Augmented World Expo 2013 was really an amazing experience. I’m co-founder and co-organizer of the conference, along with Ori Inbar, so it has meant a lot to me to see our event grow over the last four years, and thrilling to make such a big splash this year.  There were 1,163 attendees, and the expo show cased an ecosystem of emerging technologies – augmented reality, gesture interaction, eyewear, wearables, and connected hardware of  many stripes, that mark the beginning of natural computing entering the mainstream. It was a unique opportunity to get up close and personal with what it feels like to be an augmented human in an augmented world!

Videos of AWE 2013′s 35 hours of educational sessions and inspirational keynotes are now available on our YouTube channel. I am sharing my own talk (my slides are also up on slideshare here), and a few of my favorites in this post, but there are far to many to post here, so please browse further on the Augmented World Expo youtube channel.

One notable high point of AWE2013, for me, was the showcase sponsored by Meta, a startup developing the first device allowing visualization and interaction with 3D virtual objects in the real world using your hands. It was made possible by the generous contribution from the private collections of Paul Travers, Dan Cui, Steven Feiner, Steve Mann, and Chris Grayson, and passionate volunteers who are helping advance the industry. Sean Hollister of The Verge did this excellent report on the eyewear showcase 35 years of wearable computing history at Augmented World Expo 2013
Also for more on Meta see this article by Dan Farber.

My colleagues at Syntertainment, Will Wright, Avi Bar-Zeev, Jason Shankel, and LaurenElliott all gave great talks. Ironically, we’re not building augmented reality apps or H/W. We all just happen to continue to be very interested in the field.  

Thank you to everyone for supporting the event!

The press coverage was truly extensive:

In the shadow of Google Glass, an augmented reality industry revs its engines
The Verge, Sean Hollister, June 9, 2013, 271 Tweets

The next big thing in tech: Augmented reality
CNET, Dan Farber, June 7, 2013
Pick up on Current News Daily
350 Tweets

AWE 2013 Conference Report: Augmented Reality and Marketing
The Persuaders Marketing Podcast on Dublin City FM, June 23, 2013

AR Dirt Podcast – Ori Inbar AWE2013 Extravaganza Recap
AR Dirt by Joseph Rampolla, June 18, 2013

35 years of wearable computing history at Augmented World Expo 2013
The Verge, Sean Hollister, June 9, 2013
7 Tweets

Augmented Reality: Bruce Sterling, keynote at Augmented World Expo 2013
Wired, Bruce Sterling, June 9, 2013
9 Tweets

On the road for VR: Augmented World Expo 2013
Doc-Ok, Staff, June 7, 2013
3 Tweets

My Interview from Augmented World Expo 2013 [VIDEO] Wassom.com, Brian Wassom, June 7, 2013

Augmented World Expo
ZenFri, Staff, June 7, 2013

AWE2013: Hardware for an augmented world
FBNSantos.com, Felipe Neves Dos Santos, June 6, 2013

Augmented Reality Will Be the New Reality
InvestorPlace, Brad Moon, June 6, 2013

Wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann: Who watches the watchmen?
TechHive, Armando Rodriguez, June 6, 2013

Expo puts augmented reality in the limelight
ABC 7 News, Jonathan Bloom, June 5, 2013

These OLED microdisplays are the future of augmented reality
DVICE, Evan Ackerman, June 5, 2013

Visualized: a history of augmented and virtual reality eyewear
Engadget, Michael Gorman, June 5, 2013

Wikitude announces Wikitude Studio and in-house developed IR & Tracking engine
PapiTV, KC Leung, June 5, 2013

Augmented reality expo aims for sci-fi future today
USA Today, Marco della Cava, June 5, 2013

Augmented Reality: High Dynamic Range (HDR) Video Image Processing For Digital Glass
Wired, Bruce Sterling, June 5, 2013

Will Wright at Augmented Reality Conference: Don’t Augment Reality, Decimate It
AllThingsD, Eric Johnson, June 4, 2013

Philip Rosedale’s Second Life with High Fidelity
CNET, Dan Farber, June 4, 2013

Google Glass competitors vie for attention as industry grows
PC World, Zack Miners for IDG News Service, June 4, 2013

4D Augmented Reality Leader Daqri Announces $15 Million Financing
Press Release, June 4, 2013

CrowdOptic Powers Lancome Virtual Gallery App, Crowd-powered Heat Map
TechZone 360, Peter Bernstein, June 3, 2013

Augmented humans, enhanced happiness?
Crave Culture, Angelica Weihs, June 2, 2013

Metaio & Vuzix to Showcase AR-Ready Smart Glasses at the 2013 Augmented World Expo
Press Release, May 30, 2013

Four ways augmented reality will invade your life in 2013
Quartz, Rachel Feltman, May 30, 2013

Augmented Reality: Augmented World Expoâ„¢ is next week
Wired, Bruce Sterling, May 28, 2013

Strike it Rich with Cachetown and AWE 2013 Playing the Gold Rush 49’er Challenge In Augmented Reality
Press Release, May 24, 2013

Local Community College Student Headed to Silicon Valley to Learn More about Augmented Reality
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Staff, May 24, 2013

Explore an intricate labyrinth with smartphone AR
CNET Australia, Michelle Starr, May 21, 2013

Dartmouth firm lands super app
Herald Business, Remo Zaccagna, May 21, 2013

Augmented World Expo 2013–The Future of Augmented Reality
Silicon Angle, Saroj Kar, May 17, 2013

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

“Y Combinator hackathon’s prize-winning designs”

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

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

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

Here’s a look at some of the winners.

Printing on whole wheat or white

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

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

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

Peripherals and apps for the IO Toaster

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

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

Touch screen toaster displays

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

Grand prize was a real grabber

Meet the Tactilus team

Fitness glove has something up its sleeve

Baby gets a robo rocker

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

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

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

From here to China and back

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

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

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

Registration will open in February.”

I am super excited to be speaking at SXSW Interactive 2012, as part of Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club, on “A Lifestyle with a Gaming Sense.” Michael Trice just did a post on our session for SXSW.com, Screen Burn Panels at the Palmer Presents Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club. The photos of Will Wright, Tish Shute (me!) and Peter Swearengen are by Anya Zavarzina. Thank you Anya for such great photos!

I have been too busy to blog much lately, but there is a lot to unpack in future posts in my quote in Michael’s SXSW post!

“Really we’ve entered a new era where the world has become a platform for storytelling and the goal is to turn everyday life into an opportunity for play, relatedness, and new forms of autonomy and fun. We’ve now come to a point where software has moved out of the computer and into the world. Rather than viewing this process in terms we’ve already grown out of, like gamification, we view this as an opportunity to explore everyday activities as possibility spaces.”

