“The internet eats everything it touches,” write Brady Forrest and Nathan Torkington, O’Reilly Media, Inc., in their must read 2006 companion essay The State of Where 2.0 (PDF).  Now in 2010 that statement is more true than ever.

Last week,  I talked to Brady about what we can look forward to at Where 2.0, 2010,  and what he thinks will be the “internet eating” trends emerging this year.  Brady is uniquely positioned to get a glimpse of things to come.  His job for O’Reilly Media is tracking changes in technology and organizing large scale events, including Where 2.0 which he chairs, and Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC which he co-chairs.  Brady also runs Ignite, and previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search.  And, when not doing his day job, he participates in such Uber Geek activities as Steve the Robot H.E.AI.D – A Human Energized Artificial Intelligence Device…with lasers and generative sound, (click on pic above or see video here).  Look out for Steve the Robot H.E.AI.D, at Augmented Reality Event, June 2nd and 3rd, Santa Clara, CA,  and a presentation from Brady.

As Vernor Vinge pointed out in his intro to ISMAR 2009 – the “possibilities are both scary and wondrous” as “the physical world becomes much more like a software construct.”  Brady Forrest has taken a lead role, since 2004 – when “‘local search’ was interesting but not yet real,” in shaping this transformation.

Where 2.0, together with WhereCamp (this year at Google) constitutes WhereWeek – a crucible for emerging trends in web mapping platforms, and location based technologies.  This year augmented reality, proximity-based social networking, local search, and the rapidly maturing field of Crisis Management are in the  mix along with the huge and long established GIS industry which has moved rapidly into the Where 2.0 space.

But what business models will oxygenate the system is still a key question – one Brady discusses in the interview below.  Certainly, the usefulness of location based analysis, mapping, new interfaces, and bringing this data to every application is clear.

Crisis management is center stage this year Jeffrey Johnson (Open Solutions Group), John Crowley (Star-Tides), Schuyler Erle (Entropy Free LLC) who will present on, Haiti: CrisisMapping the Earthquake.  And Chris Vein & Tim O’Reilly will “discuss how cities and application developers will benefit from open data and what these programs will look like in the future”  in the plenary City Data.

Mobile social, proximity- based social networking, which may soon emerge as a challenger to web based social networks, and augmented reality are the sexy rockstars of  the Where 2.0′s 2010 showcase of potentially disruptive technologies.  Augmented Reality has had a breakthrough year, and this is reflected in its strong showing on the Where 2.0 schedule.  But, as Brady notes, AR awaits the killer app, that will drive it to the next level  Of course, we hope to unveil that at are2010!

At Where 2.0, I am presenting on The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences panel.  We will look at how social augmented experiences will be key to the next wave of mobile augmented reality.  Mike Liebhold, in a complementary presentation, looks at Truly Open AR. If you have been reading Ugotrade, you already know I am an advocate for an open, distributed, real time communications framework for AR – see ARWave.  Wave Federation Protocol is an open fast, compact, federated, communications protocol that is a dream come true for AR.  And, I would hazard a guess that in 2010, real time communications plus location will become oxygen.

But also key to the next wave of AR, as I discussed with Anselm Hook in this post on Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform, will be a view 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.”

And as Brady notes in the interview below,  a key step forward would be “to take advantage of your location, but it doesn’t need to have been mapped before.”

For some interesting news on the mapping front (and a discount code for Where 2.0 for Radar readers) see Brady’s post, Flickr Photos in Google Street View. These kind of human built maps have the potential to develop into “photo-based positioning systems” that could create new opportunities for augmented reality.  Brady asks:

“how often the Flickr photos get updated, where else these Flickr photos are going to show up in Google’s services (Google Goggles perhaps?) and will they show up in new search partner Bing? I am doubly curious if Facebook will ever let its photos be used in a similar way.”

Lior Ron of Google Goggles will be at Where 2.0 to tell us all about, Looking into Google Goggles.  And if you want to learn more about how our view of the physical world will be ” rooted in powerful computing, pervasive connectivity, and the cloud” don’t miss this one.  I will be there.  And I very much hope there is a Q and A with this session.

During our conversation (see the full conversation below) Brady gave me his short list for breakthroughs that he sees as having big significance in 2010:

“Well, I think Google Goggles is one of the most exciting things to me.  Having access to a visual search…having someone actually release a visual search engine in that way, to consumers, I think is huge.  You know, you see stuff like that in the labs. But I don’t see it… it’s rare to see it out.

I think Android is huge.  And the way Google is pushing hardware to show off the platform; so the Nexus One being another example and the fact that it’s breaking free from the carriers.  Because I think when we get away from the carriers we are able to see more innovation, it’s what’s going to allow people or developers and companies to really innovate.

And I think Twitter adding geo-location to their APIs and buying MixerLabs is a huge move. I think Twitter may end up becoming the end-all be-all of location services. They are going to be updated constantly by people; they are going to have a really good grasp, real-time, of what is happening in any one place, at least based on the people.

And then with the addition of the MixerLabs data, they’re going to have more datasets at their ready, as well as any data that they start to collect from the clients themselves, like from TweetDeck.

So there are global clients that are updating Twitter.  I think those are some of the most exciting things.  And again, just to come back to Yelp, I think Yelp’s Monocle is also pretty significant, just because it’s an AR [augmented reality] app that’s being pushed into consumers’ hands.

And we’ll see how useful they find it.”

Talking With Brady Forrest

Pic above from WhereCamp 2009, Brady Forrest, facing camera, checks out Mark Powell’s Food Genome Project.  Check it out here – it just woke up!

Tish Shute: So last year when you were interviewed by Michael Calore for WebMonkey before Where 2.0 you said, “Location is no longer a differentiator it’s going to become oxygen.” And after attending Where Week 2009, I agreed with you and wrote about it here.  But, in what ways did this prediction exceed expectations, and what ways were you disappointed now as we get close to Where 2.0, 2010?

Brady Forrest: Well, it exceeded expectations in that there are now five different mobile OS’s where you can load on third party applications that active users’ locations that can then be shared out.

And so, what it is making is the possibility of real-time social location aware applications.  And this is something that hasn’t truly been possible in years past. Looking back three years ago when the iPhone launched, it was the first major phone, especially in the US, to be location aware.  And a year later, the Apps Store launched, giving developers full access to location, which previously had been held onto very, very, incredibly tightly by the carriers.

And now, a year and a half later, you have Android, you have Palm Pre, you have Blackberry working on their SDK to make it better, but it still is there.  You have Windows Mobile working on their SDK.  And, you know, who knows?  Maybe even BREW will get into the mix.

And AT&T is opening up their own interactive store.  And so, AT&T and Verizon and all their smart phones may now be looking at BREW.

Tish Shute: Right. It was very exciting last year at Where 2.0, where we had all these new toolsets announced and then the iphone being location aware. What were the best implementations of these new capabilities that became available in 2009, do you think?  What, in your view, was the most creative, surprising and disruptive?

Brady Forrest: Well, I am a huge fan of Yelp Monocle. I think, you know, that is just a real life example of using Augmented Reality.  You are on a street.  You have got a bunch of restaurants.  You have got a bunch of businesses.  And just to be able to swing through and look for people…I mean and look for ratings and reviews.

They have just started to institute check in, so you will be able to know where your friends are and where your friends have gone.  And that type of real-time, incredibly useful data is what will make augmented reality a standard part of the landscape.

I think it is that type of data, more so than, say, reference data, that will make people want to have all the possible sensors.  So, what do you need for that?  You need a camera.  You need a compass for orientation.  You need a GPS or, at least, a decent location service.  And then you need a screen where you can actually see the data, and then you need an Internet connection.

So it is not like any phone can handle this.  And so, you are going to need those killer apps to actually drive people to the type of phones that can support this.  I don’t think AR is quite there yet.

Tish Shute: I agree, for true AR you need more that compass, camera, and GPS.  There are some missing pieces for the real deal experience – and not just a pair of sexy AR spec.  As you mention, hybrid tracking and sensor fusion techniques that can combine computer vision technology with  compass and GPS are vital.  We need the compass.  We need the GPS.  We definitely need the camera!  But we need this combined with computer vision techniques to get the tracking, mapping and registration for true AR, or even to deliver a stable experience with the post-it/geonote AR that we see emerging with Layar, Wikitude, and others. At the moment we need to put together the tools for a true AR hyper-local experience.

And, of course, another aspect of this is the kind of physical hyper-links that applications like Google Goggles are building.

Do you have a speaker from Google Goggles at Where 2.0.  I would be absolutely fascinated to hear more about their road map?

Brady Forrest: I was loading Google Goggles onto the program yesterday.

Tish Shute: Oh, you did?  Oh, fantastic. And you have Lior Ron speaking!

Brady Forrest: It is actually possible it is not up on the website, but I talked to them and got them to agree to do a talk on it.

Tish Shute: I very much want to hear more about their road map.  Google Goggle’s is a very, very significant step towards the physical internet and this integration of computer vision with sensor fusion techniques necessary for true AR.

Brady Forrest: I mean that combination with Computer Vision is going to be incredibly valuable, because,  and then the other issue you have there is like is it on the client,  or is it on the server?  And right now, Google Goggles is definitely on the server, and that is not fast enough in real-time AR.  So that is like more of a 10 blue links IO interface.

Tish Shute: And also, they haven’t got an open API, have they?

Brady Forrest: No, not yet.

Tish Shute: Maybe they will announce that.  Can you nudge them?  For true AR,  we need to move forward in several areas – of course, there is the mediating device issues, like access to the video buffers in the iphone, and the development of cool AR eye wear would be nirvana!

But my recent obsession has been working on a real-time communications infrastructure for AR, because that is quite doable now, yet we don’t really have that real-time infrastructure, i.e. a real-time mobile social utility that is really up to the real time requirements of AR [see more about this here and on ARWave wiki].

But we certainly don’t have the integration of computer vision and sensor techniques, and the access to the big image databases we need, let alone the clients we need to put it all together either!

Brady Forrest: Google has done work to help out the community with their support of Open CV.

It is based out of Willow Garage, but I believe that Google has done quite a bit of work on it.

Tish Shute: Could you talk a bit more about Open CV?

Brady Forrest: O’Reilly has  a 500 page book on it.  It came out of the Darpa Project, or the Darpa Contest, where unmanned vehicles are raced.  And that has since become, at least in my mind, the primary computer vision library that people work with.

I actually used it…or, one of the teammates did, on our project we did this summer.  We implemented an Open CV pretty quickly that detected where people were, and then we would play music based on that.

Uber Geek Meeting from ShellyShelly’s photostream
Tish Shute: Is that your Burning Man project? Do you have a link for that, and some pictures, video?

Brady Forrest: Yeah.  Heaid.com.  Human Enhanced Artificial Intelligence Dancing.

Tish Shute: Thank you! This year the augmented reality story has been fairly basic – relying on basic sensors, compass, gps, accelerometers.  But it has also been an exciting year because  we hadn’t even had  smart phones with the camera, and GPS, and compass before this.

But now, the big adventure is to hook this all these sensor fusion techniques up with computer vision so that we can actually do reverse positioning for example from photos from what we are looking at, right?

Brady Forrest: Yeah, and start to use it in a more ad-hoc manner so that as you are traveling around, yes, it will take advantage of your location, but it doesn’t need to have been mapped before.

Tish Shute: Right – moving from mapping to context awareness.  Could you give like a quick explanation of what you did in your Burning Man project and how that relates to this kind of,  ad-hoc, on the fly, beginning to know what you are looking at without it having been mapped before, that is fascinating.

Brady Forrest: Sure.  So we mounted a camera about 30 feet off the ground.  And as people would move underneath or dance, they would move from block to block.  And we had kind of created kind of bitmap of the area underneath and set up different sound zones.  So as people moved from zone to zone, it would play different music.

And we used Maxim FP to handle the computer vision, although it has Open CV library to handle the computer vision part and to handle determining which of the audio to fire off.  And then, also, we had a laser that would play at the same time.

And then we used Ableton Live, which is a very popular DJ software to actually handle the music.  So as someone moved from, say, square A to square B, it would fire off various MIDI signals and Ableton would interpret that.  And each person who went in, up to…well, theoretically, up to 4- 8 people.  But because of how small the stage was and how the sounds are played, realistically, more like 4-6 people.

Each person had there own set of sound.

Pic from extramatic‘s Flickr stream here

Tish Shute: Wow! Awesome.

Brady Forrest: We would be able to detect different people, assign them a sound, or a set of sounds, so, like bass, drums, vocals.  And then we would have clips that played well together that were 3-5 seconds in length.

Tish Shute: At what distance could you detect people?

Brady Forrest: We had a 22 foot area underneath the camera.  That was mostly based on what the lens could capture.

Tish Shute: OMG I love this!  This is really the next step for augmented realities – not just attaching reference data to the world but exploring new shared “cosensual realities” (see Anselm Hook’s interview part 2 upcoming).

I am very interested in how in something you talk about a lot in your “State of Where 2.0″ essay, about lifestyle coming first for a potentially disruptive technology, not commercial considerations.  I still have to post the second half to my interview with  Anselm Hook but Anselm has some brilliant ideas in this area.  He is working on a project called Angel, where part of the vision is for people to actually find what they need without explicitly having to ask for it having to ask for it.

And this brings me to something that is very, to me, noticeable about Where 2.0 this year, and very exciting.  This is that location aware technology and crisis management basically has matured, hasn’t it?  We are beginning to see really useful stuff in this area now.

What is different this year that has brought crisis management and location aware technology together, a world in crisis?

Brady Forrest: Well, I think the primary thing that has brought all these technologies together is Haiti.  Without Haiti…A lot of times, future crises benefit from the current one, because people put in a lot of work.  And so, there is new infrastructure being laid with things such as Ushahidi, which is an open source platform for tracking…well, originally for tracking election violence in, but now is being used to track people and their locations and food requests in Haiti.

Also, Haiti did not have solid, accessible, good maps at the time of the of the earthquake.  And there have been two volunteer projects that have sprung up to help with that.  One being headed by the Open StreetMap Wood Foundation and many volunteers.  And then the other, Google Map Maker. And in both cases the activity around Haiti on these programs went up exponentially…or, I don’t know about exponentially, but a lot.  In the case of Map Maker, it was up 100 times and was the most worked on country for that week.  And one of the most downloaded for that week.

Tish Shute: Yes the work being done in CrisisCamps around the country is very encouraging.

Brady Forrest: And then also, you know, not just Ushahidi or Open Street Map, but also the People Finder which had open API so that different organizations could share their data, thus learning from Katrina.  There are all these different pieces of technology will be used in the future and hopefully be able to save more lives.  I didn’t see…there are iPhones apps that were released.  But I’m not aware of any Android apps.  I’m not aware of any AR apps.

Tish Shute: We don’t have smart phones devices distributed widely enough for them to be appropriate, do we, in a lot of areas where crisis strikes.

Brady Forrest: Yeah and there was criticism that they shouldn’t have been on iPhone.  You know, that iPhones were a waste of time. Because they aren’t…a lot of on the ground agencies aren’t going to have iPhones.  However, a lot of people who are going from the States will, and if the apps are there, then people will start to have them.

But relatively speaking, an iPhone is not that expensive.

Tish Shute: One thing I noticed and actually I discussed this in the second half of the interview I did with Anselm which I am getting ready to post.  But one of the aspects of the crisis filter was having people working as curators looking at messages coming out of Haiti, and while integrating the streams that would be useful is still probably a challenge, many curators will be on iPhones because they are based in the US.

We need to work across all platforms probably.

Brady Forrest: Yes.  Patrick Meier of Ushahidi, who runs Crisis Mappers, he ran a 24/7 emergency room. It was out of the Fletcher School in Boston.

They had volunteers all over the States and Canada.  They had volunteers in Vancouver that were translating Creole messages in under ten minutes.

Tish Shute: Yes and another point that is interesting in terms of the reconstruction and rebuilding of  Haiti is  the whole idea of leap frogging, and the idea that you can really… there’s always, as we’ve seen in other parts of the world, opportunity, when you miss pieces of basic infrastructure, to skip a whole stage and go onto the next one, like how virtual banking took off in Africa because of the absence of brick and mortar infrastructure.

Brady Forrest: To skip to a topic that been in my head, I’m just so bummed that the iPad does not have a camera.

Tish Shute: I was bummed is barely the word I would use.  Particularly as we had just been planning our ground breaking AR/next generation ebook in the days leading up to the announcement!

I suppose there is the hope they’re going to put it in the next one.  But I suppose the play for conventional content delivery is so big that everything else is trivial in comparison – especially in seems jump starting the emerging augmented reality industry!

So we might get thrown a camera and compass in the next round but will we get access to the video buffers?  AR enthusiasts may have to live on table scraps from Apple a bit longer it seems.

But what blows my mind is why hasn’t the iTouch got a camera, been AR enabled?  AR gaming would get an enormous boost from that alone. My son loves even the simple minded AR games available now on the iphone, and he loves iphone games – he has 110 games downloaded!

Brady Forrest: Ridiculous.  Yeah.  I don’t know what they don’t like about cameras.  And I plan on getting an iPad, but because of the limitations I plan on using it for base content and will probably get the bottom line model. I can’t imagine…I don’t know.

Tish Shute: It is very interesting, who actually puts together the big enabling mediating device for AR is still an open question, isn’t it?  I mean, that’s the truth; we have sort of mediating devices but we don’t have the magic brew yet do we?

Brady Forrest: No. Not yet.

Tish Shute: Good enough in some ways, and certainly a start but not quite the real deal.  For me, Where 2.0 this year covers the groundwork for true AR, mobile social proximity-based social networking, visual search, computer vision and sensor fusion techniques….   And because all these things have a chicken and egg relationship laying the groundwork is basically as important as having the mediating device otherwise you can’t do interesting things when we get the mediating device, right?

Is this the year we get the magic brew for AR, i.e., the business model, the killer app, and the mediating device?

Brady Forrest: This is not the year.

Tish Shute: Then I should ask you. Are you in the Goggles camp? That is do you think AR needs eyewear to go mainstream?

Brady Forrest: I think this may be where we get…we start to see what is going to be the killer app that gets people to buy the hardware that will support AR.  You see what I mean?  And then from there the apps will come out and the hardware will advance in that direction.

I don’t think AR has made that leap yet.  It hasn’t, to use almost a cliché, it hasn’t crossed the chasm yet and it hasn’t proven that it will.  Because I don’t know if…I think it’s difficult to tell right now.  Is it going to be games?  Is it going to be data layers? What is going to drive people to an AR device, especially one fully dedicated to it?

Tish Shute: I think in terms of AR games taking off a bit of help from the mediating device e.g. access to the iphone video buffers would probably be enough to stoke up AR games into being a hot commodity.  But in terms of AR data layers  going mainstream, we need some of the other players in the location space to put together the magic brew on the business model, don’t we?

Brady Forrest: That’s why I’m so curious though…that’s why I gave Yelp their own talk.  They are…Those guys are gang busters, they’re a consumer company, very consumer facing website.  They’ve got amazing data stores.  They do a lot of interesting stuff with their data.  And I don’t think people always give them the geek credit they deserve.

Tish Shute: You began Where 2.0 back in 2004, when as you point out, “‘local search’ was interesting but not yet real” and you have always stressed something that’s proven to be absolutely true which is lifestyle before commerce, right?  And that if location based services were going to be big it was because they meant something in terms of our lifestyle, not just because they told us where to get another good burger.  Right?

I think there’s been a lot of breakthrough in that area this year in terms of what location based services and proximity based social networks are to us now, how they’re changing our lifestyle.  What do you see as the breakthroughs for in 2009 and what are you hoping for in 2010?

Brady Forrest: Well, I think Google Goggles is one of the most exciting things to me.  Having access to a visual search…having someone actually release a visual search engine in that way, to consumers, I think is huge.  You know, you see stuff like that in the labs. But I don’t see it… it’s rare to see it out.

I think Android is huge.  And the way Google is pushing hardware to show off the platform; so the Nexus One being another example and the fact that it’s breaking free from the carriers. Because I think when get away from the carriers we are able to see more innovation, it’s what’s going to allow people or developers and companies to really innovate.

And I think Twitter adding geo-location to their APIs and buying MixerLabs is a huge move. I think Twitter may end up becoming the end-all be-all of location services. They are going to be updated constantly by people; they are going to have a really good grasp, real-time, of what is happening in any one place, at least based on the people.

And then with the addition of the MixerLabs data, they’re going to have more datasets at their ready. As well as any data that they start to collect from the clients themselves, like from TweetDeck.

So there are global clients that are updating Twitter. I think those are some of the most exciting things. And again, just to come back to Yelp, I think Yelp’s Monocle is also pretty significant, just because it’s an AR app that’s being pushed into consumers’ hands.

And we’ll see how useful they find it.

Tish Shute: Gary Gale, Yahoo! Inc., is going to talk on overcoming the business, social, and technological hurdles so we can reach the long promised [Laughs] Hyperlocal Nirvana. I think you’ve outlined some of these obstacles in relation to  AR, where there are obstacles are in terms of mediating device, and bringing all the pieces together including computer vision techniques in order to have an AR view. That’s the AR side of it. But the layer below that, which is the layer where actual location based apps that are beginning to go mainstream now,  are these presenting successful business models for location-based services.

So in short, in your view, what are the big hurdles to Hyperlocal Nirvana before we get to AR, even just for these location-based services?

Brady Forrest: Well, how do you make money?

Tish Shute: Yeah, to put it bluntly. I like John Battelle’s way of putting it [laughs] how do we oxygenate the system!

Brady Forrest: So are location-based services something that you can make money in the long-term? Nokia bought NavTec for $8 billion. And then two years later, they’re giving it away free as part of Ovi Maps.

Tish Shute: Right.

Brady Forrest: I’m assuming that that’s actually part of the plan.  And that although their hand may have been forced by Google with their release of Turn-By-Turn that…but it’s still got to be a hard nut to swallow that this huge investment in location ends up becoming a loss leader to sell more phones.

So, can you make money through subscriptions, through selling apps? And I think that is still being proven. The other one is, can you use advertising? And it’s kind of scary to see that Apple is restricting the use of advertisers to use location.

It came out yesterday or two days ago that advertisers cannot use location, or app developers cannot use location for ads. They can only use location to show something interesting or useful to their customers.

And there’s a lot of speculation that it’s because Apple wants to control the location-based ads that go on the iPhone.

Tish Shute: Yes. I heard a strange rumor.  Actually its an un-strange rumor, a likely rumor in fact,  that Apple and MS are getting together to replace some of the Google aspects of the iPhone like search and maps?

Brady Forrest: Yes, …. Microsoft employees get 10% off at the Apple store. There’s a longstanding relationship between those two companies.

And Android is definitely more of a competitive threat than Windows Mobile is.  And it’s well-known what the relationship between PCs and Macs are. So I don’t think…I don’t find that to be that surprising of a rumor.  I do wonder if it would hurt the iPhone, but it doesn’t surprise me that they would consider it.

Tish Shute: I do know, certainly from the AR point of view, Microsoft has recently hired some of the key researchers, including Georg Klein. And they are looking for more people in the image recognition area so it seems currently MS is going to be making a bigger push not just with PhotoSynth, but with image ID.

So it could be a pretty powerful combo between the iPhone, and Microsoft – they have some of the key computer vision research that would be needed for full AR.

Brady Forrest: Oh, yeah. Microsoft has amazing research depth. They’ve got an amazing team.

Tish Shute: But it is a bit of a mystery to me why Microsoft haven’t done more with Photosynth.  As I noted in my previous post, Nokia’s ImageSpace is beginning to do what many thought Microsoft would do with photosynth two years ago.  And “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 could be hugely important to AR.  But that brings me to another mystery why haven’t we seen more from Nokia in this space yet – the N900 doesn’t have a compass?

Brady Forrest: Yeah, I don’t know why Nokia hasn’t made more of a space for themselves in these things. They did a lot of early work in these areas. I think they are trying to…my guess is that they’re trying to restructure themselves. They made some pretty big changes on the web-Ovi made its own division. And they’ve been doing a lot of location-based acquisitions: Places, Gate 5 several years ago, Gossler, just the past six months. And so I think that’s really been their focus…and the research team.

And a large company, since they haven’t found a business model, which is what we’ve been discussing here, they are hesitant to launch it, or to…they don’t really know if this is a business that they need to launch, or if this is an app that they should have there out for fun.

Tish Shute: Yeah. And that’s back to the oxygenation of the system and location.  We really still have some work to do to with the business models

Final question!  At the core of many of today’s business model is the idea of hoarding data – that’s an underpinning.

