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

Visual search is heating up, and with it a key stage of turning the physical world into a platform is underway as images become hyperlinks to the world in applications like Google Goggles, Point and Find, and SnapTell – see this post by Katie Boehret.  And while there may be no truly game changing augmented reality goggles for a while, make no mistake, key aspects of our augmented view, factors that will have a lot to do with what we will actually see when an augmented vision of the world is a commonplace, are already in the works.  And, as Anselm Hook (pic above from @caseorganic’s flickr) notes:

“There is a real risk of our augmented reality world being owned by interests which are not our own. There is a real question of when you hold up that AR goggle, what are you going to see?”

Cooperating services, e.g., Google Earth, Maps, Streetview, Google Goggles, and leader in local search like Yelp (see here) would have an enormous ability to filter and control a mobile, social, context aware view of the physical world, and Google themselves see an ethical quandary.

“A Google spokesperson says this app has the ability to use facial recognition with Goggles, but hasn’t launched this feature because it hasn’t been built into an app that would provide real value for users. The spokesperson also cites “some important transparency and consumer-choice issues we need to think through” (quote from Wall Street Journal Column by Katie Boehret).

Anselm Hook and Paige Saez, with great prescience, have been advocating a social commons for the placemarks and imagemarks to our physical world platform through a number of pioneering projects, including imagewiki.   I have interviewed both Anselm and Paige (upcoming) in depth, recently.  My talk with Anselm was nearly three hours long!  So I am publishing the transcript in two parts.

Understanding what it means to have a social commons for  our physical world platform, and augmented reality, are key questions for all of us to think about, but especially important for those of us involved in the emerging industry of augmented reality.

Anselm notes :

“The placemarks and imagemarks in our reality are about to undergo that same politicization and ownership that already affects DNS and content. Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations try to protect our social commons. When an image becomes a kind of hyperlink – there’s really a question of what it will resolve to. Will your heads up display of McDonalds show tasty treats at low prices or will it show alternative nearby places where you can get a local, organic, healthy meal quickly? Clearly there’s about to be a huge ownership battle for the emerging imageDNS”

The mobile internet is moving beyond the internet in your pocket phase of mobility with mobile, social, proximity-based, context aware networks like FourSquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and GraffitiGeo (see Smart Data Collective) likely, soon, to start to take precedence over other forms of social network.

Regardless of the timeline for true augmented reality – 3D images & graphics tightly registered to the physical world,  proximity-based social networking and real time search are already taking us into a hyper-local mode and the realm of augmented reality which is “inherently about who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you” (Robert Rice – see here). The ground is being prepared for augmented reality now.

If you have been reading Ugotrade, you will know I have been actively involved in developing  an open, distributed AR platform/mobile social interaction utility for geolocated data based on the Wave Federation Protocol – AR Wave a.k.a Muku – “crest of a wave” (see my posts here, here and here for more on this project, and the AR Wave Wiki here).  Federation is, I believe, one vital aspect to developing a social commons for augmented reality and the physical world platform.

Also, a bit of news, I am co-chairing the upcoming Augmented Reality Event (are2010) with Ori Inbar of Games Alfresco and Ogmento, whurley.  Sean Lowery, Prospera, is the event organizer, and are2010 has the support of the AR Consortium.   The are2010 web site is live and there is an Open Call For Speakers.  You can submit your proposals and demos for one of the three tracks, business, technology, or production on the web site here.

Bruce Sterling “prophet” of  augmented reality and more, “will deliver the most anticipated Augmented Reality keynote of the year.”

It didn’t surprise me when Anselm mentioned that Bruce Sterling was a key influence for his work on the geospatial web and augmented reality.  Anselm explained:

“I’d seen a talk by Bruce Sterling at an event called Planetwork [May, 2000]. And that event was, for me, a turning point where I decided to focus full time on exactly what I cared about instead of doing things that were kind of similar to what I cared about. So, his influences is a pretty significant one to me at that exact moment.”

