Social Augmented Experiences leveraging geoawareness and human and machine intelligence to create real time information brokerages, combined with an augmented reality view, can create a new opportunities to reimagine our relationships with each other and our environment.

This Summer, I have been on a blogging hiatus, which has meant I haven’t been sharing as frequently and, unfortunately, the second half of two conversations I had earlier this year, both of which have much influence my thinking on social augmented reality, have languished in private mode -  part 2 of my talk with Bruce Sterling (see Interview with Bruce Sterling, Part I: At the 9am of the Augmented Reality Industry, are2010, and part 2 of my conversation with Anselm Hook - Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook, Part 1. Time to get caught up on some blogging!  The lightly edited transcript of Part 2 of my conversation with Bruce Sterling is posted in full below.

Bruce Sterling has been blogging all the key developments in augmented reality (amongst other topics of interest!) on his Wired Blog, and he brought my attention to Boskoi the Ushahidi based app for Android phones, augmented foraging pictured in use above – for more pics see fightthegooglejugend.

Augmented Reality and Real Time Information Brokerages

Picture above is the path the “nomads” took through the Westhaven cryptoforest with Pieter Bol,co-auteur of the book Biological Globalisation and Theun Karelse of Urban Edibles Amsterdam “who presented his ‘augmented foraging’ app Boskoi.“  For more see, The Cryptoforests of Utrecht and, Westraven Psychogeography, 6 June 2010. Note: Cryptoforests: 1) Urban forests hidden from view 2) Urban fallows that might or might not be considered as forests 3) Gardens gone wild)

My interest in the Ushahidi family of ideas was already fired up by a conversation with Anselm Hook early this year.  We discussed a number of Ushahidi related projects, Swift, Crisis Filter and Anselm’s project Angel, Augmented Reality, and my own keen interest in an open, real time, distributed platform for augmented reality – ARWave.

The Ushahidi platform and the related project Swift has pioneered the real time brokerage of information with people acting in curatorial roles or matchmaking roles coevolving with machine assisted matching to connect wants to haves.  Ushahidi uses multiple gateways including SMS, and Twitter.  But the Ushahidi family of ideas is extremely interesting when combined with augmented reality and suggests many new possibilities for social augmented experiences, as Anselm pointed out, for human to human communications, human to civilization communication, and human to environment communications (e.g., perhaps, how machine intelligence can help bridge the difference in time scale that Kate Hartman explores in her, Research for Glacier-Human Communication Techniques).

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. It is now an open platform with a wide range of applications and growing developer community.  See What is the Ushahidi Platform? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Swift - a project that emerged from the Ushahidi dev community, is a human sensor/real-time brokerage for dealing with emergencies, enabling the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds.

Boskoi – augmented foraging is the first app,  I have seen, to begin linking Ushahidi with augmented reality – although I don’t think there is a full augmented view for Boskoi developed yet?

“The whole point of AR is to see things from a different point of view…”

Click to enlarge poster from upcoming ARWave demo at Software Freedom Day – for more see below

I am often asked what augmented reality brings to the table with respect to location based social networking, which is on the verge of going mainstream in smart phone apps like Four Square. While the first part to my answer is usually to explain what is unique to augmented reality.

As Bo Begole notes, the full vision of AR requires machine perception technologies to detect the identity and physical configuration of objects relative to each other to accurately project information alongside/overlaid with a physical object (see this post on the PARC Blog by Bo Begole on the difference between AR and ubiquitous computing – thank you Rouli for bringing my attention to this).

But it is only in recent months that we have begun to see the kind of tools that make this possible become freely available to developers – see my interview with Jay Wright of Qualcomm here.   Also see this post on Bundler: Structure from Motion for Unordered Image Collections an open source system that allows the creation of 3D point clouds from unordered image collections, e.g. internet image collections.  We now have many tools available to move mobile augmented reality beyond the recent crop of apps relying on GPS and compass alone for positioning into a new era of vision assisted AR apps that will increasingly bring the full vision of AR into our daily lives.

Further, the integration of visual search applications like Google Goggles and Kooaba which can detect the identity of particular objects will add another vital tool to machine perception technologies enabling AR “checkins” on potentially anything in the physical world around us, and more fuel to the Gamepocalypse (e.g. it would be easy to turn every trash can in the city into a basketball hoop as we discussed at the ARNY meetup last month).  And soon, the Pandora’s Box of  facial recognition (Google Goggles have the capability though it is not released to the public yet) will open up.

Jesse Schell described the importance of AR in a nutshell in his keynote for 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?”

But how AR matures as a social experience will be the key to Jesse’s suggestion that:

“Augmented Reality will be one of the things that fundamentally define the 21st century”

There are many interesting forms of AR that are not reliant on a tight registration between media and physical objects – several are put forward by Bruce in the convo below.  And, it is likely we will see AR eyewear as an occasional useful accessory to a smart phone long before we have the sexy, affordable augmented reality eyewear worn that we wear throughout the day.   These speech to text glasses would be a very useful and viable accessory to a smart phone right now for the hearing impaired.

For the moment, as Bruce notes, some of the most interesting and useful augmented experiences to date have not been in the cell phone space:

“There are other aspects of AR besides the cell phone space. There’s Total Immersion’s big display screens. There’s the web-based fiduciary stuff. And there’s projection mapping. And then there’s experience design just for people who need their reality augmented for whatever personal or social reason.”