But ultimately, for open AR, we want a situation where we can really share data so that we don’t really have the data all locked inside one particular browser or app. The current crop of AR browsers aren’t really browsers in the sense that we understand a browser on the web today, because the data’s locked inside each service, Wikitude, Layar, Acrossair etc.

I have become very interested with Federation as a model for solving this, so that we can begin to have an opportunity to build consensual relations around data, sometimes sharing, sometimes not. Federation is my big dream at the moment.  And now we even have something to work with in the Wave Federation Protocol. But how do we get from here to there, where we really have a federated world of data for AR and location-based services? But you think people need to solve the question of business models first?

Brady Forrest: I think people need…I think one potential is ads; so serving up content.  And by ads, I also mean coupons, meals, the Foursquare…. what it looks like Foursquare’s going to do, featured content, which is Layar’s.

So we need to see, is that the way we’re going to sell these? The other is to have the best viewer, which in some ways is a race in selling that, but that’s potentially a race to the bottom, price-wise.

Tish Shute: Right. Do you think Google Wave Federation Protocol has a chance of taking off and changing the game for real-time communications, federation, real-time…

Brady Forrest: Quite possibly with the real-time. I think they need to work on the UI.

Tish Shute: Oh dear we can’t discuss the Wave UI right at the end of the interview – of course I believe it would do better in an AR view!   I know you have to go  now but I have to say Google Wave not standardizing the client/server interface – so we could seem some new UIs for Wave [we are working with PygoWave for ARWave because of this], and  iPad’s lack of camera were two huge disappointments in recent months.

Brady Forrest: Yeah. It’s [the Wave client] is very difficult to use.

Tish Shute: But the Wave Federation Protocol is an open fast, compact protocol that is a dream come true for AR.  Open, distributed, real time communications is a very big enabler for AR.  I would hazard a guess that in 2010 real time communications plus location becomes oxygen.

ISMAR 2009 -  was an extraordinary mix of  high geek, academic eminence, gungho Dutch Cowboy entrepreneurial spirit, German engineering and industry, brilliant artistry, and invention, all fueled by a sense, and a very active presence in the case of Diamond Sponsor – Qualcomm, that the big technology players are waking up to augmented reality.

In the picture sequence above (click on photos to enlarge),  Noora Guldemond, Metaio, demonstrates Junaio (coming to an iphone near you Nov 2nd) to Dirk Groten, CTO of Layar (top left photo).  One of the nice social features of Junaio is that users can share the 3D augmented scenes they have created.  Noora is demoing this capability to Dirk, and as you can see he cracks up when he sees the  scene Noora has stored on her phone.  Dirk and I both recognize that this cute little dinosaur augmentation (close up above on bottom left) must have been created by Peter Meier, CTO of Metaio, during the Interoperability and Standards workshop earlier that day.  Metaio it seems were discussing standards while enjoying some 3D augmented back chat.

Both Dirk and I were active participants in the workshop too.  But little did we know that Peter Meier had introduced his little 3D dinosaur into our discussion while we diligently, and sometimes heatedly, debated the merits of XMPP, Wave Federation Protocol,  KML, ARML, VRML, X3D, and  more!  The photo I took is on the bottom right of the four pics above. It was probably taken very shortly after Peter’s augmented Junaio scene.  Of course there is no little dinosaur in my pic of  Dirk Groten with Joe Ludwig and Markus Tripp of Mobilizy who were discussing AR standards oblivious to Peter’s virtual pet in our midst.

I must say I had noticed an impish look on Peter Meier’s face (see photo above on the left – Peter is wearing glasses and holding a phone).  And Markus Tripp, of Mobilizy  revealed a little bit of gaming of his own, when he let out that, in part, ARML is a provocation.  But Peter was clearly unfazed and enjoying himself.  Dirk, tasked to summarize our discussion, stalwartly maintained an optimistic but serious tone fitting for a standards discussion:  “There is a willingness to standardize….,” he began (pic above on left – click to enlarge and read text).

But it was a little 3D dinosaur that, perhaps appropriately, had the last laugh. Fitting, as I am not sure whether anything anyone says about AR standards at the moment will hold up.  But, as Ori commented in his great post – an epilogue for ISMAR 2009, the vibe was “Peace and Love” in AR Browser land (although Chetan Damani of Across Air was not in the standards discussion because he attended the UX/content? workshop instead).  But as they say, “all’s fair in love and war.”  And it is my feeling the games have barely begun!  There are many players (virtual pets included) waiting in the wings. I met some at ISMAR, and they are just itching to join the frey.

Ori Inbar, Ogmento and Robert Rice, Neogence Enterprises, both founders of the AR Consortium, made great efforts to set our young industry off on the right foot -  in the  spirit of coopetition (a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition). See Curious Raven for Robert’s conference observations, and Ori’s post on Games Alfresco for more about Mobile Augmented Reality at ISMAR 2009.  The Mobile Augmented Reality Workshops were driven by an indomitable spokesperson for the new AR industry, Christine Perey.  Christine not only helped motivate discussion on the issue of oxygen to the system, i.e. business value, but also she was a very generous connector at the conference.

What’s Next From Augmented Reality’s Top Chefs?

As Ori pointed out, Kent Demaine, oooii (pic above is from the oooii web site), Minority report VFX designer was hanging out at ISMAR 2009 and he came to the panel I was on: “Augmented Reality in Sports,  Entertainment and Advertising.”  We chatted afterwords about instrumented environments and how this is such a key to development interesting augmented experiences.  Also I mentioned how back in the day I was involved in some of the early development of motion control software.  And it was great to hear Kent say they were still finding motion control cool at oooii.  As Ori notes, he is the “guy with the most enviable AR credentials in the world (the guy who designed VFX for minority report),” and oooii is busy and hiring.

One of the highlights of the Arts, Media and Humanities track for me was meeting Jarrell  Pair. He really brought the best out in panelists with his well tuned questions.  The recording of ISMAR was comprehensive and videos should be up next week.  I will post the slides on Ugotrade of my presentation:  “The Next Wave of AR: Shared Augmented Realities and Remix Culture.”.

“Mixed and Augmented Reality: ‘Scary and Wondrous’” – Vernor Vinge

“Imagine an environment where most physical objects know where they are, what they are, and can, (in principle) network with any other object. With this infrastructure, reality becomes its own database.  Multiple consensual virtual environments are possible, each oriented to the needs of its constituency.  If we also have open standards, then bottom-up social networks and even bottom up advertising become possible. Now imagine that in addition to sensors, many of these itsy-bitsy processors are equipped with effectors.  Then the physical world becomes much more like a software construct.  The possibilities are both scary and wondrous.” (Vernor Vinge -  intro to ISMAR 2009)

Vernor Vinge’s short intro to ISMAR 2009 (which can be downloaded with the ISMAR 2009 schedule here) captures the essence of the “Scary and Wondrous” dawn of the age of ubiquitous computing and mixed and augmented reality.  It is definitely worth a moment to download.  The future of augmented and mixed realities, as Vernor Vinge points out, is tied up in a “tension between centralized and distributed computing” that “will continue long into the future.” One of  my fascinations with Wave is that it offers a tantalizing opportunity to explore augmented reality in an open distributed architecture.

At ISMAR, I talked with as many people as possible about the AR Wave project – see my post here for more about Wave enabled AR.  Many people were very enthusiastic to join the AR wave and the only thing I really lacked was about 100 invites to hand out!

“Everything, Everywhere – making visible the invisible”

Some of the areas that I would have liked to see given more attention on at ISMAR were sensor networks, data curation, and user experience.  Not that these areas were entirely neglected with Pattie Maes, MIT as a keynote speaker, and Mark Billinghurst presenting on some fascinating work on social augmented experiences and user experience.  I highly recommend catching up on these and other ISMAR presentations when the videos go up.

And, I was very happy to meet and talk to Sean White whose work at Columbia University is one of my inspirations (for more about Sean’s work see here or click image above):

“the confluence of powerful connected mobile devices, advances in computer vision and sensing, and techniques such as augmented reality (AR) enables exciting new opportunities for interacting with this hidden network of dynamic information and shifts the locus of interaction from the desktop computer to the world around us”

And I had several very interesting conversations  at ISMAR about developing social augmented experiences that connect us to a physical world that is becoming “much more like a software construct” (Vernor Vinge).  Dirk Groten, CTO of Layar mentioned a few interesting projects Layar has up their sleeves, including something  Layar may be cooking up with The RoomWare Project.

The picture above is of RoomWare’s Social RFID Installation for Media Plaza in Utrecht (read more here).

Demos Galore!

In the demo rooms, Noah Zerkin (pic below left) pretty much single handedly carried the AR flag for a growing community of augmented reality Makers and Hackers.  But his presence was much appreciated, and he tirelessly demoed The Zerkin Glove. See the first of what may be several posts from Noah on ISMAR here.

And I got to try out the Vuzix goggles (picture above on right).   This was my first experience playing an AR game that was smart about real world gravity. It’s  “an augmented reality marble game that uses gravity as a game controller” – see Ori Inbar’s write up here.  It was a very compelling experience and I have to say I didn’t really notice the shortcomings of the Vuzix goggles while I was absorbed in the game. And  I turned out to be quite good at the game too. It is intuitive unlike the kind of  rule based games I never have time to learn properly.  But what is so special about this project is the tools that it is built with are open, and available for all, and affordable (see this list on Games Alfresco).

It was a great pleasure to meet Prof. Steven Feiner (picture on below the left) who heads Columbia University’s brilliant AR research team at The Columbia University Graphics and User Interfaces Lab.

Ori Inbar (pic below on right) also spent a lot of time in the demo room showing off Ogmento’s lovely AR learning game that delighted attendees, “Put a Spell: Learn to Spell with Augmented Reality.”

For a round up of  what’s next for augmented reality head mounted displays check out, Games Alfresco here, and Thomas Carpenter’s excellent review of the head mounted displays.

Ori Inbar on Games Alfresco asks is “Microsoft – the new big player to watch?”   “Georg Klein, inventor of PTAM-on-an-iPhone (and the smartest Computer Vision guy on the block)” has joined Microsoft to make Mobile AR.

The picture on the left above shows Georg trying out ARhrrr with Blair MacIntyre.   And on the right Blair is demoing his marker card pack to Senior Vice President of Cypher Entertainment, David Elmekies.  Yes ISMAR was abuzz with demos. See this post from Gail Carmichael for more video demos.

Next Year ISMAR 2010 in Korea!

At the banquet, I managed to find a seat at a table with Sean White (at left in photo above with Christine Perey to his right) and the Columbia University team.  The banquet culminated with the “Past and Future of ISMAR” Panel chaired valiantly by Jay Wright of Qualcomm.  We were asked to offer our input for ISMAR 2010.  I offered up an idea that I have been nurturing for a while now -  to stage a “Green Tech AR Competition.”  Perhaps, I suggested, we could base the competition around a conference (ISMAR 2010 in Korea?) and set up a target rich, instrumented environment for the occassion.  I think the Arduino open hardware community and AR developers have a synergy that is just waiting to be explored!  And, if we add the innovators of data curation to the mix, e.g., Pachube, AMEE, and Path Intelligence…(Markus Tripp left ISMAR to speak on a Web 2.0 Summit panel, “Humans as Sensors,” which also included Path Intelligence, Deborah Estrin on “participatory sensing,” and the brilliant work of Di-Ann Eisnor, Platial, on “Transactional Cartography”).  Anyway a big Green tech AR competition could get people working together across the broad spread of AR terrain on some of the sticky problems of user experience.  And, with a high level of support from Smart Phone companies, HMDs manufacturers and the chip makers we just might come up with some extraordinary magic.

The devil of course will be in the details.  But a competition like this could not only motivate key players to come together in the spirit of coopetition but also be an opportunity to show the world the power of AR to make visible the invisible ecosystems that are so important to the health of our planet.

One of the notable presences at ISMAR 2009 was the Qualcomm team.   Jay Wright’s presentation (an exclusive for ISMAR) not only outlined AR for 2012, but Jay also talked about some “close to the metal” innovation that we will see from Qualcomm very, very soon!  I had some time in the press room with Jay and his team prompted by MoMo’s Yuri van Geest.  When I twittered about Qualcomm’s presentation at ISMAR, Yuri replied:

vangeest “@tishshute: good stuff, hopefully you will integrate the neat new solutions and ideas in your talk in November ;)”

I will be presenting at MoMo #13 on AR, open AR, future of AR and GeoWeb,  and hopefully will bring some good news from Qualcomm too.  Anyway Jay seemed to like the idea of a Green Tech AR Competition, even though I did stress that I thought it needed some serious sponsorship and BIG prizes.

Where’s the beef? Tracking and Mapping at ISMAR 2009

On the flight from NYC to Orlando and ISMAR’o9 I dozed (I had been up late preparing my presentation) and I watched the Dew Tour Pro Skateboard competition and Top Chef on the Food Channel.  In this particular episode of Top Chef, the aspiring chefs were all given a brown bag of ingredients by an already famous chef who then judged whether the contenders managed to make a delicious meal with their allotment which was notably lacking in key ingredients of haute cusine.

This metaphor of  trying to cook up a great meal while perhaps missing the staples is apt for the current early stage of commercial augmented reality.  And when I arrived in Orlando, not only were the Dew Tour pro skateboarders staying at the same hotel as ISMAR, but ISMAR itself felt remarkably like an Augmented Reality Top Chef Coopetition.

Much of ISMAR was dedicated to the task of  providing the meat and potatoes of Augmented Reality, solutions to mobile tracking, mapping and registration, particularly in the Science and Technology track.

Industrial and Military Augmented reality solutions I found out, typically, solve the tracking problems by using fixed mounts which clearly wouldn’t translate well into the AR everywhere with everything mobile consumer culture expects.

In the picture on the left Fabian Doil stands by the VW engine that provided some of the outdoor targets for the ISMAR tracking competition.  On the right is a picture from the VW’s presentation on their research and development of AR.

I followed the tracking contest, organized by Daniel Pustka and Fabian Doil of Volkswagen, quite closely. And I learned a lot in the process. While  it is clear there has been progress in AR mapping and tracking, we still have a ways to go.

But hanging around the Tracking Competition was a good way to find out the state of play of this crucial part of the AR dream.  For example,  a little tidbit I learned is that Michael Goesele who has been reconstructing “high-quality geometry models from images collected from the internet (so called community photo collections, CPC)” is soon to be at the Institut Graphische Datenverarbeitung where top contenders in the tracking contest – Harald Wuest  and Folker Weintipper (in the foreground of the photo at the left and right respectively) are also to be found. [update Harold and Folker were the winning team see here for details of scoring and results!] Otto Korkalo and Tuomas Kantonen of VTT, Finland, Augmented Reality team are in the background. They have been working on the joint IBM, Nokia and VTT project that brings, Avatars and People Together for Virtual Meetings in Physical Spaces.

The picture on the right is another team that were doing very well. If my notes serve me well (and please forgive me if they don’t. I came back with my card wallet overflowing!) the photo on the right showsChristian Waechter (on the left) and Peter Keitler (on the right) of the Technische Universitat Munchen.

Germany is certainly leading the way in industrial AR. And I learned how small businesses like Metaio get to work with top research institutions and big companies like VW, thanks to very strong German funding program for AR and VR. The current iteration of a series of funding programs is  called Avilus.  Avilus  is putting 42 million Euros into AR and VR this year alone (click on the slide below to see more about Avilus ).

I wish we had the equivalent of Avilus here in the US.  But there is no equivalent to Arvilus for AR here, and  no AR is  being developed by the US car industry either it seems.  But look at the slide above to get a taste of some of the cool stuff Metaio and other small AR and VR businesses do for VW through the Avilus project.

I also got to meet many people from one of the world’s most important AR hubs -  The Department of Informatics, Technische Universitat Munchen, including Prof. Gudren Klinker on the far right in pic above.  And from left to right, Fabian Doil (VW, co-organizer of contest), Sebastian Lieberknecht , Selim Ben Himane (Metaio), Tobias Eble (Metaio).  Prof. Klinker is the engine behind much of German innovation in AR.

Metaio was one of the few teams to rely mainly on markerless tracking which in this contest was very challenging because of the very different light conditions (see pics below) between the windowless interior and dazzling Florida sunshine outside (pic on the right shows targets under ideal lighting conditions).  Many people in the US may be  familiar with Metaio’s consumer applications, like Junaio,  but thanks to Germany’s efforts to nurture augmented and virtual reality they are also respected software developers in industrial AR.  And I suspect that Metaio will spearhead markeless tracking in consumer AR too.

This post as usual has already expanded to something much longer than I originally attended – pretty typical for me! There is much I have not been able to cover including some of the interesting contributions by augmented reality artists at ISMAR – again I recommend the upcoming videos.

But I cannot end without a hat tip to, Oriel, Nate et al. who won the best student paper award for AR Sketch – again please see Games Alfresco for more on this (pic below from Games Alfresco). AR Sketch, Ori notes, is featured “in our top post and popular video.” And

“Their work is revolutionizing the AR world by avoiding the need to print markers – or any images whatsoever.”

Above is an image above  from Total Immersion’s augmented reality experience developed for the “Networked City” exhibition in South Korea, – “a fun scenario created for a u-City’s infrastructure and city management service”

“To the naked eye, the exhibit looks like a bare bones model of a city. But when visitors put on the special AR goggles a whole new world unfolds – as graphics overlaid on the city model.” (Games Alfresco)

“The Networked City,” is a large scale augmented virtuality of a scenario for a networked city. But my guess, reading the     Korea IT Times, is the plan is to move from an augmented virtuality to an augmented reality as Incheon Free Economic Zone  (IFEZ) realizes its vision to become a leading u-City – where reality is turned “inside out” (see Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality ).  If you are not familiar with South Korea’s u-Cities, check out this post for a short primer (and note Google Trends search on Augmented Reality shows  South Korea leaving everyone else in the dust).

Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality are like adenine and thymine – a DNA base pair.

A sky view of Incheon Free Economic Zone (from Korean IT Times). For more on the IFEZ vision to become a leading u-City see here.

Korea IT Times writes about the u-city concept:

“Korea began using the term u-City after accepting the concept of ubiquitous computing, a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction created by Mark Weiser, the chief technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California, in 1998. There have been a lot of research in this field since 2002. As a result, many local governments in Korea have applied this concept to various development projects since 2005 based on a practical approach to it.”

The back story to many of my recent posts, including this one, is an understanding of a relationship between ubiquitous computing and augmented reality that emerged, for me, in a February conversation with Adam Greenfield, Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield.  In cased you missed it, here is the link again because I think it holds up very well considering the rapid developments of recent months.  Also, importantly for this post, it includes a discussion of  moving on from Weiserian visions.

Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird is one of my key sources for understanding “networked urbanism,” and the list he makes of the elements of networked urbanism here (also see the comments) – is my mantra for thinking about the DNA base pair relationship of augmented reality and ubiquitous computing.

Adam Greenfield’s, “summary of what those of us who are thinking, writing and speaking about networked urbanism seem to be seeing” is:

1. From latent to explicit; 2. From browse to search; 3. From held to shared; 4. From expiring to persistent; 5. From deferred to real-time; 6. From passive to interactive; 7. From component to resource; 8. From constant to variable; 9. From wayfinding to wayshowing; 10. From object to service; 11. From vehicle to mobility; 12. From community to social network; 13. From ownership to use; 14. From consumer to constituent.

Augmented Reality – Making Visible the Invisible

The screenshot above is one of  the coolest “making visible the invisible” AR applications. It was developed at Columbia University Graphics and User Interface Lab where Steven Feiner is Director (see the deep list of projects from the lab here).  This app “shows carbon monoxide levels projected over New York City. The height of each ball reflects concentrations of the pollutant.” Credit: Sean White and Steven Feiner  (via Technology Review).

The recent emergence of “magic lens” augmented reality apps for our smart phones – Wikitude, Layar, Acrossair, Sekai Camera, and many others now, have given us a new window into our cities. But we are yet to realize the full potential of the AR/ubicomp base pair that can “make visible the invisible” and give us new opportunities to relate to the invisible data ecosystems of our cities, not merely as a spectator experience,  but as an interactive, in context, real time opportunity to reimagine social relations.

Mark Shepard says in his curatorial statement for, “Toward the Sentient City:” (Much more soon on this very significant exhibit which runs from Sept. 17th to Nov. 7th, 2009.)

“In place of natural weather systems, however, today we find the dataclouds of 21st century urban space increasingly shaping our experience of this city and the choices we make there.”

Augmented Reality, as Joe Lamantia points out, is becoming the great “ambassador of ubiqitous computing.” AR is. “…mak[ing] it possible to experience the new world of ubiquitous computing by reifying the digital layer that permeates our inside-out world,” and we are only just glimpsing the razor thin end of the wedge in this regard.

I am still working on my Gov 2.0 Summit write up  and, amongst other things, I will talk about how an emerging new social contract around open data, here in the US,  will put augmented reality  apps center stage  – “doing stuff that matters.” At Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase Tim O’Reilly tweeted:

Tim O’Reilly Really enjoyed @capttaco (Digital Arch Design) @ #gov20e: “Augmented Reality could be a new public infrastructure” http://bit.ly/18iCx

Also see Tim O’Reilly and Jennifer Pahlka on Forbes.com discuss the The “Web Squared” Era -  “the Web Squared era is an era of augmented reality arriving (like the sensor revolution) stealthily, in more pedestrian clothes than we expected.… …our world will have “information shadows.” Augmented reality amounts to information shadows made visible.”

Again there is back story to how I came to think about Information Shadows in relation to augmented reality.  So in case your missed it the first time, here is the link to a conversation that began in a hallway meeting between Tim O’Reilly, Mike Kuniavsky, ThingM, Usman Haque, Pachube, and Gavin Starks, AMEE, at ETech earlier this year,  “Dematerializing the World, Shadows, Subscriptions and Things as Services: Talking With Mike Kuniavsky at ETech 2009.”

Slide from Augmented City Lab @ Picnic ’09

So What’s Next for Mobile Augmented Reality?

These videos from Daniel Wagner’s team from Graz University of Technology showing Realtime Panorama Mapping and Tracking on Mobile Phones and Creating an Indoor Panorama in Realtime, as Rouli from Games Alfresco points out,  indicate that there is a lot in store for us at ISMAR09.

We may not be so impressed by directory style/”post it” AR anymore, as these applications have become common place so quickly!  But while these early mobile AR apps may be disappointing in relation to some futurist visions of AR – merely AR/ubicomp appetizers,  there are still good implementations of this model coming out (see new comers to the app store Bionic Eye and RobotVision). And Layar, always on the ball, has upped the ante for the new cohort of AR Browsers with Layar 3D.

But as Bruce Sterling notes here:

*In AR, everybody wants to be the platform and the browser, and nobody wants to be the boring old geolocative database. Look how Tim [creator of RobotVision] here, who is like one guy working on his weekends, can boldly fold-in the multi-billion dollar, multi-million user empires of Apple iPhone, Microsoft Bing, Flickr, and Twitter, all under his right thumb

(watch video here)

But if  you looking for something more from AR, you probably won’t have to wait too long.  The two pioneering companies in AR, Total Immersion – founded in 1999, and Metaio – founded in 2003 are both coming out with “mobile augmented reality platforms” in a matter of weeks (see press releases here and here).  And both companies, it seems, will deploy much more sophisticated AR rendering and tracking than we have seen to date.

I approached Bruno Uzzan, founder and CEO of Total Immersion, for an interview as part of my look at the new industry of augmented reality through the eyes of the founding members of the AR Consortium. These consortium members are some of the first commercial augmented reality companies.

The interview below with Bruno began early this summer and then we both went on vacation and it picks up after the announcement of the partnership between Total Immersion and Int13.

The significance of this announcement is that Total Immersion is now positioned to take the augmented reality experiences they have developed for a number of top brands onto multiple mobile platforms with, “Int13′s very clever embedded solution that allows our [Total Immersion's] solutions to work across many [mobile] platforms,” while Int13 gets to extend their reach.

Total Immersion has a 50 person R&D team and their two main focuses have been, firstly getting:

“Augmented Reality to work with as many platforms as possible – PC, Mac, Mobile, Game Consoles, all those are the platforms that we are targeting. We are currently doing lot of work in the R & D team in cross platform compatibility….”

and, secondly:

“Our R&D guys are working on the real world interacting more with the virtual world.  And I have started seeing some results which are pretty much crazy and this will be ready for next year.”