For more see viridiandesign.org -  seems it is time for a “Neo-Viridian,” revival!

This post by Bruce Sterling on Pachube Feeds, and Thomas Wrobel’s prototype design for open distributed augmented reality on IRC, were key inspirations for me when I began thinking about the potential of Google Wave Federation protocol for augmented reality.  I had been exploring Pachube and deeply interested in the vision of Usman Haque, but I had a real aha moment when I read this :

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

I think the AR Wave group will earn the extra credit and more very soon!  Davide Carnovale, need2revolt, and Thomas Wrobel have been leading the coding charge, and there will be a very early AR Wave demo soon, perhaps as soon as the Feb 16th ARNY Meetup. 

Open access to the creation of view that will eventually find its way into AR goggles, will depend not only on the power of  an open distributed platform for collaboration like the AR Wave project.  Our augmented reality view will be constructed through complex “hybrid tracking and sensor fusion techniques” (Jarell Pair), cooperating cloud data services, powerful search and computer vision algorithms, and apps that learn by context accumulation will drive our augmented experiences, and at the moment, these kind of resources, at least at scale, are for the most part in private hands.

In the interview below, Anselm’s discusses  how trust filters, and being able to publicly permission your searches so that other people can respond and so that people can reach out to you, and the democratization of data in general, are even more of a concern with augmented reality and hyper local search. The task of understanding what it means to have  a social commons for the outernet remains an open, and pressing question.

Anselm explains (see full interview below):

“as we move towards a physical internet where there’s no clicking and there’s no interface and the computer’s just telling you what it thinks you’re looking at, translating, you know, an image of a billboard to the name of the rock star who’s on that billboard, or translating the list of ingredients on a can of soup to the source outlets where it thinks that, those ingredients came from. When you have that kind of automated mediation, the question of trust definitely arises.

And we haven’t seen the Clay Shirkys or the Larry Lessigs of the world start to talk about this yet.  Although I suspect that in the next four or five years that the zero click interface will become the primary interface, that we’ll have…we’ll come to assume that what we see with the extra enhanced data we get projected onto our view is the truth. Yet, at the same time, there is just no structure or mechanism even being considered for a democratic ownership of it.”

Augmented Reality will emerge through sensor fusion techniques & cooperating cloud services

In 2010, sensor fusion techniques, computer vision technology in conjunction with GPS and compass data will create data linking that can enable the kind of augmented reality that has been the stuff of imagination for nearly four decades (see Jarrell Pair’s post).

Putting stuff in the world in 3D is of course key to the original vision of augmented reality, and one of its biggest challenges.  Augmented reality is going to be implicated in a real time mapping of the world at an unprecedented scale and granularity.  We have barely an inkling of the implications of this now.

Anselm and Paige have been working in the heart of the social cartography movement for nearly a decade.  The vision and experience of this community is vital to understanding how augmented reality and the world as a physical platform can evolve into something that benefits people and allows them “to have a better understanding of the opportunities around them.”

We have been hacking maps for millenia –  “from conceptual story mapping, to colloquial mapping in European development and the cartographic renaissance created by the global voyages and rediscovery of Ptolemy’s maps” (Andrew Turner).  And, recently, initiatives on a public-provided GIS, like OpenGeo, have led the way toward more open, interoperable, geospatial data.

Mapping takes on a new an crucial role to augmented reality.  Nokia’s ImageSpace is beginning to do what many thought Microsoft would do with photosynth two years ago.

And, if we see these kind of projects developed into a “photo-based positioning systems” -  “3d models of the environment to cover every possible angle, and then software that can work out in reverse based on a picture precisely where you are and where your facing” (Thomas Wrobel), we would find augmented reality leap forward over night.

It is time to take very seriously the vast opportunities and potential pitfalls of an augmented world.