For the complete post, including Peter Swearengen of Stupid Fun Club on StoryMaker, see here http://sxsw.com/node/9969

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m really looking forward to the O’Reilly Strata events that are coming to NYC in a couple of weeks. I’m fascinated to see where the art, science, and business of data has gone since February, when I attended the first Strata Conference in Santa Clara – a sold out event imbued with an awareness that this was an important gathering of cognoscenti working on the next big thing.

Strata in New York City is a sequence of events,  Strata JumpStart, Sept. 19th, and then The Strata Summit, “The Business of Data,” Sept. 20th & 21st, and followed by the Strata Conference, “Making Data Work,” Sept. 22nd, 23rd.

“The future belongs to those who understand how to collect and use their data successfully.”

Below is a transcript of a conversation I had last Friday with Strata Program Chair, Edd Dumbill about some of the highlights of the schedule from my perspective.  However, I highly recommend taking a good look at all that is planned through the three events because there is a depth and breadth that could not be covered in one conversation.

The video opening this post is from visual.ly.com – a start-up making it easier for people to create, explore, share, and promote data visualizations and infographics.

Talking with Edd Dumbill

Tish Shute: It seems a dialogue between the art of data and the science of data is going to be center stage at Strata NYC, and there will be much discussion about story telling with data.

Is that observation correct or is there something else going on there?

Edd Dumbill: No, I think that’s a great characterization. For the Summit, the core realization for me has been that when you have these tools for getting value from data and when you can drive what you’re doing by data, then actually, the biggest consequences are human ones, and they are organizational ones, and they are strategic ones once you have the technology in place.

So what the summit is doing is really looking at how, in a variety of industries, governments, and within disciplines within those, how the amount of data, the ease of which it can be communicated and mined is changing the way industry is shaped.

Tish Shute: Also, I noticed  that the Strata Summit Schedule (Sept 20th & 21st), and even through to the Strata Conference (Sept 22nd & 23rd), has more of an emphasis on pop culture; sports – baseball, dating – OKCupid, and Narrative Science, all have a place on the schedule, for example?

Is this the culture of New York City being reflected – interests in media and marketing, or is there something else going on?  Has the data tool stack matured since the Strata Conference in Silicon Valley at beginning of the year?

Edd Dumbill: Yes, there’s certainly a different flavor to the event because we’re in New York. And, yes, the tool stack has matured, but it is, by no means mature, and the maturity’s only coming at the lowest level.

I think there’s many years left in maturing the tool stack. But one of the beauties of big data is that once you have the data together, the algorithms to get value from it initially are pretty simple.

So, focusing on the stories of success of being data driven, particularly in the Summit, is important to us because the two questions people are asking are, “One, I’ve got data. Two, What do I do with it?”  We don’t need to make the argument that data is important anymore. But we do need to demonstrate what you can do with it.

The data isn’t necessarily big; it’s just there. It’s about having an analytical approach to your business that compliments your intuition, and compliments your vision.

“One of the most powerful ways of presenting data to people is in a story,” Edd Dumbill

Tish Shute: Yes I can see the emphasis in the schedule on how to tell meaningful stories with data. Narrative Science seem to be doing something very interesting re turning data into stories?

Edd Dumbill: Yes. They absolutely fascinate me with what they do. There’s this kind of hierarchy and sort of chain of needs right now where business is going, “We need data scientists. Find me data scientists. Train me data scientists. Hire me data scientists.” And the data scientists are all going, “I need visualization. I’ve got this data, I now need to turn it back into a story that’s going to be useful to people or provide interfaces that are going to help people understand and explore this,” because it doesn’t scale to have to have an interpreter all the time between the data and the results.

You need to be able to present it in a way that means something to people.

People can look at a graph and get many things out of it, maybe not even get anything at all out of it if they are not used to it. But particularly for digesting certain kinds of high-level summaries and results, if you can put the data back into prose, it makes it very accessible to people.

Tish Shute: Natural Language Generation from data really opens up so many possibilities..

Edd Dumbill: Yes, it’s interesting. I think it’s a very novel use. A lot of people would consider that the end result of their data was a spreadsheet or a graph that they are processing.

But if you turn that back into a story, I think there’s a lot of potential of helping executives understand what’s going on. It makes it possible to use language to understand the results.

Tish Shute: I am really excited to see the emphasis on stories, data design and visualization, and the way we experience data is as much part of The Strata Summit and The Strata Conference as some of the more hardcore big data challenges and analytics stuff.

Edd Dumbill: Yes. We are definitely ramping up on visualization. And I think that’s going to become more important. Having a fundamental grasp of how to use graphics and charts is still incredibly core to what we’re saying. But I’m also interested in ways that go beyond, because at least 50% of the point of visualization is to help people understand the dynamics of the data, to really augment their senses with the results of the computation.

You know, the people who are some of our best leaders, the ones who know how to ask the right questions of the data, have a sort of indefinable fingertip feel that you get for numbers when you live around them for a while. And anything we can do with interfaces to accelerate this is going to be very beneficial, whether it comes to being visual and flying through the data or hearing it in natural language.

Tish Shute: Have I missed anything in that in terms of what you’ve got on the schedule re visualization? VisualizingData.com published an ideal schedule from the visualizing data perspective. But have you added anything recently?

Edd Dumbill: Well, there’s one event which isn’t actually listed on the schedule yet, which is on Tuesday night. There’s a venue called EyeBeam in New York; we’re having a visualization showcase that evening. So there will be stuff to walk around and then a few talks, really from some of the most interesting companies doing viz and viz approaches. So that’s not up on the schedule yet, but that will be in addition. It gives a nice focus on Tuesday night.

Tish Shute: Oh, that’s super awesome. I’ll definitely go to that.

Tish Shute: I am very interested in mobile social communications and augmented reality – especially augmented reality that feels different, not just looks different, as Kevin Slavin puts it.

I am excited to see people thinking about data not just in terms of visualization, but in other ways too that we can feel it through our secondary senses as well (see Mike Kuniavsky’s talk at ARE2011, “Somatic Data Perception”).

Edd Dumbill: Yes, absolutely. That is where we view this as going. I will be incredibly depressed if I’m still looking at the world through a glowing rectangle in 10 years time.

Tish Shute: Yes, it would be! I am looking forward to see the new data start ups too.

Edd Dumbill: Yes, there are a variety of interesting startups, that I feel are particularly important in the data space. Media Sift and Data Sift, for example, Data Sift is doing a lot of real time processing on the Twitter fire hose. They provide real time analytics on Twitter, which I think is very important.

Tish Shute: In terms of using data to provision mobile experiences, real time is massively important, isn’t it?

Edd Dumbill: Absolutely. Yes.

Tish Shute: But real time data is still a big challenge, isn’t it?

Edd Dumbill: Yes. I mean right now, our focus on real time is probably at the technology level. Looking at real time, people are kind of building out the frameworks, companies like Media Sift and Data Sift creating parts of the experience.

And yes, our Where 2.0 conference will be focused more on the mobile experience.