On of my favorite social AR experiences is this SMS Slingshot.

But I have been excited for a long while about the intersection of mobile social augmented reality, real time communications, and ubiquitous computing see Total Immersion and the “Transfigured City:” Shared Augmented Realities, the “Web Squared Era,” and Google Wave.  And I have described in many places why I think real time, open, distributed communications for AR are so important to developing social augmented experiences – see the slides for my talk at Augmented Reality Event here, here and here for starters.

ARWave at Software Freedom Day 2010, September 18th 2010

Thomas Wrobel and Bertine van Hovell will demo the first ARWave Android client at Software Freedom Day this weekend!

A number of people have asked me, (including Bruce), What will be the future of ARWave now that Google Wave is no longer a stand alone application?  Yes, the recently announced release of Wave in a Box (see here and here) is very exciting for the ARWave team.

The ARWave Android client is the first open AR client built on an open, real time, distributed platform -  based on a server that anyone can download and set up, currently the “FedOne” server but Wave in a Box, hopefully, will be even easier to deploy.  Wave in a Box seems perfect for ARWave’s needs – for more see the WiaB Google Group here.  And for more information on the ARWave client -  click to enlarge the poster below, see the ARWave concept video here, and for more, and how to get involved see arwave.org.   Props to Thomas Wrobel and Bertine van Hovell (posters below from demo for Software Freedom Day), Mark Evin, Davide Carnovale, and Markus Strickler, for all their hard and brilliant work on ARWave.  Also to JCPT the open Android 3D engine that has saved a lot of work!

click to enlarge slide

Social Augmented Experiences that Matter

My ideas on the future of social augmented experience have been deeply informed by the the conversations I had with Bruce Sterling and Anselm Hook this year.

Bruce Sterling notes in the conversation below, location based social apps like, Four Square, are interesting because they are not “urban geography like Google’s satellite stare from above,” but rather “groups of citizens are doing portraits of their own region.” Augmented Reality, with its of lauded power to make the invisible visible is, of course, is the ideal tool for “citizen portraits”  to the next level.  Cory Doctorow described to me three years ago (see here) an “inverse surveillance society,” enabled by an augmented view  – “where all the data from the positional and temporal characteristics of all the objects that we own were in aggregate visible and available so that we can mix and match them remix them understand them and have more agency in the world.”

It is very cool to go back to reread this conversation now that it is becoming possible to build the kinds of apps Cory described, and Bruce Sterling envisioned in Shaping Things (see Amazon.org  page 111).

click to enlarge

My  conversation with Bruce earlier this summer (see below) took place on the heels of are2010 – Augmented Reality Event.   See the video of Bruce’s keynote, “Bake a BigPie,” here,  and the final keynote, “Seeing,” by Jesse Schell (see video here) in which Jesse riffed on AR and the man with the X-ray eyes.  Both these awesome talks are still fresh in my mind.  Bruce noted how we should pay attention to augmentations for people and situations that could really use some augmentation… and not get too fixated on the coming of AR Goggles.  He elaborated on this in our conversation (again full transcript below):

“Well, it’s a matter of deciding whose reality it is that you’re trying to augment. I’m not trying to be a bleeding heart about it, but obviously there are people in our society right now with reality that could really use some augmentation. They are mostly disadvantaged people. They are vision impaired, or maybe they have autism. They might be senile and just can’t remember where they put their shoes. These are people who could really use some help, right?”

So, start with people who really need sensory or cognitive help. Before you turn our geeks into Superman, why don’t you try turning some people who are harmed into more functional individuals? Then you’ll be able to learn how to do that. Then maybe you can ramp it up to these Nietzschian heights of the superb Man With the X-ray Eyes. Whatever.”

What will make AR interesting and useful long before and long after we see the full vision of AR eyewear manifest is its social aspects.  Bruce points out:

“My argument would be that if you want people to be more sensitive toward certain, say, issues and problems, it’s better to find the people who are already sensitive to those issues and problems, and give them a bigger stake in your augmentation system.”

“Say that I am really worried about public health. Well, if I have a lot of nurses that are using my system, people who are aware of my issues, then I could be walking around and I’ll see a lot more tags saying, “This is where he got food poisoning!” “In this shooting gallery, many people have caught AIDS!” Or, you know, “Tuberculosis has been spotted over here in this building.”

At that point, I could simply share their knowledge and get some social intelligence. As opposed to trying to amp the basements of my little hacker-mind and drag stuff up that’s escaped my conscious attention.”

Finding new ways to broker information – bring together needs with haves and different participants, empowered and disempowered  is., as Anselm discussed with me, one way to change our view of human to human, human to environment and human to civilization communication (particularly in light of this  “sobering account of how open data is used against the poor in Bangalore” that as @timoreilly noted recently OpenData Empowering the Empowered).

The key idea in a crisis filter, Anselm noted,  was to break up the participants into different kinds, to connects wants with haves:

“There are people who are in  situation.  We call them citizens.  And then there are reporters, people who report situations back to Twitter.  And then there are curators, people that canvas Twitter looking for important Tweets.  And then there are first responders, people who take the curating collection of responses and then act on them.”

This kind of brokerage between people acting in a curatorial role or matchmaking role with each other can be extended into and coevolve with machine assisted matching as Anselm explains.

It is also a vital part of creating social augmented experiences that matter.

