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!”

Shortly after Augmented Reality Event – are2010, I talked with Bruce Sterling on skype and in gdocs about his experience there.  I am posting the conversation in two parts to make it a more blog friendly length!

The picture above is the Auggie Award for the best AR demo (above) designed by Sigal Arad Inbar.  It was won by YDreams! See, Ivan Franco recounts the team’s ARE 2010 experience, and winning the event’s first-ever Auggie Award, for more.   The video below was shot at the YDreams booth by Bruce Sterling.

“The Hotness” – YDreams rocking it at ARE2010 from brucesflickr

Rudy Rucker, who was hanging out with Bruce Sterling, captured the are2010 buzz and some great images in his post, Augmented Reality, Painting, Twitter. As Rudy put it:

“AR is hoping to be a next big thing, a cozier and more commerce-driven cousin of the old VR, or virtual reality.”

Bruce Sterling’s opening key note is up, ARE 2010 Keynote by Bruce Sterling: Bake a Big Pie!, and also the ARE 2010 Keynote by Will Wright: Brilliant Inspiration for the Augmented Reality Community with more videos from are2010 on the way.  One must read post on are2010 is Chris Cameron’s post, Augmented Reality’s Next Steps: Sitting Down with the Titans of AR.

Talking with Bruce Sterling, Part 1

The Auggie panel, Bruce Sterling, Jesse Schell, and Mark Billinghurst inspect the award.

Tish Shute: In your keynote at the 9am of the augmented reality industry you asked some questions of the are2010 audience: “What’s the mission statement?  You’re the world’s first pure play experience designers, except that user experience it’s mostly futuristic hot air.  But run with that, right?  What are your tactical steps?  You should get dressed, have a coffee, have a to-do list.”

How much of that did you see going on in the next two days?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I wasn’t privy to any of the business discussions.  I didn’t think it was an accident that this standard AR enabled tag thing came up from Bruno Uzzan, Total Immersion.  That seemed to me to be a useful thing.  I was always interested in the Augmented Reality Consortium.  It struck me as remarkable that there was this group of people who clearly all knew one another and it had some kind of game plan.  I applaud them for that, because these are not the 1980’s.  [laughs]  You know, it’s just a different world for young startup companies.

Tish Shute: I think you’re right. There seem to be some VC conversations going on, we don’t know what went on in the meetings, but it was noticeable in the atmosphere of excitement, and remarked on by a few people. So I think that kind of was definitely going on.

And, of course, I was so busy I never even got to see the expo properly! You said you wanted to be surprised.

Did anyone surprise you in any of the talks, in any of the expo?

AR used as interfaces for devices

Italian augmented robot from SEAC02 from brucesflickr

Bruce Sterling: I have to say I was a little bit surprised to see Andrea Carignano demoing a robot. I happen to know him because he’s here in Torino. He’s the guy that came out of Fiat and went into AR. I am not a particularly huge robot fan, but I think it’s of great interest that AR is used as interfaces for devices, as opposed to the Jesse Schell idea that AR is all about a “man with the X-ray eyes.”

My suspicion is that a lot of surprises will come out of mashups of AR.

Tish Shute: I didn’t get to see Andrea’s robot.  So what did it do?

Bruce Sterling:  It’s basically a sister device to that little helicopter that those Parrot AR Drone guys were doing.  It’s a little autonomous robot and it runs around with a webcam on it.  You can place video into the acquisition stream coming off the robot.  You can play a game, and blow away imaginary monsters or whatever.

Tish Shute: It’s interesting, because did you notice Will Wright and Patrick O’Shaughnessey, Patched Reality, spend some time hacking the Parrot AR drone in the hallway?  Did you come across them?

Bruce Sterling: Rudy was there with them.  You know, I didn’t want to watch Will Wright hack a robot.

[laughter]

Tish Shute: They seemed to be having fun even though as it turned out the power supply was dead.

Bruce Sterling:  I’m sure Will enjoyed that.  As a game designer, you want to go out and get your hands dirty with a plastic gizmo.

[laughter]

My Swiss Army knife can’t get through airport security, so I really don’t want to strip anything down.  But yeah, what else did I see that was of particular interest?  I was pretty happy about the Korean guys because they are a difficult group to get close to.

AR companies are like mini-global micro-startups.  They’re “glocal”.

“Korean elegance at the Zenitum booth” – from brucesflickr

Tish Shute: Zenitum.  What did you like from Zenitum.  They were one of our sponsors, along with Qualcomm.