Tish Shute: Re mobile experiences, I am very excited about Infochimps and their new geo APIs, and sensor data is becoming such a big part of the picture now too. But the Kinect has also opened up a whole set of possibilities for the future of sensor data!

Edd Dumbill: Yeah. I still think Kinect is probably one of the most exciting things going down because of the democratization of that kind of capability. Interesting things happen when the sensors become cheap, right?

When alongside a little camera in your iPad you have a Kinect sensor equivalent. That’s become extremely interesting because everybody has it with them and can do things based off it.

So the things that always fascinate me are when it becomes cheap and hackable.

Tish Shute: And if Kinect went mobile, that would be exciting?

Edd Dumbill: I think it’s entirely likely in the next couple years, yes.

The more sensors we can start instrumenting our mobile and personal devices with, I think it’s going to always result in some much more novel uses that we ever dreamed of.

Tish Shute: There was a lot of hoo-ha about Color when they launched this year. They were unable to capture a user base, but if they had issues of privacy might have come to the fore because they were really collecting more sensor data than any other app, right?

We are still waiting to see a breakthrough app in that area in terms of using all the phone sensors in ways that will really enhance a user experience rather than just the aims of data mining, aren’t we?

Edd Dumbill: Yes. I think this is one of the things where, in parallel, we’re really learning out the social and privacy implications of this kind of technology. It seems to me the focus has shifted from the tech in the second half of the year too. Frankly, everybody getting kind of freaked out about the amount of data that’s being mined and, you know, what’s acceptable use for that.

But on a slightly more prosaic level, there are some rather fabulous things being done. If you look at the Google Maps navigation experience on an Android phone. For instance, there’s some very practical applications of sensors collecting data with traffic and a variety of other augmentations going in that to actually do something useful.

So maybe we’d like to think we carry our sixth sense around with us in our pocket, and maybe we will. But we certainly can in our car right now with all the automatic rerouting and so on. That’s slightly more prosaic, but I think a lot more significant in terms of a pattern of how that can be applied.


Tish Shute: One of the Startups that really excited me in February at Strata, Santa Clara was Singly and The Locker project. They are really thinking innovately in the area of putting people at the center of their data.

I am looking forward to seeing the fruition of that work. And, while I’m enjoying Google +, it seems, we are just sort of holding up our hands and saying, “Well, there’s only one business model for data, and that is a centralized Fort Knox,” isn’t it? Or is there something that I’m missing?

Edd Dumbill: You’re right. I mean I think Google +, for instance, is rather the walled garden is a hedged garden. You know, there is a certain barrier there that I think is more about the fact that you need to put certain barriers up to actually create a decent user experience in the first place. I think user experience is one of the BIG problems with open data, and private data, to be honest.

There’s a reason we are not all writing PGP encrypted emails to each other, right? Because it’s so hard to make a UI for encryption that’s safe. Most people don’t use passwords properly. And I think a lot of the same user experience considerations come into this whole data thing.

Facebook can get away with anything they want to because have you ever tried using their privacy settings? Google, I think, more than anybody has tried to address this issue using sensible defaults, making the explanations clear. And they probably succeeded for a geek tech audience.

So I honestly think, probably, Locker’s biggest challenge, in that kind of approach, is definitely UI and giving the concept to the users so they can understand it.

But there’s certainly a very useful contribution to this conversation.

I think there are parallels in blogging, actually. There is a case where people have information they want to disseminate. And do you choose to do in on your own website, set everything up, publish for yourself, host for yourself, so you have complete control, or do you cede, for convenience, control to Blogger or Tumbler, knowing that you are being monetized somehow and that you’re playing in somebody else’s walled garden and don’t have that control?

So I haven’t really expanded that thought too much, but I think there’s something there in following that along and seeing where that actually leads.

But, you know, there is a whole technical challenge as well.

I really like the idea of being able to give permission to people. Being able to say, well, “I’m engaging you to do X,Y,Z in return for such and such. That seems like a good bargain to me. Giving up my data is a decent bargain for the services I’m getting back.” I mean that’s generally the contract we make in real life with people anyway.

That’s another thing re Google+, –why it’s a promising approach. At least in their rhetoric, they’re trying to say, well, “We’re trying to model this on the real life economy, the economy of real life interactions.”

Tish Shute: Yes. Any movement towards saying, well, “I’m not just collecting your data randomly, I’m collecting this data because I want to give something back to you that will enhance your interactions,” definitely feels like an improvement, doesn’t it?

Edd Dumbill: Yes. I think that bargain is clear. I’m just fascinated by who could be trusted and… I do actually wonder if there will be some kind of, rather than necessarily everything being decentralized like Lockers suggests, there might be an idea of a variety of inter-operating, trusted identity brokers. People who we would actually trust. Banks, right? We do that right now. Banks are pretty much our identity brokers. Who knows?

Tish Shute: I think, that is where the Locker project’s going with Singly, isn’t? Isn’t Singly the trusted broker for the Lockers, right?

Edd Dumbill: Yes. Now the question is whether you trust a startup with that or whether you’re going to trust… I mean, who knows? Trust levels are at such all-time lows with everybody right now. People in America won’t trust the government. I think Google are probably one of the most trusted brokers out there online.

Tish Shute: Perhaps, that’s interesting, isn’t it?

Edd Dumbill: I did write a piece, which kind of speculated that Google may become some sort of center brokering of social information and kind of a platform.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes, “Google+ is the social backbone” – a very thought provoking piece! It deserves an interview on it’s own!

But back to the Strata schedule! I notice you have DePodesta doing the Moneyball talk, right? What’s the 2011 twist on Moneyball?

Edd Dumbill: I think the twist on that is that the’re a lot more people can play now, really, which is why we’re having Strata in the first place. That 10 years ago the people doing this kind of stuff are McDonalds and Walmart and sports teams. Everybody, where there was large money, they could afford to gather the data. Maybe they could try this service out in making decisions based on it.

Well, we’re now in a very instrumented society where every business, every person has instrumented data about their interactions. I think the kind of resistance and dynamics and opinions that Moneyball brought up are the ones that people are going to be facing again right now as they seek to be more data-driven in what they’re doing.

It’s also very interesting to know 10 years on, what do you think? You’ve had 10 years of this, of sort of sabermetrics and so on. Have you matured in your view, have you softened?

What I’m endlessly and ultimately fascinated by is, where does this fit in the decision process and in the organization tree? Where does it mesh with vision?

Steve Jobs achieved it perfectly. He had vision and all kinds of things for his products. But Apple succeeded through a relentless operational efficiency. Absolutely relentless in their suppliers, their supply train, their manufacturing lines down to their detail. They are an utterly data-driven, process-driven organization at the same time as melding that with vision, design values and good quality. That’s a case where it worked together.

I’m eager to try and tease it out, figure out how that really works and how those things come together.

