And I think to really understand what you see, you need to actually really know what you see, and an image doesn’t do that.  But if you have compass, and GPS, and 3D models, which is what Navteq is capturing, we can actual do line of sight calculations and you can really say, “OK.  He is looking at that building.” And you can click on the building because you have that understanding.  And you can combine that.  And that leads to a completely new way for how people interact with their environment.

So the here and now, and me here and now, and what next is a key innovation in our focus hereafter.

Tish Shute: I suppose for AR enthusiasts we were all disappointed when we saw the N900 with Maemo, which was very exciting as an operating system, didn’t have a compass.

Michael Halbherr: Yeah, but you know, that is just a matter of timing.  At the end of the day, Meego is our, I think, high-end push.  You will see this Mego device have what you need it to have.  So I wouldn’t worry too much about that.  We are building all the  phones, and everything has everything.

I think it is not just Meego.  It is the whole thing around it.  It is the QT, it is the web run time, it is the whole Meego system.

Tish Shute: Yes we have used QT for some development on the ARWave project, it is very good.

Michael Halbherr: Yeah, and the web run times, it’s open…So Nokia is about open and emotional.  Others are maybe open and more utilitarian or closed, and we are more open and more emotional.  And I think that is what we want to basically do with this platform.

And we are working very hard.  And so whatever I say has been built almost a year ago.  So there is a lot that we are building that we don’t talk about before we announce.  And we try to do this as a global offer, so we can’t launch a little service in the US, which maybe is a problem for us.  But we are basically building complete solutions for global markets.

Tish Shute: Yes.  And when I heard you talk just now on Nokia’s global strategy just now, it all fits in.  But from the point of view from someone who lives here in the US, it seems Nokia is disappointing us.

So is Nokia enabling augmented reality in any ways that noone else is?   I mean if you are interested in augmented reality, the backend and data is vital, e.g. the Navteq part.  And Apple has excited us with the amazing performance of their hardware, and they have taken steps like controlling the manufacture of their chips, powerful cpu and gpu is very important for augmented reality experiences too? Is there a need for a chip set geared to augmented reality specifically?

Michael Halbherr: I’m not sure you have to go that far.  I think at the end of the day it is the data, right?  The map data and the 3D data that is actually extremely important.

Tish Shute: Yeah, I agree with you that the data is vitally important.

Michael Halbherr: Because at the end of the day, when you have a real abstract view, it is really important, because the camera or the view is only a viewer, right?  And people don’t really know what they see.  It is just they plaster on it believing that the person sees what he sees.  So I think real augmented reality or mixed reality is really basically having a real picture, but having, actually, the understanding of the 3D logic of the picture.  And for that, you need to capture the data which Navteq is doing.

Tish Shute: The original dream of augmented reality is 3D media and graphics tightly registered to the physical world.  But actually, it is the data…being able to integrate the streams of data and sensor fusion techniques that will make this interesting and possible right?

Michael Halbherr: Again, it is overlaying virtual elements on real elements.  It is like you are taking your glasses and now you can see information attached.  And of course, you need to make sure it is not overloaded, and that everybody works with it, and it is precise.  So that is basically it.  So I think that is why we are investing a lot in the precision of the maps and the 3D elements of the maps.

At this point we had to leave our seats has the set was being broken down for the next event at Where 2.0.  Check out all the videos for Where 2.0 here,  it was a watershed event for all things hyperlocal, geo, and augmented!

Here  is the “world premier” of  the  ARWave demo – also see on youtube here.  Below are the slides from our panel: The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences, with Anselm Hook presenting on “10 reasons Why Ar Not a Flash in the Pan,”  Jeremy Hight, spoke on “Augmenting the Map,”  Sophia Parafina presented on “Citizen Sensor,” and I presented the “ARWave” project.  These slides are also posted on the Where 2.0 site.  Joe Lamantia was unable to come from Europe due to last minute obstacles, but you can check out his slide deck here. The videos of the Where 2.0 keynotes are up, and I highly recommend watching what went on at this watershed event.

We got so much positive feedback for the ARWave project at Where 2.0 that I am very excited about the next steps, and about our session at WhereCamp tomorrow.

WhereCamp will be at Google, Maxwell Tech Talk and the buzz continues!  The latest from WhereCamp is:  WE ARE OVER-SUBSCRIBED. HOWEVER PLEASE SIGN UP ANYWAY. THE EVENT TAKES PLACE OVER TWO DAYS. IF WE REALLY HAVE TO TURN PEOPLE AWAY ON SATURDAY YOU CAN STILL COME ON SUNDAY.  Hope to see you there!

Where 2.0 is going to be epic this year (see my interview with Brady Forrest here), and it is so exciting to be part of it.  Location technologies and augmented reality are annointed rulers now.  Time Magazine recognized augmented reality as one of its 10 Tech Trends for 2010 (for more see ReadWriteWeb).

The photo above is by Jeremy and Lisa Hight.  Jeremy Hight is an information designer, theorist and artist working in Augmented Reality and Locative Media.   His essay “Narrative Archaeology” was named one of the 4 primary texts in Locative Media.

Jeremy Hight will be part of our panel: The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences, with Anselm Hook, Joe Lamantia, Sophia Parafina and myself. We will debut the video of the ARWave project demo that brings together augmented reality, geolocation, and wave federation (more details later in this post).  And, Jeremy will bring to our presentation some augmentations on his recent brilliant work and paper, “Writing Within the Map.”

Greg J. Smith’s points out in his in depth look at Jeremy’s work that it, “dovetails with some of the main points in Bruce Sterling’s recent atemporality keynote at Transmediale” – fortunately there is a transcription of Bruce’s keynote here.  What is so awesome about this dovetailing is that you can get a feel for the fun part of living in an, “atemporal network culture.”  And, if you want to really understand just how much locative media and augmented reality have changed us, you  might want to dig into these texts.

Bruce Sterling and Jeremy Hight, and members of the ARWave team, and a superb cast of augmented reality movers and shakers – including Will Wright and Jesse Schell, will be speaking at Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, June 2nd and 3rd.

But, this week, the AR community’s attention will be on the events at Where 2.0.   The keynote speakers will be streamed live, so if you are not fortunate enough to be there, tune in!

The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences

On our panel, Jeremy Hight, Anselm Hook, Sophia Parafina, Joe Lamantia and I will cover some of the key social, cultural, technical and interactional questions for exploring social augmented experiences. There will be five lightning presentations, and an opportunity for questions from the audience, and a world premier of the ARWave demo!

1) “Augmenting the map as interface: AR and Locative Narratives” - Jeremy Hight

*Map augmentation of the historic route 66 can house an essay contest and publication globally but as embedded within that map augmentation instead of books or even web sites.

* A place on a map can be a graphic index and database to save and collect
the writing of that place with a graphic or textual search index.

*One can pop immersive visualizations of abandoned or lost buildings from map location in shared software and collectively augment (imagine channels within the lost core of detroit where one is memories and accounts tagged within parts in the immersive visualization while another is of poems and stories written by people moved by the place and its semiotics and story).

*The news stand is to be the map.

*New forms of literature will be born of mapping, spaces,augmentation and
new tools

The concept drawings below (click to enlarge) are a collaboration between Jeremy Hight and Paul Wehby, Senior Designer at LA County Museum of Art.

2) Anselm Hook will look at, “10 reasons why AR isn’t a flash in the pan,” and how, “AR can help us see the world we would like to have exist.”

Anselm notes, “So much of what we do is so fickle and I’m looking for ways to connect digital media work to deep values.”

3) Sophia Parafina will present on, “Social AR and Crisis Response”

“Augmented reality as a multi-party conversation.  Rather than being passive viewers of AR with a limited ability to  checkin to places and make annotations, current devices can broadcast sensor information that can be fused into an interactive stream. AR users can send and receive information, location, and sensor data from their mobile device.  The streams can be federated into a unique AR view composed by the user.

Entertainment and gaming are obvious applications, but it can also be applied to crisis situations such as the search and rescue operations in Haiti.  Efforts such as Mission 4636, the SMS translation service, could benefit from AR views.  The collaboration among the Mission 4636 volunteers was the key element  in their success for providing location and rapid translation to responders on the ground.