“when you are mediating the translation layer between the image and the data, then there is an opportunity for you to control it, and that opportunity is hard to resist.  It is hard to choose not to own that opportunity. It is an advertising opportunity. It is a revenue opportunity. It is a chance to send a message and a tone.

I know that Google and companies like that are keenly aware of the kinds of roles they don’t want to hold, but it is sometimes seductive to think about them. And I am afraid that we, as a community, need to assert an ownership, kind of a commons, over how computers will translate what they see to information that we perceive.”

There are some initiatives emerging.  Tonchidot (who closed on $4 million of VC for augmented reality last December) has helped create the AR Commons in Japan.  CFO of Tonchidot, Ken Inoue explained in an interview with me in September 2009.

“We feel that public data, such as landmarks, government facilities, and public transport should be shared. We see an AR world where people can readily and easily access information by just seeing – quick, easy, and efficient.  And because of this ease and intuitiveness, children, the elderly and handicapped will surely benefit.  AR could help create a safer society.  Warnings, alerts, and safety information could save lives and avoid disasters.  These are what we, and AR Commons would like to tackle in the not so distant future.”

But the task of building a social commons for the physical world platform has only just begun.

Interview with Anselm Hook

photo from Anselm’s Flickr stream here

Tish Shute: We first met last year at Wherecamp. The start of 2009 was I think the “OMG finally” moment for augmented reality and in less than a year AR, at least in proto forms, AR is breaking into the mainstream now! You are one of the founding visionaries/philosophers/hackers of the geo web and you have been thinking about geo web and AR for a long time – all the way back to the legendary Head Map Manifesto, and before.  Mostly recently you led the way in the very successful ARDevCamp in Mountain View. Could you start by telling me a little bit about the history of your pioneering work with geolocated data?

Anselm Hook: I am a long time Geo fanatic. I’m really interested in social cartography and what some people call public-provided GIS, that’s some language that people use. Anyway, my personal interest, when I talk to people who are non-technical (and it’s been a long term interest in the way I phrase it) is that I want to help people see through walls. So, the goal is very simple. I want people to have a better understanding of opportunities around them, the landscape around them. I always get frustrated when people make bad decisions because of a lack of information, especially when it’s related to their community and related to their environment. But, plainly put, I really just want “to help people see through walls”. It’s a very simple goal.

Tish Shute: I know you worked on Platial, which is really one of my favorite social mapping applications. It really broke new ground. What was the history of that? How did you get involved with Platial?

Anselm Hook: That’s an interesting question. It actually started at around 2000 when I saw Bruce Sterling talk. I had been writing video games for many years, and I was quite good at it, and I enjoyed it. But, the reasons I was doing it diverged from why the industry was doing it. I was making video games because I like to make shared spaces for my friends to play in and to share experience. I really enjoyed making shared environments. I worked on BBS’s and my friends and I were always making these collaborative shared environments.

Once the video game industry kind of started to take off, I started to do high performance, 3D interactive video games and making compelling shared spaces, and it was a lot of fun. But, the frustration for me was that there was a huge industry growing around it and became very commercial. Although it paid well, it started to diverge from my values which were more centered around community environments, and shared understanding.

Tish Shute: Yes very rapidly, the big games kind of devolved from the social aspects and became more and more into single player really, didn’t they?

Anselm Hook: It was the way, actually, because even though often you were in a many player world, you weren’t collaborating, everything else became just a target.  I liked the idea of deep collaboration that calls the kind of playful space you see in IRC, or in the real world, where people are solving real world problems.

And I grew up in the Rockies, and I was always had a lot of access to the outside. So, I saw shared spaces and collaboration as a way to protect our environment. [ To step back ] I think people used different metrics for measuring their choices in the world and many people have a value system centered around minimization of harm: making sure that the people are not hurt. But, my value system is different. I personally believe that protecting the planet is more important: to maximize biodiversity. I feel like protecting people around me comes from protecting the ecosystems they live in.