Tish Shute: And that’s another thread I see being explored at Strata, NYC. It’s not human versus machine or machine trumps human, but it’s human with machine. This is another theme, isn’t it?

Edd Dumbill: Exactly. We all operate by feedback loops. Really, what machines are doing enables us to get better quality data and in a tighter feedback loop.

Tish Shute: One feedback loop that we’re finding machines very useful for is understanding how we feel. I think that’s really interesting.

Edd Dumbill: Yes. I’m very fascinated by all the quantified-self stuff and where that can take us. At the end of the day, we have a very personal little organization to deal with, which is ourselves.


Quid: Building Software and Mathematical Solutions 
to Simplify Complex Decisions

Tish Shute: Yes! But the thing is we don’t understand ourselves in isolation, do we? I am definitely going to attend the session by Sean Gourley, CTO of Quid, on semantic clustering analysis. It seems like sentiment analysis is going big-time now, isn’t it?

Edd Dumbill: Yes. I mean, sentiment analysis is actually becoming a checkbox feature in databases now. The latest release of Greenplum has it built it. It’s that kind of level of feature that people want as social data is so important. Of course a lot of this is being driven by marketing and advertising.

Tish Shute: Yes but even re marketing data story telling has been taking some interesting and quirky turns hasn’t it?

Edd Dumbill: Yes, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of interesting research ahead of us there as well.

OKCupid Trends

Tish Shute: OkCupid is a very interesting example of data story telling that leverages our desire to know ourselves, and ourselves in relation to others.
.
Edd Dumbill: Yes. I mean they’re an example of a shift that’s happening in the PR industry, actually, which is companies understanding that telling marketing stories with data is very, very compelling. OkCupid really used that to hit well above their weight. Of course they got acquired as a direct result of that and their profile.

Tish Shute: I know OKCupid got acquired by Match.com, but you were saying they hit above their weight by using this analysis? How did that work?

Edd Dumbill: I think a lot of it’s down to their blog. That they analyze these things, publish them on their blog. It got a lot of attention, generated a lot of media stories, which brought them to Match.com’s attention. There’re millions of – well a large number of dating sites. But they differentiated themselves through the smart use of their data.

Tish Shute: Data and Games is an area I am very interested in. Zynga changed the game with game analytics and social games. And now we are seeing Rovio partner with Medio for analytics, (see Green pigs and data). But I noticed that you don’t have games as a strong theme on the schedule?

Edd Dumbill: I think you’ll see more of that on the West Coast to be honest. It’s not that we’re not interested. I just feel that the center of gravity to that topic is probably back on the West at the moment.

Tish Shute: So what’s after Zynga in terms of game analytics? A nice easy question!

Edd Dumbill: Sure. Let me predict the future for you.

Tish Shute: Yes please do!

Edd Dumbill: I don’t know, to be honest. One of the very interesting things about games is that it helps us understand the real world by modeling and playing around. I’m highly fascinated to see some more of those things played out through real life actors. There’s been some examples right out of Scavngr and whatnot. But if any of those techniques can really start to make a way into mobile technology, that’s one interesting thing.

What lessons can we take from what we’ve actually learned in game analytics that are reproducible and useful elsewhere?

Gamification is a bit of a trend right now. I am slightly skeptical… But I am fascinated by a lot of systems that are having these game elements added to them. And so the second question is, if you’re having games added to things, like losing weight or saving money or writing a book, I’ve seen that too, what can you apply from the analytics world on top of that, and learn about systems and tweak them?

I don’t have that good of an answer for you. How my game is, is not steeped in that. But I am aware that there’s probably a lot of progress in games that has yet to be applied anywhere else.

Zynga and whatnot, is kind of a space race, isn’t it, to monetize that. Space races generate technologies that can be applied in a variety of places.

What are the spinouts of game analytics that we can actually use elsewhere?

“These Bloom Instruments aren’t merely games or graphics. They’re new ways of seeing what’s important.”

Cartagr.am by Bloom

Tish Shute: Last February, at Strata, I was very struck by the new work by Ben Cerveny and Bloom on “pop cultural instruments for data expression” (also see Ben Cerveny’s talk at ARE2011).

Edd Dumbill: Yeah. I love every time the visualization comes onto a tablet….there’s an interesting back channel there.

And Google has done this in extreme to add to their great advantage. There’s a potential when you read an E-book, or you interact with the visualization of a tablet, that it can learn from your interactions.

If you read an E-book, and the book is instrumented and sends stuff back, then the book can read you at the same time that you’re reading it. That kind of collective intelligence can then be harnessed.

So what if Bloom’s pop culture visualizations are instrumented so that they know how people are using it? Well what can they learn about that? About either the quality of the visualization, about what’s interesting to data and back at the same time?

This is what the fundamental principles I think even of Web 2.0 and definitely in this era of big data that we’re in, is that the secondary signals, the exhaust from any electronic product, can be incredibly valuable.

We know that every time you run Google you are probably a part of at least one experiment that they are running to determine an optimal, and optimize their product through that. And how can you turn this up to generalize that out?

Tish Shute: I agree.  This is at the core of the art, science and business of data.  I hear your phone ringing, but do I have time for one more quick question?

Edd Dumbill: Oh yes.

Tish Shute: So it sort of follows on from my previous question.  The relationship between the crowd sourced intelligence and machine intelligence has played a huge role in making data work and  solve real world problems – Crowd Flower, for example.

Where are we at now with this relationship between crowdsourcing power of, for example, Crowd Flower and Mechanical Turk when combined with machine intelligence. Is there anything new going on here?

Edd Dumbill: What we’re actually starting to do is learn where to apply these tools. We’re reaching a point of understanding what crowd-sourcing is for, how to better design crowd-source tasks and so on in innovative uses.

One of the things I am particularly excited about is Natala Menezes who was at Amazon working on Mechanical Turk, she’s now moved to a company called GigWalk, which is a Turk platform that’s mobile.

So if you want to assign tasks that depend on people being in particular places and being able to do particular things, this is a platform for turking using that, which I think is fascinating. That’s definitely a new approach.

Tish Shute: Yes GigWalk is awesome – I saw that Photosynth is partnering with GigWalk. That is interesting – perhaps a step towards strong AR! ( see Read Write World and Blaise Aguera Y Arcas’s work on Photosynth was big news at ARE2011).

Edd Dumbill: Natala will be talking about GigWalk. I think the session is called quirky crowdsourcing. I want to call it Quirky Turks.

Tish Shute: [laughs] I like that.

Interview with Vernor Vinge

Tish Shute: Many of the pioneers of the emerging AR industry who will be speaking at, and attending Augmented Reality Event, consider “Rainbows End” one of their key inspirations. [Note: If you want to attend ARE2011 readers of this post can use my discount code TISH295 ($295 for two days, or for one day only TISH1DAY11 for $149]

What is the best and worst, in your view, about the way Augmented Reality is emerging from science fiction into science fact?