Pandora’s Box – Shared Augmented Realities

Spes or “Hope”; engraving by Sebald Beham, German c1540 (see Wikipedia article on Pandora’s Box)

There are many weaknesses to the mobile smart phone AR experiences we have now, and the lack of near field object recognition (to date), and difficulties with accurate positioning aren’t the only ones.  Note re solving positioning problems in mobile AR, we are yet to see AR  leverage public libraries for analyzing scenes like Flickr’s geo tagged photos, see Aaron Straup Copes’s work on “The Shape of Alpha.” And for more on this my post here.

But, as Joe Lamantia points out:

“One of the weakest aspects of the existing interaction patterns for augmented reality is their reliance on single-person, socially disconnected user experiences.”

In my view, The Pandora’s Box of Augmented Realities is an open, distributed, multiuser augmented reality framework, fully integrated with the internet and world wide web.

As Yochai Benkler has pointed out many times, and argues again in, Capital, Power, and the Next Step in Decentralization, it is “open, collaborative, distributed practices that have been at the core of what made the Internet.”  We have to try to make sure that open, collaborative, distributed practices are at the core of mobile augmented reality.

Can Google Wave be the basis for an Open, Distributed, Multiuser Augmented Reality Framework?

I have been exploring the idea of using Google Wave protocol as the basis for a distributed, multiuser open augmented reality framework with a small group of AR enthusiasts and developers. And I am happy to say the proposal is beginning to get fleshed out a little.  New collaborators are welcome both for “gear heady” input and use case suggestions (but re the latter, you can’t just say everything you see in Denno Coil..!).

This effort started with Thomas Wrobel’s  proposal for an Open AR Framework prototyped on IRC – see here, and click to enlarge the image above of, “Sky Writer: Basic Concept for an Open Multi-source AR Framework.”

But recently we began looking at the Wave Federation Protocol.  And, if you check out this post, and this post, you may get a glimpse of why Google Wave protocol might be a good basis for an open, distributed, AR Framework.  You will notice, if you study what Google Wave has done with the XMPP protocol, that many of  the elements of networked urbanism that Adam Greenfield describes resonate strongly with what is being attempted in Wave.

But enough said for now!  Regardless of the details of implementation,  Google Wave or an AR protocol built from scratch (phew! the latter does seem like a lot of work) -  an open, distributed, multiuser AR framework integrated with the internet and web would explode the potential of AR, creating new possibilities for data flows, mashups ,and shared augmented realities.

And we are excited by Google Wave because, as Thomas puts it:

“The really great thing wave does ….(aside from being an open standard backed by a major player…hopefully leading to thousands of worldwide servers )….is that it allows anyone to create any number of waves, set precisely who can view or edit them, and for them to be able to be updated quickly and continuously (and even simultaneously!) Better yet, changes will (if necessary) propagate to all the other servers sharing that wave. It does all this right now. From my eyes this does a lot of the work of an AR infrastructure already.

I cant see any other protocol actually doing anything like this at the moment, although correct me if I’m wrong, as alternatives are always welcome :)”

Also, Thomas notes, “even the playback system (that is, the ability to playback the changes made to a wave since its creation) …this could give us automatically some of the ideas Jeremy Hight has mentioned in his visionary work here,  and here on “the geo spatial web, interlinked locations and data, immersive augmentation and open source geo augmentation.”

One of the many reasons why an Open, distributed AR Framework would be so cool is it would open up all kinds of possibilities for GeoAR by providing the over-arching standard protocol for communication of updates necessary for the substandards that will facilitate GeoAR.

Also important to note is the  Wave Federation Protocol allows anyone:

“to run wave servers and become wave providers, for themselves, or as services for their users, and to “federate” waves, that is, to share waves with each other and with Google Wave. – “the federation gateway and a federation proxy and is based on open extension to XMPP core [RFC3920] protocol to allow near real-time communication between two wave servers.” See Reuven Cohen’s blog for more here and here, “HTTP is Dead, Long Live the Real Time Cloud.”

Still some people have expressed concern that an AR Framework using Google Wave protocol would give Google disproportionate influence.   Will Google-specific functionality be an issue?  How much stuff is Google specific just because no one else is using it (yet)? And how much is Google specific because it holds no value to anyone else but Google? These are some of the questions that have come up.

You are going to see a variety of suggestions for standards and specs for open AR coming out out in the next few months which as, Robert Rice of the AR Consortium points out is: “a good thing, we need that competition early on to settle down on best case.” Recently,  Mobilizy have offered up an ARML (“an augmented reality mark-up language specification based on the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML) with extensions”) for consideration see here.

So it is, perhaps, also important to note, that an Open AR Framework should be neutral/transparent to techniques of  “reality recognition,”  and methodologies of registration/tracking, allowing various ones to work on the system as new techniques evolve, and to support as many evolving standards as possible.

Augmented Reality developers, like Total Immersion and others with powerful rendering/tracking AR software, should be able use an Open AR Framework to exchange the data which their tracking will use. And the tracking/rendering problems they and other researchers have solved are much harder than figuring out data exchange on on a standard infrastructure or protocol!

So I pricked up my ears when I heard Bruno Uzzan, CEO of Total Immersion -  the first and currently the largest augmented reality company, with a 50 person R&D team in France and offices in LA, where Bruno himself is now based, say: “Total Immersion is  only months away from launching shared mobile augmented reality experiences using near field object recognition/tracking across multiple platforms” (for more details read my conversation with Bruno Uzzan below).

I was happy when I asked Bruno about the possibilities for developing an open, distributed, multiuser augmented reality framework fully integrated with the internet and world wide web (possibly using Google Wave protocols), and he replied:

“I think this is feasible. I think that’s doable, that’s just  in my opinion. I mean some people might have another kind of opinion but I think that that’s definitely doable.”

Total Immersion – working with the “symbiosis between augmented reality and brands”

Total Immersion has created many of the best known and most ambitious augmented reality experiences for major brands to date, including Mattel’s new AR toys to be released in conjunction with the James Cameron film Avatar, and AR baseball cards for Topps, video here (or click screenshot above), and the UK’s first augmented reality books.

Bruno founded Total Immersion 10 years ago when he was just 27. And the kind of conviction it took to survive as an augmented reality business in the decade before augmented reality captured the world’s attention is remarkable.

AR’s first steps out into the world after 17 years as predominantly a lab science maybe “wobbly” (what new technology isn’t), and sometimes gloriously kitsch – check out this riotus video of the 3D Interactive Live Show Total Immersion produced in Korea (also see the Total Immersion Augmented Reality Blog for more on the TI’s turn key  Interactive 3D Live Show Solution).

As Lamantia points out here, ” projecting mixed realities into public, common, or social spaces makes them social by default.”

However, the potential for shared location based augmented reality experiences is as yet untapped.  So I see the entry of the most experienced commercial augmented reality company into mobile as pretty interesting.   While  smart phone AR still has significant limitations, and it certainly does differ from some of the futurist dreams of AR (see Mok Oh’s post here on his disappointment in this regard), it is significant that Total Immersion is committing to becoming a leader in mobile AR.

Our smart phones, the powerful networked sensor devices that so many people carry in their pockets, have proved themselves a “good enough for now”  mediating device for early manifestations of the ubiquitous computing and augmented reality base pair.  And now AR and ubicomp is mixed in the  rich, messy soup of everyday life, commerce, business, marketing, art, entertainment, and government, we should get ready to see these technologies grow up fast, and unfold in some surprising ways that lab science didn’t necessarily predict.

And, perhaps, the new dialogue between scientists and entrepreneurs may spur both communities to outdo themselves.

Particularly, as Joe Ludwig notes: “It seems to me that the biggest disconnect between the academics and the entrepreneurs is that they disagree on how far we are from the finish line.”

See the comments’s on Ori Inbar’s post, Augmented Reality Entrepreneurship: Natural Evolution or Intelligent Design?, for  a courteous but spirited discussion on the potential benefits and frictions of the newly expanded AR community of  researchers and  entrepreneurs.

As Blair MacIntyre (see my long conversation with Blair here) notes:

“not all academics and researchers are only interested in the traditional models of impact. Case in point: I wouldn’t be building unpublishable games, nor investing so much time talking to the press, entrepreneurs and VCs if I did not believe strongly in the value of the impact I am having by doing that — and I know others with the same attitude.”

In this vein, check out the Marble Game (video here) developed by Steve Feiner and his team at Columbia U. It’s enabled by Goblin XNA, an open source AR framework built on top of Microsoft’s XNA, which powers XBox live games, Zune games, and some Windows games. For more about Goblin XNA and AR from Columbia U see here.  (Hat tip to Brian Jepson for this link)

While we are still waiting for the kind of sexy AR specs – nothing totally game changing in Gigantico’s AR eyewear rounup (maybe note this Apple patent), that might get wide adoption. But at least researchers are not afraid to explore the possibilities of AR Goggles.

But how far are we now, with or without sexy goggles,  from a fuller expression of the base pair DNA of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality?

We may have a LAN of things before we have an Internet of Things

The picture above is a workshop I attended at Conflux last weekend – Fish ‘n microChips, with Natalie Jeremijenko. We are at the site of the Amphibious Architecture project (a commissioned work for Toward the Sentient City) and “a collaborative project with xClinic, The Living and other intelligent creatures.”

We are probably as far off some grand futurist visions of ubiquitious computing as we are some of the futurist visions of augmented reality. But as it turns out that may not be a bad thing! Recently, @mikekuniavsky noted in a tweet:

“Another argument for the LAN of Things before the Internet of Things: http://tinyurl.com/lgp9uq”

Bert Moore, in the article Mike linked to points out, the grand vision of an “internet of things” with everything connected to everything  can “distract people from thinking about the benefits of RFID in smaller, more easily implemented and cost-justified applications.”  The same argument I think applies to sensor networks and augmented reality.

In New York City, a series of commissioned works for the Architectural League of New York’s exhibit, “Toward the Sentient City” are giving us the opportunity to dip our toes into the ocean of a “networked urbanism.”   For only a small budget, two of the five commissioned works, Amphibeous Architecture and Natural Fuse demonstrate how sensor networks can allow us to explore new kinds of communities – connecting people to environments in interesting ways to create new forms of social agency.

“Amphibeous Architecture” -  from The Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Directors David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang) and Natalie Jeremijenko, Environmental Health Clinic at New York University, uses a skillfully built (electronics and water are notoriously hard to mix) array of partially submerged sensors to pierce the blinding, reflective surfaces of the rivers  surrounding Manhattan and to create a new two way relationship with the ecosystem below – the water, our neighbors the fish and even a beaver that lives in the water surrounding Manhattan.

Image from Toward the Sentient City

In a similar spirit, “Natural Fuse” – Usman Haque, creative director, Nitipak ‘Dot’ Samsen, designer, Ai Hasegawa, designer, Cesar Harada, designer, Barbara Jasinowicz, producer, creates a network of people and electronically assisted plants to explore what it takes to work together on energy consumption and to experience the consequences of “selfish” and “unselfish” behavior interactively before it is too late to modify our actions.

The “Greedy Switch“ from Natural Fuse on the left. On the right “The System” – click to enlarge.

Much more to come in another post on these works, and “Toward the Sentient City.”  Also an update on how Pachube – an important part of both these projects and a very important contribution to ubiquitous computing because it creates the opportunity to connect environments and create mashups from diverse sensor data feeds – has matured since my interview with Pachube founder, Usman Haque, “Pachube, Patching the Planet,” in January this year.

In the picture above Natalie Jeremijenko, and Jonathan Laventhol give the Amphibious Architecture sensor array a last look over, as it will soon be lowered into the East River. Jonathan is on a busman’s holiday to help out at the pre launch of Amphibious Architecture, nr Manhattan Bridge, NYC.

I was very happy to get  a chance to talk to Jonathan Laventhol - more on our conversation in another post. Jonathan Laventhol is CTO of Imagination – one of the world’s leading design, events, and branding agencies. We talked about the importance of  Pachube, which Jonathan called the “The Facebook of Data,”  and  how the symbiosis between brands and augmented reality, and healthcare applications, would  be key to augmented reality emerging into the mainstream.

Natalie Jeremijenko’s workshop at Conflux on the social negotiation of technology and how “everyware” can give us the chance to experience new forms of agency and connection was a totally inspiring.  And I will cover this too in another post.  I have so much awesome stuff  to write about at the moment!

None of the projects in, “Toward the Sentient City,” included a mobile augmented reality, or “magic lens” component, but they all pointed to why “enchanted windows into our newly inside-out reality” are going to be so important. And why the DNA base pair of ubicomp and augmented reality can really do stuff that matters.

Shangri- La – “Transfigured City”

Screenshot from Shangri-La episode Transfigured City

In my AR Consortium founder member interview series, I have found that, understandably, the visionary founders of these first augmented reality companies are a little reticent about sharing their full vision.  They are basically on stealth mode in this regard.  So as you will not, from my interview with Total Immersion founder and CEO, Bruno Uzzan, get a fully drawn scenario of his vision for a next generation of shared augmented reality experiences, here’s a really interesting anime episode from the anime Shangri La called, Transfigured City, to mull over instead.

As you can tell from this rather long and circuitous intro to my my conversation with Bruno Uzzan, I  have been investigating shared augmented realities pretty intensively recently. And Mike Kuniavsky pointed me to Shangri-La, and Transfigured City, in a conversation with Mark Shepard, after Mark’s presentation at Conflux, Sentient City Survival Kit.

Mike Kuniavsky with Tod E. Kurt is founder of ThingM, a ubiquitous computing device studio. Also Mike Kuniavsky researches, designs and writes about people’s experiences at the intersection of technology and everyday life – see Mikes blog Orange Cone.  And I interviewed Mike at Etech- see here.

In Transfigured City, the “Metal Age” group has to figure out how to share and communicate in a city transfigured by augmented realities/virtualities, where no-one sees the same place in the same way.  Only one character can figure out from her previous experience of the city the relationship between the transfigured city and how it used to be.

The conversation I had with Mike Kuniavsky on The Transfigured City continued at a picnic in Washington Square Park the next day with Elizabeth Goodman, who I met at Etech when she gave a brilliant presentation, Designing for Urban Green Space.  We covered so many areas at the picnic related to ubiquitous computing and augmented realities that this conversation probably deserves a post of its own (my writing to do list is growing longer!).

The Plot Synopsis for Shangri La:

“In the mid-21st century, the international committee decided to forcefully reduce CO2 emission levels to mitigate the global warming crisis. As a result, the economic market was transferred mainly into the trade of carbon. A great earthquake destroys much of Japan, yet the carbon tax placed on the country is not lifted, so Tokyo is turned into the world’s largest “jungle-polis” that absorbs carbon dioxide. Project Atlas is commenced to plan the rebuilding of Tokyo and oversee the government organization, which the Metal Age group opposes due to its oppressive nature. However, Atlas is only built with enough room for 3,500,000 people and most people are not allowed to migrate into the city. The disparity between the elite within Atlas and the refugees living in the jungles outside of its walls set up the background of the story.”

Talking With Bruno Uzzan

Tish Shute: We won’t have fully opened the Pandora’s Box of Augmented Realities until we have ubiquitous, shared augmented realities, will we?

Bruno Uzzan: Yes. The most important for augmented reality is the experience we want to share. Now we are working on the cell phone, we can potentially do some marketing components that we already have developed now on cell phone. Done. It’s working.

But the most interesting part of it is how these new components [cell phone AR] will be used for marketing campaigns by brands. And we are also pretty much well positioned to transform some of the AR that we currently have working on Mac and PC and to transform these to applications working on mobile devices.

Tish Shute: We haven’t really experienced yet what it means to actually share mobile AR experiences?

Bruno Uzzan: It’s hard — we did a Facebook app. It’s a first try, it has a way to go.  But to go more and more into social, is the way forward for us – to share and expand AR experiences. But yes, I mean what you’re seeing is how two people on two different applications can share that same expanse.  For sure we are going in that direction. We are currently working on those kind of solutions. How people can share and experience together at the same time. That’s how we start creating excitement in augmented reality, and it’s coming up.

It’s a new market and there’s so much more in store for augmented reality. You know, some people are telling me, don’t you believe that augmented reality is a gimmick? It will be a trend for a few weeks or a few months and then gone? I say, you’re kidding me. This is only the beginning. I mean I can assure you that the applications that are on the market today are one percent of what we will have five years from now.

Tish Shute: I agree.

Bruno Uzzan: And I’m sure that augmented reality will be a part of a lot of components that we are currently using today – GPS, web browser, glasses, I mean there are so many applications that will come up shortly. This is only the beginning. I’m completely convinced that augmented reality will be in three years from now what virtual reality is today, which is a billion dollar market.  I know that it’s not just a gimmick of a few weeks or a few months, because so many brands are jumping into it, spending money, exploring solutions.  I know that it’s not just short term -what they are willing to do and we are willing to do, but also middle and long term. And that’s what makes this adventure pretty much unique and what makes creating a cutting edge technology, very, very much exciting for us.

Tish Shute: First could you explain more to me about your partnership with Int13. I am not sure I understand what is in the arrangement from Total Immersion’s POV. I mean what happens re your own mobile software development? Haven’t you only been licensed the Int13 SDK for a limited period of time and have limited access to all it’s power? Stephane from Int13 said to Ori on Games Alfresco, here, “we have licensed the SDK4 for two years,” and then Ori asks, “but you have basically kept the power to yourselves, right?” So if they are the only ones that can enhance it and develop the software, where will  TI be in two years in mobile if you haven’t really had the chance to develop your own software .

Bruno Uzzan: Actually it’s a real win-win situation. Int13 is a very small company and they have so many requests they can’t possibly fulfill them all. So  this is a way for both of us to be, as quickly as possible, the first mobile provider for all the requests we have. Also they give us exclusivity so nobody else can use INT13 SDK for such applications.  I think that it is a good partnership,

And concerning our own mobile application… First of all we have currently some mobile applications working. But with Int13 we have a mobile solution that can work on many different devices. That’s a fact and that’s working. And, believe me you will hear from us a lot more about this soon. We are fully independent on our mobile development. The reason we closed the partnership with Int 13 is  to be able to deploy mobile in a broad way.

I mean you know that the difficulty with AR mobile is that each separate device needs some customization. Working on the iPhone is different from working on the Nokia, different from working on the Palm; it’s different from working on the Samsung. Each of them have their own operating system inside and so we were interested in Int13′s very clever embedded solution that allows our solutions to work across many platforms.

The reason we are working with Int13 is that we are able to work on so many mobile devices, thanks to Int13. And in the mobile AR race that we are currently in, the next two years will be extremely important to us…

Tish Shute: OK, that definitely clarifies it a lot. So Int13 has done an embedded solution to allow TI developed AR solutions to work easily across many devices?

Bruno Uzzan: Yes  they have kind of an embedded solution, a way to address extremely quickly new cell phone… But, currently on our side, we are in discussions with a mobile company… and that only refers to some very specific mobile devices.  And what they have is also a way to embed deeper our technology into mobile, so that we can have quicker… applications that work on a large number of cell phones.

Tish Shute: So, basically it means you don’t have to go through some complicated negotiations with each of the cell phone companies, is what you are saying?

Bruno Uzzan: Not only negotiations, but also hard development. You know? Working on the Windows mobile is completely different from working on the Palm OS. You know, that’s different! Its a big work, to have a mobile application working on many other devices. So, INt13,  provides us a way for us to save some time and some development cost too.

Tish Shute: And Int13 doesn’t have powerful AR development tools like D’fusion right?

Bruno Uzzan: Right! That’s right. That’s why we say it’s a true win-win solution. They can benefit from our work too. And we can benefit from their work, in order to deploy quicker and faster mobile solutions.

Tish Shute: Now, the second thing is… there is a lot of debate and disagreement about how far mobile augmented reality is from delivering something more that the “post it” approach that has been much publicized in recent months, via all the AR browser apps.

But from my understanding from the conversation we had earlier this summer (see below), Total Immersion is targeting a much higher level of mobile augmented reality than we’ve seen to date?

Bruno: Yes the browser apps we have seen are a kind of augmented reality, but not exactly the way we see it. Let me explain you why. With this kind of application it’s true that you can overlay 3D-information and video. That’s a fact. So, in a sense, that’s augmented reality. But the way that they are working on the position of the 3D on that video is that they are using compass and GPS-information.. so it means that this AR solution will work only on some building and some physical objects that are FIXED. In a fixed and known position.

So you want to go to a theater?

The theater is here, for sure it will not move, so you know the position of the theater, and that’s a fact that you can superimpose an object on the theater. That’s what can be done currently. What we are achieving and what we are doing on mobile is more than that. We want to be able to port our solution with trading cards, with brands, into a smart phone.

I’m assuming that you want a can, a drink can, to be able to trigger an experience. The only way you can do it is to be able to understand what the can, it is. And the current solutions that are out there can’t do that, it’s impossible.

Tish Shute: Right, yes. There’s no near-field object at all in these early browser apps.

Bruno Uzzan: And the solution we have is that we can recognize a can and then — in a very, very precise way and that activates geo-location, so we can superimpose 3D. I mean in that case, it opens up all the applications that we currently have, so they could work on mobile.

Tish Shute: So for example, if you’re working with a soft drink company, people can trigger that experience wherever they see that can?

Bruno Uzzan: Correct.

Tish Shute: Yes. Yes, I assumed that was what you’re doing

Bruno Uzzan: We believe — and maybe that’s not the case, but we believe that our marker-less tracking technology is pretty much unique on the mobile devices.

I haven’t seen yet, from anyone, a full augmented reality mobile solution working.

I really see AR being part of the Web 3.0 next generation. I mean the vision I have is that, you know — today, when you want to have information, you go on a website and then you find your information. AR — and the future is that I think it will be part of the opposite. You want to have information about a product, you just show it to your computer and the information will automatically pop up. I see here a new way to market some key messages, a new way to get information is that some physical product by themselves could be a way to get information, and you don’t have to search anymore for them, it’s coming out to you.

AR is definitely for me, one of these components. Another thing that AR is a solution, another thing that AR itself will create these kind of results in how information is being displayed. But I’m seeing  here a way that could be part of a new way to have access to information. And that’s part of the vision I have. Whatever, if it is through mobile phone or web or PC, Mac, whatever, I really believe that now this kind of new generation of receiving information will come shortly and could be a kind of a new — could be part of the new 3.0 generation of the web.

Tish Shute: My friend Gene Becker did an interesting post recently on some of the current limitations of mobile AR where he pointed out the problem of:

“Simplistic, non-standard data formats – POIs, the geo-annotated data that many of these apps display, are mostly very simple one-dimensional points of lat/long coordinates, plus a few bytes of metadata. Despite their simplicity there has been no real standardization of POI formats; so far, data providers and AR app developers are only giving lip service to open interoperability. Furthermore, they are not looking ahead to future capabilities that will require more sophisticated data representations. At the same time, there is a large community of GIS, mapping and Geoweb experts who have defined open formats such as GeoRSS, GeoJSON and KML that may be suitable for mobile AR use and standardization.”

Bruno Uzzan: That’s interesting. I mean — I know exactly what his is referring to. He is mainly referring to a localization and how you can have a quick, accurate localization.  If you look at current solutions, and you look at this 3-D superimposing on the video, the 3-D is shaking a lot. I don’t know if you see that in some of these early efforts.

It’s hard to use because the 3-D, you know, is  part of the magic of augmented reality, that is when the 3-D is being inserted in a very easy way and smooth way in your solution. Here, when you see this overlay, 2-D or 3-D overlaid on the video, it’s shaking a lot. One reason for this is that the GPS compass is not accurate enough to coordinate the perfect location of the user. And here, what Gene says is interesting. I think we are addressing this localization issue in a pretty smart way.

But to be frank with you, I don’t believe mobile augmented reality in the extremely short term — I’m talking about three weeks, one, two months is mature enough for good AR applications.  It will be shortly.  But for now it is more proof of concept than a true and easy application to use.

But we are starting to see a lot of new application coming out, but I really believe that marketing and entertainment are the two key markets for AR right now.

I’ve been working ten years in augmented reality. And, eight years ago, when I was talking about augmented reality, I was E.T., you know? Nobody understood what I said, and I thought it was crazy. And now, today, yes it’s completely different.

Tish Shute: The Pandora’s Box of Augmented Realities, in my view, is an open, universal and standard, distributed, multiuser, augmented reality framework fully integrated with the internet and world wide web. I have been looking into Google Wave protocols as a basis for this would you be interested in this? Do you think it is feasable?

Bruno Uzzan: I think this is feasible. I think that’s doable, that’s just  in my opinion. I mean some people might have another kind of opinion but I think that that’s definitely doable.

Tish Shute: Yes I suppose an open AR Framework involves cooperation and collaboration, it is more about business and politics than technological problems.