With an AR view, responders can send back their sensor information from their mobiles to provide contextual information to remote volunteers.  This extends the conversation between remote volunteers and on the ground responders and fosters collaboration which was a key element for the success of Mission 4636″

4) Joe Lamantia, an experience design and strategy consultant helping to define the interaction framework and scenarios behind ARWave, will discuss, “Design Principles For Social Augmented Experiences:”

“With the exotic mixed realities envisioned by futurists and science fiction writers seemingly around the corner, it is time to move beyond questions of technical feasibility to consider the value and impact of turning reality inside out for everyday social settings and experiences. Thanks to the inherently social nature of augmented reality, we can be sure the value and impact of many augmented experiences depends in large part on how effectively they integrate with the social dimensions of real-world settings, in real time.”

Joe will share, “eight guiding principles for designing experiences that engage naturally with the social dimension, and increase the value of augmented experiences.”

5) “ARWave – A demo and state of play,” from Tish Shute

I will have the awesome privilege, on our Where 2.0 panel, of showcasing ARWave.   We will  premier the ARWave demo which shows how ARWave has accomplished the basics of geolocating data on Wave Federation Protocol (and real time collaboration on this geolocated data).  If you’re interested in the ARWave project join the Mailing list, FAQ are here, and have a peek at the current state of development at Google Code, and the specification for an AR Blip.  We also have Waves for the project hosted on Google Wave.  You can join the general discussion here, and the technical side here.

The picture below is a screen shot from the demo video produced by core AR Wave developer and concept designer, Thomas Wrobel.

Click on the image to enlarge, and note: “The pink thing is from Dennou Coil. Its an anti-virus program (that literally chase’s down bugs and glitches and removes them).”

ARWave

In ARWave, stories or art are tied to place. And as Jeremy Hight writes:

“The possibility exists to take a part of an area and overlay a dystopia, a utopia, multiples of each of these, or even recreations of previous incarnations in the past. Writing and publication thus cannot only be of place, and form(s), but of selected augmentations of icons, streets, buildings and related texts on top of the map. These spaces can be built in real time and can be turned on and off as channels of augmentation that over time illustrate many faces of place in its present, past, possible futures,etc. with texts within these alternate spaces as commentary, as fused aesthetic analysis, or simply creative writing relevant to these charged and hybrid spaces.”

As Thomas notes, Jeremy Hight’s,  “idea of channels ties into the concept of waves = a layer, and people can have many layers on at once.”

This is different from the Layar concept of a layer or rather “layar.”

“We are not talking about layers in the classical map layer way of thinking, where you have a layer of all restaurants or a layer of all mountain peaks, etc.,” notes ARWave developer Markus Strickler.

Currently all geo location apps like Layar have to use their own servers, so users have to use different clients with different log ins to see data from different sources.  But because ARWave uses federation, we don’t depend on centralized infrastructure where the client of one company can only connect to the server of that company.  This opens up many exciting new possibilities for how people can decide to view and publish geolocated data.

With AR Wave, via one login, people can access the whole distributed network of servers (see diagrams below), and any content will be accessible to them. ARWave will make it easy for individuals, not just developers, to layer their environment – allowing the creation of augmented reality content to be as simple as contributing to a Wave.

“ARWave will enable individuals to publish easily to everyone….or just a few people,” Thomas notes:

“To ‘publish’ is also self publication and distribution in communities or like minded groups without the hard read of publication or rejection.” = publishing on a Wave. No one approves it, anyone can publish to communities, or their friends and family. Or even just personal publishing it for their own reference.”

But ARWave does not compete with existing AR Browsers.   On the contrary, AR browsers like Layar, Wikitude and others, could implement ARWave and use it to enhance their applications.

“Layar has a killer browser already,  ARWave would add social features. They can keep their “walled garden” of data and still join the federation of open data too ” (Thomas Wrobel)

Yup, that is the cool part of federation – you can have your cake and eat it too!

Sophia Parafina and I will be organizing a discussion session on ARWave and Federation at WhereCamp, right after Where 2.0, April 3rd and 4th, and Dan Peterson who is in leading the federation effort for Google Wave will join us.

The diagrams below illustrate how ARWave and federation can revolutionize the way we share our augmented realities.

Real Time Social Augmented Experiences

Another key aspect of ARWave is it’s near to real time update capabilities.  As Jeff Pulver pointed out in, “SXSW 2010: The days twitter became less relevant:”

“At South By Southwest 2010 (SXSW), a strange thing happened on the way to Austin. A community of twitter faithful shifted from sharing everything about everything on only twitter (and maybe Facebook) and changed their habits to rely on learning about what was happening and where things were happening by using foursquare and Gowalla instead. I’m sure there were other products and platforms being used including Loopt and GySPii but foursquare and Gowalla were the dominant platforms.”

Later Jeff wrote:

“There were times where I could feel the ebbs and the flows of the people move as different people checked into various locations. While most of this was felt locally in the place I was in, it also became apparent on the platforms when hundreds of people would rush to check in to a location. There were also times when it felt like I was chasing ghosts; These were the times I would go to a spot because a friend had checked into that spot only to discover they were no longer there.”

ARWave’s realtime collaborative capabilities are going to introduce some fascinating dynamics to “chasing ghosts,” as the ARWave framework gets integrated into services like foursquare – a project we have already begun to look at.

Augmented Reality Search

As I mention in my previous post, ARWave presents some fascinating possibilities for AR Search.  For example, one might do advanced searching within waves using SPARQL, which could then display in the form of a personal blip in your viewpoint (which in turn could be shared with others).  Linked data will be massively important in filtering and delivering useful info for augmented views (see my conversation with Will Wright about the problem of augmented reality overriding our very smart instincts and not being useless or worse as a result).

Anselm Hook, who I interviewed in depth recently about, Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook, has some very interesting thoughts on real time stuff, trading brokerages, and  the view within a single city block, which he elaborated on in the second half to this interview which is upcoming on Ugotrade soon!

The ARWave Developers

There are three people who unfortunately can’t join us at Where 2.0 –  the costs of travelling from Europe being an obstacle.  But as they have been developing the code for ARWave that will rock our augmented world, I asked them, in a Wave conversation, to give me a few comments about their interest in working on ARWave, and a pic and a short bio.   Also I should mention the work of the PyGoWave team whose incredibly fast work creating PyGoWave has given ARWave a rocket launch pad.  Also many thanks to the Wave community, see the Wave Federation Protocol documentation, Google’s Wave Server, RubyOnSails (Ruby On Rails based Wave server).

Davide Carnovale @need2revolt

“Imho, the coolest geolocated related thing is that we’re making a world where the info does not necessarily comes from an explicit search from the user, but comes also from the actual locaton you’re in. For instance, you can have special offers in stores like fourquare does, or your friends can leave geolocated notes for you that are triggered when you walk by.  We can have games based on the treasure hunt schema requiring you to actually go to specific location.

Other than this I can think about self-guided tours of the city, maybe user generated too, or for museums.

Naturally these are long term goals with some rl use cases.

As for my bio, there isn’t much to say… I got a first level degree in computer science and I’m taking the second (and last) level. I’ve developed with mobile agents, osgart/artoolkit, brain computer interfaces, linux kernel and that’s pretty much all…”

Thomas Wrobel

“If you are looking for specific advantages of using Wave I’d say;

* Federated – Letting creators tap into bigger userbase. Each new app or data layer will add to the “incentive” for users to join in. Google had some good stats a few months back as to how much a simple login screen can put people off using stuff.  By breaking that barrier it should make AR userbase’s grow.

* It deals with user accounts, permissions, and real-time updating without creators needing to make a new server standard themselves. It lowers barriers to development.

* As the clients, servers, and data can be made separately by different parties, its easier for developers to concentrate on just providing what they want. You want to just make content? No problem! You dont need to worry about doing anything else but that. It would become as easy as making a webpage (or easier!).

* Bots will allow the development of interactive AR games very easily. Just like modern version of IRC bots, the infrastructure does the heavy lifting, and interesting things can be done with just simple scripting.