Vernor Vinge: Progress that sets the stage:
The worldwide market penetration of cellphones in the era 2000-2010 was of a size and speed that would have counted as foolish implausibility even in science-fiction of earlier times. More than half the human race suddenly had access to knowledge and comms. Being in the middle of this firestorm of progress, we can’t really judge ultimate effects, but I expect that smart phones and the empowering aspects of social networks and AR are still massively underhyped. (This is not to say that individual innovation enterprises can’t fail; the treasure is there for those who dare, and ultimately the whole human race can benefit.)

But I can still whine:
Some — mostly political/legal — issues are disappointing. These affect AR but also the broad range of our progress with technology:
o Software patents and some styles of cloud computing are blunting the ability of average people to innovate. In the 2010-2020 era, average people should have the building blocks to empower them to create (and throw away at the end of the workday) tools that in olden times would have been the whole purpose of a business startup.
Unfortunately, some companies restrict and compartmentalize their releases like we’re still living in the twentieth century.
There are also some mostly tech issues that I’m impatient with (speaking as a never-satisfied consumer and fan:)
o The low pixel counts in contemporary head up displays.
o The poor position coordination in current HUDs.
o The lack of mass market acceptance of HUDs.
o The lack of progress in distributed store-and-forward between
mobile devices (sub-femtocell, ad hoc and transitory forwarding).
o The lack of progress in uniform solutions to centimeter-scale
localization.

Tish Shute: What do you feel will be the most impactful application of AR in people’s everyday lives?

Vernor Vinge: There are nebulous and fairly high likelihood answers: AR apps that let each person/team see those aspects of physical reality that are important for their current activity. Pointing technologies that coordinate with that AR vision. The combination is a revolution of interfaces, and the probable physical disappearance of more and more of the gadgets that twentieth century people associated with high tech.

There are also more specific, spectacular, and necessarily uncertain impacts (that depend on social acceptance and the development of network infrastructure for consensual sharing of local imagery).
o Economic disruption of the trend toward huge, expensive display devices.
o Bottom up social networking, arising from GPL’d tools. I see this as very disruptive, in good, bad and arguable ways, as illustrated by descriptive terms such as “consumer protection clubs”, “belief circles” and “lifestyle cults”. Some of these could be as public as our topdown social networks. Some might be quiet and widespread, perhaps growing out of pre-existing groups that already have a lot of intermember trust. (See:http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/C5/index.htm)
o More farfetched, but in the tradition of the last 50 years: the digitization of external visual design: building architecture could give less priority to physical appearance and more to cheap physical strength, network access support, and physical modifiability.

Tish Shute: I interviewed Bruce Sterling earlier this week – http://www.ugotrade.com/2011/05/06/augmented-reality-transitioning-out-of-the-old-fashioned-legacy-internet-interview-with-bruce-sterling/.  And, I’m really looking forward to your “fireside chat” with Bruce at the end of Augmented Reality Event to sum up the event [see the full schedule for ARE2011 here].  But was there anything that particularly rung a bell for you in my conversation with Bruce?

Vernor Vinge: Bruce says:  “… it’s pretty clear that the people who would weep for joy to have Augmented Reality are people whose reality is already damaged. People who need reality augmented as a prosthetic …” This really rings a bell with me. And social networks with AR may have a special impact at small sizes, even just _two_ players. At such a scale, they might be better called “joint entities” than “social networks”. For example, two differently disabled persons, where one is mobile. There’s a lot more that could be said about this, including applications that could be done (maybe are being done) already.

Picture via IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

Tish Shute: As Jesse Schell pointed out last year at ARE2010, “The whole point of AR is to see things from a different point of view … How can there be a more powerful art form than one that actually changes what you see?”

The magic lens of the smart phone, screens – large and small, projection, audio and sensory devices are mediating our AR experiences today. Bruce pointed out last year in his opening keynote, that these less immersive forms of AR have their own merits.

But eyewear has always been integral to the big vision of AR. Do you see some interesting futures for AR without eyewear? And, How long before AR eyewear is part of our everyday lives?
Vernor Vinge: This importance of vision is a visionist claim :-), but for the majority of us who have sight, binocular vision is by far the highest bitrate input we have, and we have enormously sophisticated wetware for analyzing what we see. Current display tech is far short of fully exploiting this input channel.

Along the way to this goal, I expect we’ll pass through mini-eras of exploiting the best-available tech. Right now, that is the tablet and the smartphone. Sometimes I almost wish for slower progress: in the nineteenth century, you could profitably spend your tech lifetime mastering one mechanism (for instance, black-and-white silver halide photography). The whole world would benefit from your career. Now, we rattle through the mini-eras so fast that we never fully exploit what’s zooming past before we’re on to the next stage.

How fast (or if) HUDs like in Rainbows End show up will probably depend on network and localizer tech as much as the HUDs themselves, with clear generational differences within such eyeware. In fact, it’s fun to imagine the mini-eras you could get with different combinations of HUDs tech, localization, and networking.

(Aside, a quibble: I think AR should not be restricted to visual only. There are tactile and kinesthetic possibilities, at least.)

(Aside, a whine: If only we had an output channel with the bitrate and flexibility of vision! Wearables plus voice and gesture could do some of that. Going further might involve scary human re-engineering. In Fast Times at Fairmont High, I speculated that a small re-engineering (eidetic memory) could give a form of highrate output,
simply by allowing selection from very large menus.)

Tish Shute: Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Computing are intimately connected. Is a distinction between AR and Ubicomp still useful? (This recent PARC blog post: http://blogs.parc.com/blog/2010/03/defining-ubiquitous-computing-vs-augmented-reality/ takes a look at the definitions.)

Vernor Vinge: In a literal sense there is a distinction, and there is enough technical challenge in AR to justify specialists spending all their time with AR. But Augmented Reality’s importance to humanity is in its role as a portal to the power of ubicomp and human cooperation.

Tish Shute: Augmented Reality, as we understand it now, is a human centered experience. But even now some of the most important aspects of our lives are governed by machine to machine intelligences that operate for the most part beyond the reach of human perception, e.g., the trading bots of Wall Street. What role can augmented reality play in better mediating between human intelligence and machine to machine intelligence? Does AR hasten the arrival of the technological singularity?

Vernor Vinge: I see four or five concurrently active paths to the Singularity:
a) Artificial Intelligence: We create superhuman artificial intelligence in computers.
b) Digital Gaia: The worldwide network of embedded microprocessors, sensors, effectors, and localizers becomes a superhumanly intelligent entity.
c) Internet Scenario: Humanity with its networks, computers, and databases becomes a superhuman being. (Bruce’s story “Maneki Neko” is a beautiful and subtle illustration of this possibility.)
d) Intelligence Amplification: We enhance individual human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces.
e) Biomedical: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological function of our brains. (I regard this last item to be the weakest of the possibilities.)