Bruno Uzzan: Yes!  Actually the Web is politics. Business is politics.

Tish Shute: I would be interested if anyone in your R&D team would be interested in looking at some of the ideas that are emerging in our little discussion of Google Wave and an Open AR Framework  to offer feedback. it is an interesting time now to input on the Wave Federation Protocol docs because nothing is set it stone right now.

Bruno Uzzan: Just shoot me an email, I’ll try to put you in touch with the right person and, and a team member that can input on this.

Tish Shute: For mobile augmented reality the best thing we’ve got now is the phone, right?

Bruno Uzzan: Right.

Tish Shute: And the only way we can use the phone is by holding it up, right?  Isn’t this a bit of an an obstacle as you introduce better object recognition and tracking?  People are going to have to stop moving to use their phone. What do you feel about that experience? Isn’t AR eyewear and essential part of a tightly registered AR experience?

Bruno Uzzan: We don’t do hardware and we don’t have the current solution for eyewear that would do all we need for a good mobile AR experience, so I guess we don’t have the current answer for that.  But we are beginning to see the next generation of this — of these glasses.

Tish Shute: But you’re happy enough with the mobile experience of augmented reality on smart phones that you’re investing in this next generation of software for this.

Bruno Uzzan: Yes, I know. We know that some application will not work on the iPhone. And yes, whatever you do, you still need to hold the iPhone, so it means that you can’t play with your hands anymore. So we know that partially, some AR solutions  we have on other platforms will lose the magical effectivities on just the iPhone.

But I’m starting to see on the market some glasses that could perhaps be not too expensive — that’s a challenge!  And easy to use — that’s another big challenge. And, that could fit on anybody’s faces and head — there’s another big challenge. So yes, I’m starting to see that, but so far AR glasses are only applicable for some very, very specific application, like design or theme park or, you know, some specific location where it makes sense to move forward with glasses.

I don’t believe that kids will use glasses for — in our toys and for games in the next months or maybe othe next one or two years. But maybe something will come out shortly and that could be a big breakthrough, and enable us to think another way. But  from what we have seen so far and from what we know in this hardware market, I don’t believe that currently there is a workable solution.

Note: The following section of the interview took place earlier in the Summer.

Tish Shute: You are the first commercial AR company  – you started in 1999 right?

Bruno Uzzan: Yes you are right. We started the extremely early in this augmented reality market. We were the first company worldwide to start doing augmented reality and to start promoting augmented reality. So it’s true, we are pretty old players although the market has been getting bigger and bigger for the last year and a half. So for a long time we were only in the market, and the market was not really there.

But for the past 8 months, the company has been growing really fast.

Tish Shute: Yes I’m sure. Congratulations for hanging in there long enough to get the pay off!

Bruno Uzzan: You know, my background is Financial. So I have been driving the company for many years in a very cash efficient way. So we have been waiting for the markets to reach maturity before starting make some investments. So that’s the reason we are still here, and that’s the reason I think we managed pretty smartly the cash that we raised for the company.

Tish Shute: Yes there is a saying that when a market takes off you can tell a pioneers because they are the ones with the arrows in their backs. But I am glad you are dodging the arrows!

Bruno Uzzan: You know, I’ve always driven the company with revenue. And because revenue was not there at the beginning I was extremely cautious about the cash. So now that the company is getting some revenue, for sure we are making more and more investments, and taking advantage of our situation as a worldwide leader of augmented reality.

This situation is not easy as it appears today but it’s now getting better, as you can see, AR, Augmented Reality, has very good momentum and we are benefiting a lot from all this momentum for augmented reality right now.

Tish Shute: You’ve been very involved in researching developing augmented reality tools. Are you still as active in the research area, or are you too busy keeping up with work for hire now, to be working on research and building new technology for Augmented Reality?

Bruno Uzzan: Both. First of all, we are part of lot of projects either directly with clients like Mattel or with some partners that are using our technology to promote and develop other AR projects. From what we he have seen, many, many, many, projects augmented projects have been done currently with our solutions.

To continue with your previous question. So we are being perceived as this leader in that space, and we  have some pretty heavy demand for our services. But we are coming up with new technology, of course, still connected to Augmented Reality.  But, our R & D is working in two different directions, which of course also bind together.

The first one is platform developments. So we want Augmented Reality to work with as many platforms as possible – PC, Mac, Mobile, Game Consoles, all those are the platforms that we are targeting. We are currently doing lot of work in the R & D team in cross platform compatibility.

Tish Shute: Robert Rice said recently, “markers and webcams equal Photoshop page curls…”

Bruno Uzzan: Yes. There are so many concerns with markers. The quality is extremely bad. As soon as you hide a part of the marker, a slight part of the marker, you’re dead. You can’t track any more of the object. So compared to our solution where I want to say play with cards or where you are going to play with a Mattel toy, even if you hide a part of the toy, it’s still working.

Tish Shute: But you haven’t offered the public an SDK to your engine right? Basically the way people get access to your tools is working in a partnership with Total Immersion right?

Bruno Uzzan: Correct.

Tish Shute: Do you think in the future you might open your SDK? Are you considering that?

Bruno Uzzan: Yes, it would be interesting.

Tish Shute: So that is something we can see coming soon?

Bruno Uzzan: Maybe, because it’s true that Total Immersion is starting to be mature enough for these kind of tools. The only thing is that we have to respect good timing for that.  It’s a big decision. You know what I mean?  It is a big, big decision. We would then compete with others using our technology.

Tish Shute: Oh I know, it is a big decision when you have so much skin in the game! But it would be nice to have your SDK being THE platform for AR, wouldn’t it?

Bruno Uzzan: It is a really big decision that we can’t just take like that, you know.  There are a lot of friends who told me you have to be extremely careful about timing. This timing is pretty much connected to the maturity of the market. For sure, we see the market being more and more mature. But, there are a lot of low hanging fruits we still want to address

To get the best value possible for all the publicity we have and all the clients we have now.

Tish Shute: Yes, I know. You’ve been in this game so long. Now, there is an interesting question here though about tools and platforms because you know, A.R., augmented reality has already expanded  beyond its kind of original purist definition. And when I talk to people  about augmented reality, there are actually lot of different ideas and priorities of where the tools should go right now. You know, obviously we have these kind of browser-like applications, but these browser like applications are not dealing with recognizing near field objects yet.  What are your priorities for tool development and what are your priorities for AR development in the future? What areas are you going to focus on? Oh dear that is a rambling question!

Bruno Uzzan: [laughter]  So, one of our first priorities is we need to create our software with one development, one installer, one software that can be spread on different platforms. The same application, the same software can be used either on a PC, Mac, phone or console. So that’s a lot of work, because that means that our platform has to address many many different devices and that’s a big priority for us because we received this request from our clients. We want to be able to use one application on many different platforms and devices. So, that’s the first one.

And the second one is to add more and more interactivity between the real and the virtual world. So, we are working on some improvements to add some real components that will interact with virtual, and that also part of our big strategy and direction and these two worlds can more and more be bridged together, linked together so they can interact  one with the other.

Our R&D guys are working on the real world interacting more with the virtual world.  And I have started seeing some results which are pretty much crazy and this will be ready for next year.

There are so many different directions for interaction between the real world and virtual world to develop.  I’m sure ten years from now you’re going to have AR applications everywhere.  Its not just temporary fashion stuff or a gimmick for few months. I mean we are getting there, its getting stronger and stronger and we are getting a good adoption rate from our consumers. They like it, they test it, they play with it and brands wants more, people want more and its getting bigger and bigger.

Tish Shute: Yea and I totally agree, its not a gimmick because the interaction between “virtual” and “real” enhances the magic of both. Another question about you RandD operation. Is your R&D still in France or have you moved totally out to LA.

Bruno Uzzan: We are 50 people in France and I started this LA office two years ago and I moved permanently two years to LA. So I’m now permanently located in the US to take care of the US office, knowing that revenues are really getting bigger and bigger in the US. So it means that we are getting a lot of traction, working with large company and now I’m currently located in the US.

Tish Shute: My sister lives in Paris. Could I visit your R&D lab at some point? I’d love to visit!

Bruno Uzzan: Yeah sure sure sure. I mean if you want to go. You won’t have access to all the research. But if you want to go out and meet all the team please do.

Tish Shute: I’d love to.

Bruno Uzzan: No problem. Shoot me an Email you and I will introduce you to Eric Gehl, COO, he is the COO of the French team. And he can definitely take care of that.

Tish Shute: That would be fun. Thank you!

Recently, AR browser applications have really caught the imagination of the web community, eg., Layar and Wikitude?  Where do you think the most important market for AR is at the moment, entertainment,  green tech, business, education?

Bruno Uzzan: I think that all that you mention will be important. The first one that did grab my attention is entertainment particularly dual marketing, because they always searching for new ways to interact with players or the consumers.  But it’s just the tip of the iceberg, you know, I mean medical applications could be huge using augmented reality. Education, and edutainment is definitely using more and more augmented reality components.  And I will just be submitting with big companies – that are considering using augmentation for education. Museums are very important too. Also augmentation as a kind of free sales tool, you know there are so many applications, design, architecture – so many directions that it’s hard to say today which one will take the lead.

But I do believe that on the short term the ones that are really really moving fast are the entertainment business and the digital marketing business.

Tish Shute: What do you think are the biggest shortcomings with current augmented reality and what are the obstacles that no one has solved yet?

Bruno Uzzan: I think the cell phone is not fully ready for augmented reality – a lot of people are working on that but there are still a lot of constraints to get the augmented reality working on a cell phone and I think that from what I heard a lot of manufacturers and a lot of companies are working from direction that are going to help us a lot to develop some great cell phone applications.

And I think that’s one of the biggest part of the game. All the applications that you see on cell phones so far are just gimmicks – the next big key is how to transform some gimmick cell phone application to a real, industrial, robust application that’s going to work on a cell phone. So I think that’s a big challenge for this year.

Most of what we see now is just matching and overlaying some 2d components in a video. This is not what I call AR.  You’re far away – with this kind of application, you are far away from doing the registration that we need to do – you can’t do it. So here’s the challenge: “how can you get a Topps is an application working on cell phone. That’s the big challenge  How we can make that work!” You can’t today get a real AR Topps application working on cell phone because there’s no cell phone  that’s actually ready. But we are working on it and the first one that can make that work, it’s going to be huge.

When you are working with good AR components you need a lot of CPU and GPU programs. So today new cell phone have started to be more and more ready for augmented reality but you need a really good cell phone to make it work. You can’t choose an old cell phone to make it work because you have some recognition, you have some tracking, you have some rendering, so you can’t choose a Nokia cell phone two years old to make that work. For sure the newest iPhone is the one that can make it work, but that’s it for now. There is a lot of research – from large cell phone companies – to get more CPU and GPU into their cell phone.  But so far we are also waiting for these devices to be released to consumers.

Tish Shute: And the current economic climate has put a damper on MIDs hasn’t it. But who can tell? It depends what price points some new MID came out at right?

Bruno Uzzan: Correct.

Tish Shute: Yes,I agree. But basically what’s interesting, the interesting thing is, the iPhone can deliver so much of what is necessary and even if Apple hasn’t given access to the full power of the iphone to AR developers yet, there is really no going back now – the mobile augmented reality cat is out of the bag!

Bruno Uzzan: You’re right, you’re fully right.

I first started talking to Robert Rice, CEO of Neogence Enterprises, Chairman of the AR Consortium, in 2008.  Robert was already actively working on creating the world’s first global augmented reality network.  But it took a few months before what Robert had said to me about impending explosion of  augmented reality into our lives really sunk in – “this is going to be much bigger than the Web!,” he extolled.

By January, 2009 I was convinced and I posted my first interview with Robert, “Is it OMG Finally for Augmented Reality?..” As I mentioned in the intro, I had recently tried out Wikitude and Nathan Freitas’s grafitti app on the streets of New York City and I was impressed.  Now, 7 months later, Augmented Reality has  not disappointed and there is an explosion of new applications, and the arrival of some of first commercial and practical toolsets, SDKs, and APIs for aspiring developers.

For more on this see my previous post, Augmented Reality’s Growth is Exponential: Ogmento – “Reality Reinvented,” talking with Ori Inbar, which is an introduction to my series of interviews with the key players in augmented reality and founding members of the ARConsortium – Int13, Metaio, Mobilizy, Neogence Enterprises, Ogmento, SPRXmobile, Tonchidot, and Total Immersion.

As I mentioned before, Maarten Lens-FitzGerald of SPRXmobile told me the other day that my first Interview with Robert Rice, in January of this year, was a key inspiration for SPRXmobile to get started on the development of Layar – a Mobile Augmented Reality Browser. Much more on Layar and Wikitude – world browser in my upcoming interviews with Maarten Lens-FitzGerald and Mark A. M. Kramer, respectively.

Recently, both Layar and Wikitude earned a mention in the white paper by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle, Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. Web Squared is essential reading not only because it covers the underlying technological shifts of “Web Meets World,” which augmented reality is a vital part of;  but, crucially, Web Squared focuses on how there is a new opportunity for us all:

“The new direction for the Web, its collision course with the physical world, opens enormous new possibilities for business, and enormous new possibilities to make a difference on the world’s most pressing problems.”

I am currently working on a post on Green Tech AR which is one of the areas augmented reality can play an important role “in solving the world’s most pressing problems.” Augmented Reality has a lot to offer Green Tech development.  As Gavin Starks of AMEE said at Euro Foo in 2006, “climate change would be much easier to solve if you could see CO2.”

But really useful Green Tech AR requires still hard to do markerless object recognition (going beyond feature tracking and modified marker recognition), and a tight alignment of media/graphics with physical objects, in addition to a quite a high level of instrumentation of the physical world.  And for Green Tech AR to really shine, we are going to need innovators like Robert Rice who are working on, and solving, multiple really hard problems like:

“privacy, media persistence, spam, creating UI conventions, security, tagging and annotation standards, contextual search, intelligent agents, seamless integration and access of external sensors or data sources, telecom fragmentation, privilege and trust systems, and a variety of others.”

Recently Robert Rice presented at MoMo Amsterdam. Here is a drawing of him in action (picture below from wilgengebroed‘s Flickr Stream).

In his Twitter feed Robert Rice ( @RobertRice ) Robert reminds us: “By the way folks, what you see out there now as “augmented reality” is not what it is going to be in two years.”   Robert plans to show the first public demo of his “platform for platforms” at  ISMAR 2009.

Robert is writing up a series of White Papers currently.  I got a preview of the first, “The Future of Mobile – Ubiquitous Computing and Augmented Reality.”  Robert points out, “AR through the lens of the mobile industry and ubiquitous computing is almost overwhelming compared to AR as marker based marketing campaign.”

I asked Robert, “What are the key take-aways for investors interested in the augmented reality field at the moment:

“First, Mobile AR is going to be bigger than the web. Second, it is going to affect nearly every industry and aspect of life. Third, the emerging sector needs aggressive investment with long term returns. Get rich quick start ups in this space will blow through money and ultimately fail. We need smart VCs to jump in now and do it right. Fourth, AR has the potential to create a few hundred thousand jobs and entirely new professions. You want to kick start the economy or relive the golden days of 1990s innovation? Mobile AR is it.

Don’t be misguided by the gimmicky marketing applications now. Look ahead, and pay attention to what the visionaries are talking about right now. Find the right idea, help build the team, fund them, and then sit back and watch the world change. Also, AR has long term implications for smart cities, green tech, education, entertainment, and global industry. This is serious business, but it has to be done right. I’m more than happy to talk to any venture capitalist, angel investor, or company executive that wants to get a handle on what is out there, what is coming, and what the potential is. Understanding these is the first step to leveraging them for a competitive edge and building a new industry. Lastly, AR is not the same as last decade’s VR.”

Talking with Robert Rice

Picture of Robert Rice at MoMo from Guido van Nispen‘s Flickr Stream

Tish Shute: So perhaps we better start with an update on state of play with Neogence?

Robert Rice: Neogence is doing well actually. We don’t talk much about the fact that we are still a small startup and we face a lot of the usual obstacles related to that and being a small team. Fundraising has been extra difficult, mostly because people are just now beginning to see the potential in AR, but that is still colored by perceptions based on a lot of the gimmicky AR ad campaigns out there. Still, it is better than it was two years ago the idea of an AR startup was a bit of a joke to a lot of VCs we talked to. However, we do have an agreement from a new venture fund in Europe (which we can’t talk about yet) for our first round of funding, but we don’t expect to close that for several months.

If all goes well, we hope to debut our first public demo at ISMAR 2009 in Orlando to select individuals and a few press folks. We might release a few viral videos before then that are conceptual and about what we are building in the long run, but that depends on how things go over the next several weeks.

We are also very active in looking for and building strategic partnerships and relationships with other companies, and this is not restricted to the augmented reality or mobile sector. As I have said before, we are looking at this as a long term business venture and the industry as something that will be bigger than the web itself within ten years. We are doing typical contract work and custom AR solutions to keep the cash flow going and build up the corporate resume a bit. So, if you want something done, and better than the stuff you are seeing now with all of the generic “look at our brand in AR with markers and a webcam” you should definitely give us a call.

Tish Shute: Just to clarify because most of the recent press has been about browser type AR like Wikitude and Layar which are not in the purist sense AR ‘cos they do not have graphics tightly linked to physical world. Neogence, if I am correct, is focused on building a true AR platform in the sense I just described?

Robert Rice: Hrm, I have argued with a few others about the actual definition of AR. Some people prefer a narrow and limiting view (3D overlaid on video), but I think in terms of the market and the end-user, it is better to have a wider definition. In that sense, AR is purely the blend of real and virtual, with or without full 3D overlaid on video. If we go with that, then Wikitude, Layar, Sekai, NRU, and others all fit into the AR definition.

Anyway, you are correct. We are building a true platform for AR, and this is quite different from what others are marketing as AR browser “platforms.”

There are a few problems with the “AR Browsers” approach that no one seems to be noticing. One is that they are all trying to get people to build new applications for their browsers, when they should be trying to get people to create content that they can share and browse.

Second, someone using Layar is not going to see anything that is designed for Sekai or Wikitude.

Third the experiences are generally for one user. While I love all of these guys and think each of the teams has some real talent on it, the model is flawed until someone using Wikitude can see the same thing that someone using Layar or Sekai camera is seeing (provided they are in the same physical location).

While we are working on our own client side technologies that we hope will be useful and integrated with every mobile device and AR browser out there, our core focus is on connecting everything and everyone together, and facilitating the growth of the industry with the tools to create content, applications, and so forth. We want to solve the really difficult technical problems (some of which most people haven’t even considered yet, because of the perspective they are looking at the potential of AR with), and make it easy for everyone else to do the cool stuff. We want to be the facilitators.

If you really want an idea of where we are going or some of what has inspired us, you have GOT to read Dream Park, Rainbows End, and The Diamond Age. If you have heard me speak anywhere or read my blog, you know that I am continually suggesting these and others.

Anyway, short answer, yes, we are building a true platform for ubiquitous mobile augmented reality, and we are absolutely the first to be doing so. I hope to demo some of this in October at ISMAR, with a full commercial launch next year (10/10/10 at 1010am Hehe, seriously). We will probably launch a website soon for people to start signing up and building a community now (especially if you want in on the beta testing of the whole kibosh).

Tish: So just to clarify,  how will Neogence’s approach differ and fit into the  growing world of Augmented Reality tools that we have now, e.g.,  ARTookit, Imagination, Unifeye?

Robert: I guess you could say that we are trying to build the infrastructure for the global augmented reality network. This could be viewed as a service, or even a platform for platforms. If Neogence does its job right, anything you create using ARtoolkit, Unifeye, or Imagination would be applications you could ultimately link to, integrate with, or deploy on or through, what we are building, and not be tied to a specific set of hardware, browser, or walled garden.

Tish: You mention Neogence is going to provide a platform for platforms. Without knowing the details that sounds like a lot of centralization which prompts the inevitable question: “Who owns the data?” Do you think other AR applications or providers would resist a “Platform for Platforms?” I know the potential centralization power of Google Wave has already got people talking about these issues (one of the comments in my recent blog post was about how Google Wave protocol may be interesting for a least some parts of augmented reality communication).

Robert: It really depends on perception and how we end up building it. We aren’t talking about creating a closed system. As far as who owns the data, it depends on what data we are talking about. For the most part, I think that if the end-user creates something, they should own it and have control over it. They should also be able to do what they want with it, independent of everything else.

This is one thing that proponents of the smart cloud and the thin/dumb client don’t like to talk about. It sounds great on paper, but when you start thinking about it, all that does is strip away power from the end user. Case in point…Amazon recently wiped every copy of George Orwell’s 1984 from all Kindle devices. They claimed they didn’t have rights to distribute/publish it and it was available on accident. The scary thing though, is that they literally went into every kindle out there, found copies, and deleted them.

How would you like it if Microsoft suddenly decided to delete every copy of Microsoft Office? Or every file that had a .doc extension? That is a huge violation…we feel like we own what is on our computers. But with the whole cloud thing, your data is at the mercy of whoever is running the cloud servers. No privacy, no ownership, no control. And if the system breaks, all you will have is a pretty dumb device that can’t do much on its own. Now, that isn’t to say that the technical merits and benefits of a cloud model aren’t worth pursuing, they are.

But I think there needs to be some hybrid model. Don’t dumb down my computer or my smart phone, let’s keep pushing how much these devices can do. We should take full advantage of centralized and distributed systems, but in a hybrid mashup sense. That is what we are pursuing with our AR platform, while trying to protect ownership and intellectual property rights of the end user.

Tish: Earlier today I was telling you how impressed I was by Google Wave – it is quite mind blowing to experience massively multiplayer real time interaction on what will be an open internet wide platform – Wave is breaking new ground here and more than one person has mentioned its potential role in AR to me (see the comments to my recent post on Ogmento).

I know you are a strong advocate of this kind of real time shared experience being part of AR.  But we are only just beginning to see it emerge via Wave on the existing web – what will it take to have this kind of real time shared experience in AR!  We got briefly into the thick client, thin client, cloud versus P2P discussions – what is your approach to delivering a massively shared real time experience that is like Wave not confined to a walled garden?

Robert: I’m not a fan of any of those models as being stand alone or mutually exclusive. Again, the hybrid model with the best of both worlds is key. In the early stages of the emerging industry, you are likely to see some walled gardens (or perhaps a walled garden of walled gardens…).

No one knows how things are going to turn out in the next five to ten years and few people are thinking about it actively. For us though, I favor Alan Kay’s quote (pardon the paraphrasing): “To accurately predict the future, invent it”. That’s what we are doing. In the short term, there will be plenty of experimentation in the industry and a lot of model testing.

Tish: Do you think though Wave protocols might be useful as at least part of the picture for AR standards?  As you point out open standards and open protocols are going to be vital for shared experiences of AR.  Is it important to build off existing protocols to get the ball rolling and what do you see as being the important early protocols for AR?

Robert: I think for now, we will use a lot of existing protocols for communications and whatnot, as well as the usual standards for things like 3D models, animation, and so forth. This is only natural. However, as the industry and technology evolves, we will need entirely new ones. As far as I know there is no existing market standard for anything like the Holographic Doctor from Star Trek Voyager, and that type of thing is definitely in the pipeline for the future (sooner than you would think).

Tish: All the excitement at the arrival of the browser like mobile reality developments has been really great – I feel people are getting a taste for what it means to compute with anyone/anything, anywhere and and anytime.

Wikitude started the ball rolling. And with Wikitude.me it is the first to support user generated content. Now there is Layar, Sekai Camera also. But as you mentioned to me in an earlier chat, with Layar and Wikitude opening up “their are probably half dozen other apps coming out in short order with similar functionality (even the AR twitter thing has some similarities).”

What has been most exciting to you about these developments up to this point? What will these apps/platforms need to do to stand out in a crowd.  Up to now, these browser like AR experiences do nothing with close by objects. Do you see “world browsers” with near object recognition coming out in the near future. Could Wikitude do this with an integration of SRengine or Imagination?

Robert: Yes, Wikitude or Layar could do this (integrate with something else for “near” AR) and it would be a step in the right direction. Tagging things in the real world is the basic functionality that will grow from text tags to photos, videos, 3D objects, and all sorts of other types of data and meta data. This gets really fun when that data is generated by the object itself. First is just giving people the ability to tag something and share that tag with their friends, everything else grows from that. This sort of functionality is probably the most exciting in terms of near future advancement.