* The idea is anyone will be able to make a layer onto the world, and people can mix, match and share their layers as they wish. Its not just the data that becomes interesting to see augmenting our world, but the combinations of data! For example, perhaps you could see the profits generated by different companies above their buildings, but also see how environmentally friendly they are at the same time. Or maybe see pollution levels against health-statistics.  Seeing combinations of geolocated data from different sources at the same time has many interesting possibilities both for scientific as well as casual (game/ map/ chat) use.

hmz..I could go on forever listing stuff here really…..

I guess if we are supposed to be forming a roadmap of significant/interesting things for ARWave?

* Example clients letting people make their own layers (waves) and add points to them.

* Letting people log in to different servers

* Servers federated together. (not our responsibility, but essential part of the roadmap).

* Anyone logged into any server can see data from anyone else that’s shared with them, regardless of where they are logged into

* 3D support, demonstrating various sorts of geolocated data.?

* Use of bots for example games?
—-
My Bio’s quite simple.
Studied 3D Animation in Portsmouth, UK.
Moved to the Netherlands, have since been working in creating ARG games, in the last year founded Lostagain (Lostagain.nl).”

Markus Strickler @kusako

“I think the main point behind ARWave is to go beyond simply displaying existing placemarks on top of a live camera view, towards a highly personalized, augmented world where everybody can edit and share localized information collaboratively and in real time. Wave provides the means to do this through its model of persistent real time conversations and adds even more by providing a way for personal agents (robots) to participate in these conversations.

As for my Bio: I’ve been developing Web applications for the last 15 years, hold a degree in Image Sciences and am currently working as a Java developer in Cologne, Germany.”

The video above, The Imawik commercial, is a collaboration between In The Can Productions and Paige Saez for Makerlab

“The Imawik (ImageWiki) is a visual search tool for mobile devices. It allows for the ability to turn images into physical hyperlinks, conflating visual culture with a community-editable universal namespace for images.”

Paige Saez is an artist, designer and researcher.  In 2007 she founded Makerlab with Anselm Hook, an arts and technology incubator focused on civic and environmental projects.

Paige and Anselm (see my interview with Anselm Hook here, Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook) have been asking a very important question:

“Who Will Own Our Augmented Future?”

But most importantly, they have been actually developing applications (again see my interview with Anselm for more background on this), to allow people to play with, hack and explore and create with the physical world platform, and to imagine new possibilities for physical hyperlinking and augmented realities.  This is pretty important stuff, and kudos to Paige and Anselm for beginning this work before the big players – Google Goggles, Point and Find, and SnapTell came hurtling into the field of visual search and physical hyperlinking  – see this demonstration of translation and optical character recognition in Google Goggle’s.  Also check out Jamey Graham’s (Ricoh Research) Ignite presentation at Tools of Change, 2010 – Visual Search: Connecting Newspapers, Magazines and Books to Digital Information without Barcodes, for more see ricohinnovations.com/betalabs/visualsearch.

We are only just beginning to get a glimpse of how contested the social commons of the physical world platform is going to be – see the Yelp controversy.

As Paige points out:

“The lens that you are actually looking through was as important as what you were looking at. And democratizing that lens became the most important thing that we could possibly do.”

I am in total agreement.  One reason I have so much enthusiasm for ARWave (note: if you are interested in following the developer conversations there are several public Waves) is I see this open framework playing an important role in the democratization of our augmented views, by creating an open, distributed, and universally accessible platform for augmented reality that will allow the creation of augmented reality content and games to be as simple as making an html page, or contributing to a wiki.

Federation, real time collaboration, linked data – ARBlips that contain metadata that is usable for semantic searches, and modified wave servers that can listen to and respond to  SPARQL HTTP requests properly (see Jason Kolb’s many interesting posts on XMPP and Wave).  These are just some of the reasons why ARWave could revolutionize augmented reality searches and more! (see my presentation at MoMo13 – video here)

For more on real time social augmented experiences see our panel, The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences at Where2.0 2010, and don’t miss the Where2.0 conference which has been the crucible for the emergence of location technologies.

Augmented realities, proximity- based social networks, mapping & location aware technologies, sensors everywhere, linked data, and human psychology are on a collision course in what Jesse Schell calls the “Gamepocalypse”   See Jesse Schell’s Dice 2010 talk here, and check out his Gamepocalypse Now blog.  As Bruce Sterling’s notes in his post here:

*Another precious half hour out of your life.  However: if you’re into interaction design, ubiquity, social networking, and trendspotting, in the gaming biz or out of it, you’re gonna wanna do yourself a favor and listen to this.

And don’t forget to register now for Augmented Reality Event (ARE2010 in 2-3 June, 2010 – Santa Clara, CA).

Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, and Jesse Schell will be keynoting, and there is a totally awesome line up of AR innovators and industry leaders, including Paige and Anselm!

And:

You are in luck!

Here is a discount code for the first 100 folks to register to the event (before the end of March). Go to the registration page, type in code AR245 and “you’ll be asked to pay only $245 for 2 full days of AR goodness.”

“Watching AR prophet Bruce Sterling, and gaming legend Will Wright, visionary game designer Jesse Schell deliver keynotes for this price – is a magnificent steal.  And on top, participating in more than 30 talks by AR industry leaders will turn these $254 into your best investment of the year,” as Ori  put is so well on Games Alfresco!

If you want a preview of just how exciting it is to be involved in augmented reality right now check out Ori Inbar’s great round up on our latest monthly Augmented Reality Meetup NY (or as, Ori notes, we fondly like to call it ARNY.)  There is lots of video up now (much thanks to Chris Grayson, who  live streamed it).  Augmented Reality Magician, Marco Tempest, is an absolutely must see.  (developers note this is an awesome use of open Frameworks and OpenCV).   The video of the show includes a rare explanation of how it all works  – see here.

Talking with Paige Saez – “Software is candy now!”

Tish Shute: What interests me about ImageWiki is that you have thought about physical hyperlinking beyond the obvious of where to get your next good hamburger and beer, right?

Paige Saez: Right. It was interesting for me in just thinking about the two things. How do you design a tool to work in a way that people are getting value from it? And also, how do you make it work in a way where people can explore and hack it? I think the most interesting technologies, and this is probably something somebody else said sometime, are the ones that disappear, that we don’t see, instead we see through. They become just the intermediaries.  They don’t interfere with what we are trying to do.

It’s a struggle whenever you are developing a new way for people to get information or make something happen, because you are playing with magic a little bit. And you have to make it vanish the way a good magic trick makes an experience a magical one. But at the same time you also need to reveal just enough that you let people in and they can see how to change it and make it their own. That is the interesting tension for this space right now, the idea of augmented reality begins to lead the idea of a social commons for physical things. The Imagewiki project was a locus of just this tension. Tish you and I have previously discussed how difficult it was to even get people to understand the two concepts independently.

Tish Shute: Right, until recently most people hadn’t even heard the term augmented reality and I am not sure that a particularly high percentage of people would recognize it now despite the recent interest in smart phone apps.

Paige Saez: It’s very difficult to get people to understand the two concepts, and now you are adding in the third level of participation as well. So I don’t think it is impossible, but I do think it requires narrative. It is interesting that you were talking about the stories you heard this morning from the creatives at the event [Tish mentioned David Curcurito, Creative Director, Esquire gave an excellent presentation at Sobel Media event NYC] because it’s narrative and the attention to telling a story that help you walk through all of the ways you can understand how completely expansive this area is right now.

So I think we have to play with it, play with the space and the tools. I think we need to have an idea of what we want people to use the tool for, and we need to not only introduce them to the tool and the technology, but also introduce them to the concepts as well. So I see it as a three part process.

I’m really excited to be there with people, helping them do that. I think we need to do this face to face. I don’t think this can be only through a social network. The ImageWiki website is like one quarter of the entire picture, you know? The website is the resource center and the place where you can see people adding images, but what value is it to you to see an added image? It is more valuable for you to be interacting with the image or interacting with the object in the real world.

Designing for the experience of using the ImageWiki got very complicated very fast. I was trying to figure out the main thrust of the design for the UI for the ImageWiki and at a certain point I had to take a step back and say “Okay, this has to be good enough for now because we can lay it out and prototype as long as we want on the Web or mobile UI. What we need to be doing is going outside and actually aggregating and putting images into the database in order to see what exactly happens when we are adding.”  It’s not just like you are taking a picture of something and adding it to Flickr. Using the tool is very context specific and the information is context specific, and you can’t necessarily make that all happen at the exact same time. I think these are really fascinating spaces to be struggling in and I’m so glad to be working in this space.