One of Anselm Hook’s projects, which is called Angel is the the most radical expression of connecting wants with haves in that the idea is that “you have a situation, you broadcast that situation, and help magically appears.  You don’t even sign up for a service.  You just get help …

As Anselm explains this is the same idea of a brokerage for dealing with emergencies, but applied to the long tail of crisis response.  As Anselm describes it:

“I am interested in personal crisis.  ‘I lost my cat.  Help.  I can’t find where my kid is.  I am out of gas.  I have a flat tire.  My house is on fire.  My aunt is trapped in the bedroom.’  The kind of personal crisis that is just as important, but is not enough to get a national movement to help you…

I will publish this conversation with Anselm in full in an upcoming post.

Zorop – an ARG for World Peace

If you want to be part of a really exciting experiment to reimagine our relationships with each other and can be in San Jose this weekend, I highly recommend exploring this “rabbit hole”.

Thank you Gene Becker, Lightning Laboratories and Ubistudio for sending me this invite:

“Ken Eklund (@writerguygames) is developing a wonderful game for the 01SJ Biennial called ZOROP, aimed at creating World Peace(!). Some of you might know Ken from his work on the amazing ARGs EVOKE and World Without Oil. Anyway Ken, along with his collaborator Annette Mees, are furiously working to get ZOROP ready to go for the Sept 17th premiere at 01SJ.

Are you intrigued? I thought so, and here are your next steps down the rabbit hole:

> Check out http://zorop.org to learn about the game

> Follow @ZoropPrime to watch it unfold: http://twitter.com/zoropprime

> ‘Like’ ZOROP on FB for a different view: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Zorop/141140772593618

> Become one with the game; consider volunteering as a Zoropathian: curious@zorop.org

> Head down to San Jose on the 17th, play the game, and ride the ZOROP Mexican Party Bus. Seriously.”

Interview with Bruce Sterling

Click on image above to see video clip from from brucesflickr

[Note the first part of this interview is here and I broke in anticipation of Part 2 just as I started experimenting with an idea Joshua Kauffman – an advisor and entrepreneur working on design in the public sphere gave me for an interview technique – the All Souls College one-word question interview.  Although apparently they recently scrapped it and I am not very good to sticking to a single word!]

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…

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

Tish Shute: Yes.

Bruce Sterling: It’s not true of 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 is “Augmented Japanese Reality.” It’s hard to imagine a Layar interface going gangbusters at Tokyo. Whereas the TonchiDot interface, which is so clearly influenced by Anime and cartoon graphics…. Maybe it could find some niche of hipsters in Amsterdam hash bars…

Stuff that’s socially generated by people on the ground, as with Foursquare and Gowalla, is bound to take on a regional influence. Right? It’s like the New York hipsters who were early adopters of Foursquare. They’re not mapping New York! They’re mapping Hipster New York.

It’s all about Williamsburg and places where 24-year-olds go to drink… They found a demographic niche there. These guys are building the service for them. They’re people who are willing to work for Foursquare for free, because they want to wear the little king hat.

Tish Shute: I got the far far away badge ‘cos I live on the Upper West Side!

Bruce Sterling: But that’s not urban geography, right? I mean, that’s not like Google’s satellite stare from above. That’s a group of citizens doing a portrait of their own region. You’re going to see interesting things happen because, of course, people who use Foursquare elsewhere are going to check into New York, and they’re going to look at the “New York Foursquare.” They’re going to be aliens who interact with Foursquare people in New York and annotate what they’re seeing.

Tish Shute: Oh! Yes. Good point.

Bruce Sterling: That Foursquare community has a certain émigré soul. It’s different from the normal émigré soul of simple tourists on New York. So you’re friend there is right about the territorialization.

Tish Shute: Yes, Joshua Kauffman is a smart guy! Yes I am interested to see what interesting kinds of deterritorializations proximity based social networks and the hyperlocal view of augmented reality might bring, not just the new territorializations.

Bruce Sterling: It’s not the intense kind of territorialization, like gangs putting down graffiti markers and beating people up. It’s an inherent regional character that comes with using peer production to build your database.

Tish Shute: We were discussing whether AR could break down the walls between people – people who share the same physical space but actually inhabit different territories even if they are sitting on the table next to you.

Bruce Sterling: You know, I just wrote an article for my Italian magazine column. I think I mentioned this to you – a report about ARE 2010. I titled it, “Chicks Dig Augmented Reality.”

Tish Shute: [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: There is a very heavy social element to AR, and a phone based element. So the question is: Why would a woman wear a fiducial marker? Like our Metaio speaker at ARE2010 who had a fiducial marker on her lapel pin.

Tish Shute: Right. Lisa!

Bruce Sterling: Why would a woman go out in public with her Facebook profile on her body?

Tish Shute: Well I can think of some reasons…

Bruce Sterling: So that men will approach her, of course.

Tish Shute: Yes the core of all successful social networks is always a form of dating app.

Bruce Sterling: You do it a social icebreaker. It’s like: I’m a woman, I’m sitting here alone, and you can sort of glide by and, you know, take a snap of me. Then you retreat and have a beer with your friends and you work up the courage, and then you come and say, “So! Susan! I understand you like bicycling! And, boy, me too!” Right?

Tish Shute: There are all kinds of social barriers between people in cities that AR might be helpful in breaking down. An extreme example is the dilemma you actually quite often face as a New Yorker as you walk around a city. There are people asleep on the pavement and you don’t know if they’re dead or alive.