However, I think the idea of a stand-alone browser platform is a bit awkward…unless you also consider firefox a website browser platform. After all, you can create widgets (applications) for it. Anyway, the point is having access to the same data…if you put three people in a room, one for each browser, they should see and experience the same content, although the interface might be different (based on what browser and of course which hardware they are using). This means there needs to be some communication between whatever servers they are storing their data on (meaning, user tags) and some standard for how those tags are created.

Of course, if all they are doing is grabbing the GPS coordinates of the nearest subway station and telling you how far it is and in what direction, then they should all be able to see the same thing, regardless of the platform. But then, that isn’t really interesting is it? I could get the same info on a laptop with google maps.

This is part of the problem right now though…no one seems to be thinking about the bigger picture much. All of the effort is either on making the next cool ad campaign for a car or a movie, or creating a tool to tell you where the nearest thingamajig is, but in a really cool fashion on a mobile device.

No one is talking much about filtering data, privilege systems, standards, third party tools, interoperability, and so on. There is also little conversation about where hardware is going. Right now everyone is developing software based on what hardware is available. This needs to change where hardware is being developed to take advantage of new software coming out (this happened in the PC industry a while back and growth accelerated dramatically).

These are some of the reasons why I led the effort to start the AR Consortium. We brought CEOs from 8 different AR companies and startups together to start talking about these issues. We are still getting organized and have plans to expand the membership to other companies, but we want to do this right and we aren’t rushing things. The important thing is that we have started and there is at least a line of communication open now, where there wasn’t before.

I would expect to see the early movers expanding what they offer very soon, and they will probably lead the way in the short term. Definitely keep an eye on the companies involved in the AR Consortium. There are lots of very smart and motivated people there, and they are far ahead of all the experimental dabbling in AR we are beginning to see on youtube, twitter, and elsewhere.

Tish: When we had a discussion about what were the basics for an AR platform and an AR browser earlier, you talked about the difference between tools, a platform, and a AR browser – like Wikitude and Layar which should be about features/functionality e.g. to create treasure hunts AR geocaching, invisible AR yellow sticky notes you can leave at restaurants you don’t like, etc. Also you noted it should let you explore (browse) multiple formats, and open content content for AR – any data, information, or media that is linked to something in the real world and the visualization/interaction with the same.

Wikitude is a stepping stone to a true browser by your definition. But are we also seeing what you would define as an AR platform emerging – Unifeye, Wikitude (you can recap your definition if you like too)?

I think Wikitude hopes to provide the lego blocks for  augmented reality readers, browsers, applications, tools, and  platforms?

Robert: I expect some segmentation among the various AR companies that are out now, as they find their individual strengths and focus on them. Some will emphasize the client software (the browser), others will develop robust tools for creating content, SDKs/APIs will advance and facilitate rapid development of applications, etc. Neogence is ultimately working on the glue in the middle that ties everything together, makes it massively multiuser, persistent, and ubiquitous. Things like Unity3D have the potential to fill a need in the middleware space.

Tish: I know Blair McIntyre (see my interview with Blair here) and others are using Unity3D as an AR client, Could Unity3D become increasingly important?

Robert: It has the potential to become a favored middleware for providing the rendering layer. It already works nicely in regular browsers, and on several mobile platforms. Why code all the graphics rendering stuff from scratch when you can just license something and extend its features with AR functionality?

Tish: Now to ask your own question back to you! There seems to be a lot of reason to think that, eventually, there will be the kind of access to the iphone video API that augmented reality really requires and by that I mean more than we will get with OS 3.1 which is rumored to deliver only about half of what we really need for AR on the iphone – “not truly useful when you want to align video. with graphics.”  So:

“The iphone…future or failure? Seemingly anti-developer stance regarding augmented reality, and only a sliver of the global market share. Are we letting the short term glitz of Apple and the iPhone fad pull us in the wrong direction? Shouldnt we be focusing on symbian devices that have the lion’s share of the market? or should we be looking more at either other OSs (winmobile, android) or not at all and trying to create a new platform that is more MID and less smart phone with a hardware partner?”

Robert: Apple and the iphone are a bit problematic right now. There is no way I can go to a venture capitalist (at least in North America) and say hey we are building awesome AR applications for winmobile or symbian…they would either laugh or they simply wouldn’t get it. There is this false perception that the iphone is the ultimate mobile device, it is the sexiest, and the only thing that people want. Everyone wants a demo on the iphone, the media is mostly interested in iphone developments, and the apple fanatic market could give a fig about other devices. Other devices may have a larger market share or even better hardware, but we have to focus on the iphone right now at least in the demo stage to get any market attention and traction worth the time and effort.

In the future though, unless Apple changes its stance with their SDK and APIs, and starts adding hardware that is key for mobile AR (beyond what is there now), the market will move on without them. This is a really easy decision to make given Apple’s draconian policies and the fact that their percentage of the global market is miniscule. The smart companies are looking at the whole picture and not putting all of their eggs in the Apple basket.

Of course, once the wearable displays are commercially viable everything changes. Wearable computers with small screens or even no screens are going to be what everyone wants. The interface will go from handheld touch screens to virtual holographic interfaces that you interact with using your bare hands.

So for now, (the immediate short term), its all about the iphone. Taking mobile ubiquitous AR to the global market and building for the future will be based on something else. Hardware risks becoming a commodity or a closed platform. Do you really want to buy the Apple iGlasses and only see AR content that is compatible, where your best friend has a pair of WinGlasses and sees something entirely different? No. The hardware, and the client software (what people are calling the ar browser now) will become common and it won’t matter what brand you use, they will all be accessing the same content.

But at least for the forseeable future, we are building software for specific hardware, and the sexiest mobile on the block is the iphone. The second someone comes out with something much better and the paradigm shifts (software driving hardware instead of vice versa) everything changes.

Tish: How is the quest for sexy AR eyewear going.  I know we were checking out the Japanese eyewear with Adam Johnson from Genkii just now.  For the Neogence project – as you are going for a fully developed model of AR doesn’t this necessitate going beyond the iphone and getting the hardware companies moving on the eyewear?

Robert: The guys making wearable displays really need to get off the pot and stop paying lip service to mobile AR. If they don’t do something quick, I,  and others, are going to be scouring the planet looking for someone capable of building the lightweight stylish wearable displays with transparent lenses we are begging for. We aren’t going to be waiting around for hardware anymore. The AR Pandora’s box has been opened. I should note that many of us (AR Consortium members) have had less than pleasant experiences or communications with the half dozen companies or so that are making wearable displays. Either their visual design is terrible, the materials feel flimsy, the field of view is limited, or the companies are preoccupied with other business and government contracts. Any attention to the growing AR market is an afterthought and in a few cases condescending. AR is going to be a billion dollar industry in a very short time, and these guys are just leaving money on the table. If they were smart, they would be begging the CEOs from the AR Consortium to fly out to their offices and collaborate on building a pair of wicked sick glasses. The smart phone manufacturers should be doing the same thing, but I have to say that they at least seem to have some ambition and zeal to create better devices, so I can’t really complain too much there.

Anyway, to answer the rest of your question, we have to assume that the hardware guys, especially regarding the eyewear, is going to take a long time to develop and release the things we need for the ultimate AR experience. So, our goal is to start building things now for what is available. That means scaling things down and handicapping what AR can do, so it works on the “sexy” iphone. The important thing though is to start creating applications -now- so when the glasses are commercially available, there will be a wealth of content for people to access and use on day one.

As long as Apple isn’t playing nice, it is going to hurt everyone. Is it any surprise that they shut down Google Voice? There is a huge opportunity for someone to step up and leapfrog the rest of the industry. Give us the hardware and we will create amazing software for it. Don’t compete with the iphone, surpass it.

Tish: What is the state of play of current AR technology and toolkits?

Robert: The current crop of AR technology and toolkits is absolutely critical for this stage of the industry, and everyone should be leveraging it as much as possible. I talk down marker and image based tracking a lot, but I also like to point out that it is the necessary baseline that the industry is going to be built on. The problem is that there is only so much you can do with marker driven apps, and as creative people and marketing types start conceptualizing about all sorts of cool stuff for the future, they risk setting the expectations too high. It is one thing to show someone the future, it is another to say this is the future and its happening right now. This is why I cringe everytime I see a conceptual video presented as “our product DOES this” instead of “our product WILL DO this.” Something that simple can still cause the butterfly effect of raising expectations too high and contribute to overhyping.

Tish: One of the things that seems very exciting about the new Ogmento partnership is that experienced content producers  Brad Foxhoven and Brian Selzer from Blockade are now taking a leading role in AR.  What are the most exciting directions for content that you see emerging for AR in the next 12 months?

Robert: Virtual (well, augmented) pets, and multiuser mobile AR games (2-4 people) are probably going to lead in the next 12 months for content. Easy, accessible, engaging.

Tish: And are you at Neogence also involved in content partnerships?

Robert: Yes, we are in the process of finalizing some content partnerships with an eye for long term relationships. We are specifically looking for partners that want to find substantive ways to leverage AR technology, and not use it as a superficial gimmick or attraction that wears off after five minutes. I’m still cringing over the Proctor & Gamble Always campaign with AR.

Tish: So back to your observation about some of the tricky problems re creating a true global massively multiuser, ubiquitous, mobile AR platform – what are some of the main obstacles to this mission in our view? (aside from getting investment!)

Robert: Trying to explain it to people. The technical problems we can handle or have already solved. But trying to communicate what exactly we are doing is still tough. Not because it is overly complicated, but rather because it is so new and different. People are having a hard time grasping augmented reality beyond marker/webcam.

Tish: Which AR tools are most important right now?

Robert: Content is critical right now to show what the technology is capable of and to continue building the presence of augmented reality in the public mind the big benefit to integrated / unified platforms now is speed of development for content. I think that the flash artoolkit = papervision is rocking the planet right now. It is accessible, easy to learn, and lets people create something very quickly. More tools and middleware are coming out and this increases options for designers and developers.

Tish: What are your favorite papervision apps?

Robert: Hrm, I don’t have a favorite papervision app just yet, although I think the tech is solid. I expect to see a lot of stuff built on that platform in the near future. Especially as more ad agencies get on the bandwagon and start telling their IT guys to learn how to program flash so they can make something. Have you seen www.ronaldchevalier.com Not so much for the actual AR stuff, but because the whole thing is just brilliant. Its exactly like some cult figure spiritual guru would do with AR. I wish I had thought of it first actually. This is probably one of the best -seamless- implementations of AR in marketing where it fits…it isn’t just jammed in there for the sake of saying they used AR.

Tish: Do you think Apple is going open the iphone to the full potential of augmented reality anytime soon – a lot of expectations have been raised?

Robert: Apple is like that guy has a party at his house and owns this really awesome state of the art home theater in his basement, but makes everyone watch a movie in the living room on a regular TV with a VCR.

They need to get over themselves and quit being a wet blanket. Otherwise, we are taking the beer and pizza we brought, and going to someone else’s house. Sorry, the Apple thing is a bit of a sore point with me.

Tish: But will people leave all that candy and soda at the appstore?

Robert: I tell you what though, there is an opportunity for certain mobile phone manufacturers to give me a call and start talking to Neogence and the other members of the Consortium. We have some ideas and specs that could have a radical impact on the mobile market and stuff the IPhone in a box. Hint hint.

Tish: So what is your vision for the ARconsortium.  I know it kicked off with a letter to Apple about the video API.  What is the next step? There was a lot of hope that this year would be big for MIDs but this really hasn’t happened yet – do you think there is hope for a MID take off despite the lousy economy?)

Robert: MIDs? No, not yet. smart phones are too lucrative and too hot. It isn’t time yet for the MID to go mainstream. For that to happen, there needs to be a driving need (cough ubiquitous AR cough)

The AR consortium is mostly an informal affiliation. I expect that representatives from each member will probably meet at every significant conference to catch up over drinks. We are also going to be planning for our own members conference at least once a year. That will happen after we expand the membership though.

The main idea behind the consortium though was to open up a channel of communication between the CEOs so we could work together on standards, solving problems, collaborating, forming some partnerships, and using the collective to bang on the doors of companies like Apple and others. There is power in a group.

Tish: You mentioned there is a whole long conversation we can have about getting the eyewear.  As you point out true AR eyewear changes everything.  Can give a little road map of where this has to go?

Robert: There are essentially four or five main approaches, depending on whether or not you make the lenses special or if they are just plain. You would normally want them to be plain so people with prescription lenses wouldn’t have problems and would have the option to switch them out. Some types use a more prismatic approach for top down projection, or a corner piece mounts lasers and bounces them off the lens into the eye.  Another approach is embedding OLEDs or something else into the lenses themselves.

I really like the Lumus approach, but their product design isn’t quite there yet. If the wearables don’t look cool, people won’t use them. To be honest, if I had the money, I’d probably ask the Art Lebedev guys to design them based on someone else’s optical engineering. They designed the optimus maximus old keyboard…   brilliant industrial designers, loaded with engineers too. If these guys couldn’t build the glasses and make them look damn bad ass, I’d be shocked. Heck, I bet they could build the next gen MID while they were at it.

Tish: Getting the hardware innovation and software innovation feeding into each other would be really great.

Robert: Absolutely.

Tish: That would push the eyewear forward too wouldn’t it?

Robert: All it takes is one, and then the competitive landscape would fire right up.

Tish: What applications would the accurate gps enable?

Robert: Everything. for example, you know exactly where the phone is and where it is facing, that means you can put it on a table and hit a button, then move it somewhere else and do the same thing in a few minutes, you have a nearly accurate “mental” model of the whole place now you go back and start dropping virtual flower pots everywhere.

This is one area where I think the smart phone guys are missing the boat and taking the cheap route. It is possible to have very accurate GPS (down to a six inch area) with better chips and firmware, but it is cheaper to stick in old tech. Most apps today dont need that hyper accuracy, so they aren’t bothering. Mobile AR though, thats a different story.

With that level of accuracy, you would know exactly where the mobile device is, so all you would need to know is the direction it is facing (orientation), and you could solve one of the problems with registering exactly where 3D objects and augmented media is (it is more complicated than I am describing it, but we don’t need to get into that much detail here). You wouldn’t need markers anymore.

Tish: Isn’t Wikitude doing this with Wikitude.me their tagging app.?

Robert: Not really. That type of approach is on a very large scale using the accelerometers compass and GPS to determine where you are and what is in the distance. They (and others like Layar) don’t handle “near” AR. They effectively poll your GPS and then check a database to see what is nearby and what degree/distance it is and then they draw a representation on the screen. They don’t even need a mobile device’s camera at all.

Even if they did things up close, its still based on finding landmarks or on things that are broadcasting their location. For example, if they were standing near me, they might get “robert, 37 degrees, 15 meters away” but they wouldn’t be tracking me exactly as I walk around or have the ability to overlay graphics on ME.

Tish: I retweeted your #ar marketing using ARToolkit + flash (markers/webcams) = Photoshop pagecurl <six months. Bad design kills innovation. I know you like Dr Chevalier though!  What are some of the other AR marketing projects that you like. What would you like to see in terms of innovation in the next 6 months?

Robert: The marker/webcam approach is already becoming overused and cliche (tremendously fast). Older readers will remember the ubiquitous photoshop page curl that adorned nearly every website and graphic on the internet back in the day. It was horrible. Yes, the Dr. Chevalier stuff cracks me up.

I want to see some big companies or ad agencies really try to do something different with AR, preferably mobile. Take some risks, do something different. Don’t follow the crowd. Innovation? I want to see some wearable displays with transparent lenses, I want a mobile device specifically designed for ubiquitous AR, I want to see some experimenting with AR in the green tech sector, and I’d like to see someone get that GiFi wireless technology from that researcher in Australia and jam it into a smart mobile. I would also like my flying car and lunar vacation now, thank you. It is almost 2010 and no one has found that black obelisk yet.

Tish: So a few closing thoughts! What do you see as the next big thing? Hopes for the ar consortium?  Biggest bstacle for commercial AR?  And what is the coolest thing you have seen this year?!

Robert: The next big thing is what I’m working on hahaha. I hope the AR Consortium will grow and be the active catalyst in making AR mainstream, practical, and world changing.

The biggest obstacle is making sure that the right funding finds the right developers to develop the right technology and create kick ass applications.

The coolest thing I’ve seen this year would probably be the facade projection stuff (see below): Now, imagine that, but without the projector. Thats part of what I envision for AR in the future.

I am kicking off what will be a series of  talks with key players in the rapidly emerging augmented reality industry with an interview with Ori Inbar, co-founder of Ogmento. For Ori’s full bio see here.  Ori not only has a passion for interactive entertainment and a commitment to developing augmented reality to, “free young and old from getting lost in front of the screen.” Ori also, as I noted in the intro to my first conversation with Ori in May, brings invaluable experience to the young augmented reality industry because he has already gone through the cycle of working in a very small start-up and growing it into a billion dollar business. Ori worked with Shai Agassi (Shai is now leading the world changing Better Place ) driving Netweaver from a mere concept to a “major, major business for SAP.”

I have been tracking developments in Augmented Reality pretty carefully since my post, “Is it OMG finally for Augmented Reality?: Interview with Robert Rice.” And I talked at length to Blair McIntyre on Mobile Augmented Reality and Mirror Worlds recently. These interviews, and my first conversation with Ori, are long in depth conversations. But, if you haven’t already read them and you want the full story, they may be a good place to start.

As Ori notes, the Google trend on Augmented Reality is really growing exponentially at this point, and recently there have been two high profile round ups in the New York Times here,  and one in Venture Beat here.

Ori comments (for more see full interview below):

“What was unique about the article in Venture Beat is that it was probably the first roundup of Augmented Reality companies. It wasn’t very comprehensive or detailed, but it might be a sign that VCs are getting interested in AR companies.”

I feel that now is an excellent time for a detailed and comprehensive series of interviews on the state of play for augmented reality. I hope to speak with all eight founders of the AR Consortium, Int13, Metaio, Mobilizy, Neogence Enterprises, Ogmento, SPRXmobile, Tonchidot, and Total Immersion. The recent founding of the AR Consortium focused on facilitation of, “faster market penetration, robust technical standards, and a strong focus on the end-user’s experience,” is an important development for augmented reality.

Ogmento co-founder, Ori Inbar, created augmented reality’s trail blazing blog, Games Alfresco, and Pookatak Games – now Ogmento.  Ogmento will bring out their first augmented reality game for the iphone later this summer.  But Ogmento also brings two important new facets to the rapidly growing augmented reality field. One is that Ogmento brings leadership from veterans of the entertainment industry into augmented reality development  – Brian Selzer and Brad Foxhoven from Blockade have partnered with Ori on Ogmento.  The other, a very exciting announcement from Ogmento, is that they will be acting as publishers for a fast growing cohort of augmented reality application developers. Ori explains, Ogmento will be helping, “AR development teams out there bring their concepts to the market.”

The emergence of a savvy publisher for augmented reality developers is a vital step forward for this emerging industry.  As Ori notes in the interview below:

“recognizing elements on product packaging, posters, games will kick off a frenzy of new consumer experiences before the end of the year mobile AR will take the center stage. Next year will be huge for these experiences.”

The first commercial and practical toolsets, SDKs, and APIs developers wishing to create AR experiences have emerged including AR engines with key development tools for markerless image recognition like Imagination and SRengine Lite (for more see these posts on The Future Digital Life and Games Alfresco).  Also the pioneering and the most used AR engine out there, ARTookit, now has a version for the iPhone. And Metaio has produced a powerful  modular development tool kit, Unifeye.  Wikitude (Mobilizy) and Layar (SPRXmobile) have caused a lot of excitement recently with applications that unlock the potential for a wide range of augmented reality browsing experiences. Notably, they have both opened up developer APIs for their mobile augmented reality platforms in the last couple of weeks (although Layar is only providing “50 developer keys to interested companies across the globe,” whereas the Wikitude World Browser APIs are open to all). Maarten Lens-FitzGerald explained:

“There will be more keys distributed by Layar.  We are starting with a small amount to make sure that the servers will be able to handle it. Biggest difference is that the Layar API is aimed at Business to Business market: Companies and or developers with major brands or other content and services which are relevant for the new AR world. They are able to get their own branded experience in Layar”

Wikitude, however, has introduced the vital component of user generated content. With Wikitude.me you can add your own tags now.

I just added my first tag to Wikitude.me and twittered from TweetDeck:

“Signed up for Wikitude.me today, very cool the world as a wikipedia platform.”

click on image above to watch the video

I have interviewed both Mark A. M. Kramer, Mobilizy and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Sprxmobile, for this series so I will be posting more on Wikitude and Layar soon. See Wikitude’s “World Browser” press release and video for more, and the video here for read here more about Layar.   I was very chuffed to hear from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald of Sprxmobile the other day that my Interview with Robert Rice, in January of this year, was a key inspiration for SPRXmobile to get started on the development of Layar.  I hope this series of interviews and the arrival of a world class augmented reality publishing team, Ogmento, will be the inspiration for many more game changing augmented reality projects.

Robert Rice (who founded the AR Consortium with Ori) is a key innovator in the field who is tackling some of the really hard problems of AR development. While we will have to wait until ISMAR in October to see demos of Robert’s AR platform, Robert explained in my interview with him (to be posted soon):

“I guess you could say that we are trying to build a platform for platforms, or more accurately the infrastructure for the global augmented reality network. If Neogence does its job right, anything you create using ARtoolkit, Unifeye, or Imagination would be applications you could link to, integrate with, or deploy on what we are building, and not be tied to a specific set of hardware, browser, or walled garden.”

Augmented Reality and the Next Generation of Compelling Interactive Entertainment Experiences

Ogmento and the partnership of  Brian Selzer and Brad Foxhoven from Blockade with Ori Inbar is a very significant development for Augmented Reality.  I am very excited to be discussing Augmented Reality with Entertainment Industry veterans (interviews with Brian and Brad upcoming soon). Here is an excerpt from the beginning of my conversation with Brian.

“My first conversation with Ori was actually about my interest in Location Based RPG concepts. We had a long conversation about the possibilities with AR, and it was clear that we shared similar interests, but we’re coming from different complementary backgrounds. The idea of collaboration was exciting, so we just kept talking until the timing felt right. Now, with Ogmento we bring a unique blend of AR development experience with a deep backgrounds in AR technology, animation, video games, entertainment, social media, etc. I think this is a powerful mix that will allow us to do some great things.

It’s still so early, and things are just getting started in AR. There are only so many webcam magic tricks you can enjoy before you are ready for something else.

The location-based apps have the most potential in my opinion, which is why we are really focused on mobile AR. We have some board-game type projects, which do not instantly scream location-based gaming, but if you look at  something like the ARhrrr board game [for more see my interview with Blair McIntyre here], you can see how much more compelling it can be when the game invites the player to be actively moving around during the experience.”

Talking with Ori Inbar

Tish Shute: First I really want to catch up with you on your new venture – Ogmento.

Ori Inbar: It’s basically an evolutionary step. A little bit about Ogmento, I partnered with a couple of very strong veterans of the entertainment industry from LA, and we want to do two key things. One is develop augmented reality applications and games; and two, which is becoming really interesting lately, is to help AR development teams out there bring their concepts to the market.

Tish Shute: Your new partners are Brian Selzer and Brad Foxhoven. Are they both from Blockade?

Ori Inbar: Brad and Brian are both from Blockade and are leveraging their contacts and deep knowledge of entertainment companies and big brands they worked with over the years.

Tish: Sounds great to have a team like this getting into AR! How will you work with developers? Will you help them market their AR applications?

Ori: Exactly. In parallel to my blog becoming popular, it seems there’s a lot of activity picking up in the AR space. People are reaching out to us and are asking asking for help. So we started actually making that a part of our business. We help connect them with the right technologies if they need it or connect them with the right brands or companies and strategize with them on how to go to market and help publish their applications or games. So that’s becoming an exciting part of what we do.

Tish: It seems that great content rather than applications is going to be what drives the early AR market. What is your direction/vision for content development and what technologies are you focusing on: In my recent discussion with Robert Rice he asked the question: “The iphone…future or failure? With a seemingly anti-developer stance regarding augmented reality, and only a sliver of the global market share, are we letting the short term glitz of Apple and the iPhone fad pull us in the wrong direction? Shouldn’t we be focusing on Symbian devices that have the lion’s share of the market? or should we be looking more at either other OSs (winmobile, android) or not at all and trying to create a new platform that is more MID and less smart phone with a hardware partner?”

Ori: I can tell you that we’re now being inundated with requests for projects from all angles. Either from big brands, independent entertainment companies, all and everything in between. In terms of the hype it’s curving up. More and more people are hearing about it. In a sense we’re moving from a very strong push to a little pull. We’re starting to see some pull from people asking for development of AR projects.

