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

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

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

Augmented Reality and Real Time Information Brokerages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesse Schell described the importance of AR in a nutshell in his keynote for are2010:

“The whole point of AR is to see things from a different point of view…How can there be a more powerful art form than one that actually changes what you see?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARWave at Software Freedom Day 2010, September 18th 2010

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

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

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

click to enlarge slide

Social Augmented Experiences that Matter

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

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

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

click to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zorop – an ARG for World Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with Bruce Sterling

Click on image above to see video clip from from brucesflickr

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Oh! Yes. Good point.

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: [laughs]

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

Tish Shute: Right. Lisa!

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

Tish Shute: Well I can think of some reasons…

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

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

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

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

Bruce Sterling: Right.

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

Bruce Sterling: Yes.

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

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

Tish Shute: Right. Yes I saw that!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Sterling: Right.

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

Bruce Sterling: Right.

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Right.

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

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

Bruce Sterling: Right.

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

Bruce Sterling: Oh, I see. Yeah.

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

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

Tish Shute: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: How do you explain that?

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

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

Tish Shute: Right! Right!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Sterling: Hi, there.

Tish’s Son: Hi.

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

Tish’s Son: Good.

Tish: [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

click to enlarge

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

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

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

Tish Shute: very cool stuff…

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

Tish Shute: It was so AR and so gorgeous.

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Yeah, exactly.

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

Tish Shute: Yeah, very interesting…

Bruce Sterling: Not shabby, right?

Tish Shute: Not shabby at all.

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Oh!

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

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

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

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

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

Recently, Qualcomm announced an SDK for vision based augmented reality – currently in private beta and open to the public this fall. The Qualcomm augmented reality (AR) bonanza will launch with a $200,000 developer challenge and a SDK that will put vision based augmented reality into the hands of developers without licensing fees.

This is a big step forward for augmented reality and a very important move made by an industry giant to support the rapidly evolving AR industry. Innovation at all levels of the AR stack, particularly at the hardware level (CPU/GPU optimization) is vital for the full vision of augmented reality – media tightly registered to physical space, to take center stage. Vision based AR takes mobile AR beyond compass/GPS based AR post-its, which are only loosely connected to the world (but the staple of most current AR apps), towards the holy grail of AR – markerless tracking with the whole world as the platform.

Click on the image above or see here for a video demo of an AR version of Rock’em Sock’em Robots game.  Mattel, one of the first companies working with the SDK demoed AR Rock’em Sock’em, at the Uplinq 2010 conference (see Chris Cameron’s ReadWriteWeb write-up on Uplinq 2010).

The Qualcomm AR stack, which reaches from the metal to developer APIs, will give Android developers an important edge in AR development. And, when vision based AR starts getting integrated with visual search capabilities, and combined with cool tools like Unity, we will start to see the augmented world get really interesting.

Visual search is already an area of AR getting a lot of attention, with Google Goggles, Point and Find, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo set to launch “chokkan nabi,” or “intuitive navigation,” in September, and the recent partnership between Layar and Kooaba. Metaio’s mobile augmented reality platform Junaio is already integrated with Kooaba’s computer vision capabilities.

And, of course, I am particularly excited about including open distributed real time communications for AR in this stack, which is why I asked a group of developers who have been inputting into the ARWave project if they had questions for Jay Wright, Qualcomm.  Thank you Yohan Baillot, Gene Becker, Anselm Hook, Patrick O’Shaughnessey, Thomas Wrobel, Markus Strickler, and Davide Carnovale for your input.  [Note: see my upcoming post, about the future of ARWave and real time distributed communications for AR following this Google announcement.]

Jay Wright, “is responsible for developing and driving Qualcomm’s augmented reality commercialization strategy.” He “handles partnerships with leading innovators in industry and academia and leads Qualcomm’s efforts in enabling augmented reality within the mobile ecosystem.” In the interview below, Jay very generously answers our questions in detail.

A key contributor of questions for this interview is Yohan Baillot. Yohan is working on a full vision of AR – integrating computer vision, visual search, open distributed real time communications and AR eyewear. Yohan Baillot is founder of Simulation3D, a consulting and system integration company specializing in interactive visualization systems and eyewear-based AR systems. (I hope to bring you an interview with Yohan soon!).