AR is central to progress with possibilities (c) and (d).
If we humans want to keep our hand in the game, AR is an important thing to pursue.

Tish Shute: Powerful computer vision apps are emerging for smart phones and face recognition technologies are beginning to appear in consumer apps. Do you think we need a major shift in the way we handle data ownership? And, is “there is a real risk of our augmented reality world being owned by interests which are not our own?” (see my conversation with Anselm Hook last year. http://www.ugotrade.com/2010/01/17/visual-search-augmented-reality-and-a-social-commons-for-the-physical-world-platform-interview-with-anselm-hook

Vernor Vinge: Yes, there is such a risk. (See also my political/legal comments in response to your question (1).)
More broadly, I see DRM and the Law being used to reify our intellectual heritage as permanent private property. If this could work, it would be the biggest grab in history — and a major roadblock on human progress.

But even setting aside all the open/closed/free ideological questions, there is another important issue here: anytime laws are passed making popular and easily accomplished behavior illegal, things get very ugly. It may seem frivolous to compare this to the first stages of the War on Drugs, but that’s where serious enforcement would lead.

Tish Shute: We have seen gestural interfaces go mainstream in the last year. What are the most interesting innovations with gestural interfaces that you have seen in recent months? What sessions will you go to at ARE this year?

Vernor Vinge: I’m way behind the curve as to what is happening right now. Collecting data points on real hardware and applications is a high priority for me in attending ARE 2011.

Tish Shute: Are you reading/writing any new fictional literature about AR? And/or, What design fictions for AR are most interesting to you in the moment?

Vernor Vinge: As to writing: My novel The Children of the Sky should come out this October from Tor Books. It’s set in the far future and is the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. Alas, the story has only indirect connections to our present technological interests.

As to reading: I got a big kick out of Daniel Suarez’s duology Daemon and Freedom(TM).

Planetary from Bloom Studio, Inc. on Vimeo.

It is just over a week until Augmented Reality Event, and I know there are a lot of people, including me (full disclosure I am co-chair and co-founder) who are totally psyched to see what unfolds there this year.   Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Blaise Aguera Y Arcas,  Jaron Lanier, Will Wright, Marco Tempest and Frank Cooper will join 107 speakers from 76 augmented reality companies on a single stage (see my previous post) to tell a momentous story of a technology of our time (also see my previous post here).

As Bruce Sterling points out, Augmented Reality is “truly a child of the twenty-teens, a genuine digital native,” and one visible indication that:

..the Internet really could look like a “legacy.” The Legacy Internet as an old-fashioned, dusty, desk-based place best left to archivists and librarians, while the action is out on the streets (see the full interview below).


(photo by Jasmina Tesanovic)

Opening this post is a video of Ben Cerveny’s Planetary app, which “turns your music into a universe,” and enchants all who try it.  Planetary shot into #3 on the Top Ten Free ipad app list soon after its release.

Ben Cerveny’s talk at Augmented Reality Event will be one of the must attend talks (see the full schedule for Augmented Reality Event here, and note my discount code for Augmented Reality Event, TISH295, is still good, if you want to register).

Planetary, while it is not an AR experience,  points the way for AR to take us out of the old-fashioned, “Legacy Internet.”

“Planetary is just the sort of science fiction experience you expect when using an object from the future like iPad,” developer Bloom Studio writes on the app’s iTunes page. ( from Mark Brown’s Wired post).

In his interview on cnet Daniel Terdiman, Ben describes how popular computing will evolve beyond those, “dusty, desk-based place best left to archivists and librarians,” (Bruce Sterling).

Ben points out:

“The tablet is a total disruption of how we understand popular computing. The next era of experiences will be driven by visceral gesture-based input, and rich fluid responsiveness in native graphics contexts. I see the potential for Bloom to help define a “killer pattern” for application design. Because apps have been deconstructed into discrete tasks that flow across devices….”

Bruce Sterling had some interesting comments on the Bloom app:

I’m a big fan of Ben and his good works in infoviz — and urban informatics, too. I admit I’m not sure the I entirely need the metaphor of a solar system in order to play a few Texas blues tracks. But I could be persuaded. Ben Cerveny is a significant thinker and a very well-spoken guy.

I’m not saying that happens tomorrow; I’m just saying, why not? Why not aspire to that?

I too am a huge fan of  The Bloom team, Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, and Jesper Sparre Andersen (also see my post here about Fizz, the Bloom team’s app used by The Locker Project for their Strata demo).  And, if you haven’t already heard about The Locker Project and Telehash – get on it!  This is one of the most important projects of our time – an infrastructure for a better future!

Interview with Bruce Sterling by Tish Shute and Ori Inbar

Tish Shute: As you so memorably put it, “AR is a technovisionary dream come true – something really rare, and you have to be really patient for those….”

What is best and worst, in your view, about the way Augmented Reality technovisionary dream is coming true and emerging to flourish in the wild?

Bruce Sterling: The best part is that AR is truly happening and is a lot of fun, and the worst part is that it’s happening in a Depression. If AR had broken loose in the dotcom days when cash flew around like soap bubbles, man, that would have been psychedelic.

AR that is even more of-our-time than “social media.” AR has arisen directly from modern technical factors that just didn’t use to exist. It’s made from shiny new parts, and is truly a child of the twenty-teens, a genuine digital native. It’s a little kid and it has to walk before it can run, but it’s great to see it walking.

Tish Shute: As Jesse Schell pointed out last year at ARE2010, “The whole point of AR is to see things from a different point of view…How can there be a more powerful art form than one that actually changes what you see?” What do you feel will be the most impactful application of AR in people’s everyday lives?

Bruce Sterling: I’m all for impact, but it’s pretty clear that the people who would weep for joy to have Augmented Reality are people whose reality is already damaged. People who need reality augmented as a prosthetic, in other words, so that they can achieve an “everyday life.” This is like the impactful but underappreciated role of the Internet in the lives of people who’ve been shut-in. If you’re laid-up in a hospital bed, a laptop is a revolution in convalescence.

But that kind of “impact” doesn’t sound too exciting or too profitable. My guess would be that the biggest arena for “impactful AR” would be augmenting cityscapes for foreign people who can’t speak the local language, can’t read the signs, and lack time to learn the local reality. Imagine, say, the Brazilian overlay for Moscow. You could show up, read your native Brazilian overlay of that city, do your business, eat, sleep, buy, leave, and scarcely “be in Moscow” at all. Constructed right, the AR Brazilian Moscow might even be a better Moscow — a Moscow that Russians themselves would pay to visit.

Tish Shute: You pointed out last year, in your opening keynote for ARE2010, that less immersive forms of AR have their own merits. We are still not seeing much “head mounted display weirdness” yet, but many other forms of AR are emerging – mobile, webcam, projected video, sonic augmented reality, even sticky light. You noted, practically everything that AR is involved in is a transitional technology. But since you spoke last year at ARE2010, which of these transitional technologies have shown the most promise for AR?