In terms of technologies, what platforms to use? At this point we’re very open to picking the right technology, the right platform for each project. For example: Wikitude, or Layar, could be good for certain types of experiences, but they do not visually recognize elements in real life. So for that purpose you’ll need technologies from other folks like ARtoolkit or Imagination. We are basically picking the right tool for each job.

Tish: What distinguishes Imagination from ARtoolkit?

Ori: Imagination have been doing virtual reality and augmented reality for years now. They probably have the best augmented reality engine for mobile devices. It’s the only engine built from the ground up for mobile.

Tish: What about this whole issue of most of the world being Symbian and the U.S. being iPhone and possibly moving somewhat towards Android?

Ori: That’s right. We’re currently focusing on the iPhone because it’s the coolest out there and fits our target audiences perfectly, and there’s a pretty good market here in the U.S. which is currently our main target market. But you’re right, it could change tomorrow, when another major platform becomes popular. Another thing is that is attractive about the iPhone is that all of the iPhones are the same (although it’s now changing with the 3G-S). It’s very easy to develop an application and distribute it to 40 million people. But if you’re going into the Symbian market or Windows Mobile, it’s a nightmare. It’s not just the technical aspect of testing the app on all these devices but also the distribution challenge. Apparently there’s just no simple channel to distribute it across these various versions of these platforms.

Tish: That’s what stopped mobile gaming taking off until the iPhone wasn’t it.

Ori: Absolutely.

Tish: So this Austrian AR engine, Imagination, it must be for Symbian too, is it?

Ori: They have an augmented reality engine that works on P.C. webcam, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and now in the iPhone. You write the application once and theoretically it runs on all these platforms.

Tish: Any interesting development showing up on Imagination yet, or is it too early?

Ori: Our first game that we discussed [see my previous interview with Ori here] is actually going to be based on that engine.

Tish: Your game for pre-schoolers that we discussed before? What’s the release date for that?

Ori: We said it’s going to be released this summer and that’s still the plan, but it depends a little bit on Apple. You’ll be among the first to know when it’s in the app store.

Tish: It seems at the moment the two main forms of AR are mainly tethered or marker experiences or kind of stepping stone apps like Wikitude and Layar that are markerless but mainly pull info from web to world rather than truly aligning graphics in a tight relationship to the “real” world. Although what differentiates Wikitude from Layar is that you can actually create content with Wikitude.me and add your own tags now. When are we going to see something that goes beyond the tethered experience and the “browsing” experience and get to the magic of AR in terms of tightly aligning media/graphics with real world objects?

Ori: That’s right. That’s one difference between Layar and Wikitude. Another is that Wikitude is actually being used across the world by what is it now 160,000 or 200,000 people and Layar only works in the Netherlands for the moment. That’s a big difference. But things are changing rapidly.

But there are a lot of new AR concepts being developed out there (and we are fortunate to be working with some of them).

We’ll still see many webcam campaigns for another year or so, but recognizing elements on product packaging, posters, games will kick off a frenzy of new consumer experiences before the end of the year mobile AR will take the center stage. Next year will be huge for these experiences.

But to address your question, you’re going to see two different types of apps. One is the so called browsers like Wikitude and Layar, which actually doesn’t comply with the scientific definition of augmented reality in the sense that you have to align graphics with real life objects (Azuma).

Tish: Wikitude and Layar are not the purist idea of AR and technically should they really claim the title “browser”?

Ori: Right. But I don’t think it really matters to users that find these apps useful. The second type of apps you’re going to see in parallel are those which recognize markers or natural images and soon any real life object – and overlay on top of computer graphics. I believe we’ll see more and more of that towards the end of the year.

Tish: And you think Imagination really does give people an engine that allows them to do image recognition more easily?

Ori: Yes absolutely. They do. We’re using it. Right now it’s not an official SDK, but pretty soon they’ll open it up and more and more people will be able to take advantage of it.

Tish: When do you think they’ll open it up?

Ori: You’ll have to ask them But there’s also the ARtoolkit – the most used AR engine out there, which now has a version for the iPhone. They also have a version that can track images, but it’s still not running on the iPhone. It’s going to take some time until these, as well as the products from Metaio, and other folks are going to catch up with them.

Tish: I want to ask you about the Cartoon Network AR campaign? I didn’t get a chance to look at it before I spoke to you. It’s still a tethered experience I think but there is a “next generation AR” claim?

Ori: I think in terms of the experience it’s trying to take it a bit further than what we’ve seen so far by creating an actual game. But you are still tethered to a PC screen which is not significantly different than playing a 3D game on a PC.

Tish: Then the other thing is did you get a chance to play with the iPhone video API? Is it accessible now? I noticed your blog on this.

Ori: It’s under NDA with Apple so we cannot really talk about the details. But it seems like it’s doing only half of what we need for AR. It’ll be useful for applications like Wikitude but not when you want to align graphics with live video.

But I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen soon and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t… It’s just that Apple’s policy is to never reveals their plans. We don’t know when it’s going to happen.

Tish: You basically think we’re going to have to be very flexible because it seems as a developer the iPhone is obviously the only place to get easily to a market. But in terms of developer you do have to make some serious decisions and there are some interesting MIDs and new Android platforms coming out aren’t there?

Ori: Last year I thought MIDs would make a big difference in the AR world but they didn’t. Not in terms of adoption and not in terms of the number of MIDs that we expected to be released this year. Some companies are trying to resurrect it for next year… or later this year. I think the high price is going to be a barrier for adoption.

Tish: The economic climate hasn’t been good for it. Which bring up another question, now that people are really catching on to AR, should there be a partnership with the hardware people to get some of the hardware that really will make AR rock n roll moving e.g. accurate gps (Robert mentioned to me the idea of creating pseudolites = ground based differential GPS with <10cm accuracy hotspot say in partnership with Starbucks, for example).  And it seems to be that there definitely needs to be an eyeware push now we have seen close but not yet perfect prototypes from companies like Vuzix and Lumus. Will Ogmento,’cos you are going to be involved in lots of cool projects focusing on content, partner with the hardware people and get it moving along in that area?

Ori: That’s absolutely right. For ISMAR this year we’re planning some panel discussions with industry leaders as well as hardware companies to define the ideal mobile  device for augmented reality. These discussions are already happening. But I don’t think companies like Intel and others are paying enough attention to it just because they don’t see the demand yet. I believe that with more content and apps in the market, they’ll realize they can’t wait any longer and will accelerate their decision process and act.

Tish: But it does seem to me – one would have to be an Ostrich not to have noticed the excitement that relatively trivial Augmented Reality apps have stirred up. It’s something that people get is a cool and engaging experience and right away they like it. Although we haven’t seen a popular game yet have we?

Ori: Exactly. It’s gaining mindshare but it’s still very low on most people’s radar and there’s no market right now. You can’t even size the market. Before they invest a lot in this concept they’ll want to see some ROI.

Tish: So that’s the plan then. You’re basically hoping at Ogmento to make some popular iPhone apps? That’s really the first step?

Ori: Yes. That’s true. That’s what we think is going to trigger the other parts of the industry to contribute and to invest.

Tish: Right. Because ultimately a partnership between content and hardware – each enables investment and ROI in the other, its a synergistic combo. You need the big content to push the hardware companies, and you need the hardware to get the really dynamic content.

Ori: You are so right. It’s multiple elements in the industry that have to come together. You have the technology companies like Imagination and Metaio, then you have content companies like what we’re trying to do; the hardware vendors and the large content providers. Those brands that we’re trying to go after and educate them about the potential of AR. All these pieces need to come together for this market to ignite.

Tish: So is Ogmento talking to major content franchise owners or are they coming to you?

Ori: It’s both ways actually. Mostly we’re still educating. That’s one piece of the puzzle, the other piece is connecting them with various AR developers out there who have great ceoncepts, but don’t have the expertise or connections to market it.

Tish: So Ogmento acts as an agency for them or how would you describe it?

Ori: It’s more of a publisher-developer relationship. Similar to the gaming industry where you have game developers and publishers.

Tish: At the minute are you working with any particular team or are you still in the early stages with that?

Ori: We have several projects in the early stages. Follow us on Ogmento.com or Games Alfresco to see the progress with these projects in the future.

Tish: Have you had seen anyone coming up with good ideas for a Green Tech AR application? Seems that visualizing emissions and carbon footprint for everything in our lives would be a big step forward in taking action to make the changes we need to avert a climate catastrophe – seeing is believing!!

Ori: Not really yet. I was kind of playing with this idea (see my previous interview with Ori here) about that but the technology wasn’t really ready for this kind of application. I think that when it happens this will be a very important area.

click the image above to see video

Tish: I was thinking if we could organize a prize, for development of really good Green Tech AR apps. that would help.  It is early for Green Tech AR because it really involves a level of instrumentation and visualization/alignment of media with nearby objects  that is hard to do at the moment (although the necessary instrumentation is on its way to becoming ubiquitous – see Google’s Android to invade homes and Touch Revolution household Android devices coming this year). And smart energy monitoring like Current Cost is already widely available in the UK.  AMEE – the world’s energy meter is integrated with Pachube and can be used to calculate the carbon footprint of a Pachube feed that is monitoring some kind of energy consumption.  And many people are interested (see Tom Raftery’s Green Monk post here) in this kind of application that will really advance the usability of much Green Tech. So we have some ground work for a competition already!  Particularly, I think, if the competition focuses on a target instrumented environment.

[Note: Pachube has produced a really nice augmented reality demo (see video above) where 3D Pachube visualisation data is overlayed in realtime ‘on top’ of Arduino sensor boxes around their office. The demo  “features the Pachube office carbon footprint wall with chalk-drawn augmented reality marker, for Dennou-Coil-style space-hacking.” The code is written in c++ using openFrameworks, ArToolKit and the ofxPachube library and is being cleaned up for public release soon.  As the Pachube team notes, this “could provide an easy way to inspect rooms (or streets) full of sensor and environment data via a camera (e.g. iPhone)… or even AR goggles!]

Ori: Yes a prize is a good idea!

Tish: What do you think would be a reasonable sum to get the right kind of developers into that?

Ori: I think fifty thousand is the minimum. Or a publishing deal.

Tish: $50,000 is the minimum. And how would you offer it?

Ori: A cash prize for the first place and a little bit less for the second and third.

Tish: I’ll start talking to people. Maybe Ogmento could help adjudicate it, if we can find a way to raise the prize money, would you be willing to help run a competition?

Ori: We would love to. Just like we discussed before, it’s a matter of understanding the  current technical limitations, and then designing something that works within those limitations and delivering an added value.

Tish: What have been the most exciting things that you’ve seen since we’ve last talked. What are the things that got you going wow this is moving forward?

Ori: First If you just looked at the Google trend on Augmented Reality, it has the right curve. It’s really growing exponentially at this point. Also I really like a couple of articles just last week, one in the New York Times and one in Venture Beat. What was unique about the article in Venture Beat is that it was probably the first roundup of Augmented Reality companies. It wasn’t very comprehensive or detailed, but it might be a sign that VCs are getting interested in AR companies.

Tish: Yes.

And, in a way AR is perfect because it’s suited to the kind of level of investment that people are interested in right now – relatively small scale investment. And what’s good about particularly say iPhone apps, you can do a lot with relatively little can’t you?

Ori: Yeah, I agree. But to answer your question, I think the most exciting thing that is happening is the (small) swarm of AR developers popping up in various corners of the world and are looking to bring their ideas and products to the market. I think that’s unique and we haven’t seen it until this year.

Tish: Why are we seeing most things coming out of Europe like Layer, Wikitude, Imagination?

Ori: It’s a true statement. You know what? I have no idea why. I really don’t know.

Tish: Is there anything special coming out of Silicon Valley that’s normally leading the field in these kind of things?

Ori: I can’t say, but at least…there’s Ogmento!

Tish: Yes! There is Ogmento. Right. But it is interesting isn’t it? I think I know the answer to my own question. It’s because mobile culture is very well developed in Europe and this is springing out of mobile culture.

Ori: There is another important initiative from the US – the AR consortium which Robert Rice and I have recently launched…

Tish: Oh yes I must ask you about that. And Robert’s been really working hard on the big problems of full on AR- massively multiplayer, 3D, virtual goods market, tight alignment of media/ graphics with real world objects, partnerships to move the hardware forward – eyeware etc.  I know he has some exciting demos planned for ISMAR 2009,  it’s just that he’s still under the radar.

Ori: Robert is going after the hard problems, which is good.

Tish: It is great. Actually  I just spoke to him today and it seems like he’s a few months off being able to show us something. He is working hard to push the hardware forward.

Ori: I think he is and he’s probably targeting existing platforms.

Tish: Which is were we get back to the snake biting the tail – great content need good hardware and hardware investment comes from seeing great content.  What does the current crop of AR browsers have to do to take it to the next level?

Ori: I think what they’re doing right now is a very good first step. Which is opening it up just like Wikitude and Layar. It’s kind of what made a difference for Facebook versus other social networks and for Twitter as well. Their approach as a platform is what made it so huge. The other step which Wikitude is doing with wikitude.me is allowing people everwhere to tag the world.

Tish: They’re the first who are doing that so far.

Ori: There were other attempts to provide ways to tag the world, but I think Wikitude is the first that is actually available on a global scale.

Tish: Have you had a chance to try out Google Wave yet – do you see some potential for some interesting AR integrations with Wave? I think Wave may be a big game changer in real time communication, if it gets mass adoption. It basically makes the web like a videogame – bringing a real time many participant shared interaction to the web. I have been exploring in the sandbox and there are some interesting possibilities for role playing games. It’s completely open so it could be integrated into an AR project.

Ori: I am going to have to look into Wave in the next few days.

Tish: So what should we look out for from Ogmento in the next few months? What do you want to develop next?

Ori: I have given some hints above – you’ll have to stay tuned to discover…

Blair MacIntyre is one of the original pioneers of  augmented reality and an extraordinary amount of creative work is coming out of his Augmented Environments Laboratory at Georgia Tech – see YouTube videos here.  The screenshot below is from, ARhrrrr, a very impressive augmented reality shooter game created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and Savannah College of Art and Design, (SCAD- Atlanta), and produced on the NVidia Tegra devkits – watch the demo here.

Blair has spent much of his career working on immersive augmented reality and more recently the integration of augmented reality with mirror worlds. Blair explains:

“I am interested in the intersection of mobile devices – whether they are head mounts or handhelds – and parallel mirror worlds…I think that parallel mirror worlds are a direct manifestation of the intersection of the virtual world we now live in (the web) and geotagging.  As more and more information is tied to place, and as more of our searching become place-based, we will want to do those searches about places we are not at.  A 3D mirror world may provide one interface to that data.  Want to plan your trip to London;  go their virtually and look around, see what is there (both physically and virtually), teleport between areas you want to learn about, and so on.  More interestingly, talk to people who are there now, and retrieve your location-based notes when you are on your trip.”

But, at a time when many augmented reality developers are focusing on AR apps for smart phones, including Blair (the picture on left opening this post is Blair’s augmented reality iphone app ARf), I was interested in finding out from Blair what the state of play was for the real deal Rainbow’s End style AR, as well as the potential he sees in smart phones to mediate meaningful AR experiences.

There is enormous amount of  innovation in mapping our world, see my post, “Location Becomes Oxygen at Where 2.0 and WhereCamp,” and  Ori Inbar’s  Where 2.0. conference roundup. But as Ori notes, to move augmented reality forward:

My point is not a shocker: all we need is to tap into this information and bring it, in context, into people’s field of view.

And this is what Blair MacIntyre’s work is all about.

Talking With Blair MacIntyre

Tish Shute: There do seem to be broader implications to augmented reality today than when this term was first coined. I am interested to have your perspective on how augmented reality may go beyond some of our early definitions?

Blair MacIntyre: I still think the original definition of the term is useful:  media (typically graphics) tightly registered (aligned) with the physical world, in real time.  Many people talk about many things that relate virtual worlds to places, spaces, objects and people.  There is room for many of them, and they don’t all have to “be” augmented reality.  I like using Milgram’s definition of Mixed Reality as everything from the physical world (at one end) to the virtual world at the other;  it’s a spectrum, and augmented reality just sits at one point.

The reason I like the old definition is I believe there is something special about graphics that are tightly, rigidly aligned with the physical world.  When things appear to stick to the world, and an obviously identifiable location, people can start leveraging their natural perceptual, physical and social abilities and interact with the mixed world as they do the physical world.  We’ve found this with the two studies we’ve done of tabletop AR games (Art of Defense and Bragfish);  one key to those games is that the graphics were tightly aligned with identifiable landmarks in the physical world (gameboard).

Art of Defense (pic on left) Bragfish (pic on right)

Tish: I know that you are involved with ISMAR 2009 which is the key US augmented reality conference.  What do you think will be the hot themes, applications, innovations at this year’s conference? Do you think this will be the year that AR really breaks out of eye candy into truly useful and sustained experiences?

Blair: Unfortunately, I won’t be involved this year.  I was supposed to be helping run the technical program, as well as the art/media program, but sickness in my family prevented me from having the time, so I am not helping this year.

First, I would not agree with the implication of the last question — I don’t think AR has just been eye candy up to now.  I do agree that the “high profile” uses of it have largely been that, which is mostly because of the limits of the technology.  I don’t think we’ll see huge changes in that regard by ISMAR this year.  However, we will hopefully see a mixing of communities that hasn’t happened at ISMAR before, and I do believe that this year (independent of ISMAR) we will see more and more AR apps.  Whether they go beyond eye candy is still a question.  I’m hoping that some folks (including myself and other ISMAR folks!) will help push AR in new directions.  But I also expect many folks new to ISMAR and AR to play a big role, because it is this new blood, especially those folks with real problems to solve, new art and game ideas, and a fresh perspective, that will open new doors.

Tish: You have been working on integrating augmented reality with virtual worlds. You mentioned that the way you use Sun’s Wonderland is really about pulling the virtual world into the real world, i.e., Wonderland, “is just a place to put data.”  How is your use of the persistent virtual space different from what we have become accustomed to call virtual worlds?

Blair: The approach we are taking in our project at Georgia Tech is to use the virtual world as the central hub of the information space, and allow the virtual world to be the element that enables distributed workers to collaborate more smoothly.  This is work we are doing with Sun and Steelcase (and the NSF), and is an outgrowth of a project (the InSpace project) that’s been going on for a few years.

What we are trying to do is use mixed reality and ubicomp techniques to pull as much of the physical activity into the virtual world, and then reflect that activity back out to the different participants as best suits their situation.  So, folks in highly instrumented team rooms will collaborate in one way, and their activity will be reflected in the virtual world;  remote participants (e.g., those at home, or in a cafe or hotel) may control their virtual presence in different ways, but the presence of all participants will be reflected back out to the other sides in analogous ways.  We may see ghosts of participants at the interactive displays, or hear their voices in 3D space around us;  everyone will hopefully be able to manipulate content on all displays and tell who is making those changes.

A secondary benefit, I hope, is that by putting the data in the virtual world and making that the place that gives you more powerful and flexible access to the data (e.g., by leveraging space and giving access to history), distributed teams will begin to have the virtual space become a place they go to work, bump into each other and have those casual contacts co-located workers take for granted.

Creating the Information Landscape of the Future

Tish: At the end of my interview with Ori Inbar he said, in order to have a ubiquitous experience “you’ll need to 3d map the world. Google earth like apps are going to help but it is not going to be sufficient. So let’s leverage people. Google became successful in part by making people work with them.  Each time you create a link from your blog to my blog their search engines learn from it.  So let’s find ways to make people create information that can be used for AR.” What ways do you think people can create information that can be used for AR?

Blair: I think the big part of that is the creation of models and environments, the necessary “baseline” for specifying experiences.  Google and Microsoft are clearly working toward this;  recent videos from Microsoft show them starting to move the photosynth work toward Virtual Earth.  Similarly, I came across a page where people are finally starting to mine geotagged Flickr [see my post, “Location Becomes Oxygen,” and here for more on the “The Shape of Alpha” project from Flickr]  images to create models.  It’s that kind of thing that will be useful first;  using the data we all create to enable modeling and (eventually) vision-based tracking in the real world.

After that, it’s a matter of time till more of what we “create” (e.g., Tweets and blog posts and so on) are all geo-referenced;  these will become the information landscape of the future, the kinds of things people think about when they read “Rainbow’s End”.   The big problem will be filtering, searching and sorting.  And, of course, safety and security.

Tish: You are working with Unity3D to research the integration of mobile location based AR with persistent mirror world like spaces.  What has attracted you to Unity? What is the difference between this and your Wonderland project? I know you mentioned. you will be using head-mounted displays are part of this Unity project. What are your goals for this project?

Blair: We started to use Unity3D because it gave us what we wanted in a game engine.  Most importantly, it’s very open and let us trivially expose AR technologies into the editor.  Similarly, it can target the iPhone, so we can begin to work with it on that platform, too.  The biggest problem with creating compelling experiences is content;  and a show stopper for creating content is not getting it into your engine.  Unity has a nice content workflow.

Unity3D is a front end engine, for creating the game;  Wonderland is both a front end, and a backend.  We are actually looking into using the Wonderland backend with Unity as well.  Wonderland also has growing support for doing “real work” in a virtual world, which is key to our other projects.

Eventually, we’ll be using HMD’s.  The goal for the Unity3D project, initially, was to explore what you can do with an AR/VR mirror-world; this is a project are working on with Alcatel-Lucent, and demo’d at CTIA this year.  It’s continuing to grow, though, and now includes a number of our projects, including some work on mobile social AR and soon, some performance and experience design projects in the area of AR ARG’s.  It’s really quite interesting to imagine what you can do when you have an “MMO of the real world” (which we now have for part of campus) that supports both VR-style desktop access simultaneously with mobile AR access.

Tish: Have you taken another look at OpenSim as a possible backend for augmented reality?  Recently I talked to David Levine, IBM and he is thinking about some possibilities to optimize OpenSim to dynamically load a large amount of objects at once (i.e how fast OpenSim can bulk load into an existing sim) and make it better suited to augmented reality/mirror world type projects.

Blair: I haven’t looked at OpenSim recently.  We will probably look at it this summer.

Tish: Why did you select Unity as a good client for augmented reality?

Blair: Unity is a 3D game authoring environment so at some level it is no different from using Ogre, if all the associated stuff was just as well done. It has integrated physics, scripting, debugging, etc. – you can write code in javascript or C# or whatever.   It has a good content pipeline, as well, and supports a range of platforms.

It has simple networking built in, so multiple unity engines can talk to each other but it is not a virtual world platform out of the box – there is no back end …

Tish: Someone described Unity to me as a great client waiting for a great backend? So what are you going to use as a back end?

Blair: There is no real processing except in the client right now.  We will eventually have to create a back end.  We are thinking of using Dark Star because someone on the Sun Wonderland community forums has already built a set of scripts connecting Unity to Darkstar.

But for us, we are not proposing right now to build a real product.  This is research to demonstrate what you could do if you actually had the back end.

Tish: What are the most important aspects of the backend from your POV?

Blair: We want to simulate a variety of the interesting aspects of the back end.  So I very much care about notions of privacy and security and how these sorts of AR/VR Mirror Worlds would work in practice.  But I care about how those things as they impact user experience, not really about how we would really implement them.

Tish: So looking at some of the big problems from the perspective of user experience? Are we are going to go through the same growing pains that the web and VWs have seen, for example, will we have to type in passwords to get into everyone’s little worlds….

Blair: Well you know the SciFi background to this, you’ve mentioned it in other posts on your blog.  Because when you look at the Rainbow’s End model where you have security certificates flying around, that is in effect what cookies and so on are now.  You can authenticate yourself once and then have those certificates hang around. So you can easily imagine how it could be done.  But the big question is how does that change user experience.  There are all kinds of things that start coming into play – like what happens if nearby people see different things – it goes on and on!

Tish: Sounds Like this is very valuable research.  It seems to me that there will be a lot of investment soon in putting the pieces together to do location based markerless AR and it would be nice if we knew more about it from the user experience POV.

Isn’t it vital for a productive intersection between mobile AR and persistent mirror world spaces for us to have markerless AR?  Aren’t we right at the beginning of people really saying yeah markerless AR is doable now? But it seems to me not many people researching or working on fully immersive AR and its integration with mirror worlds?

Blair: I think some of the AR community is thinking about this. There’s probably people who are doing stuff in some other non technical communities. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that people in the digital performance or ARS electronica world who are thinking a little bit about these sorts of things. Although not necessarily at the level of actually trying to build it, because they probably can’t right now.  But experimenting with the precursors.  My colleagues in digital media like to point out that this is often the purpose of digital art, to point out new directions and push the boundaries.