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: And you sort of like have this awful ethical dilemma of like, “Am I walking by someone I should be shaking by the shoulder, right, to wake them up so they don’t die, right?”

Bruce Sterling: Yes.

Tish Shute: You said in your keynote that we should pay attention to augmentations for people and situations that could really use some augmentation..

Bruce Sterling: Right. There actually is such an app in Britain right now. I posted about it: two Augmented Reality schemes for rubbish and hobos.

Tish Shute: Right. Yes I saw that!

Bruce Sterling: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage and hobos.” You don’t need to personally find out whether this hobo is worth your help. What you need is a good way to report the hobo to a hobo check-up service. They come in, and they look on their own database or supply a database to you, or a facial recognition unit, whatever. The service says: “Oh, well. That’s Fred. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. He always sleeps in that alley. Let him be.”

The same goes for the rubbish — although I don’t want to compare rubbish to hobos. In fact, people do go out with their AR kits and take pictures of abandoned garbage bags and broken glass. They upload them with geolocated tags for the local garbage guys. Guys who are sitting around doing pretty much nothing because they don’t know where the rubbish is.

And they will come out and get the rubbish! I mean, they just deputize guys to go out and follow these alerts. Right?

But nobody predicted — least of all me — that you were going to have a high-tech Augmented Reality system that consisted of removing rubbish and derelicts. Right? But rubbish and derelicts always go profoundly under-reported. It’s just hard to get people’s attention.

But it’s very easy to set up a system so that, if you get ten reports on the same piece of rubbish, that’s going to work its way to the top of the stack. That’s why I was trying to get AR people away from the romance of the hottest app for the shiniest machine. More toward a design stance that’s more user-centric.

Where are the actual problems about stuff that we perceive? Stuff we can’t do anything about? Or people whose mechanisms of perceptions are harmed. They could be doing good work, being more participative, if they didn’t, basically, walk around without their glasses on.

Tish Shute: Well this leads well into the second word, Joshua suggested was interesting spring board – sensitivity.

On the one hand we can do these things for people who maybe need the augmentation because they have difficulty with one or another sense, e.g., their eyes are not functioning, or their ears are not functioning. But on the other hand, we can’t cross the social bridge to communicate with people who are temporarily disempowered in relation to the rest of society e.g. hobos and people who sleep on the streets of New York City.  And even though Augmented Reality could potentially be helpful it can even be more disempowering to the already disempowered.

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: But re “sensitivity” – does augmentation increase or decrease our sensitivity? This is a problem that Will Wright brought up [see video of Will Wright’s keynote at are2010], e.g, the problem of parking HUDs getting in the way of your intuitive parallel parking skills. The Lexus that takes driving control from you when you look back, ‘cos it knows that you’re looking at the road, and it starts to brake. Right?

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: The fact that the problem with technology is that it makes us less sensitive, right, augmentations sometimes get in our way?

Bruce Sterling: I suppose that’s true. But I’ve heard that said about practically every medium. Especially television.

Everybody wants to blame machinery for their lack of morality. It’s hard to top something like the Kitty Genovese killing in New York. This sort of legendary New York horror story from the 1960s. A woman is stabbed to death in public, no one does anything.

Tish Shute: Right.

Bruce Sterling: I don’t think that our media is making us any less humane or more callous.

Tish Shute: All right. Oh no! I see what you’re saying. Perhaps I misrepresented what Will was suggesting by putting it that way. The question is perhaps more how do we get the sensitivity into the technology. Human bodies are fantastically sensitive and sensory.

Bruce Sterling: Right.

Tish Shute: And we have these like sensitivities. For instance, How could augmentations of reality be like a blush ? You definitely want an interaction that’s not just this data being pushed at you. But what is the data that counts, right? Will shows a slide often of an iceberg with the tip of the iceberg which is the conscious mind.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, I see. Yeah.

Tish Shute: And underneath it is all the preconscious stuff that really counts, right? Any thoughts on that?

Bruce Sterling: I did take interest in that. Will has obviously been spending a lot of time studying cognition.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Bruce Sterling: I’m not convinced that AR has got a lot to do with that. There is certainly a trend there. There are a lot of people who want to do body hacks and brain hacks. I can imagine AR being used for that purpose, but it seems like a niche application. What is the point of our accessing even more stuff that’s outside of our consciousness?

Tish Shute: One of the things he is talking about is game dynamics, is it? The role of the imagination in play. For example, he shows the high dynamic range photos that make the world magical. Something you want to engage with playfully. This he points out increases a sense of agency because you are encouraged to engage and to play with the world.

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’m a literary guy. Italo Calvino did a lot of writing about this. He talked about the classics of literature. Why do we read the classics? Calvino said we do not read, but reread the classics. And the reason we do that is that, at first, we read a classic book and we think, “Boy, this book is really good.” Then, five years later, we read it again and we think, “Boy, this is a really good book, and it’s got so much more in it than I thought it had when I was 18.” Then we read it again at 28, and it’s like, “OK, now I really seem to understand this book, and it means something to me now that I didn’t know when I was 18 and 25.”

What you are doing through that access is learning something about yourself. So Will is arguing is what I really need is like a better augmentation. So that I can go in there and sop up the book all at once. I can grab every cultural nuance in it, instead of the stuff that’s sliding past me because I’m 18 and kind of young and hasty. Maybe I could have certain words and phrases helpfully underlined, that are like, “OK, well, this part is problematic for you.” In some sense, that’s not allowing me to be 18.