Images by Chris Blow of unthinkingly.com

Tish Shute: Could you explain why we need ImageWiki? I mean I think I have ideas on this, but perhaps you can explain to me from you point of view why we need an ImageWiki, as opposed, to say, extending the image space of Wikimedia or something added on to Flickr.  I mean maybe something leveraging the geotagged photos sets and APIs we already have?

Paige Saez: Yes, definitely. It’s a really good question, I mean it really is. Like, do you need an entirely new place to be holding images outside of the places that we are already holding images? That’s a huge question; enormous. Especially when you take a look at the problems around that. Its’ exhausting for an end user. Who the heck wants to go and reload everything into yet another place, right?

Tish Shute: Right.

Paige Saez: Moreover, who is going to really bother? Another problem would be what happens to the existing datasets that people have already committed to? And then of course there is the problem of authority and explanations why….Gaining interest and authority in a space when nobody even understands why that space should exist in the first place. And those are just three, you know, off the top of my head problems with that idea.

And yet at the same time, I don’t actually know how else to go about thinking about the ImageWiki unless I think about it as it’s own thing. Then you start thinking about models of large independant image databases that exist already, examples of this from a product standpoint- references to consider. The Getty Foundation comes to mind. There are many other historical centers that have huge resources and images that are licensed out and used. So here we have a working example of people already doing this. But succesfully? I don’t know. We do have a ton of intellectual property rights and copyright issues and ownership and use issues with images currently. As a working artist these issues for me were a major red flag to consider. Working on the social commons for augmented reality starts paralleling issues found in digital rights management and intellectual property.

Tish Shute: But one good thing about Wikimedia, why I focused on Wikimedia, is Flickr and Wikimedia already use a creative commons licensing, right?

Paige Saez: Creative commons, you know they have their own resource center, too. But you know they haven’t been successful as great databases for images so far.

Tish Shute: What would you like to see that they don’t have? Like say maybe start with Wikimedia, right?

Paige Saez: There’s just still a lot of issues with how to encourage people to want to contribute. It’s hard to show the value to someone who doesn’t already understand the value for some reason. At least for me personally this is something I have run into frequently. I don’t know if it is necessarily what Wikimedia doesn’t have, I think it is a lack of understanding of what creative commons really means. And there is still a very strong sense of ownership and concern about creative property rights. Being paid to be creative is a tremendously difficult thing to do. People fear losing their livelihoods. They think this is possible. Is it? I dunno.

For example : Look at me, I take a photograph of something, I can sell that. And there’s a question about whether or not, as an artist, I want to have my photographs in a pool of images that is open and accessible when I could be making money on it instead. Now that is just an example. Me personally, I can see the value. But that is a common concern. The gist of the question being, ‘what value does it bring to give something away versus holding on to it?’ A hugely popular discussion right now.

This is the same crux of the problem we are dealing with when we talk about thinking about images in the social commons for the real world. It’s a conversation about ownership. It’s about, who does this belong to really? If I take a photograph of a Levi’s billboard, does that photograph belong to me or does it belong to Levi’s? We know the boundaries of that. But when the image becomes a living image, an image capable of transmutation; an image that provokes an action or hyperlinks to a product, experience, information….where are the boundaries in that?

Tish Shute: But how is ImageWiki handling that differently from Wikimedia, I suppose is my question.

Paige Saez: We haven’t solved the problem.

Tish Shute: Yes, I suppose it is not like we have fully solve the problem of a creative commons for images on the internet let alone the issues of a social commons for the real world! So neither one has solved the problem, right?

Paige Saez: Exactly. To be honest, it made my head spin. I realized we were building a web application and a mobile tool doing augmented reality, real time feedback on the world and suddenly we weren’t. Suddenly we were dealing with DNS and talking about physical hyperlinks and ownership and property. And basically at that point you just have to sit and really start looking at catching up on IP issues and figuring out how to deal with that space in a much more wholistic way. It became so important that we had to take a step back and go

“Oh my god I think we have really uncovered a real problem here.”

At the point when we were building out the tools we realized something was really going on with our project. Here we were thinking that this was just a beautiful experience of learning about the world around us. We really…Anselm and I both just really wanted this tool to exist. It was something that we both just really wanted to happen in the world, something that we felt really just thrilled to make. And we looked at and used it and realized that instead of it just being a beautiful experience, it was a fundamental shift in how we understood everything. That it impacted our world in the same way the Internet impacted our world. It was a fundamental shift in understanding. A sea-change.

So I put down the prototype and went back to researching, read a ton of books on IP and went and presented to friends, family, schoolmates and co-workers trying to explain the project and then the larger conceptual framework that had emerged from the project. I began using the metaphor of thinking about Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Thinking about a pipe that isn’t actually a pipe.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes!

Paige Saez: ..to try to help explain to people that the image that you see is actually not, you know, it’s not an image of a thing. It’s an image. And that image has a tone and that image has a voice, and that image was chosen. And there were decisions that were made through the interface of the camera, specific decisions that defined the view of what you were looking at. And that that wasn’t being acknowledged and that that was a fundamental part of what the ImageWiki was aiming to do. The lens that you are actually looking through was as important as what you were looking at. And democratizing that lens became the most important thing that we could possibly do.

Tish Shute: So the emphasis for you on ImageWiki was in fact the lens, even though you found obstacles to creating the interface, right?

Paige Saez: Yes. Definitely. That’s what I fell in love with first. I really wanted to be able to use my phone to learn about what kind of tree this was or to buy tickets for the band on the poster I just saw, or see a hidden secret. For me it was very much a story, a narrative experience that I just thought was magical. And that is how I fell in love with it, which is not where I ended up. Where I ended up was realizing it was a fundamental shift in not only my own understanding of how to use the world around me, but in our understanding of looking at the world.

Tish Shute: It would be pretty scary if an image DNS was basically in the hands of either one or very few people, right? I mean even ImageWiki would be stuck with this problem, that if you set up a bunch of servers, you are going to be holding a very, very large image database. I mean, whatever your motivation, right? I think at the minute that is why I am very into seeing everything through the lens of federation, I see that unless we have federation, these giant central, databases are inevitable aren’t they?

Paige Saez: Essentially, yes. I mean I wasn’t able to walk through it as quickly as that. It kind of just overwhelmed me. Looking back on it, it seems perfectly obvious. I was just like “Oh my god, what have we done? Like what is going on?” Particularly for me because so much of my life has been spent in art, it was really easy to immediately understand the connection between the view, the viewer, and what’s being viewed as all just different layers of ownership and understanding that it is a gaze. Right? We know that we are never able to look at something without passing judgment on it, but to see that become a part of the interface in a real-time fashion just blew my mind.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Paige Saez: I think you are right. Getty Images, Flickr images, no matter what you are always holding on to something and you have to be responsible for it. Right? So how do you deal with the responsibility but don’t take on too much ownership? Where is the boundary with that?

Tish Shute: And for me, the simple answer to that is loosely connected small parts, distributed systems and federation. Because there is only one way to be able to utilize these things is to have them distributed so that no one holds all the cards. Right?

Paige Saez: Definitely and I personally agree with you wholeheartedly. However, the idea of distributed power is a concept that most people just don’t know how to deal with.

Tish Shute: And it’s easier said than done because actually the root problems that you are talking about aren’t got rid through federation, because if someone really holds the, sort of, all the good image databases just because they have the potential to be federated, they may not choose to open them up on many levels.

Paige Saez: And even then you have to think about, sort of, like the next level of it, which is we want it to be all open and accessible, but everything is owned by somebody. Like, what really is public anymore, in general?

Tish Shute: And what is interesting though, regardless of what we speculate conceptually on this, we already set off down the road. I mean we have already several large…they are all in beta I suppose, Google Goggles, Point and Find, right? But we have applications that are beginning to implement this. They are beginning to implement search on it, and it is geo-located even if it’s not in an augmented view, right? So it is proximity based.