Obviously Science Fiction has explored the possibilities because that is what Rainbow’s End and the Matrix were all about.

Tish: and Denno Coil…

Blair: There has been some research – people like my adviser Steve Feiner up at Columbia, Mark Billinghurst in New Zealand, myself and people at Graz University in Austria .  But partly it has been so hard to do mobile AR up to now – so many people mock head worn displays and can’t get past current technology – you have had  to be willing to ignore the bulky back packs and cables and batteries and so on.  That is changing which is good.

My current response to the anti-head-mounted display people is if 5 years ago you told me you told me that fabulously dressed people who care about their looks and wear stylish clothes would have had big things hanging from their ears that blink bright blue light, so they could talk on the phone, many of us would have said you were crazy, because it would be ugly and so on.  But because there is an intersection of demonstrable need and benefit…Bluetooth headsets are really useful and the sort of early gestalt feeling that grew up around them – that people who use them are so important that they always have to be in touch, they wear these things – so people accept them.

It will likely be a similar thing with head mounted displays. And I don’t know if it will be that people wearing them so that they can read their mail while driving, god forbid. But it will be something.  And when we get the 2nd generation of the wrap glasses that look more like sun glasses and are not bulky and so on, we will have the potential for them catching on because you will look at them and you will think that the person is wearing because they are doing x…

X might be surfing a virtual world or reading their email or keeping in touch, or being aware. It will happen. But they have to get unbulky enough and there has to be more  than one important application, not just watching TV.

Picture above shows  an outside view of the KARMA AR system;  the knowledge based maintenance system Blair built in his first year of grad school (“first AR system Steve Feiner, Doree Seligmann, and I worked on”).  Blair noted, “The Communications of the ACM paper on it (from 1993) is a pretty widely cited AR paper.”

Tish: I think the need for  full on transparent, immersive, wraparound, Gucci stylish eyewear with a decent field of view are the elephant in the room in terms of realizing the full potential of augmented reality.  There are a few new players in the field Digilens,  Vuzix, others?  What is the progress in this area and what do you hope for in terms of near term solutions?

Blair: I agree with that sentiment.  I think that, in the near term, there is a lot we can do with handhelds, as we’ve been doing in the lab.  However, because it’s awkward and tiring to hold up a device, even a small one, for any length of time, handhelds will only be good for “focused” uses of AR.  Such as the table-top games we’ve been doing, or the constellation viewing app that I heard came our recently for the Android G1.  I don’t even see something like Wikitude as that compelling (beyond the “gee wiz” factor) for a handheld form factor.   Many proposed AR apps only really become compelling when users have constant awareness of them, and that requires a see-through head-worn display.

I’ve seen the mockups of the Vuzix ones;  they seem pretty interesting, and are getting to were early adopters could use them (they will be cheap enough, and will hopefully be good enough).  Microvision’s virtual retinal display is also promising;  the contact lens displays will be the most interesting, if anyone can ever make them work.   I don’t know of anything else out there.

“its not really a killer app you care about, it is the killer existence that all of the technology and small applications taken together facilitate”

Tish: While location based services are accepted now and people are understanding that it is something that opens up a new relationship to everything, we still haven’t found the experience that will get everyone holding up their mobile devices?

Blair: Well that is actually the killer problem.  Gregory Abowd is one of my colleagues who does ubiquitous computing research here at Tech.   Way back when we started the Aware Home project (Aware Home Research Institute at Georgia Tech) when I first got here about ten years ago, there was always this question of what is the killer app.  So Gregory comment in a meeting once that its not really a killer app you care about, it is the killer existence that all of the technology and small applications taken together facilitate. It is not that any one of these AR demos we see right, whether it is seeing your photos in the world or whatever, is important. Its that when taken together, there is enough of a benefit that you would use the whole environment.

In the original context we were talking about an instrumented home, but it is the same thing here with AR.

The problem with the mobile phone as a AR device is that problem of awareness. If I have a head mount on and I walk down the street and there is bunch of probably-not-useful-but-potentially-useful information floating by me, that’s a good thing, because I may see something that is useful or makes me think of something else.  But if I have to hold up my phone to see if something might be interesting nearby, I will never hold up my phone because at the time there is a high probability that there won’t be anything particularly important there.  You might imagine you can get around this by using alerts or something like that, but then you overload whatever alert channel you use.  For example, I forward maybe 5 or 6  people’s updates from Facebook to my phone – started with my wife, a few friends, my brother, and the net result of that is I never get SMSs’ anymore because when my phone buzzes, usually I ignore it because it is probably just somebody’s random Facebook update. So if we start overloading channels like that with “oh there might be something useful here in the real world, if you pick up the phone and look through it you will see it … and I will buzz you.” People  just start ignoring the buzzes.

So it is a very hard problem if you think about the kinds of applications that people always imagine with global AR — names over peoples heads and other random information floating in the world — until you have a head mount and all that information is around you all the time. That is when those sort of applications will actually happen.

Tish: Robert Rice notes: “AR is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.” (see my interview with Robert, “Is it ‘OMG Finally’ for Augmented Reality?). And I think the iphone experience has laid the foundation for the increasing desire to experience the network wherever we are – and not be stuck behind a pc.  We cannot perhaps do all we want to do yet. But even in the range of things we can do know, we are not even sure exactly what it is we want to do where yet is it?

“imagine your iphone Facebook client supports AR and that all data on Facebook might be georeferenced – pictures, status updates etc…….”

Blair: Yes that is a huge problem. I have been lucky to be able to teach two fun classes this year that let the students and I start to explore some of the potential that handheld AR might bring.  Last fall I taught a handheld AR game design class — coordinated with a class at the Savanna College of Art and Design’s Atlanta campus — and we had the students build a sequence of prototype handheld AR games, which was a lot of fun.   This spring I taught a mixed reality/augmented reality design class with Jay Bolter (a professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture here at GT).  Jay and I have been teaching this class off and on for about 9 years; this semester we decided to say to the students “imagine your iphone Facebook client supports AR and that all data on Facebook might be georeferenced – pictures, status updates etc…….” and have them do projects aimed at such an environment.

Tish: Not many of our favorite social media today have much sense of location do they? But Flickr  are  utilizing the geo-referenced pictures to create vernacular maps…..The Shape of Alpha

Blair:Yes that is because lots of cameras put geo location data into the exif data so they can extract it…

Some mobile Twitter clients like the one I use in my iphone will let you add your location.  But in general Facebook and other sites don’t have any notion of location. But if you look at all the things people do in Facebook, such as sending gifts and other games, its easy to imagine what these might look like with geo-reference data.  So, the high level project for the class is the groups have to design experiences people might have using mobile AR Facebook.  We told them to assume Facebook as it stands now, but add geolocation and AR to the client.  The class boiled down to “What would you imagine people doing?” So it has been kind of fun.

And we are using Unity for the class too – the same infrastructure I am working on in my research linking mobile AR to persistent immersive mirror world type spaces – and we having the students mock up what a mobile AR Facebook experience would be like.

Tish: Can you describe some of the ideas you class came up with that you think have potential? I know Ori mentioned that from the games class he liked Candy Wars.

Candy Wars

Blair: In the end, they had a nice range of projects in the Spring class.  One created tag clouds out of status messages over spaces, others looked at analogies to virtual pets and gift giving out in the world, one looked at leveraging geolocation to help with crowd-sourced cultural translation, and three groups did straight-up social games.

[See all of the projects from the handheld AR games class on YouTube here]

iphone, Android, or NVidia Tegra devkits or the Texas Instrument’s OMAP3 devkits?

Tish: Is anyone in the class working on Android?

Blair: Nobody is using Android because no-one in the class has the phones. We have ATT microcell infrastructure on campus.  Some ATT people joke that we are better off than them because we have a head office on campus so we can build in the network applications which people even at ATT research can’t do.  But because  we have this infrastructure on campus, and a great relationship with ATT and the other sponsors, we have the ability to provision our own phones without having to pay for long-term contracts, which is vital for research and teaching.

Tish: So does this lock you into the iphone?

Blair: Well the G1 is of course not AT&T but it is GSM so we could probably buy them unlocked and put them on our AT&T network. But the students I work with are much more interested in the iphone right now.

Tish: Is that because the iphone has the market?

Blair: For me the reason I am not interested in the G1 is because you can’t do AR on it – there is Wikitude and a few other apps, but it is all hideously slow.  Worse, because the Java code isn’t compiled like it would be on the desktop, you can’t do computer vision with it, so you can’t do anything particularly interesting on the current commercial G1s.  We could probably take the NVidia Tegra devkits or the Texas Instrument’s OMAP3 devkits (both are chipsets for next gen phones — high end graphics, fast processing),  and install Android on those and we may actually do that yet.  But, it seems like a lot of work right now, for not much benefit.

Augmented Reality shooter game ARrrrr from Georgia Tech and SCAD Atlanta on the NVidia Tegra devkits – watch the demo on YouTube here.

Tish: Everyone seems very excited about the iphone OS 3.0 and the addition of compass. Compass is pretty essential for AR right?

Blair: It is necessary if you can’t do other forms of outdoor tracking, but the problem is that the compass on the G1 isn’t very good, relatively speaking and the iPhone one probably won’t be much better. It does not have very high accuracy, nor is it very fast (compared to, say, the high end 3D orientation sensors we use, from Intersense and MotionNode). As far as I can tell, it doesn’t even give full 3D orientation. I don’t have a G1 (although I have pre-ordered an iPhone 3Gs), but people have told me it only has absolute 2D orientation, so you can only line things up if you are careful.  Your can’t look around arbitrarily…

Tish: You can’t sweep your phone?

Blair: You can look left and right, but if it doesn’t have full 3D orientation, you can’t go up and down. You can’t tilt it in weird directions. It is not fast in the form that you would want to look around quickly.  So it is nice demo.  And it is good for what the Android people use it for which is to let you do your Google street view by looking around, which is actually really useful.

I think there are lots of really useful things you can do with such a compass.

And, it is clear that compass is a necessary feature if we want to do AR.  It’s just not sufficient.

Outdoor Tracking and Markerless AR

Tish: Isn’t it essential for markerless AR? I guess not I just saw this post about SREngine on Augmented Times!

This wasn’t up when we spoke so perhaps you have some comments about what it brings to the table?

Blair: Maybe. The folks at Nokia are working on outdoor tracking, they demoed some stuff at ISMAR last year on the N95 handsets that is all image based.  We are trying to do some work with them, one of my students is working on it.  And probably Microsoft is going to do more on this as well, they had a video up showing that they are also working on vision based techniques.  If you give the phone the equivalent of those panoramic Google Street View images (assuming they are up-to-date) and you are standing at the right place, you don’t really need a compass, you can figure out which way you are looking by looking at the camera video. Ulrich Neumann (USC) did some work on tracking from panorama’s years ago, I don’t know what ever became of it.

Regarding SREngine, that project appears to be a pretty simple first step, but is probably just a demo at this point, and limitations like “only works on static scenes” and “doesn’t work for simple scenes” means it’s probably extracting some simple features out of the image and then matching those to some database.  The trick would be getting this to work on a large scale, where the world changes a lot.   It’s not obvious how to get there.

Tish: So forget RFID for AR…

Blair: RFID is not really useful.

Tish: not at all?

Blair: RFID is useful for telling you what things are near you.  The problem is it doesn’t give you any directional information – it just tells you you’re in range of the tag. So can use it to tell you when you are near a certain product for example.  So it is useful in terms of telling you what thing you are near, and then you can load up a vision system or something else that will recognize that thing.

In that way, it could be useful as a good starting point.

Similarly for computer vision, the compass and the gps are very useful for giving you an initial guess at what you may be looking at that can then speed up the rest of the process.  But, computer vision by itself will not be a complete solution because if I have my panoramic Google Street view (or whatever image database I use for tracking) and you are standing between me and the building -  I am not going to see what I expect to see, I am going to see you.

So I think it is all going to be part of one big package – you are going to see accelerometers, digital compasses, and gps and then combine that with computer vision and other sensors, and then maybe we are going to start getting the things that we have always dreamed about.  I like to show this video from the U. of Cambridge (work done by Gerhard Reitmayr and Tom Drummond) of an outdoor tracking demo because it gives a sense of what will be possible.  Techniques like this will be an ingredient in the future of things.  It becomes especially interesting when you have these highly detailed mirror worlds.  It is sort of one of those chicken and egg problems where if I have an highly detailed model of the world then techniques like they have can be used to track.  But that mirror world needs to be accurate or you can’t use it for tracking, and why would you create the mirror world if you couldn’t track?

Tish: I noticed in your comment to “my interview with Robert Rice” that you said you thought that is was important not to collapse AR into ubicomp – “forgetting what originally inspired us about AR” is, I think if I remember correctly, the suggestion you made. But aren’t ubiquitous computing and AR basically coextensive?

The vision of ubicomp Mike Kuniavsky describes – “sharing data through open APIs and the promise of embedded information processing and networking distributed through the environment” demonstrates how much can be done with very little processing power.” In its most immersive form augmented reality requires a lot of processing power. I think we have all become very conscious about trying minimize levels of consumption.  Can you explain why you think people shouldn’t see AR as the Hummer (energy squandering indulgence) of Ubiquitous Computing?

Blair:  I think there will be a hierarchy of interfaces. You are going to have the rich Rainbow’s End like experience – you are totally submerged in a mixed environment, if you have a head mount on (its not going to be Rainbow’s End for while) but if you don’t have the headmount on that information might be available to you other ways, whether it is a 3D overlay using your handheld or just a 2D mashup with Google maps.  But there will be some circumstances and people who will want to get the compelling experience you can only get with the headmount.

Tish:  Are you doing any research on how all these hierarchies of experiences will fit together – what aspects of this are you looking at?

Blair: The thing that really needs to happen is you need to have this backend architecture that allows you to collect your data from different sources and aggregate it much like the web. Right now Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth are much like the old pre-web hyper-text systems that were all centralized. And what we really need is to have the web equivalent where Georgia tech can publish their building models and I.B.M. can publish their building models and their campus models, and your client can aggregate them, as opposed to Microsoft or I.B.M. puts their building models into Google Earth and then somehow you get them out with Google’s google earth browser. That’s just not going to fly.

Tish: so what does it take then to get us to this backend architecture, because I’m in total agreement?

Blair: The nice thing about augmented reality versus virtual reality is that you don’t need everything modeled. You can do interesting AR apps like Wikitude with absolutely no world model.

Tish: So that means we can start with what we have – utilize cloud services without a full blown backend architecture?

Blair: It may very well be that Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth act as a portal because people go and build models and link them with KML, and they can see them in google earth but they can also download the KML’s through some some other channel. So it may be that those things end up being something that feeds some of this along. Then people start seeing a benefit to having these highly accurate models so then you start integrating the Microsoft photosynth stuff and leveraging photographs to generate models.

It’s just keeping up with it and building it in real time is the challenge. A lot of folks think it will be tourist applications where there’s models of times square and models of central park and models of Notre Dame and the big square around that area in paris and along the river and so on, or the models of Italian and Greek history sites – the virtual Rome. As those things start happening and people start building onto the edges, and when Microsoft Photosynth and similar technologies become more pervasive you can start building the models of the world in a semi-automated way from photographs and more structured, intentional drive-by’s and so on. So I think it’ll just sort of happen. And as long there’s a way to have the equivalent of Mosaic for AR, the original open source web browser, that allows you to aggregate all these things. It’s not going to be a Wikitude. It’s not going to be this thing that lets you get a certain kind of data from a specific source, rather it’s the browser that allows you to link through into these data sources.

So it’s that end that interests me. It’s questions like “what is the user experience”, how do we create an interface that allows us to layer all these different kinds of information together such that I can use it for all my things. I imagine that I open up my future iphone and I look through it. The background of the iphone, my screen, is just the camera and it’s always AR.

I want the camera on my phone to always be on, so it’s not just that when I hold it a certain way it switches to camera mode, but literally it’s always in video mode so whenever there’s an AR thing it’s just there in the background.

When we can do that I can have little alerts so when I have my phone open I can look around and see it independent of the buttons and things that I’m tapping and pushing to use the phone. That’ll be a really a different kind of experience.

Of course it is not known yet if the next gen iphone will have an open video API.  And of course, the current camera is pretty low quality, so why would they give it an open API until they put in a better camera?  I am not expecting anything one way or the other until the 3Gs comes out and people start using it.

But there are many things about the iphone 3.0 OS that are hugely important, like the discovery API that allows people to play games with other people nearby, that don’t have much to do with AR.

Tish: You have an iphone AR virtual pet application ARf.

Macrumors wrote it up and suggested that the neg gen iphone will have compass and open video API.  What are your plans for ARf?

Blair: ARf is just a demo right now.  I know what we’d like to do with it, but it would require tons of work;  imagine what it would take to do a multiplayer, social version of Nintendogs?  It’s not clear what we’d really learn by doing that, but there are lots of other game ideas we have that we want to explore.

Tish: I think it was on Twitter where Tim O’Reilly said, “saying everything must have a RFID tag is like saying we can’t recognize each other unless we wear name tags. Look at what’s happening with speech recognition, image recognition et.al. and tell me you really think we need embedded metadata.” What would you say to that?

Blair: I think that whatever extra data is there will be used. So if we put machine readable labels on some objects then they’ll be used if they make the identification and tracking problem easier. But it’s pretty clear that people are already working on tracking and so on.

A lot of these mobile AR apps are clearly putting ideas in people’s minds things that won’t really be doable in the near future. Like being able to look down the aisle of the store and it recognize all of the products. Given the distances and complexity of the scene, the number of pixels devoted to each of those objects, and so on – you just can’t recognize things in that context. But if I’m standing in front of a small set of objects, or looking at one thing, or I’m standing in front of a building, or if I’m in the store and because of the location API — imagine an enhanced location API that can tell me within a few feet where I am, and then combine that with some use of the discovery API that allows the store to tell your device you’re in the toothpaste section. Now you only have to look for different brands of toothpaste. So now you can recognize the big letters “Crest” or whatever. It’s all about constraining the problem.

That’s why I like that particular piece of Drummond’s work, the tracking web site I mentioned above. The general tracking problem of looking around and recognizing objects and tracking is still impossible. But if I know roughly what direction I’m looking in and I have a good estimate of my position, and I have models of what I should be seeing when I look in that direction, then it becomes a tractable problem. And so it’s not that a compass and a GPS are 100% necessary. But if you have them it certainly makes things possible that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.

Imagine for example  if there’s a new version of GPS, I just noticed that some of the new satellites going up have this new L5 channel. There’s the L1 & L2 signals  that the military and civilian ones use and they added this civilian L5 signal, which should make GPS more accurate. I haven’t found anything online that says how much more accurate.

But someday, hopefully, all GPS will get to be the quality of survey-grade GPS. Right now, if you get an RTK GPS from one of these companies that make the survey grade GPS systems, they give you position estimates in the range of two centimeters, and update 10 to 20 times a second. When you have that kind of positional accuracy combined with the kind of orientational accuracy you get from the orientation sensors we use in the lab from Intersense and MotionNode, everything is easier because you’ve pretty much got absolute position. You put that into a phone and now when I look up, it’s still not perfectly aligned because there will still be errors (especially in orientation, since the compasses are affected by metal and other magnetic noise). But it does mean if you and I are standing 5 feet apart from each other and look at each other, I can pretty much put a little smiley face above your head. Whereas now, with GPS, if I look at you and we’re 5 feet apart our GPS’s might think we’re on the opposite side of each other because they’re only accurate to two to five meters.

And that depending on the time of day and weather!

Putting RFID tags everywhere is easy; the problem is the readers – they currently require lots of power and they have a limited range.  Sprinkling RFID tags everywhere is fine. But you have to be able to activate those tags and read back the signal.  In certain contexts it works.

Tish: And one final question!  What do you think can be done re beginning to think about standards for AR.  Is there a meaningful discussion going on yet? Thomas Wrobel left this comment on my blog rcently and I was wondering what your position was on some of the ideas he raises?

Wrobel wrote, “The AR has to come to the users, they cant keep needing to download unique bits of software for every bit of content! We need an AR Browsing standard that lets users log into an out of channels (like IRC) and toggle them as layers on their visual view (like Photoshop).Channels need to be public or private, hosted online (making them shared spaces) or offline (private spaces). They need to be able to be both open (chat channel) or closed (city map channel) as needed. Created by anyone anywhere. Really IRC itself provides a great starting point. Most data doesn’t need to be persistent, after all. I look forward too seeing the world though new eyes.I only hope I will be toggling layers rather then alt+tabbing and only seeing one “reality addition” at a time.”

Blair: I agree with him, in principle.  But, I’m not sure there’s a point yet.  It can’t hurt to try, of course, from a research perspective, and I’m interested in the experience such an infrastructure would enable (as we’ve talked about already).

Recently, I talked to Ori Inbar (above), formerly senior vice- president at SAP.  Ori is on a mission to make augmented reality commercially successful not in 5, 10, or 15 years, but now. Ori is the founder of Pookatak Games – a video game company, “with a vision to upgrade the way people experience the world.” Ori will be participating May 20th, in O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 panel, “Mobile Reality” -  an event not to be missed IMO.

The taste for computing anywhere anytime has entered human culture via the iphone and is spreading like chocolate cake and pizza at a preschool party (see why the iPhone changed everything).  And while the full flowering of the next step is yet to come – computing anywhere, anytime by anyone and anything (“the internet of things”), our love for these first devices capable of being mediating artifacts for ubiquitous computing (Adam Greenfield) is a vital first step to free us from our tethers to computer screens, and fulfill the promise of augmented reality.

If you need more convincing on the pivotal role augmented reality will play as the web moves into the world, check out Tim O’Reilly’s recent comments in this video clip posted on Augmented Times and here early last year.

From another perspective, the gloomy specter of economic and environmental catastrophe  is driving a movement to “infuse intelligence into the way the world work’s.” But the challenge for a smart planet is not just about making environments smart, it is about using smart environments to enable people to act smarter (see my interview with Adam Greenfield).

We need a rapid upgrade in both the way the world works, and the way we experience the world.

((Note:  It is time to read (if you haven’t already) Bruce Sterling’s Caryatids (Cory Doctorow’s book of the year for 2009) “as a software design manual” (see Julian Bleeker) because Caryatids reveals the Gordian knots of human folly, greed, compassion and desire entwined in near future designs for technologies to save the world.))

Ori Inbar, worked with Shai Agassi (Shai is now leading the world changing Better Place ) driving Netweaver from a mere concept to a “major, major business for SAP.” So Ori has already been through the cycle of working in a very small startup and growing it into a billion dollar business.  He has both the experience and the passion to realize his vision for augmented reality.

At Pookatak, he explains :

“We design “reality experiences” that make users’ immediate environments more significant to them. We wish to free young and old from getting lost in front of the screen. By delivering the world’s information to people’s field of view, and by weaving real world objects into interactive narratives, we help people rediscover the real world.”

Pookatak will release their first game this summer. Currently it is under wraps. But Ori gives us some glimpses of what is to come in the interview below.

In addition to founding Pookatak, Ori is involved in a broader effort to move augmented reality forward. On his blog, Games Alfresco – he recently welcomed a new partner, Rouli Nir, Ori has focused his eye of wisdom on every significant recent advance in Augmented Reality (check out this essence of Ori’s thinking in a fast paced video presentation for WARM ‘09).

Also Ori is one of the organizers of the interactive media track at ISMAR 2009.  At ISMAR this year, Ori explained, “we are trying to bring in people that develop interactive experiences for consumers, beyond the traditional attendees coming from a research perspective.”

In the interview below, Ori explains much of his thinking on how augmented reality will become commercially successful.  Enjoy it, think about it, and share it. And most importantly, if you can, get involved with ISMAR 2009.

Ori  has inspired me to participate in ISMAR this year.  Ori pointed out:

The call for papers is on, and this year it targets well beyond the typical research papers audience and into interactive media and art folks.

There are plenty of opportunities such as:

Art Gallery

Demonstrations

Tutorial

Workshops

It’s a huge opportunity to shape the emergence of augmented reality.

Interview With Ori Inbar

Making Augmented Reality Commercially Successful

Tish Shute: You are considered a key trail blazer in AR and you have the go to blog for augmented reality!  What are the most important lessons you have learned researching, writing, and developing AR in the last couple of years?