I’m never going to have the experience of my own maturation against this text, because I’ve devoured it all in one gulp.

My argument would be that if you want people to be more sensitive toward certain, say, issues and problems, it’s better to find the people who are already sensitive to those issues and problems, and give them a bigger stake in your augmentation system.

Tish Shute: Yes the social augmented experiences are going to be the most valuable.

Bruce Sterling: Say that I am really worried about public health. Well, if I have a lot of nurses that are using my system, people who are aware of my issues, then I could be walking around and I’ll see a lot more tags saying, “This is where he got food poisoning!” “In this shooting gallery, many people have caught AIDS!” Or, you know, “Tuberculosis has been spotted over here in this building.”

At that point, I could simply share their knowledge and get some social intelligence. As opposed to trying to amp the basements of my little hacker-mind and drag stuff up that’s escaped my conscious attention.

Tish Shute: Interesting that seems to bring us to another kind of repetitive theme in AR, the people tend to pigeon hole it as “merely” a visual interface. But actually, it’s the intersection, isn’t it, of social intelligence and augmentation.

Bruce Sterling: Well, it depends entirely on how you design the system. If I’ve got a military augmented reality, I would expect that to be mostly about urban fighting. It’s going to be about kicking in a door and shooting terrorists. If I pull that helmet off my head and put that on the head of an emergency worker or a cop, I’m going to get a militarized cop or a militarized emergency worker.

Tish Shute: Well the histories of the two great mass media of the twentieth century – TV and the atomic bomb were intertwined, and I suppose the evolution of ubiquitous media, augmented reality and urban warfare is already intertwined too.  So how can we encourage augmented realities to move beyond military roots that is common to much technology and into more peaceful urban realities?

Bruce Sterling: Well, it’s a matter of deciding whose reality it is that you’re trying to augment. I’m not trying to be a bleeding heart about it, but obviously there are people in our society right now with reality that could really use some augmentation. They are mostly disadvantaged people. They are vision impaired, or maybe they have autism. They might be senile and just can’t remember where they put their shoes. These are people who could really use some help, right?

So, start with people who really need sensory or cognitive help. Before you turn our geeks into Superman, why don’t you try turning some people who are harmed into more functional individuals? Then you’ll be able to learn how to do that. Then maybe you can ramp it up to these Nietzschian heights of the superb Man With the X-ray Eyes. Whatever.

Tish Shute: Did you notice that a couple of apps actually like TagWhat have apps geared towards people with disabilities – I haven’t had a chance to check it out.

Bruce Sterling: I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking at their tags.

Tish Shute: I was discussing this with Joshua who mentioned Zachary Lieberman’s Eye Writer, which is for people with locked-in syndrome. Do you know that?

Bruce Sterling: Sure. And people appreciate that because the poor guy, he’s laid up with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Now they’ve given him a way out. AR is like a spark of new hope that gives his life meaning. What’s wrong with that?

Tish Shute: Yeah. And Tim Byrne using Sixth Sense for Autism is interesting.

Bruce Sterling: Let’s consider it the other way. Let’s say this graffiti writer there, instead of him being sick and weak, let’s say he’s an athlete. So I want to make him into a super-human graffiti writer. I want him to run around graffiti-tagging the entire town before dawn. Is that a good idea? Do we need that? Super human, super taggers? What if he’s going to spray up stencils of Nietszche? I kinda wonder whether the game is worth the candle.

Tish Shute: Yes I suppose it is not a great social scenario to be always augmenting the lives of the elites! Hmm, the third single word interview question is “homophily,” and earlier were you’re saying that we’ve kinda got to accept this is very much part of AR – as how it works, because hyperlocal experiences gets created by local communities – that up to know have tended to be homophilies.

Bruce Sterling: Well, I think that’s easily handled with some design thinking. You’ve got to do some user observation and show some sympathy with the user, and to be aware that you’re designing for the user and you’re not designing for yourself.

In a field as young as this, it’s mostly geeks building cool stuff for geeks. In a lot of ways, it’s a “can you top this” contest. That’s OK, but it’s not good design to be your own client all the time. It’s like writing novels to amuse yourself, or sitting on the porch singing the blues on your own guitar with only yourself to hear.

Tish Shute: What will it take for AR mature out of this “geeks building cool stuff for geeks” phase do you think?

Bruce Sterling: It’s necessary to master some of the tools first. I think of the way the web has developed over the years. When the World Wide Web first appeared, it was just for physicists, and was all line commands and quite unstable and difficult. Then you got usability studies, and things like Ajax and so forth. It’s a very painstaking thing.

We’re not best at building interfaces for the best computer scientists. Web 2.0 was built from things like watching people cry while they were trying to fill out insurance forms. “Well, why are you so upset?”

“Well, I got to the end of the webpage, and then it said I took too long, and it cut me off and now I have to start all over!” Jesse James Garrett, right? Benefactor of mankind.

If you’re experienced, you think: “Why don’t I build a little module here, and kind of move the form over here, then I’ll periodically update it with some asynchronous Java and XTML.” And people are like, “Gee, how odd.” But that really works for real people. It comes from studying what people want to do. Whereas, the current AR approach to a problem like the insurance form would be like, “I will give you the ability to record the entire insurance form, and it will flash before your eyes!” OK great, that’s a cool hack, but I don’t really need X-Ray Eyes to fill out my insurance form. What I need is a more user friendly interface.