Qualcomm was the title sponsor for are2010, Augmented Reality Event, and played a vital role in making this event an historic gathering of the talent and creative minds at the heart of the emerging AR industry. Watch out for the videos of the are2010 sessions to be posted at the end of August. My are2010 co-chair, Ori Inbar, is preparing them to go online while kicking his newly funded start up, Ogmento, into high gear! Ogmento is also one of the start ups pioneering vision based AR.

Metaio, (with Total Immersion, they are one of the first augmented reality companies), has played a key role in bringing a vision component to smart phone augmented reality apps with their Unifeye mobile SDK.  Junaio, Metaio’s own mobile augmented reality platform has gone beyond location based AR with “junaio glue” – “the camera’s eye is now able to identify objects and “glue” object specific real-time, dynamic, social and 3D information onto the object itself,” (see my upcoming interview with Metaio founder, Thomas Alt).  Also, recently, Layar – who continue to innovate at a breathtaking pace, announced a partnership with the computer vision company Kooaba.

Both Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Layar, and Thomas Alt, Metaio, when I spoke to them recently, saw the Qualcomm SDK as a very positive development for AR, and they look forward to exploring its capabilities and integrating it where appropriate with their AR tools.  See more about Layar’s upcoming visit, to the US here – August 10th NYC, and August 12th SF.  Also save the date, Sept 27th, Munich, for InsideAR, Metaio’s upcoming conference.

It is clear that vision based AR will be driving the next wave of AR apps. And, as Maarten and Thomas both pointed out, it will be interesting to see which use cases capture the imagination of users the most. Having more tools freely available to AR developers will certainly be a boost to creativity. And, Qualcomm’s SDK is going to give Android developers, in particular, a big opportunity to take the lead.

Interview with Jay Wright, Director, Business Development, Qualcomm

Tish Shute: Before I start with questions on the new Qualcomm vision based augmented reality SDK, I want to briefly look ahead to what many people feel is vital for the full realization of augmented reality – head mounted displays, or more specifically, comfortable, sexy AR eye wear. Is Qualcomm going to be involved in the development of augmented eye wear and wearable displays?

Jay Wright: I think there’s some core technology that needs to come together so we can have what we think needs to be a see-through head mounted display with a decent field of view. And that looks like something that is quite possibly further than a three to five year horizon.

Tish Shute: Gene Becker asked some interesting general questions about the Qualcomm AR initiatives. He said, “I’m unclear exactly what Qualcomm’s goal is.” It would be interesting to hear from you the Qualcomm view, from the top down.

Jay Wright: Our largest revenue stream comes from sales of chipsets. And we see augmented reality as a technology that drives demand for increasing amounts of processing power. So we want to create demand for chips, higher-end chips, and augmented reality does that. Specifically vision based augmented reality because it is so computationally intensive.

Tish Shute: Yes. And I think that is why people are very excited by the Qualcomm SDK. It is not only the first free toolkit for developers to build vision apps from, isn’t it? There’s been nothing freely available before this, has there? But also Qualcomm is paying attention to the complete AR stack to support vision based AR development, from the chips to game/app development tools like Unity.

Jay Wright: That’s really the goal. We’re not here to be in the augmented reality applications business. Qualcomm’s role in the ecosystem has been to serve as an enabler. And that’s what we want to do with augmented reality: provide the enabling technology that allows the entire ecosystem to flourish.

“Augmented Reality has a number of attributes that make it a great fit for Qualcomm’s core competencies”

Augmented Reality has a number of attributes that make it a great fit for Qualcomm’s core competencies. It’s very computationally intensive, algorithmically complex, requires tight integration of hardware and software, and benefits from tight integration of multiple hardware components. And that’s the kind of problem we like here, where we can apply our core competence of really optimizing complex systems for performance, while at the same time minimizing power consumption.

And as you know Tish, mobile AR is really extremely power sensitive. We sometimes talk about it as a battery’s worst nightmare. It’s roughly equivalent to playing a 3D game and recording a video all at the same time.

Whenever there is something that takes a lot of power, that’s a definite opportunity for us to optimize it.