Tish Shute: That’s interesting, isn’t it, because the history of Keyhole was really that, wasn’t it.  Keyhole later became Google Earth, but I mean it began out of a project to look at what was going on in the ecosystem over Africa at that time, didn’t it?

Anselm Hook: Yes, in fact many people’s projects are stemming from an environmental concern. Mikel Maron’s works for example – he’s doing Map Kiberia, and he also worked on OpenStreetMaps.

Tish Shute: Map Kiberia – that is the new project?

Anselm Hook: Oh, yes his project is called Map Kiberia. He’s mapping a city in Africa.
[For more see Map Kiberia’s YouTube Channel – photo below from ricajimarie ]

Tish Shute: Right, great!

Anselm Hook: When I started to look at GIS and mapping I started to meet people who had a very similar background. What happened to me is I kind of stepped away from games around the year 2000. I’d seen a talk by Bruce Sterling at an event called PlaNetwork. And that event was, for me, a turning point where I decided to focus full time on exactly what I cared about instead of doing things that were kind of similar to what I cared about. So, his influences is a pretty significant one to me at that exact moment.

[For more see viridiandesign.org – seems that it is time for a “Neo-Viridian,” revival.]

Tish Shute: It’s interesting because now your paths are crossing again with augmented reality. You are on the same wavelength again.

Anselm Hook: It’s funny, actually, I’ve had a couple of brief overlaps in that way.  Well, so in 2000 I went to see this talk and I did a small project called — well, I called it SpinnyGlobe. What I did is I mapped protests from a number of websites onto a globe to show the level of community opposition to the pending war in Iraq. It was the first time there had been a protest before a war. So, it was very interesting to me. [ See http://hook.org/headmap ]

Tish Shute: That’s really fascinating. Do you have any pictures of that you could send me?

photo from anselm’s flickrstream

Tish Shute: Yes, I’ll definitely look SpinnyGlobe up. It sounds very interesting.  One of the aspects of your work on geo-located data projects like this and Platial is that you really started to develop this idea of a culture of place, about how people make place. This was the wake up call to me regarding the power of networks combined with geo-data.

We are hoping to extend this idea into augmented reality with the an open distributed platform for AR so that we can collaboratively map our worlds from the perspective of who we are, where we are, and what we are doing.  I know you’ve just done some work recently in augmented reality.  I know you put the code up already.

By the way, I love the way you take your philosophy into the way you make code – the practice of making some code, trying some things out, making it all public and publishing your findings, you know, your comments on that experience.  Perhaps you could recap sort of how you picked up recently on the state of play with augmented reality and what aspects you looked at, and what came out of that experience?

Anselm Hook: So, it’s a very simple trajectory. Coming out of the work I had done, Platial, among other projects and I started to just look at the hyper-local and I suddenly realize that even those services weren’t really speaking to living, and how to really see and solve local problems. What was missing was a sense of context.

The map doesn’t know how you’re feeling, it doesn’t know if you’re in a hurry, it doesn’t know what you want, it’s very static. Even the web maps are very static. And augmented reality for me I started to recognize as a combination of — well — it’s probably collision of many forces, many forces that we’re all a part of. We’ve also didn’t realize that the real-time web is really important, it’s part of what AR is about.

We have all started to realize that the context is important. You know, your personal disposition, your needs, if you want to be interrupted or not. That is the kind of thing that the ubiquitous computing crowd has talked about. We started to recognize that there are sensors everywhere, and the ambient sensing communities talked about that. So what is funny for me about augmented reality is I started realizing it is just a collision of many other trends into something bigger.

Everything else we thought was a separate thing is actually just part of this thing. Even things like Google Maps or mapping systems we think are so great are really just kind of almost an aspect of a hyper-local view. You actually don’t really care what is happening 10 blocks away or 100 blocks away. If you could satisfy those same interests and needs within a single block, one block away, you would probably be really happy. You really just want to satisfy needs and interests, find ways to contribute, or get yourself fed, or whatever it is you want. And AR seemed to be the playground to really explore the human condition.