Tish Shute: Well it seems like we are moving into the terrain of Joshua’s fifth word “ventilation,” – if I understand it rightly – it is at least partially the antidote to territorialization because it’s this idea that a place needs air so we come out of our hermetically sealed boxes of the way we relate to a place and what kind of augmentation would bring more oxygen to that space.

There was an interesting moment in the Auggies because when Maarten Lens-FitzGerald presented the guerrilla shopping Layar and basically Mark Billinghurst and Jessie Schell who spoke first didn’t seem too impressed. They didn’t want to walk to shopping – that was what web shopping did, it saved us from walking to shop… but I felt, to me you picked up on something which might have some bearing on “ventilation” in that this AR shopping Layar was kind of squatting Prada – a favela chic AR shopping thing?

Bruce Sterling: I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting what Maarten had in mind by that. But I think Maarten sees his structure accurately as an experience thing rather than a mapping thing. I think he’s proudest of things like the Berlin Wall app on Layar, as opposed to Layars that help you go get a hamburger. It’s like…so when Layar inserts parasitic augmented shopping over other people’s real shopping? That was rather a subversive thing.

I think the key there is that his client is called “Hostage T-shirts,” right? I mean it’s actually kind of a transgressive little hippy T-shirt store that Layar can dump anywhere in the world. Layered right over, say, Versace and Prada. I don’t know what becomes of that effort. And I’m not sure about the term “ventilation,” because that’s a term of art I haven’t heard much.

Tish Shute: Maybe it’s like in a cafe. Ventilation would mean we were able to communicate with all these different categories of people that we normally would be unable to connect to, even though we might be sitting only a few feet apart.

Bruce Sterling: So it means ventilation in the bottles of our homophilies.

That’s not a personal problem for me. I commonly live in foreign cities and, you know, and spend a helluva lot of time talking to strangers at conferences. So I don’t think I’d have that particular tight little social island problem.

Tish Shute: Of the three judges at the Auggies, you seemed most enthusiastic about the Layar entry.

Bruce Sterling: It may be they’re not as familiar with the business models of locative AR as I am, and as Maarten is. It was kind of a subtle in-joke he was making about Layar’s own business model there.

Tish Shute: How do you explain that?

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, Layar’s in the business of selling software to make mapping and urban structures into ecommerce.

The ideal way to do that obviously would be to move the richest customers into the most expensive shops in the most rapid way possible. Or at least distribute them in the directions they want to go, a la Google. Whereas this app that Maarten was talking about puts big barnacles in the way that are selling punk t-shirts.

Tish Shute: Right! Right!

Bruce Sterling: The Dutch are a bit subtle in their humor. I rather imagine there’s a lot of discussion in Layar’s inner circle about exactly what they want developers to do with their platform. They’re going to have considerable political difficulty deciding who can have a Layar key and how you discipline people when they start doing weird stuff. “The Oakland Medical Marijuana layar.”

Tish Shute: Well, finding nudists is one of the top layars at the moment.

Bruce Sterling: You know, obviously so. And finding narcotics in Amsterdam, or a prostitution layer. I warned them nine months ago this was bound to happen. I’m sure they’re aware of it. I don’t think Layar wants Google’s style of cool, technocratic detachment.

Tish Shute: But that’s pretty difficult to do in current augmented reality because we don’t have all the mathematical voodoo for full on AR search yet, do we?

Bruce Sterling: Well, you can hire it out. Somebody’s going to do it, if they get interested enough. There’s Nokia-Yahoo. Nokia-Yahoo! just did a big corporate deal…involving Nokia’s mapping system and Yahoo’s localization. So the Nokia-Yahoo! mash-up is called Nooo! Or could be called Yahno. Yakia! Unfortunately ridiculous names.

Tish Shute: It’s interesting because you mentioned the spiders’ mating problem at Google. They’ve got all the pieces to make this kind of level of AR obviously right now. But they actually haven’t done it yet.

Bruce Sterling: There must be at least some discussion in Google, but the same goes for Microsoft. I’m frankly baffled by Microsoft, because it’s just full of insanely brilliant people. What the hell are they doing in there? Name one serious innovation that’s come out of their labs in five years. They make Integral Research look dynamic. It’s really kind of sad.

Tish Shute: It’s a very curious situation with AR though, because AR more than any new technology relies on these big hordes of data particularly for the mapping, right? And only the big four have the data – although we are beginning to see upstarts, Earth Mine, Simple Geo… Did you get a chance to meet Di-Ann Eisnor from Waze – real-time maps and traffic information based on the wisdom of the crowd.  Waze is a very interesting project that is a potential giant killer.

Bruce Sterling: No, I didn’t talk to them. I’ve seen people speculate that Earthmine and Apple are going to make an allegiance. I guess if you’re thinking that urban informatic mapping is a super big thing for AR, that must be true. But I’m not convinced that’s necessarily the case. People have pointed out that you can just use Google Maps, and you don’t have to walk around with a little visor. There are other aspects of AR besides the cell phone space. There’s Total Immersion’s big display screens. There’s the web-based fiduciary stuff. And there’s projection mapping. And then there’s experience design just for people who need their reality augmented for whatever personal or social reason. [dog barking]

Tish Shute: Right. Oh, I’m in the middle… My son’s come. What a good hair cut!

Bruce Sterling: Hi, there.

Tish’s Son: Hi.

Bruce Sterling: How’s it going, sir? Good to see you…

Tish’s Son: Good.