Bruce Sterling:  I know that Seoul is like the number one center for augmented reality discussion.  But it’s  difficult to get behind the scenes as a journalist there and  track what’s going on in Korea.  I’m fine with Italian “realtà aumentata.”   And I feel like I’ve got a handle on French “réalité augmentée.”   The Germans were not hard to find, and the Dutch all speak English!  But the Koreans, and whoever the hell it is in Kuala Lumpur…  I have no idea what’s going in Kuala Lumpur, and only the vaguest idea of what’s transpiring in Singapore!  But I know that people there are paying a coherent interest.

So the Koreans show up, and they had some relatively predictable anime style 3D avatar conversion stuff.  But they had a really nice display space.

“Anime figures become three-d smartphone animated avatars,” from brucesflickr

Tish Shute: Ah, So Zenitum created a hot spot at the exhibition?

Bruce Sterling:  Yeah.  The Koreans had  IKEA furniture and some nifty little woven baskets.  They’d really classed up their presentation.  Most Koreans in tech tend to be kind of muscular.  The Koreans are not known for their refined presentations.  On the contrary, they tend to undersell everybody else.  But I don’t know, maybe they’ve been hanging out with Samsung and upgrading their design chops. [laughs]

Tish Shute:  Did you take some photos you could send me?

Bruce Sterling:  I took a few, but  I don’t consider myself a photographer.  They’re all up on my Flickr set. It was interesting to see so many people from so many different nations in such a collegial atmosphere.

Tish Shute: Yes – there were many different countries represented at are2010

Bruce Sterling:  It’s the beginning… and so global at such a young stage.

Tish Shute: Yes. As you said, it was 9 AM, so everyone was actually super excited to be gathered together from across the globe to start a new day together.  As you mentioned, there was a very warm affirmative vibe – everyone sharing a passion.

Bruce Sterling:   They have an online commonality. They seem to be aware of one another’s work through the Internet.

Clearly they had all heard about one another.  That’s a departure from earlier models of tech startup, 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.

Tish Shute: It was the multinational garage, wasn’t it?

Bruce Sterling:  Yeah.  AR companies are like mini-global micro-startups.  They’re “glocal.” There’s something quite new to me about that.  I don’t find it’s shocking, because in Europe today it’s common to find startup teams who are multinational.  But to see such intense globalism at such an early stage of an industry is really different.

Tish Shute: Yes it made for a fun atmosphere?  It was wonderful running into Iguchi Takahito, Tonchidot.  You have a great rapport with each other despite the language barrier?

Bruce Sterling:  Yeah.  That guy from Tonchidot, he’s very charismatic.  He’s punchy.  That’s reflected in the very strong graphic design from his company.

Tish Shute: Using minimal English to make the case for Sekai No Camera at the Auggies, Iguchi Takahito still got through to the audience.

Bruce Sterling:  Well, his visuals were good.

What AR means for artistic practice…

Picture of Eric Gradman’s Cloud Mirror, from James Alliban post ARE2010 – Augmented Reality utopia in Silicon Valley – see for more on the are2010 ARt Gala

Tish Shute: So before I move on to wider themes, I’m going to wrap up on some of the different aspects of the conference.  I was chairing the technology track but you were more free roaming, was there anything that went on in the sort of hallway discussions and the presentation rooms that struck you?

Bruce Sterling:  Well, I did get collared by artists.   They really wanted to talk to me.  We got into some serious discussions on  what AR means for artistic practice.  How you can do this and reach that, how can one sharpen up one’s presentation?  I mean, they really wanted some art criticism.

Tish Shute: That’s very interesting.  Did you come up with anything that you hadn’t been thinking about already through the conversations?

Bruce Sterling: I’ve seen augmented reality installations before, and I certainly know many electronic artists.  But I don’t know.  People in the AR art space, they are looking for guidance and trying to find fellow spirits.  In their own way, they have the same pioneer spirit as the business people.

Helen Papagiannis shows Iguchi Takahito, Tonchidot, her AR Wonder Turner, an exquisite corpse inspired installation

Tish Shute: Yeah, it’s interesting, because we wanted the art gala to be even bigger, but it turns out, because of the logistics of putting up art in a conference space is fabulously expensive, because it has to be all installed and hung…

Bruce Sterling:  I’m keenly aware of that.  At Share Festival in Turin we bring in six installations, and it’s very heavy work.  It really takes a lot of logistics.  It was like a Battle of the Bands.  It’s like doing a rock concert.