Tish Shute: Anyway, I think one of the things that has been very amazing this year is we to have the good mediating devices that, for the first time, give us compasses, GPS, and accelerometers. But one sort of missing pieces with AR at the moment is [tracking, mapping, and registration] – the kind of things colloquial mappings of the world could be of great help with.

We have seen mapping coming out of the Flickr data, e.g., the University of Washington, put the maps together from the geo-tagged Flickr photos. Now if we could have that linked up with AR, then we have the kind of mapping we need to kind of really hook the geo-data onto the world in a way that goes beyond…you know, what compass and GPS can really deliver is pretty minimal at the moment.

Anselm Hook: There is a real risk of our augmented reality world being owned by interests which are not our own. There is a real question of when you hold up that AR goggle, what are you going to see? Are you going to see corporate advertising? Are you going to see your friends’ comments or criticisms? It is going to be an Iran or a democracy, right? It is unclear.

Right now there are some disturbing trends I have noticed. I am a big fan of Google Goggles. I think it is a great project. But when you are mediating the translation layer between the image and the data, then there is an opportunity for you to control it, and that opportunity is hard to resist. It is hard to choose not to own that opportunity. It is an advertising opportunity. It is a revenue opportunity. It is a chance to send a message and a tone.

I know that Google and companies like that are keenly aware of the kinds of roles they don’t want to hold, but it is sometimes seductive to think about them. And I am afraid that we, as a community, need to assert an ownership, kind of a commons, over how computers will translate what they see to information that we perceive.

Tish Shute: Yes. And this is how we met, again, recently [over the project to create an open, distributed platform for AR using the Wave Federation Protocol]…

This is something I feel really deeply is that, you know, basically we need the physical internet to be as open as, as the, as the internet, as the end-to-end internet has been. Or more so, actually, because the end-to-end internet has seen the trend has been to walled gardens.  Basically Facebook became enormous, an enormous walled garden which, I think, was despite, our predictions about them, [walled gardens] are the social experience really on the web.  It’s very much in walled gardens still and I, and I really feel that with the physical internet, we need to make great efforts not for it not just to be a series of small pockets of privately funded walled gardens.

There needs to be some kind of communications infrastructure that keeps it open so that was when I got interested in looking at the Wave Federation Protocol because it was a real time, you know, an open real time protocol that could possibly be a basis for that. But I think the point you’ve talked to just now, the mapping of the world and who has the “goggles”, i.e., the image data, image databases, that make the world meaningful is really, that’s still a, it’s still a BIG question [i.e. who controls the view?].

When I saw ImageWiki, [I realized] that is a piece that is vital for, for augmented reality. We need to have a huge social effort to be involved in this,  linking in and creating the  physical internet, in creating the image hyperlinks that will make that meaningful.

Anselm Hook: I think that’s a great point. The search interface, the kind of Internet that we’re used to, the way we talk to the network now, is fundamentally open end to end. Yes, you can have your oligarchies inside of it, as we see with Facebook, but you can always start your own venture up and you can do a search on something, and you can find that, that website and you can join it or you can put up your own webpage and people can find it.

The translation layer, the idea of text search and the ability to discovery power and the serendipity and the openness of that discovery, it’s pretty open right now. We do have some serious boundaries of language, which is one of the reasons I was working at the Meedan.org [hybrid distributed, natural language translation] for a couple of years, trying to bridge that issue.

But here, as we move towards a physical internet where there’s no clicking and there’s no interface and the computer’s just telling you what it thinks you’re looking at, translating, you know, an image of a billboard to the name of the rock star who’s on that billboard, or translating the list of ingredients on a can of soup to the source outlets where it thinks that, those ingredients came from. When you have that kind of automated mediation, the question of trust definitely arises.