Bruce Sterling: It’s got to be handsets. Smartphones. The stats there are just amazing. The smartphone biz makes the personal computer business look like a Victorian railroad. When I read a guy like Tomi Ahonen, who talks about transitioning out of the old-fashioned “Legacy Internet,” that idea is startling. But AR is one visible indication that the Internet really could look like a “legacy.” The Legacy Internet as an old-fashioned, dusty, desk-based place best left to archivists and librarians, while the action is out on the streets.

Tish Shute: This year we have seen gestural interfaces go mainstream. What are the most interesting directions for gestural interfaces that you have seen emerge in recent months?

Bruce Sterling: To me, the most “interesting” part is seeing people do gestural stuff in public. William Gibson, my fellow author, observes that cellphones have stolen the gestural language of cigarettes. There’s lots of fidgeting, box tapping, ash-swiping, slipping boxes in and out of pockets… People quickly learn to do that without thinking twice, and they forget how weird it looks. It’s “design dissolving in behavior,” as Adam Greenfield puts it.

The gestural hack scene for the Kinect has been amazing. It’s like watching 1950s Beatnik dancing go mainstream.

Tish Shute: You have observed that Augmented Reality is Glocal which not only gives us different flavors of augmented experience but is “a departure from earlier models of tech startups, where you usually have like three hippies in a local garage. Now you’ve got German-American-Korean outfits like Metaio, and Total Immersion has a Russian affiliate. They’re inherently multinational, both inside the company and out.” What flavors of glocalness do you hope/expect to see at Augmented Reality Event this year.

Bruce Sterling: I’d be pretty happy to see some AR input from Brazil, India, and South Africa. I seem to be picking up a lot of followers in my Twitter stream from those locales. If I saw some Augmented Bollywood Reality, that would pretty much make my day.

Ori Inbar: What sessions will you go to at ARE this year? Who do you want to meet at ARE 2011?

Bruce Sterling: I make it my business to hang out with artists, but I’m hoping to drill down more on the technical aspects. For instance, where exactly are the bottlenecks in building animated augments? It looks like we’re about a sneeze away from jamming some crude Hanna-Barbera cartoons into real spaces. But the devil is in the details there.

Ori Inbar: Your commentary about the evolution of the AR industry over the years had significant focus on style. Is the AR industry dressed to kill yet? Any glimpses of promise in that direction?

Bruce Sterling: I’m not “pro-style” in every possible aspect of life, but as an Augmented Reality critic, it’s clear to me that if you claim to “augment” reality, then you should work hard to augment it — struggle to make it better. Otherwise you might as well call yourself “Defaced Reality,” or even “3D Spam.” When I see that kind of crudity and carelessness in AR, I’m gonna call people out on it. I know there will be the AR equivalent of cheesy billboards and gang graffiti, but I never much cared for those, either.

The industry’s videos have improved radically in the past year and a half. It used to be all about “look at my grainy, shaky handheld video of my cool new AR hack,” but nowadays the biz has really pulled its socks up.

If AR is about “experience design,” as I think it basically is, then eventually, as a matter of intellectual consistency and professional pride, everything you create will be considered part of “the experience.” That’s the industry’s way forward — that’s what it would do if it was grown-up.

AR people already look better than most similar geeks in the gaming business, and some day, I really do believe that augmentation people will become glamorous. They won’t be supermodels, but they’ll be about as chic as, say, professional set designers. Because AR is set design, in a way; it’s real-time interactive set-design for three-D spaces.

Ori Inbar: In the Layar Launch in 2009 you said “it’s the dawn of AR…”, at ARE 2010, you followed up on the theme saying “it’s 9am in the AR industry.” What time is it now?

Bruce Sterling: I’d be guessing it’s around 9:30 AM, but come on, that’s just a metaphor! ARE we all gonna blow off at 4:30 PM and have a beer, or is AR one of those cruel tech startups where nobody ever gets a personal life?

Ori Inbar: Are you reading any new fictional literature about AR that inspires you? And/or What interesting design fictions for AR have you come across recently?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’m always interested in creative people who just plain make stuff up. Because that’s why I commonly do myself. The stuff that “inspires” me is usually stuff that I just didn’t expect to see. But when I don’t expect it, that usually means I wasn’t paying enough attention. I plan to pay a lot of attention to AR this year.

I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense to write fiction nowadays “about AR,” because it’s no longer a fictional topic. It’s become like writing fiction “about cinema.” You can write good fiction about someone who works in cinema, but not fiction about cinema itself. AR is not sci-fi “Augmented Reality” any more, it’s become a real-world phenomenon, a new industry of real augmentation.

With that said, I must remark that I sit up straight whenever I see Marco Tempest do stuff. Magicians are all about mystery and wonder. You wouldn’t see a magician, say, using AR to work an assembly line, or re-order library books, or find a pizza joint in Barcelona. And that’s great. Marco is always gonna do something freaky and out-there, and even though he’s a tech magician, it’s never about the tech first. It’s always about his ingenuity in finding new ways to employ new tools in creating a magical experience for his audience.

Marco’s not an entrepreneur, he’s not gonna revolutionize people’s daily lives or invent Web 4.0, but even if AR becomes “old hat” some day, it’s never going to be old hat when he’s doing it. The guy is a pro, and I’m quite the fan.

Magic Projection Live @ TEDxTokyo 2010 from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.

The prophets of Augmented Reality, Bruce Sterling (best know for his science fiction works, his non-fiction includes “The Hacker Crackdown,” “Tomorrow Now,” and “Shaping Things”), and  Vernor Vinge (author of “Rainbows End” and “The Coming Technological Singularity”) are joining  Will Wright (Legendary game designer of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore), and Jaron Lanier (a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, legend of virtual reality research, and the author of You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto) to judge the Auggies at the Second Annual Augmented Reality Event, 2011, Santa Clara, Ca., May 17th, May 18th!  Pictures top row, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Will Wright, 2nd row, Jaron Lanier, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and Frank Cooper III.

Augmented Reality has been prototyped in science fiction writing and films for many years now.  But Augmented Reality Event, the first global event dedicated to the emerging industry of AR,  is your chance to be part of a momentous transformation of science fiction into science fact.   Bruce gave a seminal keynote last year at ARE2010, “At the 9am of the Augmented Reality Industry…” But we are edging closer to high noon this year – see John Markoff’s recent New York Times post, “Augmented Reality Comes Closer to Reality,” and Bruce Sterling’s opening keynote at ARE2011 will raise the bar for us all again.

Bruce Sterling  and Vernor Vinge will wrap up the show with fireside chat.  Jaron Lanier will be keynoting at are2011 for the first time and Blaise Agüera y Arcas (a leader in Microsoft’s mobile strategy), will return to top his Ted talk demonstrating innovations in Bing Maps and Augmented Reality.  Frank Cooper III, who serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Consumer Engagement Officer of PepsiCo, will give, an up to now, missing perspective of  the big brands’ on Augmented Reality (AR).