Tish Shute: One of the installations I was really sad to not have there was Uber geeks’  “Steve” H.E.AI.D installation that Brady Forrest & Co. took to Burning Man.

So I was very happy that we actually did get the number of artists we did.

Bruce Sterling:  Well, there aren’t a million AR artists in the world, so it’s hard to judge.   I didn’t see many business people rushing up to have me critique their business plans.

Tish Shute: [laughs]  They were all in the meeting rooms.

Bruce Sterling:  Maybe it’s for the best.

VC and AR Startup Action

The Zenitum Booth, are2010, photo from Chris Cameron’s Flickr stream

Tish Shute: Do you know that why your talk started a few moments late is because we had 50 people who arrived from the Silicon Valley neighborhood I guess!

Bruce Sterling:  Did they not preregister?

Tish Shute: No. They all stood in the line for the same day registration!

Bruce Sterling: It ‘ll be interesting to see what transpires there, if there is a little wave of startup action.  God knows they need some place to put their money, because the VC scene in the US is pretty much moribund.

Tish Shute: Ogmento is the first US AR Games startup to get VC, I think.  I think there was some VC action at are2010 for sure.  And Qualcomm obviously seems to have commercialization plans for their AR technology, and to be scouting talent  and ways to deliver new AR experiences.

Jay Wright, Qualcomm presents Joe Dunn, e23 Games, winner of the are2010 StartUp Launch Pad with a check

Bruce Sterling:  Some  people don’t need venture capital.  I mean, Google Goggles isn’t going to be hurting for VC money, obviously [ see Chris Cameron’s RWW post, Google Goggles Coming Soon to iPhone] .  AR may come up through other methods, like people allying themselves with Hollywood, or peeling off of advertising companies.   There’s a lot of outfits who might conceivably want in-house AR skills.  Then when people set up a specialty AR shop,  they  peel off the list of clients.  I don’t know.  Those old days  of Silicon Valley venture capital seem like a lost world.

Tish Shute: Yes.  I, again, didn’t see anything really of the business tracks and production tracks.  Did you get back and forth between the tracks?

Bruce Sterling:  I went to the Hollywood tracks.  I mean, to the extent that I could.

Is Hollywood stirring? Who’s going to have the first breakout AR property?

Tish Shute: So what did you see from…Is Hollywood stirring?  Is it waking up?  I mean I know Kent Demaine, Oooii,  and Brad Foxhoven, Ogmento, spoke about the Hollywood AR scene.

Bruce Sterling:  There were guys there from LA who were sort of saying, look…they are aware of us, but they just want AR to promote their properties to some particular niche.  They realize that AR is potentially a mass medium and that you could do some real AR entertainment.  So they were batting around some ideas as to where that might happen.  Like, could it come out of a console gaming scene?  Who’s going to have the first breakout AR property?  A popular hit AR property, as opposed to like a neat way to sell shoes, or whatever.   Really, anybody’s guess is as good as theirs or mine.  But at least they were actively guessing.

Tish Shute: I know the breaking the fourth wall discussion has been going on for a while and now the question is, whether AR is going to take down the fourth wall and bring interactive storytelling into the mainstream.  Did you hear any of that?

Bruce Sterling:  Well, I always shy away from discussions of that kind because I don’t think there’s any “final thing.”  Practically everything that AR is involved in right now is  a transitional technology. Also, because I am a storyteller, I get alarmed whenever people in technology start saying, “Oh well, it’s all about telling stories.”  Because obviously it isn’t.

People can tell stories perfectly well orally, and absolutely nobody does that.  AR is not at all about telling stories.  It’s about a great many other things, such as user bases, niche audiences,  media saturation, urban informatics,  convergence culture, and the language of digital media.   I could list these factors until the world looks level. It’s really becoming pretty chaotic.  As I was saying in my speech, AR companies are media startups who almost never use the old-fashioned word “media.”

Tish Shute: Oh, that’s interesting.  Yes.  So why do you think that has happened that way?

Bruce Sterling:  Well, it’s because they are trying to do a different thing than media does.  I mean, they are trying to “augment reality.”  They don’t want you to know that you are using a medium.  They don’t want you to realize that you’re watching computer animation overlaid on some video acquisition stream.  That would defeat the whole point of AR.  It’s entirely different from an analog medium like television, where you turn on the television and there’s a constant stream of station identification alerts.   That’s like: “Don’t touch that dial!  You’re on channel 13!  Stay with us!”  Then it’s like, “And now a few words from our friendly sponsors!”  That medium was engineered to keep your eyeballs locked to a single stream that they’re feeding you.