And we haven’t seen the Clay Shirkys or the Larry Lessigs of the world start to talk about this yet.  Although I suspect that in the next four or five years that the zero click interface will become the primary interface, that we’ll have…we’ll come to assume that what we see with the extra enhanced data we get projected onto our view is the truth. Yet, at the same time, there is just no structure or mechanism even being considered for a democratic ownership of it.

We have with DNS, for example, the idea that you can register the domain name and people can search for it, and find it, and go to it. There’s no such thing as an Image DNS, or an image translation to DNS right now. What does it mean when everything is just “magic”, when there’s no way for you to be a part of the conversation, where you’re just a consumer of what people tell you, or of what one company right now, tells you, is reality? That’s a real concern.

Tish Shute: This, to me is the most important question at the moment. I mean, it’s the big one and it’s the place to put energy if you love the Internet [and what it can now become] right. You’ve got to put a lot of energy into this because this [a democratized view of the physical world as a platform] won’t just happen, because there’s a lot of momentum already for it to be heavily privatized, partly because, one reason is, some of the computer vision algorithms that, say, make sense of things like the geotag photographs are not open.  I mean, for example, the beautiful maps that have been made from the University of Washington [from Flickr geotagged photo sets], that isn’t in the public domain.

Anselm Hook: Right. Tish, and in fact you’re referring to [with the maps from the Flickr photos] to ordinary maps and the fact we’ve already seen that maps lie, we’ve already, seen how much maps are reflecting a certain truth that becomes the normative truth. Google maps reflects roads, because this is roads and cars, right? Only recently have they thought about buses and walking. So the normative view that people assume is the reality, is showing off you know Starbucks, and roads, and cars, that becomes the default, those prejudices are just assumed, you know, the truth. But they’re not the truth at all.

I was talking to a friend of mine in Montreal, [Renee Sieber], and she said that their Indian portage routes are a bridge across land and water, they don’t think of a piece of land and a piece of water as being different things, they think of them as one thing: a route. It’s already a different kind of language we can’t even reflect it.

So not only is there this kind of formal, anthropological lie, in a sense, but there’s this way that we deceive ourselves because of our own prejudices.

Tish Shute: Yes I agree and that’s why I think when I saw some of the things you had written on the ImageWiki point clearly to the need to create a social commons. We need a social commons for the real-time physical internet, we need it for the image hyperlinks that make sense of that.

And it’s a complicated thing in a sense, though, because we don’t actually have a good distributed infrastructure for AR yet, and I found exploring AR Wave, that at last we have the suggestion of an open, federated protocol for real-time communication – the wave federation protocol. [Real time communications is a very important part of AR].  It isn’t an actuality yet where lots of people are able to use it, set up their own servers, and there’s not a standard all the way through  [there is not a standard for how data is sent between the client and the server].

But Wave Federation Protocol does make possible truly distributed social AR.  I started thinking when I saw ImageWiki that to bring ImageWiki together with the social collaborative power of distributed AR.  This really would be the basis of creating a social commons for augmented reality and the physical world as a platform – the start of a bottom up with deep social collaboration on how we create augmented reality colloquial maps that can inform a hyper-local of the world.

Anselm Hook: Yes. When Paige Saez, John Wiseman, and myself, and a few other folks… You know, Benjamin Foote, Marlin Pohlmann, and a couple other people started to play with this, we quickly found that… We started to realize, “Oh, this kind of thing will be at least as popular as IRC. There will be at least as many people doing this as chatting in little virtual spaces. There’ll be at least as many people decorating the world with augmented reality markup, and maybe using the real world as a kind of barcode for translating what you’re looking at into an artifact, a digital artifact.

And that the size of that space was going to be huge, basically. Maybe not quite as commodifiable as Twitter, but certainly very energetic.

Many of the projects we did were just kind of looking at these kinds of issues sort of from an artistic, technical, and political point of view. We weren’t so much posing complete solutions, but simply using a praxis to explore the idea with an implementation, as a foundation for this discussion. So I think we sort of opened that can of worms for sure.