Paige Saez: Right, right. I mean maybe the solution is that if we follow that line of thinking then Flickr will be partnering with Google Goggles. And then my images would stay under my ownership through the authority of Flickr. And I would use Flickr as my place to add images and they would just be responsive via my devices via AR.

Tish Shute: That’s very interesting.

Paige Saez: Definitely I think so. It is also the shortest distance between things.

Tish Shute: Yes, and as Anselm kept pointing out, basically it is going to happen in the simplest way possible, really, regardless of the implications of that. But OK, getting back to ImageWiki. As you say neither Wikimedia nor Flickr were really designed to take this role, right?

Paige Saez: Right.

Tish Shute: With ImageWiki, you’ve had these ideas and a concern with the social implications of physical hyperlinking in your mind since it’s inception. Are there any design ideas you’ve come up with that you know, as opposed to sort of, as you say, connecting Flickr to Point and Find, or who knows, Google Goggles. How is ImageWiki going to be different, do you think? Is that a hard question at this point?

Paige Saez: It is, and it’s a great question, and it’s a question I really love to think about. I think we have to introduce the politics with the tools. It has to be acknowledged that it’s not just a place to hold information, that’s what I feel in my heart.

At the same time, is that too much for people to really grasp at one time? In my experience it really has been, so the design of the experience needs to allow for an understanding of the power of the tool and the level of authority that the tool offers, while not getting in the way of it; just using it. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, nobody will use anything if it isn’t valuable to them. And so I could talk for miles and miles and miles about how important it is that corporations don’t own all of the rights to all of the visual things in my life, right? For the rest of my life I could talk about that. The idea that advertising is dominating all of our views of anything in the world around us is horrifying. It doesn’t matter unless I can show somebody why it matters to them or how it affects them. It’s just that that is a tremendously difficult thing to explain through a user interface.

And I actually think that it’s great that tools like Google Goggles and Nokia Point and Find are here to do a lot of the hard work of showing people how it works. Recently somebody explained to me their experience of using Google Goggles. They went through this process of saying how the Google Goggles took a picture and then did this really complicated visual scanning thing over the image and it took a full minute.

And I said, “Well of course they did it that way.” And they said, “Well what do you mean?” I said, “Well, what they are really doing there when they are doing all these fancy graphics, is they are showing you how it works.” And even if it isn’t actually related at all to how it functionally works, algorithmically, that’s not the point. The point is that this gesture of the time taken to make it look like it’s scanning an image and going back and forth with pretty colors is giving people the time to process that as an experience. That’s a metaphor for what’s really happening. And these kinds of metaphors are crucial with user experience design. We have lots and lots of examples of them and how they work, and many of them aren’t necessary. Like you know, for example, the bar that shows you the time it’s taking for something to process.There is no relationship between that and reality. But it is really important.

Tish Shute: Yes those bars often have no relationship between the actual time..

Paige Saez: And that’s the thing. Like the idea of time versus our perceived understanding of time. Right? The length of time it takes for your Firefox browser to open and load your last 30 tabs, versus the reality of what’s actually happening. When you are doing that sort of research you are actually accessing millions and millions of places and points of interest all over the world, so we need more of that. We need more of the process shown. Anselm and I worked with a film maker named Karl Lind from In the Can Productions here in Portland to try and make a video about the ImageWiki. We made this little video and I can try to show it to you or send it to you if you want.

Tish Shute: One of the issues with this kind of visual search is that it is inherently dependent on large databases, regardless of where they are federated, are going to be very large. Right? I mean someone is going to have something big, and aggregated there. I suppose someone will figure out the challenges of federated search eventually but that is quite a big challenge!

So I suppose I am still trying to understand what ImageWiki can offer that we can’t get with any other existing service? How will their be a social commons and even a social contract for the world as a platform for computing and physical hyperlinks?

Eben Moglen brought up something when I talked to him about virtual worlds, he said we need code angels to let us know what was going on in the virtual space – who was gathering data and how, for example.

Paige Saez: Tell me more about that, I want to hear more about that.

Tish Shute: Eben suggested this metaphor for when I was asking him about privacy in virtual worlds. The fact that people just didn’t know that when they were pushing avatars around virtual worlds what metrics were being gathered on their behavior. And he basically said that what we need is code angels when we enter these spaces because having the rules of the game buried in a TOC was ridiculous.

Paige Saez: That is a really interesting idea.

Tish Shute: Maybe ImageWiki needs to be our code angel to navigate the augmented world. I mean that’s what I want to see it as. And when I hear you talk, what I hear is you talking in broad categories about what a code angel might be in the space of images and image links to the physical world. I mean that is what I hear from you.

Paige Saez: Yeah. No, I definitely agree with that. It is interesting. In that sense, it is kind of a protection layer. Is that what you are thinking?

Tish Shute: Yes, I suppose because we can’t be navigating a lot of complicated opt-ins and opt-outs just to get around our neighborhood safely (in terms of privacy (also see Eben Moglen’s definition of privacy here…) We will need a code angel that is sort of keeping up with you in real time!

Paige Saez: Right, right. I wonder how that would work in regards to images, though. That is a really interesting thing to try and put on an image. I guess why I am having such a hard time being specific about it, is I am just trying to work it in my head, thinking of a specific use case, like what would be an example of that?

Tish Shute: Well I suppose the example, and this is a crude one, is when you point your Google Goggles to the book jacket, the code angel, this is very crude, would say “You are right now drawing images from the Amazon database – they are collecting data such and such data from your search.

And then of course the ability to have crowd sourced tagging and corrections..

There was a wonderful book that came out last year on how we can have commercial intelligence -Dan Goleman’s new book: “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything”…

how corporations various different stakeholders, including their customers will drive corporations to do the morally right thing because they will lose the commercial support of customers who won’t support them unless they are more green, fairer, do the things we would like them to do whatever that happens to be – physical hyperlinking and tagging I guess would be a big part of this.

Paige Saez: Sort of a transparency issue. And that almost becomes a page rank algorithm in and of itself. I mean now we are really talking about search more than anything, and what tool becomes the dominant search tool. Anselm and I talked a lot about one platform… I mean eventually we will have a unified platform. It will…No matter what, for the Internet and for physical objects and visual objects in the real world. It will just be a matter of, literally, who can find the best and most valuable, most relevant information on a thing. Currently we just have it very proprietary.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Paige Saez: That definitely won’t last. It just can’t, because of the exact problem that you are raising. And we already know too much about resources and information as they pertain to products for us to ever go back to a time where we are not considering other ways of getting information about it anyway. Right?

Like I have the same concerns nowadays when I look at fruit. I look at a piece of fruit in the store. I would never just assume that the person who put the sticker on that fruit, anymore, is the ultimate authority necessarily. I would always assume at this point I could go online and go find out more information about a company. Issues about like eco-footprint or how much toxicity, or pesticides or whatnot are now totally accessible already.

So I am thinking when you look at that piece of fruit and that sticker for Google, say what you are describing, do we just go immediately to the company’s website, or is it even more specific? Do we know that the sticker on that piece of fruit is going to tell us specific information about that? Or are we just getting back the nutritional resources, or are we getting a listing of all of the different options out of a page rank algorithm that shows us, “Well this is the website for the fruit. Here is the nutritional information. Here are the last 15 comments on it.” It’s basically just a basic search.

Have you heard of Good Search?

Tish Shute: you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoodSearch

Paige Saez: Right.

Tish Shute: A code angel interface would have to give you options, wouldn’t it on possible views available?

Paige Saez: Yes. You are then talking about filtering your view. Then it really gets really interesting, of course. I don’t even know if we have a choice in that. I think we are really kind of hitting a wall with who owns the space and the platform. Is it just a basic search because we are already familiar with search? If you had an option to choose, say, “I want to look at this apple sticker and I only want to get…programmatically only looking at my friend’s opinions of this company.”

Or I have a safety valve on it that only shows me certain information based on what the code angel knows about me, my preferences, my age, things like that. Then that gets really, really interesting, because we are trying to do all that work right now just with social media and the Internet. We are already overwhelmed with too much information. It is already past the point of comprehension. So to think that we would actually drill down even more specifics is very interesting.