In AR, it’s much more participative, more geolocative.  I’m not particularly interested in station-identification branding from my AR provider. What I really want to see is the interactivity of the augments they’re bringing to me.  It’s like  FlickR, the photo sharing site. You don’t have any TV-style splash page for FlickR.  “Hi! We’re FlickR! FlickR, bringing your photos to you!” No, FlickR is all about “you, you, you,” your photos, your tags, your friends, your activity around you.   It’s immediately trying to be very participative.

Tish Shute: Will Wright got to that point, didn’t he. He was trying to move us into an idea of blended reality. That the game is about the world, not about the dragons or the overlays per se.

Bruce Sterling: Right. I think that’s true. But see, the world isn’t a medium. A medium is something like this interview,  where I’m connecting to you and there’s a video Skype channel between us.  Whereas AR is more about spatial 3-D,  about 3-dimensional impositions.  Pieces of media: sound, vision, information visualization, tags, floating tags, air tags, icons, arrows, warning signs, warning sounds, tactility, whatever, being brought into the environment around us.

That’s why it’s properly called “augmented reality” instead of just augmented media.   If you call your work “augmented media,” you’re really in trouble. Because if it’s all about augmenting somebody else’s media, why doesn’t that medium just buy you, and augment their own selves?    If you think that way, instead of augmenting the world, you’ll just be a modest little plug-in for old-school media.

The World as the Platform

Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Microsoft, Santa Clara, are2010, photo from Chris Cameron’s Flickr stream

Tish Shute: Yes, which is why Blaise so generously gave the technical underpinning  for augmenting reality in his tech talk – about the trellis and the grapes,  he really explained how the world can become a platform for augmented reality.

Bruce Sterling: I wish I could have seen that. I did not see Blaise’s speech.

Tish Shute: We’re going to put the videos up in better quality.  People in the front row have put it up on the web already.  He really went into some of the challenges of mapping for augmented reality.

Bruce Sterling: His visual-mapping technique is important.  Registration is super important for AR.

Tish Shute: I think it was a really generous talk actually because he went step by step on how we will do this.

Bruce Sterling: I rather imagine that Microsoft has patented those steps.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes, I guess so!

Bruce Sterling: I could be wrong. Maybe they’ll open-source it. You never know.

Tish Shute: You never know. Because the world as a platform isn’t something one company can own, or go it on their own to exploit.

Bruce Sterling: I expect there to be a thorny path, but sometimes I’m surprised. Sometimes people really do try to fertilize the tech field in the hope of getting a good corn crop before they start fighting.

Tish Shute: We’ll I keep hearing that we may even see the unlikely marriage of Apple and Microsoft  – maybe wishful thinking, but there are motivations beyond AR for this unlikely match, and certainly between them these titans have what it takes to realize the grand visions of AR ? [laughs] But who knows…

Bruce Sterling: Well, yeah, it depends on where the thing catches fire.

Tish Shute: Yes. You mean whether AR catches fire in the form of  AR and mapping..

Bruce Sterling: It’s hard to say, but I’m convinced now that there’s more going on than I once thought. I thought that Bruno Uzzan made a very good speech for his company when he talked about how he worked on AR for eleven years.  Eleven years is no flash in the pan.   He has his long list of clients and successful applications. I thought he was right in his impatience with the press for not catching on. It’s gone on for quite awhile. The mere fact that you’re not aware of it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

The Illusive AR eyewear

My are2010co-chair, Ori Inbar, CEO and co-founder of the hottest new AR game development start-up, Ogmento, donning his goggles to open are2010 – picture from Chris Cameron’s Flickr stream

Tish Shute: Yes. So, the other theme you brought up in your opening keynote and I would be interested to know if anything you saw at are2010 changed your view is the illusive AR eyewear, and  if we actually got AR Goggles that worked they would bring AR’s gothic sister, VR, back from the grave right? [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: It took quite a lot of work, but we pulled together a six-company HMD panel, right?

Bruce Sterling: Yeah. I was impressed to see so many of them there.  And I was chagrined to see how prototype-like all their gadgets were. But that doesn’t surprise me, because if any of those head-mounts were remotely working, they would be hyped out the wazoo. Everybody’s been waiting for them and hoping for the best. They’re obviously not ready for prime time. [laughs] Maybe in certain limited applications. Like maybe a diving mask. [laughs]

Tish Shute: No, I think what was nice though they got inspired and they all got together on the last day. I saw them having a meeting about standards. They got inspired to actually work together.