Tish Shute: Did you actually set up ImageWiki to be working as a location based app yet?

Anselm Hook: It is a location based app. It collects your longitude, latitude, and the image and stores it. And then it uses that as a way to translate that image to anything else. It could be a piece of text or a URL.

Tish Shute: So there is a smartphone app, but you didn’t take it as far as an AR app yet?

Anselm Hook: No. We didn’t do a heads-up view. There are apps on the iPhone store that do that, but they don’t do the brute force image recognition that we were using. We used a third party off the shelf algorithm that we found on Wikipedia and downloaded the source code, and threw it on the server. And John Wiseman in LA wrote the scalable database backend so that we could scale the actual…

Tish Shute: So how did you set the iphone app up to work?

Anselm Hook: The iPhone side was very simple. You take a picture of something and it tells you what it is. That is all it did. We would take the location, but the client side, the iPhone side, just rendered, returned to you…It said, “Someone said that this picture of a barking dog is an advertisement for a local band.”

Tish Shute: Right. So basically it was a geo-tagged?

Anslem Hook: Yes. We are just collecting the geo information. Actually, there were a whole lot of technical challenges. The whole idea of ImageWiki is actually kind of beyond our technical ability for a small team like us. It really does take a team, a group like Google, to do this kind of thing in a scalable way.

Tish Shute: Why is that?

Anslem Hook: There are two sides. There is the curating the images. I think that is the job of groups like us – open source groups who can curate images that are owned by the community. And then the searching side, the algorithm side, where you are actually matching the fingerprint of one image to images in your database, that takes a much more…that is much more industrial.  We get both sides, ours is not a scalable solution. It is mostly…proving that it could be done was important.

Tish Shute: In terms of hooking Imagewiki up to the collaborative possibilities of AR Wave wouldn’t federation pose some interesting possibilities for scaling search algorithms and all that?

Anselm Hook: Yes. And what is funny also, incidentally, is that, nevertheless, we did look for some financial support for it, but we couldn’t…we just didn’t find the investors to scale it. Now, other companies like SnapTell took a shot at it. And they have an app in the iPhone store where you can point at a beer bottle and get back the name of the beer bottle.

The classic example everyone uses is a book. Amazon has all the image jackets of all their books. You can point SnapTell at almost any book and get back links to buy that at Amazon, the price of the book, and user comments on the book. So they are treating Amazon as the canonical voice of the book, for better or worse. That is the state of the art so far, up until Google Goggles came out a little while ago, which actually blows it out of the water. But, that is where we are now.

Tish Shute: Right. But the point you raise about how when something like Amazon comes canonical of what is book, right, this is the whole point, isn’t it?

Anselm Hook: Is Amazon truth? It’s not bad. Jeff Bezos seems like a nice guy, but, you know.

Tish Shute: And this is the point of having these open infrastructures for this.  And this should be obvious in a way, but it comes back to the thing about what made the Internet great was the fact that even though as you note, you get an oligarchy like Facebook, but people always could just go off and do something else, right? Because the fundamental infrastructure was basically open and designed to be available for everyone. And many people have championed that and fought for it hard [to maintain this openness] haven’t they? They have devoted their lives to keeping it that way, even if the oligarchies have done their thing.

Anselm Hook: Yes. There are really some things that are underneath all of this that haven’t been solved yet.

One is that the trust in social networks has not been built yet, so we can’t do peer based recommendations very well. We can’t filter noise by peers. Twitter kind of is moving there, but I don’t just want to listen to my Twitter friends. I want to listen to my friends of friends. If I am getting truth from somebody, I want to get that truth from people my friends say that they trust.

Then the second problem is that there is a search business. My friend Ed Bice, who owns Meedan, always says that a search itself, a search request, is an opportunity to make…is a publishing moment. It is an opportunity to say what you think. In the real world, if you are just hanging out with humans and you look somewhere, other people might look at your gaze and they might look at what you are looking at. Your gaze itself is a public act.