Tish Shute: That was a point Anselm made about the fact that once you are into this mobile, just in time, one view kind of situation, it is quite different than the Internet where you can bring up all these different screens and go to another website.

Paige Saez: Well yes, mobile is a different level of engagement. Very contextual. Much less information. Much more about timeliness. I don’t want to look an apple and get back a Google search. Oh my God no. That’s the last thing I want. I would love to be able to look at an apple and my phone already knows exactly what I want, information-wise, to get back from that apple. But I don’t know. It’s all contextual and personal. So I think the code angle concept you are talking about is really interesting because you still need to think about who is the person that is adding or creating those level filters- is it you, a filtered friend network, an algorithm? How much work is too much work? Where do we draw the line? How much of this are we willing to let the machine do for us?

Tish Shute: Right.

Paige Saez: And then of course once you have those filters in place, you need control over them. You will need to dial them up and dial them down, be able to choose and add new ones, so on and so forth. It becomes very modal at that point. For example, I want to change my view: To walk into a grocery store and instead of finding out information, I’d want to see where the hidden Easter egg puzzles were that my friends left last week because we’re playing a game.

I’m still really attracted to the creative opportunities with the ImageWiki. I’m really attracted to changing this experience from being a one-to-one relationship (from Corporation to Consumer) to an open-ended relationship (From Person to Person). If I look at a book jacket, sure I can find out where to buy the book, but that’s boring. Who cares? I’d like to find out a link to a story or an adventure or a movie or something unthought-of before.

How do we build that in? How do we encourage serendipity? Mystery? I think the ImageWiki is the space for building that in, actually. Not how, that would be the one place, right? That’s my really big fear is that this relationship just stays one-to-one. Click an image of consumable object, get back objects retail value. How completely dull. We have to do better than this.

Additionally, what if I want to take a photograph of a book, an apple, or something and I don’t want to pull back data. Instead, I want to pull back music, or I want to pull back a video, or I want to pull back a song, or lyrics, or a story, or another image. It’s just a hyperlink at the end of the day, you know? That’s all we’re really doing. Hyperlinks can pull back so many different things.

Tish Shute: And that’s one of the reasons I’m into mobile social interaction utility building, because without that, if we don’t have that way to do that in mobile technology…that’s very available on the Internet, as we’ve seen, with Twitter. These applications are very easy to do on the Internet. They’re not easy to do natively in a mobile application..

hey, I’m just promoting AR Wave again. I should shut up.

Paige Saez: Oh, no. I think it’s a fascinating concept, I really do. I totally agree. As we’ve talked about it before, it’s amazing that marketing and advertising are helping push forward AR, and it’s great. It’s fantastic.

But it’s also the worst possible thing that could ever happen because it is such a singular way of looking at an overall ubiquitous computing experience. There are other ways.

The best experience I ever had was trying to explain to people about physical hyperlinks. I had to walk them through it. Good interactive isn’t something you present or show, it’s something you do. Nothing beats just walking around and showing people with a device or a tool or something else.

I mean, God forbid it always stays in our computers and our phones. I really hope we don’t have to be stuck living our entire lives with these horrible interfaces. But for the time being, we will. Having an AR app show you a puzzle, or a mystery, or a game, or an adventure is a magnificent experience, totally overwhelming, and people get it right away. There’s no question; they totally understand.

Tish Shute: Yes, I agree.

Paige Saez: You walk them through the experience with a physical hyperlink and then you say, “Here, I could use this device and I could show you where to buy this thing, or I could use this device and we could start playing a game.” Then everybody gets it.

Tish Shute: So then I have a question, because one of the things Anselm said to me when he wanted me to refer back to you is that he feels that the direction for ImageWiki should be perhaps to focus less on the technology and more on just the actual, I suppose, gathering of the images, how they’re going to be annotated, the metadata, right? But my question to him was, the problem if you do that, without the platform, there’s no experience or motivation for people to do that. Right? Is there?

Paige Saez: Yeah, I agree with you on that one. I’m curious what his…I think the reason why he wants to do that is he wants to be able to show people examples via the resources. Like to be able to show someone a library, essentially, which I think makes sense with some people. I definitely think that some audiences would really relate to that. For me, it doesn’t make sense because I’m just very experiential. I need to do it and I need to show other people how to do it and I need to grow that way. I think that at the end of the day, those are great ways to go about doing it. It’s just it’s a huge thing to do in either direction.

What Anselm’s really thinking on, I believe, is more about exemplifying how we read and understand images culturally. Then you’re really getting into Visual Studies and Critical Theory which is what I did for my Masters at PNCA. I worked on the ImageWiki while I was in grad school, it was something I was doing for fun. Independently of my studies, the project lead to issues on democracy and objects and property and I ended up right smack in the middle of what I was studying; the nature and cultural analysis of images Questions like, ‘what exactly do we get out of images?’ and how all these different things are happening in an image, and people get tons of totally different things out of an image depending on many factors.

The questions I began to ask myself got very philosophical. Questions like “Is this apple red? Is this apple red-orange? Is this a small apple? What’s my understanding of small versus your understanding of small?”

Because you supposed that you needed a text backup to the search, how would I be able to search for an apple? Because what if my understanding of apple is red and your understanding of apple is green. And so if I’m looking for a green apple, am I looking for the same green apple as you? It’s all semantics, sure. But at the same time, it gets bigger and bigger, and it’s fascinating.

Tish Shute: Google Goggles seem to work best on book jackets, basically.

Paige Saez: But book jackets are actually perfect for this. Book jackets are perfect for this problem, because book jackets are specifically designed art. So at the end of the day, we are still talking about creative works, artistic works, that have been designed as a communication tool. But that is not something that people can own. Creative works that are designed are a communication tool, with varying levels of skill to be sure, but still something anybody can do. What we need to do is we need to be using that language. We don’t need to be trying to reach as far as facial recognition. We need to develop our own logos, our own brand, our own…I mean not brand. Brand is a bad way of saying it. Another way of saying it would be like, just use it. Develop a visual language that we can use that is as effective and as well utilized as book jackets or the movie posters or something.

Tish Shute: What are some of the use cases for ImageWiki you would like to develop first?

Paige Saez: My dream…I have like four or five use cases that I want to see happen. One of them is I walk down the street and there is a new poster for my favorite band. And I can just go up to the poster and I use my device, whatever it looks like, and I download the latest album. It’s transactional. I am able to just plug in my headset and walk down the street and the transaction is done. I saw something I wanted. It was beautiful. I was able to get it and I was able to move on in my life. And that is totally possible.

Another one would be I walk down the street and there is a piece of graffiti. And I am able to use my device to find out who the artist was that made it and to give them props, and to point my other friends to the fact that the piece is there and it will most likely be there only for a short period of time- information retrieval and socialization.

Or, use my device to find an Easter egg, to find a narrative puzzle that ends up going on for weeks, and everybody is involved, and we are all playing this game together. Adventure-based, non-linear experiences. I want playfulness, not just purchases.

Tish Shute: Did you think of piggybacking on the Flickr API for geo-tagged photos as a way to work with those databases or not?

Paige Saez: Yeah, we definitely thought about that.

Tish Shute: And why did you decide not to, for any reason or…?

Paige Saez: Ultimately, we just…we were such a small group, we just had to tackle certain things at a certain time.

Tish Shute: Right. And you were so prescient, you were working slightly before we had the mediating devices, weren’t you? You were just before the mobile devices really got adequate for this.

Paige Saez: Yeah. We started on it…I believe it was January…No. December 2007. Basically, the iPhone had just launched like maybe six months prior or something like that.

Tish Shute: But not 3G and not 3GS, right?

Paige Saez: Not 3GS. It was the first generation iPhone. We built the ImageWiki before the App Store existed.

We knew that the App Store was coming out. And we knew that the App Store was going to be the biggest thing in the whole world. I remember getting into multiple fights with friends about how revolutionary the iPhone and the App Store were going to be and people thinking I was totally crazy; people just thinking I was absolutely nuts for being so excited about it.

It sucks that it is a closed proprietary system, but the App Store has done something for software that nothing has ever done in the whole world. Software is candy now. It’s candy. It is like when you are waiting at the grocery store at the checkout line and you are stuck behind somebody, and you have got all these little tchotchka’s, candy bars, magazines, nail-clippers and things. That is the equivalent of software now. It’s become an impulse buy, which is amazing. Nobody would ever have thought…that is actually revolutionary. That’s huge.