Tish: [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Yeah. Nice looking shirt. I like the back of it.

Tish Shute: That’s from the American Shaolin Temple. [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: All right. Awesome. Kung Fu geek shirt.

Tish Shute: Yup he is a bit of Kung Fu Geek. He and his dad did an iPhone app on it for Yu-Gi-Oh, for Yu-Gi-Oh scoring.

Bruce Sterling: Awesome. Plenty of Pokémon-style combat in Yu-Gi-Oh.

Tish Shute: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because you’ve talked about this aspect. That all of this, the Pokémon aspect of AR hasn’t kicked in yet. But it’s obviously a match made in heaven to some degree, isn’t it?

Bruce Sterling: One would think so, yeah. The whole little kid gaming thing. What does that have to do with Google or Bing? You don’t need a massive database for stuff like that.

Tish Shute: Yeah, you’re right. But good tracking, mapping and registration requires a lot of mapping…

Bruce Sterling: Well, our current tracking, mapping and registration requires that. Maybe there’s some other way to hack it that we don’t know about yet.

Tish Shute: That’s a very interesting point. We always have to stretch the way we think about mapping… perhaps its a real-time understanding of the location you’re in…perhaps the map is being negotiated through several social processes?

Bruce Sterling: There are maps, and then there are maps. There’s a kind of artillery map where you need to know the precise location of target spaces. And then there’s the kind of social map where I’m really looking for the IN-N-OUT Burger where my sister went last Tuesday. That’s a different system.

Tish Shute: And I think AR, at the moment, we’re getting the most out of the social maps certainly. And the other [machine perception technologies to detect the identity and physical configuration of objects relative to each other to accurately project information alongside/overlaid with a physical object] is still kind of the big dream, isn’t it?

Bruce Sterling: They say that men never ask for directions and women never read maps. Clearly, the genders have different ways of navigating the world. Who’s to say what manner of augmenting our experiences is hottest? I’m not convinced that today’s rather rigid geolocativity is really what our society wants from that particular service. Maybe what we want is something more folksy. Some useful nudge in the right direction as opposed to grids with 200 meters here and instructions to turn such-and-such.

Besides, there’s other hacks we haven’t considered. We’re very dependent on GPS, but just suppose all those satellites are blown out of the sky in a solar storm. Would we really want to give up mapping? Wouldn’t we just come up with some other nifty hack? Radio beacons, let’s just say. Atomic clock timers in towns. Or maybe just little QR codes on lampposts that give you the exact location of that lamppost, and just click the thing and have it calculate where you are.

Tish Shute: Yes the NextHope OpenAMD project had a clever way of triangulating location indoors.

Bruce Sterling: Well, GPS is there and people all want to use it. It’s got good API, so of course you want to. And the guys who are good at doing it are real geolocative freaks. But the mere fact that we can do it this way, and that you can make it pay, doesn’t mean that it’s the ultimate way to provide that service to people. It’s like saying that Egyptian hieroglyphics must be the greatest way to write, because we’ve got a lot of them and they’re hard to learn. What if somebody comes along with an alphabet? It’s going to be a little embarrassing.

Tish Shute: Yeah, that’s a very good point. Now, this is a more simple ordinary question about the event. YDreams went off the map in the Auggie voting, and walked away with The Auggies. No one doubted that that was the most…

Bruce Sterling: I don’t know. I thought those Occipital guys with the panoramic painting…. That was hairy. I would have been tempted to give them the prize myself, actually.

Tish Shute: And what did you like best about that? Because I agree. I love Occipital.

click to enlarge

Bruce Sterling: I thought it was a more technically difficult stunt than the hand registration thing. Using a hand as a 3-D cursor is hot, but not like painting a panorama in 3-D in real time. That was an impressive technical feat.

Tish Shute: And they hinted at the 2.1.1 AR, more AR version of that. What do you see coming out of that as possibilities?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I’d heard of YDreams, so I wasn’t stunned. But I’d never heard of those guys. I wonder what else the heck they’ve got in the attic.

Tish Shute: very cool stuff…

Bruce Sterling: Well, more power to them. But clearly YDreams was the popular favorite. And who couldn’t like it? It was just so AR.

Tish Shute: It was so AR and so gorgeous.

Bruce Sterling: It was pretty, actually.  Except for their ugly menu button and poor font choice.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes. You didn’t like that, did you? [laughs] But with the Occipital panorama, what do you see the next stage of that?

Bruce Sterling: Well, obviously quicker and faster. Quicker and faster and more accurate in a network. Let’s just say I’m in New York and you’re in New York and I’m calling you for help. And you say where are you? I just whirl around like this and I mail it to you on a Google Wave. And you whirl around like that, and then we compare the two panoramas and do an instant triangulation. And you say: I’m over here on this red dot of your screen.

Tish Shute: Yeah, exactly.

Bruce Sterling: We’re navigating with panoramas by having two connected panoramas and considering the difference.

Tish Shute: Yeah, very interesting…

Bruce Sterling: Not shabby, right?

Tish Shute: Not shabby at all.

Bruce Sterling: If you could do it in real time.

Tish Shute: Then the other thing I missed because I was going to meet Will was I missed the Launch Pad competition. Did you catch that?

Bruce Sterling: I didn’t see it either. I thought of another app though.

Tish Shute: Oh!