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, well, unless they’re going to invent mechanical eyeballs that those machines can fit onto, it’s going to be tough. OK, I’m a skeptic, but I’m prepared to be surprised. I’m also a skeptic in Artificial Intelligence, but as soon as they bring me an AI that can write a decent novel, I’m going to get it and review that book. [laughs]

Tish Shute: It’s interesting. Re AI, I’m totally in agreement with you. In terms of the way computers turned out, it wasn’t AI per se that they turned out to be good for, not in the way everyone had dreamed of it, rather it was the harvesting of human intelligence that turned out to be the big thing. But what is interesting is that despite all of that, AI or machine learning, as it is now called, permeates our whole society now from the stock market to how many businesses make many of their decisions.

Bruce Sterling: Well, there’s a lot of so-called collective intelligence.  But Marvin Minsky-style hard AI, no way. Alan Turing-style AI, forget about that.

Tish Shute: Yeah. So, that’s an interesting comparison with the HMDs.

Bruce Sterling: People stretch the definitions.  It’s like, well, my car engine is Artificial Intelligence. Yeah, so is your wall transistor. No, I don’t really think so.

And AR is a similarly big tent. I mean, Uzzan had to admit that he had denied that AR was AR, unless it was using his favorite technology. And he felt embarrassed to be rubbing shoulders with people who put AR into cell phones. And I can understand his feeling there, because, gee whiz, that’s certainly not what AR pioneers had in mind. But he had to admit he’d become more ecumenical about it. Obviously, they’re  there and doing business like gangbusters. You can’t very well ignore success, right?

I had a similar feeling about the goggles. Obviously, the goggles would be great, should they work. But if they did work, I rather think virtual reality would come very strongly to the fore.  You’d see people doing all kinds of elaborate immersive-style stuff.   A truly immersive technology doesn’t need to “augment” much of anything.

Tish Shute: Yeah, you’re right.

Social Augmented Experiences

Bruce Sterling: I think many of the most interesting AI aspects are not personal in the way goggles are.  They’re not about guys walking around with personal tech. They’re about big, communal, social-media experiences, like stage shows, and urban informatics, things where large numbers of people can interact with the same augmented reality. The projection mapping, which I go on and on about. Augmented public spectacles.

Tish Shute: Yeah, projection’s our best example of a social augmented experience right now because we are yet to have an easy way to do networked social augmented experiences easily – but that is of course the thrust of my interest in ARWave [see the slides for my presentation, AR Wave:  Federation, Game Dynamics, Semantic Search, Mobile Social Communications here].

Bruce Sterling: I think of Edison’s early days, when he wanted to sell movies to people for a nickel a clip.  You had to bend over and put your eyes on this visor and turn this crank. That coin-op device was easy for Edison to monetize, as opposed to getting a bunch of people to sit in theater seats. But people laugh at movies when they’re together in the seats.   Cinema is a more social, involving experience in a crowd situation.

Tish Shute: But it started with them, didn’t it, Hollywood – the movie biz? Basically Nickelodeons, right?

Bruce Sterling: That’s right. They were Nickelodeons. They were a lot like the goggles because they isolated the user.

Tish Shute: Yeah, that’s a really important point that the goggles are not Nirvana because of this question of whether they actually detract from the social augmented experience and blended realities, by drawing us into VR experiences?

Bruce Sterling: I’m tempted to claim that they’re more a VR technology than an AR technology.

Tish Shute: That’s a very interesting point because…

[thunder]

Tish Shute: Wow! What was that?

Bruce Sterling: Thunder storm.

Tish Shute: Oh, my God, how very Gothic! [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: It can get pretty loud up here in the mountains.

Tish Shute: Oh, you live in the mountains, better still!

Bruce Sterling:  Torino is in the foothills. This is Piemonte. So the Apennines are over there. The Alps are over here. We do get some rather spectacularly unstable weather.

Tish Shute: It sounded like a bomb to my NYC ears. [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, it didn’t hit the building, but it was maybe half a kilometer away. I saw the flash.

Tish Shute: Oh, you did?   Well, I hope you don’t lose your power midstream here.    I was really happy to hear of that connection between Rudy Rucker and Layar  [Rudy was touched when Maarten Lens-FizgGerald from Layar said that he met the Layar co-founder at a Rudy Rucker lecture].