Tish Shute: Steven Feiner, who is one of the founding fathers of augmented reality said to me during a conversations at the ARNY meetup that one reason that augmented reality, despite the hype, is manifesting very differently from how virtual reality burst onto the tech scene is that it is about affordable apps on affordable readily available hardware.

“The game is about the world not dragons,” Will Wright, Founder and Chief Executive  Stupid Fun Club, Creator of Spore and The Sims.

I had a brief chat with Will Wright after his talk at Engage!, and I was delighted to hear that augmented reality is high on his agenda at the moment:

“a lot of our stuff is kind of in the experimental format right now, but definitely one of our strong interests is AR.”

Will Wright will be coming to speak at Augmented Reality Event, Santa Clara, CA., June 2nd, 3rd,  2010.  But, for now, here are a few hints at some of the directions that are intriguing him, e.g., the game potential of 3D mapping like Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s  demo of augmented reality maps at TED -  see the full conversation below.

There has been a vital shift, Will Wright points out.  Before the Wii,  immersive was understood as  how much we were pulled into the world of the game.  Now immersive is how much the game pulls us deeper into our world, e.g., our relationship with the people we are playing with as in Rock Band, or engaging with other people’s crazy antics when playing Wii games.

“Computers are imagination amplifiers and toys are imagination constructors.”

The slide above is from Will Wright’s talk at Engage!

Will Wright’s talk was extraordinary, dense, layered, and deeply thought provoking.

I have picked out a few samples from Will Wright’s vast tome of slides here.  They are just a glimpse of the many insights he offered.  If you are still wondering what will transform augmented reality into a mainstream experience, I suggest studying this talk carefully (I think the audio will be posted on the Engage! web site).  Also watch Will Wright’s, Games For Learning Institute talk at NYU, February 17th, 2010, archived here.

Will Wright and Stupid Fun Club are getting ready to takes us to the next level of imagination amplification and construction.

“Smart” things can make us dumber by overriding our instincts

Just one of the many wonderful anecdotes Will Wright told  was the story of his experiences with a new “smart” car (he bought this car with the intent of exploring the pinnacle of the “smart” car experience). The slide above is from Will Wright’s talk at Engage!

Increasingly, artifacts are being designed to send us more and more data, and this car was endowed with an array of sensors supplying data aimed at assisting parallel parking – a notoriously challenging aspect of driving.  But the car  failed miserably in helping.   While parallel parking had been easy for him prior to being deluged with all this data, Will Wright pointed out, ironically, he had to learn to ignore this stuff to park the “smart” car.

Instinctively, we learn to filter the information necessary for parking to the relevant stuff.  This kind of pre-conscious filtering is a key challenge for augmented reality, and one that Will Wright, as a game designer, has given great deal of thought to.

As Will Wright pointed out, a  lot of our ideas about augmented reality, and sensor enabled artifacts, are rooted in trying to give us more data, to “take over our instincts.”   Not only do these artifacts attempt to give us more data, which as in the case of the HUDs for parallel parking can get in the way of our own highly effective intuitive instincts.  But, as Will Wright also noted, these artifacts also have more data which they can deploy independently to override our instincts, e.g., the car detecting your head has turned back to talk to a passenger and applying the brakes!

“Toys Encourage Agency”

Toys can be the antidote to instinct blocking “smart things.”  In contrast to “smart” data spitting cars that “take over” our instincts, toys encourage agency.  Will Wright gave the example of  high dynamic lighting photographs that make the world “toy like” and encourage us want to reach in and play with it (photo above from HDRCreme).

“What Computers are really good at is harvesting human intelligence”

Another key insight that Will Wright explored in depth in his talk was the significance of  crowd sourced intelligence (the slide above is from Will Wright’s talk at Engage!).  If the crowd is training the filter, he suggested to me, this might build the kind of context we need to build meaningful augmented reality experiences (for more on this see the conversation below).

Talking with Will Wright at Engage!, NYC, 2010

Tish Shute: I was very interested by the idea you put out that this deluge of information gathered by sensors is not necessarily a kind of nirvana for augmented reality, in fact it can be just the opposite.  In the embryonic world of augmented reality, we have two streams it seems at the moment – one is the idea of a kind of like hyper local nirvana imagined for AR, in which we get information relevant to us, when and where we need it.   But you talked about some of the problems in realizing this, didn’t you?  The other strand  is the emerging stream of play which you are exploring..

Will Wright: Right.  I think part of it is like what I was talking about-the way our senses are set up to know how to filter out 99% of what is coming into them.  That is why they work, and that is what is beneficial.  I think that is why AR needs to focus on…

You look at what I can find out on Google or whatever, the amount of information is just astronomical.  The hard part, the intelligent part, is how do you figure out that one tenth of 1% that I actually care about at this given second?

Tish Shute: Yes.  Have you seen any examples of AR beginning to do that?

Will Wright: No, not at all.  I think that you have to have a contextual understanding of where I am at, where my mindset is, what my situation is, what my goal state is in a moment by moment basis.  And then it is still a complex task.  But the very first thing we need is more context for building a filter.  See, that filter is changing every few minutes, you know, what I am filtering into my senses is changing, and my context is changing moment to moment.

Tish Shute: I really liked your emphasis on crowd sourced intelligence as the key power of a networked world, is this the seed..?

Will Wright: Well, you can imagine crowd sourcing that filter…it would affect a million people and get a sense of what mental context that they were in and what filter they turned on.  And so, in a sense, the crowd is training the filter.

Tish Shute: Yes.  The problem with projects like SIRI, that is driven by the big DARPA AI project, CALO, is it is centralized – although I am not sure what they intend to do in terms of crowd source corrections?  But if it was all open and we could crowd source as well that would be interesting.  But in the end we need a framework for AR that is as open as the internet, don’t we?

Will Wright: Right.  I think the technological infrastructure needs to be much lighter so that it can be grounded in more like a Twitter feed or something.

Tish Shute: Yeah.  I’m actually working on a project using the Wave Federation protocol as the basis for an open communications framework for augmented reality, AR Wave – not the Wave user interface, just the real-time federation protocol.  But, of course,  for it to become an open framework that could be a vehicle for crowd trained augmented reality it would need good take-up!

Will Wright: Right.  You really want a million people involved.

Tish Shute: Yes our dream is that the creation of augmented reality content will be as open, accessible and  simple as making an html page, or contributing to a wiki.

So in terms of AR games what is interesting on the horizon, presumably games also have to solve the problems of  delivering a hyper local experience.  The car that you described in your talk tried hard to use augmented reality to solve the problem of parallel parking and ended up making it harder.  So giving us the information we need, where we need it, when we need it, and specific to who we are is going to be a big challenge.  But I mean in terms of games, what kinds of hyper local experiences will be most fun and what have you seen that is interesting in terms of augmented reality games up to now?

Will Wright: I’ve not actually seen much at all.  I’ve seen people doing interesting stuff with like Google Maps.  They aren’t really entertainment oriented, but I think you can start thinking about…

I mean I think for a lot of people, Google Street View is entertainment.  But I haven’t really seen something that was really leaning into an entertainment application using existing technology and data that is already out there.

I mean I have seen some cool experiments-people playing Pac-Man in Washington Square and stuff like that, but nothing really serious.

Tish Shute: Yeah.  of course I think one of the missing links is that the barrier of entry is way to high for creating social augmented experiences for smart phones, and as you point out in your talk it is the social implications of the game is what makes it compelling.

Will Wright: Also, I think using them [smart phones] as data aggregation devices rather than just data consumption devices…so that people out there are using their phone, cameras, microphones, or whatever to gather data and get an experience where they are rewarded for gathering data.

Tish Shute: Like foursquare where you get the badges, and people can become the mayor of like a cafe or something.

Will Wright: Right.  Yeah, you can imagine people using their phones to actually kind of pull information…

Tish Shute: A Dutch developer/artist/game designer, Thomas Wrobel,  Lost Again, came up with the original concept for the AR framework we are building on the Wave Federation protocol.  Thomas and his partner Bertine van Hovell design alternate reality games, amongst other things they do…so they are deeply immersed in the potential of the world as game.