Bruce Sterling: You’ve got a panorama maker in your home office, and it just scans the office 24 hours 365 and tags anything that moves, right? OK, where’s the clipboard?  At 8:15 it was over here. Now it’s vanished. Now another object is viewed over here. So, logically, ping, you hit it with a sticky light and there it is, right?

Tish Shute: Oh, that’s cool also knowing what has changed in any environment would be a big enabler for a lot of AR visions.

Bruce Sterling: I’m sure there are many other things you could do with panoramas.

Tish Shute: My jet lag is beginning to kick in big time – so many ideas to pursue from are2010 – those panoramas are very exciting though.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, well, it’s all right. We can augment reality! I’ve got three heads and six hands!

Augmented Twitter

Presenting Augmented Twitter (see video and slides above) at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference (#140conf ) was super fun, and great video makes this a conference that you can enjoy catching up on after the fact.  Jeff Pulver does an excellent job of keeping people to a challengingly short format.  Even I managed to bring my talk in under 5 mins!

#140conf is a real time mobile social crowd, and pretty attuned to Augmented Reality.  Everyone had heard of Augmented Reality in the audience, and while most had never tried an AR app, nearly everyone used a mobile social app like, Four Square, Gowalla, or Latitude.   As Dan Harple (@dharple) – Executive Chairman, GyPSii, said in his  interesting presentation, Evolution of Location and Places,  “everyone get’s connection, and that connection in real time is the thing if we can get it, and that real time connection is innately mobile.”

ARwave aims to push mobile, social, real time connection even further with augmented reality.  As Anselm Hook puts it so brilliantly in his presentation at EComm, “AR is about publishing “verbs” – interactive, actionable, digital agents not publishing 3D models.”  I have some mega posts brewing on this topic.  Augmented Reality will need to support publishing game like behavior, and digital agents that can embody a set of actions and reactions.

This need for augmented reality to publish behavior, and to share and integrate, in one view, multiple real time data streams are just some of the reasons AR Wave uses an open federated protocol.  Federation is also particularly important for augmented reality because, as Anselm pointed out at WhereCamp,  AR will certainly demand very efficient distribution of state change at the systems level –  to move the computation to its lowest latency.

The only other cloud over our Augmented Reality party at #140conf  was that #ashtag kept our co-panelist and panel chair from joining us.   Rita J King, @ritajking, who is Innovator-in-Residence at IBM’s Analytics Virtual Center, the “General of the Imagination Age,” and Dancing Ink Productions, and Joshua Fouts, @josholalia, “Cultural Attaché,” and Chief Global Strategist of Dancing Ink, were on a 5 day trek out of #ashcloud, and, sadly, not there for our panel.

Bu Twitter, once again, was a life line in a time of crisis connecting them to TEDxVolcano, an impromptu unconference with must see presentations from Rita and others, see Rita’s blog for more.

So the two of us carried the flag for  Augmented Twitter.  Myself and Jerry Paffenfdorf, futurist, artist, entrepreneur and swell guy – the co-inventor of the most famous real time social web system you have never heard of (actually I tried and loved it in alpha testing, before it was quote “shut down by blood thirsty investors”).

Now Jerry lives in Detroit Michigan where he works on the Loveland Micro-real estate project which is the simplest, cheapest, funnest way to become a land owner.  At a dollar a square inch it mixes video games and real estate, like Farmville for urban development.

Joshua and Rita, our very virtual panel mates, are the first and largest inchvestors, and creating their own micro city within the project.  Jerry is one of the most creative and original thinkers on the planet, so treat yourself to glimpse of what is on his mind in the video above – Loveland, 3D mailbox, canned augmented reality, and the relationship of virtual worlds to the real time social web.

Jerry also hat tipped one of the most captivating projects and presentations of the conference, Alon Nir’s, The Story Behind @TheKotel, “Tweet Yr Prayers!”  What a great story about the power of Twitter to reach out into the world, and beyond!  I got a chance to chat with Alon at #140conf, and I found out he is brother of augmented reality guru, Rouli Nir, @augmented.  Rouli is known for his sharp and comprehensive AR commentary on Augmented Times and Games Alfresco.  Cool family!

Before I close this post, I want to mention @AndyDixn’s talk on the prison sysetm, A conversation with Andy Dixon: What the prison yard & twitter have in common.  This conversation, I think, is a great example about what makes #140conf special.  As @nwjerseyliz pointed out, we, “hear few voices from those who’ve experienced that side of the issue.”

Thank you @jeffpulver for creating such a cool staging for so many diverse voices.

And before I close here is what the only slide I didn’t have time to show said!

If you liked “Augmented Twitter”
Don’t miss Augmented Reality Event!

2 days, 3 tracks, 40 AR companies, 76 SpeakersArt! Magic! Competitions! Awards!Bruce (the Prophet) Sterling, Will (The Sims) Wright, Jesse (Gamepocalypse) Schell, Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Microsoft Bing) and You! The sneak preview of the schedule is here.

Register today at Augmented Reality Event.com

Discount code for @140 attendees, (and readers of this post!) TISH245 activates $245 price for full conference.

See you there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

*The news stand is to be the map.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARWave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real Time Social Augmented Experiences

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

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

Later Jeff wrote:

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

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

Augmented Reality Search

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

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

The ARWave Developers

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

Davide Carnovale @need2revolt

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

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

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

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

Thomas Wrobel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Letting people log in to different servers

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

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

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

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

Markus Strickler @kusako

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

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

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!