Gaze is a soft act, but it is one that is visible. With Google, the gaze of four billion people is invisible. We don’t what people are looking at, there is no opportunity to participate. Let me give you a real example.  I have taken a image of something of the bust of figure or a statue.  Why can’t the museum in Cairo look at my request and tell me oh yeah that is Tutankhamen, or that is Nefertiti right? Why can’t they have a chance to participate in the search and respond to me?

Right now the the only person that responds is Google when I do a search. We need to invert the search pyramid and open up search, so that search is a democratic act, so that you can publicly permission your searches so that other people can respond and so that people can reach out to you, not just you having to do a dialogue.

The common example of this.. and we see this everywhere: I am looking for a slice of pizza right, now I am hungry I want some pizza. I have to ask Google, look find twelve websites, call twelve phone numbers, and talk to each of the twelve stores, and ask them are they open late, is the food organic, is the food in any good, do my friends like it.

Whereas what I should be able to do is just say it’s a search moment and I am interested in pizza. If those pizza places my criteria like you know my friend’s like them and they are organic, they are open, then that pizza place can call me. I have the money why should I do the search? So the whole business of search, the whole structure of search is predicated around a revenue model, but its a really short-sighted revenue model, its not a brokerage.

Search isn’t search, search is hand waving.  These should be moments for us to have a discourse. So problem we are seeing in AR with communication of the right information is actually underneath AR, at the level of the whole infrastructure.

Search needs to be inverted, trust filters need to be built. We need to democratically own our data institutions.  We don’t right now.  That will be more of a concern, especially with AR.

Tish Shute: Yes, especially with AR, which is this why got all excited about federation.  Do you think federation has the potential, an opportunity to create [the new infrastructure you describe?]

Anselm Hook: Absolutely,  its absolutely what we must do. It is much harder to do. It is absolutely critical.

Tish Shute: And why is it much harder to do? Could you explain that?

Anselm Hook: Well, it’s very easy for a bunch of hackers to build a service that you log into and fetch some data, it’s a single thing. They don’t have to talk anybody, they can use their own protocols, they can hack it, it’s a big black box, behind the scenes. There’s running back and forth in a giant Chinese room delivering manuscripts and scrolls to you. Whatever is behind the black box, you don’t care, it just works.  But when you federate, you need to actually publish and have standards, and then you’re talk about semantic, everyone starts getting really excited and wave some hands. It becomes a disaster. It’s, at least, another power order, more difficult than DIY, build it yourself.

Tish Shute: So, in terms of what Google Wave have done with their approach to federation, what do you think have been their achievements and what do you think is their obstacles? What do you think are the failings of the Wave? Because it’s the first big public major player backed approach to something federated, isn’t it? In real time.

Anselm Hook: Yes. I think the most important non-federated service on the planet today is Twitter.  Identi.ca it’s not getting any traction with respect to Twitter. [ Even though ] Identi.ca is a federated version of Twitter and is very good. [ Identica is now Status.net ] . So, we see already there that small players aren’t being competitive. Then look at other services like IRC. IRC is the secret backbone of the Net. All the open source projects, all the teams, all the people that work on opensource projects are all on IRC. It’s the only way they get anything done.

With Google Wave, and the protocols underneath Google Wave, we see an attempt to build a similar kind of real time, but distributed protocol. I think it’s the right direction. I think, people should pick up the offering and make their own servers. I think that protocol is really great, I think the fact that is compressed, its high performance, it is small, real-time of blobs of data flying around, all exactly the way it should be done. It is getting close to this kind of rewrite of the Internet that people keep talking about, because, you know, the net protocols are so bad, it is starting to treat the idea of intermittent exchanges being more transitory, volatile, and not heavy.

….to be continued.  Part 2 coming soon!