Ori Inbar: You need to have a vision. You need to know where this is going to go in ten or fifteen or twenty years. But you’ve got to start with something really simple that makes use of the technology you have on hand. And do something that is practical, that people will like, and something they would actually want to buy. Its as simple as that. I’m currently looking at what we could do with existing technology. First of all, you have to put it in front of people. Right now most people have never heard about the term augmented reality. Go into the street, and ask 100 people about it, maybe 2 would know about it. So you need to put it in front of people because most people think it’s still science fiction or a special effect you see in movies, not something you can experience in real life.

Tish: It seems to me to that for augmented reality applications to become popular with existing technology the key breakthrough would be getting people to hold up their phones. What are the obstacles to getting people to use their mobile devices like this?

Ori: There’s a really nice cartoon by Tonchidot (below) – the Japanese company behind the Sekai Camera. It’s an illustration showing the evolution of man, from ape to man (holding a cell phone looking down), to the developed man holding a device like a camera – in front of its eyes.

Which is exactly what you’re talking about. People ask, “are people going to walk with this like that all day long?” Probably not. I mean you have to build it in a way that doesn’t require them to hold it like that all the time. People are used to this gesture with the ubiquitous digital cameras. I tested one of my prototypes on a two and a half year old girl. She had no problem holding it just like she holds a camera.

Tish: Blair MacIntyre mentioned, “The problem with the mobile phone as a AR device is a problem of awareness,” i.e., you have to have a way of letting people know when there’s something interesting wherever they are. One of the issues regarding this is if you get too many alerts, then you tune them out.

Ori: First of all Blair is one of the people in academia that get it. Because he looks at it from an experience perspective. Not just as an interesting technical problem to solve. Let’s start with getting people to enjoy this new experience. The AR demos so far were mostly eye candies, and mostly for advertising – the GE AR ad created a lot of buzz; but you look at it for 10 seconds and you forget about it.  You need to build something that people would want to experience over time and would be willing to pay for. I think that’s the big test, right?

Now in terms of having a ubiquitous experience where you’re continously connected, it doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience. Just like some of the social media tools we’re using today, we decide when to connect, and we filter out the trash. You could get alerts only for things that really matter to you, not for everything that happens in your immediate environment.

There will be many layers of information, and it’ll be up to you to pick the ones you want to experience. The real benefit is that you get the information in your own field of view and in context of where you are or what you do.

Tish: So what are you working on these days?

Ori: We are working on a little app that targets a very different audience than what you’d expect: pre schoolers. We think we can encourage them to get away from a PC or TV screen and learn something while playing – in the real world. You’ll hear more about it as soon as this summer. Nuff said.

But, it is a small application that will run on the iPhone. People ask how many pre-schoolers own iPhones? Well, their parents do.

Tish: Yes there are certainly many New York kids with iPhones – my kid now has my old iphone.  He has pretty much switched from playing games on his DS to the iPhone. I noticed in your WARM video you place a big emphasis on AR as something that will get kids away from screens and engaged with reality.  This is something parents will approve of!

Ori: Yes I saw something really interesting at my kids’ party one day; they were all sitting around the room – looking down at their own DS screens.  You could play the DS anywhere, but kids would usually play it on the sofa, looking at the screen, isolated from the world. With an iPhone and a camera, and the application we’re producing, reality becomes part of the game. Yes that makes it all of a sudden much more interesting for parents. Because kids are spending so much time in front of the screen, all of a sudden they’re something that will encourage them to interact with real objects, real things. Every parent I’ve talked to loves that idea.

Tish: Yes that is what is cool about the work of Kati London – I think I saw someone say this on Twitter, “Kati puts the computer in the game not the game in the computer.”

Ori: Yes, kids are spending more time in front of games and the computer because it’s more interesting. It captivates them with “game pleasures ” that tap into their brain’s dopamine circuitry – constantly seeking reward and satisfaction. So you’re not going to be able to tell them to go back to playing in reality without these pleasures. We have to study these mechanics from games and bring them into reality. It’s about programming real life; and augmented reality helps you achieve that.

Here’s an example: cause and effect; in a game when you do something you always get an immediate effect. You’re good, you get a reward. You’re not good, you get a cue to improve. In real life you do things and you could wait 2 or 3 years until you actually get feedback (if you’re lucky). Augmented Reality allows you to bring these mechanics into the real world. I think that’s going to help kids rediscover reality, in a new sense, which is what every parent is dreaming about.

Tish: I don’t know how much you can say about your app. But in regard to doing augmented reality on the iPhone.. there’s no compass. Is this a limitation?

Ori: True, no compass yet. But the camera gives you a lot of information that you can interact with. When you run the application, you see the world in front of you, and if the app can recognize real life objects – it can put virtual elements on top of it.

Tish: But not with any accuracy unless you’re using markers. Are you using markers?

Ori: We’re using natural feature recognition. It doesn’t have to be an ugly looking marker. It can be any image.

Tish: So you’re using image recognition. Are you working with one of these image recognition startup companies (list here )?

Ori: We’re working with one of those. What’s unique about it is it runs very nicely on any cell phone, and on the iPhone it works the best. For this first app, it doesn’t really matter where you are physically; the geolocation is not part of the experience.

Tish: For a truly engaging AR experience we will need more of a backend than is currently available?

Ori: I call the backend the cloud, where you have all this information and ways to access it from anywhere. Actually I think it’s become pretty mature today. If you look at the different elements required to enable an augmented reality experience to work, you have – first – the user whose always in the center. Then you have the lens. The lens can be an iPhone, or glasses, even a projector. The lens allows you to watch, sense and track information in the real world: people, places, things. Then in the backend you have the cloud where you store and retrieve information.

So if you look at the maturity of these different elements, I think the cloud is in pretty good shape. Because there’s so much information we’re collecting and storing. Anything from Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, all that kind of stuff, it’s a lot of useful information you can access from anywhere using APIs. And a lot of it is also starting to include geolocation information. Take Loopt or Google’s friends service that allows you to see where your friends are and what they’re doing. There’s tons of information out there and it’s pretty easy to access it. Now what do you do with it is the question?

Wikitude is such a simple and brilliant application and nobody thought about doing it until this guy from Salzburg did. It doesn’t have any sophisticated visual tracking. It knows your position and it’s simply looking at the angle you’re pointing to. Based on these parameters it brings information from Wikipedia that pertains to your field of view. So most of it was already there. It’s just a matter of connecting the pieces in an experience that is valuable for people.

Tish: It is the uptake of even a very simple technology that puts the magic in it.

Ori:  Yes, take Twitter. If you go to its homepage it looks like a very simple boring app but it is something that is both enjoyable and very useful to people.

Why you should participate in ISMAR 2009

Tish: I know that you are involved in organizing  ISMAR (picture above from Ori’s post on “ISMAR 2009: The World’s Best Augmented Reality Event…,“) and there is a call out for papers and for volunteers, can you tell me more about it?

Ori: Yes, we hope to have the first ISMAR where we practice what we have just discussed: let’s build on all the research invested so far and instead of thinking only about 5-10 years from now, let’s see what we can do today. So we are bringing people in from other disciplines – artists, interactive media developers and people from the entertainment industry.  The goal is to use the technology to make something interesting for people – again, something that people would buy, and making it commercially successful.  Many people either don’t know about ISMAR because in the past it was a pure engineering-orientated event and people  from a commercial perspective of AR weren’t attracted to it.  The Chair of the Event this year is based in Florida and he is going to bring in a lot of people from the entertainment industry such as Disney. I think this will transform this event into something more like SIGGRAPH – more of an industry event.  As one of the organizers of the interactive media track we are trying to bring in people that want to build applications for consumers.

Tish: In terms of AR applications what are the flagships today?

Ori: There are very few because it’s just the beginning. There’s one tiny studio in France called Int 13 . They’ve created maybe the first commercial game running on a mobile device using AR technology. It’s called Kweekies. It was one of the contenders for the Nokia Mobile innovation awards. They were one of the ten finalists, but they didn’t win it. It’s looks really cool. It’s somethng that runs on your desk, with a marker. Many AR folks say markers are the past, markers are ugly. But it’s still a cool experience. I think people will go for it.

Tish: Yes I think we will have to look to small companies that are free to think creatively to lead the way.  It seems many games companies are tied up pulling off huge big budget projects and enterprise is still catching up on how to use social media!

Ori: Yes, last year I was in the game development conference (GDC); there was no mention of augmented reality – not on the exhibition floor, none of the sessions, nobody talked about it. I was stunned. Then this year, there was a little a change. There were like three demos on the exhibition floor, Metaio, Vuzix and a Dutch company called Beyond Reality.  And then there was Blair’s talk, which was very very cool. The room was packed with people. And after the talk there were dozens of people lining up to talk with him about the topic. There was definitely interest, but still on the very edge. The video game industry is still a hit driven business and publishers spend upward of 20-30 million dollar to create the best AAA game possible. They just can’t take the risk. So it’s going to come from smaller companies, from outsiders coming in with a vision and understanding on how to put the AR pieces together to create a totally new experience.

Tish: But the basic tool set is there isn’t it?

Ori: I talked to some folks at the games developer conference, many folks with MMO background, and they have great ideas about AR. It’s great to see different people with different views on what’s needed first. “Joe the Programmer” had this idea of creating a small piece of hardware that you can put in every house and provide accurate geospatial information in your home. That could  open up many opportunities for AR experiences in homes.

Tish: Don’t you think we have enormous resources in terms of image databases that provide a great basis for augmented reality.  I was talking to Aaron Cope at ETech about The Shape of Alpha – Flickr’s vernacular mapping project using all the geotagged photos in Flickr. That is such cool project. Aaron will be speaking at Where 2.0 also.

Ori: Think of Google Earth. Google Earth leveraged communities to basically map all the major cities around the world into 3D models. And that is an essential step to be able to do augmented reality outdoors. Because if you had to model everything from scratch, it wouldn’t be realistic.

Augmented Reality and Becoming Greener.

Tish: I am really interested in how AR interfaces might be useful to some of the emerging energy identity/metering projects like AMEE and WATTZON because I think it is very important that people have very intuitive, immediate, and enjoyable ways to relate to energy data so they can make greener choices.

Ori: Back in the day I had an idea to build an Augmented Reality application to become greener. You look at things around your home with the camera and it  recognizes its green gas footprint and makes recommendations to reduce it.  I guess it was a bit too early to do that based on visual recognition alone…you’d need  additional sensors that would provide related information about what you are looking at.

Tish: Well as there is more interest in Green technology do you think we may see VC interest in some green AR projects now?

Ori: I talked to some of the investment folks, Angels as well as VC’s about AR and they had no clue what it is. There’s a need for a whole lot of education. And there are no proof points (as in successful investments in this domain), and counter to popular belief – they don’t like risk so much…

Tish: And consumer adoption must lead the way, right?

Ori: Just like with every emerging technology in history, people never bought the technology, they bought the content, the apps, the benefits that came on top of the technology. Whether it was VHS winning over Beta Max, or BluRay winning over HD. It’s always because of more/better content. Look at the video game console war: Xbox, and Nintendo did better than Sony just because they had more and better games. Even Windows was a success thanks to its applications. People bought it for the applications not the OS. The content is the first to drive demand.

Tish: One of the challenges to giving people new ways to relate to their energy consumption is that you can just have them looking at graphs of how bad they have been in the past you – that may make them feel bad but that doesn’t necessarily give them ways or motivation to change. There perhaps needs to be more immediate relationship to the data to facilitate change. I think the mantra for optimization of anything from energy usage to supply chains is timely, actionable data?

Ori: There are a lot of ideas about measuring information and displaying it to people. For example, the Prius hybrid car, one of its interesting features – which is kind of game like – is a constant display of your current fuel consumption. That alone changes how people drive because they try to beat the “Score” and as a result conserve more fuel. That model can be applied to our homes…

Tish: Yes that is something I am very interested in. I have been following several projects in this area – one of my favorites is the Arduino, Current Cost/Tweetawatt, Pachube integrations I saw at Homecamp.

You joined a start up with Shai Agassi which was bought out by SAP right? He has a brilliant approach with Better Place.

Ori:  I think what’s really unique about Better Place’s approach is that he doesn’t require people to change their behavior. People are still going to have their own cars. They’ll be able to drive as far as they want, and for the same (or lower cost). Its not necessarily about a new technology, electric cars have been around for a long time but there was no way people were going to be limited by the 50 or 70 mile range and Better Place is solving that problem. With its infrastructure of charging spots and battery switching stations, drivers are going to be able to drive anywhere. And it’ll be similar to having to stop once in a while to refuel your car. The price maybe even lower than what you pay today for your transportation needs – and you’ll stop generating green gas. It’s a clever way of taking technology to a whole new level without changing the behavior of people.

Tish: Better Place is a classic example of things as a service isn’t it?  It is basically a utility company.

Ori: It is similar to a phone carrier model.  You pay for a membership that gives you access to the car (equivalent to the phone) and electricity (equivalent to the phone line) for the same price of fuel cost today. And as bonus you get to save the world.

How the iphone changed the game for AR – and the iphone versus Android

Picture from Ori’s post, “GDC 2009: Why the iphone changed everything”

Ori: And back to AR, you have to take the same approach, because nobody’s wants to don those huge head mounted displays or backpacks. You have to take advantage of people’s current behavior: they already carry their iPhones or similar devices.

Tish: As we discussed, you just have to get people raising up their phones and looking through them when that is a useful thing to do. Both Wikitude and Nathan Freitas’s graffiti app were enough to get me interested in the evolutionary step of raising my phone! Nathan’s graffiti app is nice. You leave a marker for your graffiti so other people can find view/add their own – a nice primal experience like pissing on the lamp post to let your pack know where you’ve been.  Also the graffiti app taps into a long history of  NYC street culture around tagging and graffiti art (see my interview, “Is it OMG finally for Augmented Reality?”).

Ori: The app store has fundamentally changed the mobile gaming industry. Last year they were in shambles. There was no growth. Everybody was complaining, “we can’t handle it, there’s a million phones, and you have to test it on each phone. And carriers suck, they don’t care about sharing and promoting your content. Everything was bad. This year mobile gaming is the hottest thing. And it’s all because of the iPhone. It changed the game.

Tish: How do you think Android is going to get traction against the iphone?

Ori: Well the number one thing is the form factor – the iPhone is just much cooler than the G1. Its OK but it doesn’t have the same feel. People thought it was going to be easy to clone the iPhone but none of the attempts succeeded so far.

Tish: How much does it matter for AR not being able to runs things persistently in the background on the iphone?

Ori: Actually they have add a such a capability in OS 3.  You can now make use of a background service.

Tish: OS 3 will open up new possibilities for AR?

Ori: The access to the video API is still not public.  But there is a new Microsoft application – Microsoft Tag that makes use of that API which means it is probably OK to use it.

Tish: (I ask Ori for his card and he shows me how to read it with my iphone.) Oh nice you have an AR card, of course!

In Search of Pong for Augmented Reality

Tish: So how will AR begin to, as Blair’s friend put’s it, “facilitate a killer existence,” particularly as we are probably looking at some new and perhaps pricey hardware?

Ori: You could take the Better Place approach. We’re going to give you a great experience and we’ll include the devices as part of that experience for the same price. Let’s say you subscribe to an AR experience  which offers access to multiuser, support, and all the information you need wherever you go – exactly according to the vision. You pay for a subscription on a monthly basis and included in that cost we give you a better device that offers a  better AR experience. It’s following the phone carrier approach, but in a good way.

But first of all we do need our Pong! I was sitting with a couple of AR game enthusiasts at the GDC and we were asking ourselves, “how do we create the first pong for AR?”

Was Pong a multiplayer game? Not necessarily! Did it connect to the network? No! We have to create the first dot in a long line of dots that will bring us to our destination.

Tish: You haven’t seen a Pong yet have you?

Ori: Not yet. I mean there’s maybe a handful of games and apps out there, but I don’t think any of them is a Pong yet. Still, it’s getting closer.

Tish: Kati London is doing some very interesting work on bringing games into reality, isn’t she?

Ori: Yes, she works with Frank Lanz at Area/Code. He teaches at NYU and has designed games for the “Come Out and Play” festival here in Manhattan. And a lot of these games are actually low tech.

Tish: Yes I have a big alternate reality game blog brewing that I haven’t had time to write yet!

Ori: The city is the gameboard is their slogan. It’s going to be a great playground for AR games. The city becomes a theme park. The city could become an even bigger touristic attraction. People will come to the city to be part of these games. So you’re having thousands of people running around the city playing all sorts of games from laser-tag style to history adventures, to treasure hunts.

Composing Reality

Tish: So why haven’t you focused on one of these kinds of games with your company?

Ori: We have a couple of scenarios along these lines that we’re planning for 2010-11. But first focus on what’s possible today.

Tish: And what’s stopping you from doing those kind of games today?

Ori: Many things. The devices are not there yet, location services are not accurate enough, ubiquitous sensors are not  there yet.

Tish: You think alternate reality gaming needs more “ubiquity” than is currently available?

Ori: Not necessarily. People are doing alternate reality games with no “ubiquity” at all. But my interest is to add the visual aspect. I believe humans are mostly driven visually.

Jane McGonigal said in a talk at GDC, that AR would allow us to program reality, which is exactly how I look at it. Once you can recognize things, some of it with WiFi and RFID and all sorts of sensors. But visual sensors is always going to be the ultimate way to recognize things. And once you recognize things and know what they are, and can pull information about those things (or people and places) from the internet, you can program it (visually). You could program it to be fictional, like in a video game, or it could be programmed as non-fictional, like a documentary. And that allows you to do things that before were unimaginable.

Tish: But you can’t forget the visual, it is primary the connection to peoples’ primary sensory relationships.

Ori: Yes, it’s like you go to a grocery store and you pick your vegetables, a lot of it is by sight and by touch. And what if you could also see just by looking at it that it’s from a local store, and that it’s organic?

Tish: It goes beyond overlays really?

Ori: By the way, I don’t like the term ‘overlay’. I know that’s how it looks: you either overlay or superimpose, but I’m still searching for a better term. A term I prefer to use is “composing reality”. Just like painters, they use brushstrokes and colors and compose a painting. We need to take the real element and the virtual element and compose them into something new. It’s not just about slapping one on top of the other.

Tish: yes I think the idea of dashboards is not so appealing.

Pookatak Games

Tish: Do you want to explain the evolution of your company? You have an interesting history of success with high end enterprise applications.

Ori: Since I was a kid I wanted to invent and create things. When I discovered software, that was a really cool way of actually creating things from nothing. From thin air; and you can do it very quickly. That’s what brought me into software. But I was always looking for the intersection between technology and art. Looking for ways to bring these things together. In the early nineties virtual reality was doing it. It had the appeal of cutting edge technology that can be combined with art. But then, as we all know, it crashed. So I joined Shai Agassi’s startup (who is now doing Better Place) back in the early nineties. I was one of the first employees in his startup which was developing multimedia products. I was leading the development of one of its flagship product. At some point we realized the technology could be great for an enterprise environment.

It was a really great experience. First going through this cycle from a very small startup and growing into this multi billion dollar business. I was responsible for defining and marketing SAP’s platform, which was called Netweaver. It was just an idea when we joined SAP and by the time I left it was a major, major business for SAP. I learned about the challenges of building a platform. No matter what purpose you’re building it for, it typically has similar rules. It’s definitely not just about the technology; the content that comes with it is really key to making a platform successful.

The third part of this platform trifecta is the community. If you don’t build a community, you won’t get the critical mass required for adoption. It may be your own platform but it’s not necessarily the people’s platform. That experience is very key to what we’re doing today. Now, a new industry is being born on the basis of a remarkable technology. But to drive adoption, first we’ll need good content. The content will be created using today’s technology with internal tools developed to simplify the process. Next step would be to make the tools used internally – available to other developers. Help scale the industry, enable innovation on a larger scale. That way we have a chance to create a platform. So it isn’t really just about my company. I’m so passionate about augmented reality, I want to it to become a healthy and successful industry for the next 5, 10, 15 years.

Tish: Yes I am so ready to be liberated from the sitting behind a computing screen! And I know that all this hardware is murdering the environment.

Ori: There’s ‘s the book by Rolf Hainich which is called “The End Of Hardware. ” It’s about hardware for augmented-reality. Once you use goggles or other AR interfaces you eliminate the need for screens, laptops, etc. It’s going to be great for the environment. You have read Rainbow’s End, right? According to the book in few years there will barely be any (visible) hardware. At least it’ll have a much smaller footprint for the environment. And it’ll touch every aspect of life, everything you do. It’ll change the way you interact with the world.

The Illusive Eyewear for Immersive AR.

Friend of Ori’s in San Francisco wearing retro AR goggles (from Games Alfresco, Ori’s roundup of GDC 2009)

Tish:OK lets talk about goggles.

Ori: Goggles are going to happen, we want to be hands free.

It’s going to happen because it’s just a more intuitive way to use this technology. But above all it has to look cool. Because if it’s not, if it’s a big headset, then maybe a small percent of the population might use it, but most people won’t. It has to look like an accessory, like new cool eyeglasses that you just must wear.

I recently talked to a friend, who runs an industrial design firm, and has experience in designing such glasses for companies like Microvision and Lumux. He says that when you try to bring the images so close to our eyes – there are some really hard problems to solve. Otherwise it can become really annoying and cause dizzyness.

But I’m optimistic. I believe it’s going to happen 3 to 5 years from now. It’s already starting now: Vuzix announced goggles that will be available this year. Some AR apps that are going to take advantage of next year. Initially only a fraction of the population will use it. And that’s going to help advance it and make it better and better. But it’s going to take time until it reaches the mass market.

Tish: In virtual worlds we have seen, I think, a lot of mistakes in terms of reinventing the wheel and producing too many proprietary versions of the same thing and not enough concerted effort on standards and open platforms that could create a vibrant ecosystem.  How can augmented reality not make the same mistakes?

Ori: There are some early AR open source efforts ARTookit, ARtag but it is not a movement yet.  One of the things we’re trying to do at ISMAR this year is to put together  discussions around key industry issues, such as standards. Some people say it’s too early, you have to have a defacto standard to start from. But pretty soon it’s going to be too late. Just like with virtual worlds, all of a sudden you have all these islands that don’t talk to each other. Why get to that point if we can plan to avoid it? Let’s start thinking about it right now. On the other front there are devices. There are pockets of people working on adapting devices for AR, second guessing the hardware companies. Why not get them together with the Intels and Nvidias of the world, and discuss what this device should be able to do. And then compete to make it happen.

Tish: How much luck are you having with this discussion part?

Ori: People are very interested in doing this. We proposed these panels for ISMAR. And I’ve got some key people already on board. They have tons of input, they want to get involved. We’ll see how much we can actually get out of it.

Tish: In virtual worlds it was a while before vibrant opensource communities developed.  OpenSim has I think been the breakthrough community in this regard.

Ori: You have to think about the elements up front. The dream job is to architect the industry. Say we agree on the required pieces. Then we could help the right companies succeed in delivering the pieces. Next, we have to collaborate so that these pieces talk to each other. And eventually these communication methods will become defacto standards and most developers will adopt it.

Tish: So I’m going to put you in the role. You’ve got your dream job. You’re going to architect this community. So what are the key pieces and where would you like to see the open source communities take hold first?

Ori: Open source will not be exclusive. It’s going to live side by side with proprietary technology.

The key pieces? You have the user at the center. And the user interacts with a lens. The lens includes both the hardware and the software. And then the lens senses and interacts with the world, which includes people, things and places. And these people-things-places emit information – about who they are, where they are, what they’re doing, etc  – which is then stored in the cloud.

And then you have the content providers, the people and companies, composers who weave AR experiences through the pieces we mentioned before. These composers need a platform that glues these pieces together. Pieces of the platform will be on the lens, and in the world, and in the cloud. If you manage to remove the frictions, and connect these pieces into an experience that people like – then you have a platform. What the platform does it reduces the overhead and accelerates innovation.

Tish: Another problem virtual worlds faced in their development was their isolation from the world wide web.  Will augmented reality avoid this plight?

Ori:  Yes, I believe the key, like you said before, is not to reinvent the wheel. The cloud is already there.  Take Wikitude for example, all Mobilizy had to do is build  a relatively simple client app, connected to wikipedia, and all of a sudden it offered a wealth of information in your field of view.

I think we can learn a lot from web 2.0. For example, in order to have a ubiquitous experience like Robert Rice and others are striving for, you’ll need to 3d map the world. Google earth like apps are going to help but it is not going to be sufficient. So let’s leverage people. Google became successful in part by making people work with them.  Each time you create a link from your blog to my blog their search engines learn from it.  So let’s find ways to make people create information that can be used for AR.

Ori Inbar directed Wiki Mouse – a WIKI Film co-created by a swarm of movie makers around the world.