“The main stage at ARE 2011 will be blessed with science fiction visionaries, ground breaking scientists, mind blowing technologists, and legendary game designers and more!”

Come prepared to Augmented Reality Event.  Read as much Bruce Sterling and Vernor Vinge as you can, and follow @bruces blog on Wired, Beyond the Beyond.  With only a few weeks to go until Augmented Reality Event, myself and co-chairs Ori Inbar, and Chris Grayson, have been working hard on a preliminary schedule ( by the time you click on this link it should be updated again).  You can follow us on twitter for updates as they come in – @tishshute, @comogard, @chrisgrayson,  and please follow @arealityevent and join our ARE facebook posse.  And, of course, don’t forget to register soon while we are still offering discount codes.

Readers of this post can use the code TISH295 for $100 of the already sweet price if $395.

If you joined us for Augmented Reality Event last year, you will know that the”Auggies” – an award for the best AR demo presented live with commentary American idol style,  is a chance to join the best and brightest in AR as they write the next chapter for AR in the sharp and often amusing reparte between judges and contestants.  Submit your demo proposal here under the “Auggies” track.

The picture below is the Auggie Award for the best AR demo designed by Sigal Arad Inbar.  (See, Ivan Franco recounts the team’s ARE 2010 experience, and winning the event’s first-ever Auggie Award, and the video shot at the YDreams booth by Bruce Sterling. “The Hotness” – YDreams rocking it at ARE2010 from brucesflickr)

ARE2011 will include more than 90(!) speakers in 30 sessions organized into 3 tracks: business, technology & programming, and production & design.

It will feature special activities such as a Startup launch pad (submit your proposal here under track: “Startup Launch Pad”), and an ARt Gala with live performances.  There will be displays by top AR artists of AR art projects and live performance art by the world’s best AR artists featuring: Helen Papagiannis, Amir Baradaran, Sander Veenhof, Ina Centaur and more to be announced.

The exhibition area will be open throughout the 2 days of the event and will include the latest product demos by the leading AR companies, as well as a career fair to help grow the fledging industry.  A small number of booths is still available in the exhibition hall ($995 for 10′x10′).Grab them while they last!

A press conference will kick start the event, as a vehicle for AR companies to launch new products and services. Submit your proposal here and add: “Press Conference” in the title. The event wrap up will feature Marco Tempest with a live AR Magic show

I have been so busy working on are2011 (and another project yet to be named -  hint I am focused on social augmentation and the world as a platform for a geo-situated social interest graph), that I have had no time to blog since I was on The Potential for Augmented Reality in Education Panel at SXSW, 2011. But I have posted my slide deck here for my talk, “Enchanted Objects and People: Data Driven AR.”

We are entering a new era of collective engagement possibilities for augmented reality, consumer to consumer brokerages which could unleash the the visions of the collaborative consumption movement and tap into our collective energies in totally new ways.  As Seth Praebatsch, Scavngr, suggested in his SXSW keynote, The Game Layer on Top of the World, the power of communal game play may even help us address even the most intractable problems like failure in education and global warming!!

One of my favorite new AR ventures exploring the potential of new forms of social engagement through AR is Suwappu.  We are working on how to get them across the pond and a few time zones to are2011.

“Dentsu London are developing an original product called Suwappu. Suwappu are woodland creatures that swap pants, toys that come to life in augmented reality. BERG have been brought in as consultant inventors, and we’ve made this film. Have a look!”

Click here or on the image above to watch the video.

“Suwappu is a range of toys, animal characters that live in little digital worlds. The physical toys are canvasses upon which we can paint worlds, through a phone (or tablet) lens we can see into the narratives, games and media in which they live.”

Many new players in Augmented Reality will join the pioneering AR companies, Layar, Metaio, Occipital, Ogmento, Total Immersion, YDreams, and renowned innovators, Mark Billinghurst, Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre and the Georgia Tech team and many others will return to surprise and amaze us this year – see the still growing list of speakers here.   Qualcomm, who announced an SDK for vision based augmented reality, and $200,000 developer challenge last year, will also be back with several of their team at are2011!

Visual Search and OCR augmented reality apps have flourished in the last year and they will have a strong presence at are2011.  Long anticipated and oft fretted over face recognition apps are coming to a phone near you soon.  Viewdle, working locally on the phone, is taking a new approach to face recognition.  Google has so far said that they will not use or release the face recognition technology that they apparently already have.  But Shailesh Nalawadi, Google Goggles, will return to are2011 to discuss building out a computer vision search database and 3D Classifiers to solve AR challenges and show us what Google Goggles has been working on recently.  Aurasma, out next month, is perhaps the next big thing in this space, so we are all eager to try it out and see what they bring to ARE2011.

My interview with Anselm Hook, Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook, is still a great reference point for important questions in this space.

Wordlens, wowed us all with OCR done locally on the phone, and they will be  showing off new features at ARE2011. Pulling out WordLens to translate at subway poster for the first time is a magic moment, and guaranteed to impress the person sitting next to you too!    Tactical Information Systems, who Fred Wilson said had the potential to be a Shazam for faces at Web 2.0 Expo, NYC, will show us what they have been up to since then. 

Data driven AR is still in the early stages, but it is data that will unlock augmented experiences of the world around us in many powerful ways.   Also, we are seeing exciting new efforts to put people at the center of their data.  Jeremie Miller who ushered in the Twitter era with his invention of XMPP has brought us a new real time protocol, TeleHash and the Locker Project, that will unleash the full potential of communication at the edge of the network.   And don’t miss Ben Cerveny and Bloom,  at ARE2011, with “pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration” and “where data visualization meets game design,”  I highly recommend Ben’s talk!

Also I am very excited that Mike Kuniavsky will be speaking at  ARE2011 for the first time.  He  pointed out in 2007 that Magic is a powerful core interaction metphor for Ubiquitous computing [and AR].  Offices. libraries, and the desktop provided us with common metaphors that unleashed the power of the PC through files, desktops and trash cans, browsing, etc.,  but metaphors of magic – “enchanted objects and people,” are keys to augmented reality experiences.   And, if Magic is a core interaction metaphor for AR, kinect hacks have shown us that gesture will be the soul of the AR experience.  Jaron Lanier’s keynote will be a must see and make sure you catch Chris Arkenberg’s presentation on the Future of Hands Free AR.

This post is just a glimpse at some of what will be going on at Augmented Reality Event.  I cannot do justice to everything in a single post, so I hope to see you there!  And, if by any chance you have a few moments to daydream between now and then, feel free to ponder your own script for a Green Lantern movie:  “In brightest day and darkest night, no evil will escape my sight.”  I will too.  As @brendanscully noted, “Green lantern’s power is Augmented Reality!”