Bruce Sterling: That was very fun, yes.

Tish Shute: Wasn’t that wonderful? What was that experience like going around the conference with Rudy?

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, Rudy’s very into graphics. He’s a mathematician, so he understands the underpinnings of this stuff. But he’s a skeptic. He thinks they’re kid toys. He’s not a gamer. He’s a good old-fashioned computer-science hacker. So he wanted to tell me all about his new eighth-order, fifth-dimensional fractals. He showed me a great many of them. They’re psychedelic. Rudy’s fractals are considerably trippier than most apps that help you find a barber or a train station. [laughs] Rudy really is a visionary. He’s into some very weird stuff.

Gamer Guys at are2010

Brad Foxhoven, Chief Marketing Officer, Co-Founder, Ogmento at are2010

Tish Shute: At are2010 there was a lot of discussion about how game dynamics and AR are going to intersect, right? Anything that you saw of interest there?

Bruce Sterling: Well, obviously, there are gamer guys there. Ori’s a gamer. The gamer guys are getting some money. The big buzz right now in gaming is, of course, social gaming.  Farmville has kicked everybody’s ass because it’s not even a game and yet it has more users than the entire gaming industry.

Tish Shute: I know, right! [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Obviously that’s kind of humiliating. For a long time, I’ve seen people trying to do giant multiuser games on cell phones. It’s difficult to do because the interface on cell phones is crap, right? People aren’t going to run around responding to SMSs.

I can imagine people running around with little Wii-style bats that have audio and visuals on them. It makes a very large native AR game seem more plausible.

Tish Shute: Yes. that would be cool!

Bruce Sterling: Again, it’s not very gamelike to use those little fiduciary markers.

Tish Shute: No.

Bruce Sterling: Moving little cardboard chips, around like with card games…. It would be pretty easy to set up a little AR chess game.  Star Trek style hologram chess pieces,  and so forth. But it’s just cumbersome.

Tish Shute: And also, from what we’ve seen from things like Foursquare, the proximity based social gaming doesn’t have to offer very much [a crown badge, a mayorship] to get some mind share.. the social is the primary game dynamic…

Bruce Sterling:  I’ve seen a lot of different philosophies of gaming over the years. Who’s to say that Second Life doesn’t have the best idea? They built a little scene and then slammed their gate shut behind them.  But at least they’ve got a really nicely-paying little cult stuck in there. It’s different. And it’s manageable and it’s really theirs, theirs, theirs.  They don’t have to call in outside experts to try and run the monster.   They haven’t blown it up to the scale of Yahoo! where they’ve lost control of the enterprise, and gone into a tailspin of management overhead. Second Life has a very intense, almost a cultish atmosphere among the player-slash-developers.

Tish Shute: One thing that helped them was the thing they were always criticized, that the barrier of entry was so high. But once they got people they never left, right?

Bruce Sterling:  That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.

Tish Shute: One of the best features!

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, it’s like being in Mensa. Why don’t you lower your barriers to entry and get in some interesting stupid people?

Tish Shute: [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: In Mensa, we’d rather sit here making puns about neutrinos and fourth-order quadratic equations. [laughs] OK, that’s a business model, if that’s what you want.

The Man With the X-Ray Eyes!

Jesse Schell’s during his keynote, “Seeing,” at are2010, picture from Chris Cameron’s Flickr stream

Tish Shute: Ok!  Now to unpack the man with the x-ray eyes idea, Jesse Schell’s keynote theme.  This is a root metaphor for AR – making the invisible visible, seeing through walls. To me. I think you kind of wrote the book on this because all my ideas on what radical transparency might be come from you – your idea of Amazon.org is key to how I understand this..

Bruce Sterling: Oh, really? That’s funny.   I was touched that Jesse brought up that famous Corman film, because I was a judge in a fantasy film conference in Trieste earlier this year.  And Roger Corman was there.  He was the guest of honor.   “X: the Man with the X-ray Eyes” was one of the films shown during the conference, and I saw it.  I even had dinner with Roger Corman.  I had never met him before, so that was quite amusing.  The difficulty with a film of that kind is that what we science fiction writers call a “House of Cards Ending.”  In that story structure,  you ramp the thing up until the protagonist sees God, and then he has to be destroyed by the falling pillars of the temple.  That’s a classic science fiction structure:  like Frankenstein.  For the sake of the drama, Corman evades the issue of what’s really going on. For instance, let’s just suppose “the Man with the X-ray eyes” is not in fact a psychopath.  Let’s say he gets a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, and he acts like a real scientist, not a stock B-movie “mad scientist.” So he has, like, backup guys, and some placebos, and a large group of people to test it on, trusted colleagues, and so forth.  You wouldn’t get any of that movie’s wild activity out of that.  What you would get is like a 5% improvement to people’s vision.