Will Wright: Yeah, one of my programmers actually works in Amsterdam….there is a whole sub-community…
Well, yeah.  The possibilities are tremendous.  And Wii is actually training us that way [to be as much engaged with the other players in the physical space as the virtual game], so it is going to happen.

Tish Shute: What are the most exciting things you see at the moment, and for the next 12 months for augmented reality?

Will Wright: Gosh.  I mean I just think there is cool stuff happening in mapping, in general.

Tish Shute: Like Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s  demo of augmented reality maps at TED?

Will Wright: Yeah, I thought the 3-D mapping with Microsoft…I think like the next level of that is going to be really compelling.

Tish Shute: You see game potentials in that?

Will Wright: Yeah.  You start overlaying really cool game potential on top of that.

Tish Shute: Might you get interested and do something?

Will Wright: Oh, yeah.  I mean in terms of games, that is one of my biggest interests, is AR.

Tish Shute: Are you allowed to talk about anything specific at all?

Will Wright: Not yet, no.  I mean a lot of our stuff is kind of in the experimental format right now, but definitely one of our strong interests is AR.

Tish Shute: Yeah, absolutely.  We are over being tied to our desks to use computers -we want to be doing it anywhere, anytime, with anything…

Will Wright: Now the game is about the world instead of about dragons.  I love that.

First an incredibly big thank you to The Open Planning Project office (TOPP) – @TOPPLabs, and Sophia Parafina, @spara,  for organizing, hosting,  sponsoring and providing so much inspiration for this event.

There is an incomplete list of attendees below, and there were about 70 people at one point watching the Ustream (thank you Dimitri Darras and friend – sorry I missed getting your card!) for setting this up.

There were at least ten or more people participating in a live skype conference moderated by Sophia with great skill.

I am sorry I didn’t get everyone’s contact info.  But please feel free to add you name into the comments of this post if I have missed you out.

After a gearheady morning, we spent the afternoon and evening brain storming the “The Big ARNY” – “a collaborative game development project modeled after a Swarm of Angels.”

Some of the morning tech discussion highlights included:

*skype presentations on AR Wave from Thomas Wrobel, Joe Lamantia, Matthieu Pierce.

*the beginnings of an iphone client from the PyGoWave Crew.

*discussing Microvision, Augmented Reality eyewear – and trying out Nomad Unit courtesy of Noah Zerkin, @NoaZark

*an awesome deep dive into the code of the open Goblin XNA VR/AR platform – courtesy of Ohan Oda (pic below) video of presentation here.

Ori Inbar live blogged the morning sessions on Games Alfresco.

But, during the afternoon, Ori presented, and we all got so caught up in the brainstorming of  “The Big ARNY Game” that live blogging, skyping, and twittering ground to a near halt.   The “meat space” (perhaps the slide show captures some of  incredible coolness of the location) was alive with brilliant ideas that were matched by an incredibly high level of technical input – see the AR DevCamp attendees list below.

During the game session we really had a master class in augmented reality tech.   Steven Feiner’s awesome discussion of markers really opened my mind to exploring markers in a new way.  And the geolocated data discussion with Sophia Parafina, Kate Chapman, Philip Ashlock,  and Steve Feiner at dinner was very interesting.  The opportunity to break out into smaller in depth discussions during the day was one of the valuable opportunities of AR DevCamp, so I can’t possibly mention them all.  But thank you everybody!

We did have some fun with low tech AR too – courtesy of Thomas Wrobel & Bertine van Hövell, Lost Again (their business card is the coolest AR card I have seen to date).  In the pic on the right, I try out their business card/AR overlay on @comogard as he presents.  The lighting does not do the overlay justice in my photo (on right), but I think you get the idea at least.

Unfortunately we didn’t manage to hook up our afternoon live session with The Mountain View AR DevCamp, as we lost the streaming laptop.  But hopefully we will be able to catch up on each other’s activities with session notes on the AR DevCamp Wiki. There is also a public wave,  AR Dev Camp NYC Shared Notes.

Sean White set the afternoon off to a great start by collecting topics and organizing topics of interest on the board.  While we didn’t get time to cover everything, it was interesting how, by working on developing a collaborative game project, we had to tackle many of the topics suggested, and come up with workable approaches.

Next weekend TOPP will host the OpenNY Summit & Codeathon on Dec 11 & 12, an event “produced by open government practitioners and volunteers.”  This would be another great place to explore some of the citizen 2.0 mobile, social AR game ideas that came up at AR DevCampNYC. In addition, Ori Inbar has started an AR New York Meetup.

Below is an incomplete list of AR DevCampNYC attendees.

Sophia Parafina, OpenGeo, @spara, organizer

Marco Neumann, KONA, @neumarcx, interested in developing Semantic Web based Augmented Reality demos.

Tish Shute, Web,@tishshute, Open Distributed AR, Google Wave Protocol for AR, Imagining the Future of the Outernet

Dimitri Darras, @dimitridarras, Visual designer, web developer, and virtual worlds content creator. Interested in multimodal input and AR/Virtual Worlds integration.

Heidi Hysell, @heidihysell, Creative Technologist & Software Engineer; Interested in the application of AR for entertainment technology for print, web and video.

Joe Lamantia, Muku / ARWave, @mojoe Amsterdam, interested in creating open frameworks, social augmented experiences, emerging media – (attending via skype)

Kate Chapman, Web Developer, FortiusOne, @wonderchook

Matthieu Pierce, itinerant poet, @matthieupierce, Pittsburgh, PA. Interested in AR Use Cases and observation. Attending via Skype.

Ori Inbar, ogmento games alfresco Let’s get together to brainstorm on the “Big AR NY Game”: The first location-based, social, augmented reality game designed for New York by New Yorkers.

Noah Zerkin, [1] – AR software and hardware interfaces; Exploring the idea of an AROS.

Ohan Oda, webpage – Columbia University; NYC

Sean White, webpage – Augmented reality research at Columbia University and Smithsonian Institution.

Steve Henderson, Columbia University, webpage, @stevehenderson

Omer Gunes, [[2] webpage] – NLP, Speech Recognition, Mobile Software Development

Steve Feiner, Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab, Dept. of Computer Science, Columbia University, personal, lab – Augmented reality, mobile/wearable computing.

Jon Russek, NYC, website, @filmaddict – AR as applied to film/theater/art.

Daniel Leslie, Reflexions Data, LLC @dan_leslie, Principal at application consulting/development firm where we’re working on a mobile app for proximity-based real time social graph analysis.

Donald Schwartz, NYC, @Ishkahbibelvirtual worlds, social media, technology writer

David Oliver, Oliver+Coady, Inc. NYC, @davidmoliver mobile strategy, mobile product definition, mobile development.

Chris Grayson, NYC, Twitter: @chrisgrayson | Blog: GigantiCo | Contributor: H+ Magazine | Web developer and marketing consultant — Interests: Future of commercial mobile AR / Outernet (GeoSearch & OOH marketing convergence); Future AR Form Factors; AR/Virtual Worlds integration re: distance learning & collaboration.

Saul Devitt, NYC

Bert Picot, NYC via Skype probably around 10:30 am for a few hours. Very interested in learning the value chain for AR applications and the development of applications for Festivals and live entertainment.

MZ – startup to develop a platform to use semantic data to enable virtual worlds

Jon Russek – film production + law + internet. Interested in AR as artistic medium for creativity

Davide Byron – developed the game Spads and Fokkers and code

Philip Ashlock @philipashlock, The Open Planning Project

Michael Keating, The Open Planning Project

Yohan Baillot, @yohanBaillot future of commercial mobile AR, emerging AR standards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, Scott Yates writes:

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

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

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

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

AR DevCamp

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

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

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

“Hacking Human Behavior Within a City”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Anil Dash concurred:

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

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

Talking with Mark Drapeau and Anil Dash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: I like that!

Anil Dash: Can you say that about yourself?

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

Anil Dash: People were feeling it..

Mark Drapeau: That’s right!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Drapeau: Universal accessibility for citizens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anil Dash: For now..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Oh yes great post!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anil Dash: They’re still five years ago.

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