Then, in a year, there would be a 10% improvement in people’s vision.  There would be a  classic industrial story.  A rising star, you know, a cash cow.   Real tech isn’t done by a single guy as a divine curse.  It’s created by classic  tech startup culture.  So a runaway technology really behaves in the way that personal computers do.

Tish Shute: The things that get me all Utopian and happy about this are the ideas like those you first outlined with the notion of Amazon.org.

Bruce Sterling:  It would be easy to do an entirely different kind of film than “Man with the X-ray Eyes.”  Something much less B movie,  much less pat.  I mean, at the end of the film,  he destroys his own hardware and blinds himself.  Why?  For what rational reason would he do that?  Why doesn’t anybody else know the big secret of what he’s doing?  Why aren’t there Koreans doing it?  Why aren’t there Austrians doing it?  Why aren’t there Italians doing it?  Why?  AR doesn’t behave like that.  It’s not one lone guy with magic eye drops.  It’s entire teams of people that have been working on stuff for 17 years.  They all approach it in different ways.

Now, they are going to get scandals in AR.  I can guarantee you that.  They are going to get into  hot water eventually.  At least some people will surely come out and accuse them of being Roger Corman B movie monsters.  But unless they accidentally discover atomic fission or destroy the Gulf of Mexico with an oil spill [laughs], I don’t think they’re going to be particularly badly off!   The trouble I imagine  for AR people is very typical new media trouble.  It’s like movies being accused of corrupting our morals, or comic books being accused of leading to violence, or Google being accused of making us stupid and warping our brains.

I’m not an alarmist in that sense, but at least I’m concerned about real threats.  Roger Corman is a B-movie director who’s trying to sew up his lost plot ends by destroying his hero and his hardware. That’s not very plausible. It’s a nice science fiction movie device, but technology isn’t a movie.

Tish Shute: Yes. Well, the other thing that you always remind us of with AR is not to be saying it’s going to be this glorious moment when it’s no longer gimmickey, no longer pop culture. You always emphasize that’s actually part of what’s good about it.

Bruce Sterling: It’s not an accident that practically everybody in that audience knew about Roger Corman.  Nobody looked surprised; not the Austrians, not the Koreans. They were all like: “Oh, yes! Roger Corman!  Love him!”

Tish Shute: There were so many Rudy Rucker fans. Were you watching Twitter? People like Eric Gradman were succumbing to fanboyz moments..

Bruce Sterling: “Yeah. Rudy Rucker, he’s the best.”

“Rudy Rucker gripping an Augmented Reality shoe” from brucesflickr

Tish Shute: [laughs]  I noticed you inspired him to join Twitter..

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’ve got 8,000 followers and, obviously, a lot of them are Rudy’s fans.  Of course he’s going to be gang-rushed on Twitter. That’s not really any more surprising than two motorcycle stunt guys at the same attraction. And I’m a big fan of his Rudy’s blog.   He’s always got interesting things to say.

Tish Shute: Yes. AR does seem to bring out some of the coolest smartest people!  This morning I had breakfast with Joshua Kauffman in Central Park.  He is an advisor and entrepreneur working on design in the public sphere.  I was feeling rather brain dead and jet lagged.  I told Joshua I was wondering how to get the cottonwool out of my brains for this interview and he suggested,  the All Souls College one-word question interview!  Have you ever heard of that? – although apparently they recently scrapped it.

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’ve heard of All Souls College there in Oxford. What was their interview question?

Tish Shute: They used to use only one word, so they would only give you one word. It’s not a question. Basically, they throw out the word and then you had to spin off from there.

Bruce Sterling: You’re supposed to free-associate on a single word?

Tish Shute: I guess so. I hadn’t heard about it, but Joshua suggested it.

Bruce Sterling:  Well, it’s possible..

Tish Shute: Joshua came up with some good words..

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: We were talking about these proximity-based social work networks like Foursquare and Gowalla and how they may influence the emergence of social augmented experiences.

So Joshua’s suggestion for the first word was “territorialization” e.g. how do these new mobile social experiences like Foursquare,  and the observation that actually rather than breaking down territorialization, which would be a good thing, tend to support territorialization…but perhaps new forms of territorialization?

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, they’re re-intensifying it in a very odd, electronic fashion.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Bruce Sterling: I have noticed that.  It’s not true of stuff like projection mapping or the webcam fiduciary display stuff. But with the handheld stuff, and especially the urban informatic stuff, it really can’t help but take on a local flavor. Layar is like “Augmented Dutch Reality.”

And TonchiDot really is “Augmented Japanese Reality.” It’s hard to imagine a Layar interface going gangbusters at Tokyo.  Whereas the TonchiDot interface, which is very clearly influenced by Anime and cartoon graphics…. Maybe it could find some niche of hipsters in Amsterdam hash bars…

…to be continued in Part 2

The Augmented Reality Event: Bruce Sterling’s keynote from Ori Inbar on Vimeo.

Bruce Sterling’s keynote (aka the prophet of the augmented reality industry) set the bar high on the opening day with a keynote address reminding us all of how awesome it is to be the “world’s first pure play experience designers,”  but also not to forget “whose reality needs to be augmented most,” and “to cut ourselves a space of our own.”

“It’s 9 am in the augmented reality industry…without vision people perish…it’s your chance to build a big pie before you start slicing it up…it’s time for you to get dressed…good luck to you, I’ll be watching you”

Wow! Augmented Reality Event was hotness.  I know, as one of the chairs, it is not like I am a neutral observer.  But, if you were there, and you didn’t pick up on the “warm, affirmative feeling,” as Bruce put it, and the optimism, fun, and cool uber geekery, of are2010, I guess I will have to hear from you in the comments ‘cos the feedback has been incredibly upbeat, so far.

Anyway,  I am still basking in that rare glow of a geekgasm at 9am – the augmented reality industry embracing lovers whose dreams are in still in full flight – no burst bubbles, betrayals, train wrecks, or tragedies in sight yet?  Although Roger Cormanesque horrors were threaded through  Jesse ‘the man with the x-ray specs” Schell’s  closing keynote, “Seeing.”  So keeping watching Ori’s Vimeo stream for Jesse’s keynote  -  it will be up soon and it’s quite a ride!

I leave for England tomorrow to celebrate my mother’s eightieth birthday, so this will be a brief post for now.  But I am looking forward to posting soon a long interview with Bruce Sterling on his experience of are2010.

Bruce Sterling hung out with with Rudy Rucker (see Rudy’s post and pics on are2010 here), attracting fans wherever they went, visiting the expo, going to sessions,  talking generously with all – their table always crowded.  Bruce said he hadn’t had so much fun in a while.  And, apparently, Rudy was touched when Maarten Lens-FizgGerald from Layar said that he met the Layar co-founder at a Rudy Rucker lecture. Awesome!

As Ori says here:

“are 2010 is over. It was a blast.  Many thanks to 400 AR enthusiasts who joined us for 2 days of AR goodness.

Special thanks to our 90 speakers from 40 augmented reality companies, our exhibitors, sponsors, and above all – for Qualcomm.”

People’s slides will be up on the are2010 web site soon. My presentation, AR Wave: Federation, Game Dynamics, and Mobile Social Communications, is already up on slideshare.

You can catch up on some of the highlights of are2010 in Rouli’s linkfest, and check out these pointers he gave to following the event for more.

• Chris Grayson’s twitter account
• Patched Reality’s Patrick O’Shaughnessey and the augmented citizen Dan Romescu are also doing their share on twitter.
• Sophia Parafina ( @spara ) live blogs the event using Google Wave.

I will have a mega post up soon.  But for now here are a few photos that will give you a taste of some of the #are2010 magic.

Bruce gets a t-shirt from tonchidot CEO, Iguchi Takahito ( @iguchi ), after checking out Helen Papagiannis’ AR art

If  an event with Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Jesse Schell and Blaise Aguera y Arcas there wasn’t already enough awesomeness, check out how Sophia Parafina, Locatively, and Patrick O’Shaughnessy of Patched reality got to hang out with Will Wright – hacking the Parrot AR Drone.  And then, when a dead power supply stopped that adventure in its tracks, Will played some of Patrick’s AR games and gave him feedback.  OMG!  Will’s only the most important game designer the whole world.  There is already some videos shot from the front row up of Jesse Schell’s, Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ and Will Wright’s keynotes up, but the hi res versions are coming soon!

“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.