Tish Shute: Right. One of the core business is chips right, but for Qualcomm there’s basically a lot of profit in licensing. When I talked to the developer community about the Qualcomm SDK developers first question was, “What’s the licensing? What’s this going to cost us in the long run to develop on this SDK re licensing?” And they had all different takes on this. So everyone had different ideas about what your approach to licensing might or might not be. Could you clarify the approach to licensing, as I think this is a core concern for developers.

Jay Wright: Anytime you see something for free, you kind of say, “Hey, what’s the hook?” So yes, it’s definitely a logical question. Our intent is not to generate licensing revenue from application developers using the SDK. So the SDK will be made available free of charge for development, and it will also be free of charge for developers to deploy applications.

Tish Shute: Now, this is another question. You also include not just image recognition capabilities but Unity in the package you are offering developers. Unity products usually involve a license. They do have some free products too, I think. But how does this work? And how do you separate your part from their part, or don’t you?

Jay Wright: That’s a good question. What we’re trying to do with the platform is incorporate it into tools that people already know how to use. So we’re actually going to have the SDK support two different tool chains. One of them is the Android SDK and NDK. And then the other one, is Unity.

We’re working with Unity to create an extension to the Unity environment that will be available as part of the Unity installer when you install Unity from the Unity website. Developers will still be paying whatever license fees are associated with Unity’s products on their existing pricing schedule.

Tish Shute: One of Thomas Wrobel’s question is whether developers can just use the image recognition without Unity? Your answer is yes, you can work with the computer vision component of the SDK separate from Unity?

Jay Wright: Yes, you can.

Tish Shute: Good because we would like to build a completely open Android client for ARWave, and not tie it to Unity unless people choose to. He’s using the open Android JPCT 3D engine, which he’s adapting for AR. So he could actually use the part of the SDK that does image recognition and association with that, right?

Jay Wright: That’s correct. You are not required to use Unity. Unity is just one option for building the application.

Tish Shute: Great! That’s very good. But I’m sure many developers are going to jump on the chance to use Unity. But I mean it’s nice to be flexible because it’s so early for AR that people have different ideas and new use cases coming up all the time. I think it’s excellent you’ve divided that.

Another of Thomas’s questions was, “Can developers use their own positioning data sharing solution?” He’s really talking about AR blips.

Jay Wright: With data sharing solutions, I am assuming that by data he means referring to augmentation data or graphics?

Tish Shute: Yes, and I’ll ask him to elaborate. But, at the moment, everyone is using different ideas for POI, aren’t they?

“The goal with our platform is to make it just as easy for a developer to create 3D content for the real world as it is for a game world or a virtual world.”

Jay Wright: Yes. So let me answer it this way, Tish. The goal with our platform is to make it just as easy for a developer to create 3D content for the real world as it is for a game world or a virtual world. So all we’re really trying to do is provide the computer vision piece that makes the real world look like a bunch of geometric surfaces and potentially some meta data that is associated with this so you know what you are looking at.

So that means from a developer’s perspective, you are still doing all of the 3D content, all of the animations, all of the game logic, all of the rendering. You are still doing that all yourself. So if you think about doing an AR game, you are doing everything you used to do, except you are not creating a virtual terrain. You are just going to map it in the real world.

So if you want to do a browser that is doing POI’s, your POI data, or augmentation, or meta data, or whatever it is, that can be in your application, it can be in the cloud, it can be wherever you want to put it. We’re not putting any constraints on what that content is or where it’s stored.

Tish Shute: Right, and that’s what I hoped for. And I think that does answer the question. People are interested to know how far Qualcomm is going with this. For instance, Gene Becker asked: “do they see a business at a certain level in the AR stack?” As you said AR development basically feeds into the core business of chip development, right? But does Qualcomm also see some new business models developing?

Jay Wright: I think it’s foreseeable that Qualcomm could identify other business opportunities down the line. But we’re certainly not there today. Today, our motivation for the investment in AR is to create technology that is going to advance the chipset business.

Tish Shute: When the news came out about Qualcomm’s support of a game development studio at Georgia Tech at the same time as the SDK I think I wondered what was the scope of Qualcomm’s interest [for more on using Unity for AR development see Vision-Based Augmented Reality Technical Super Session video from Uplinq 2010].  For example, I am interested to know how the Qualcomm initiative in developing an AR stack connects to the effort to introduce an AR browser based on web standards, i.e., the Kharma/Kamra KML/HTML Augmented Reality Mobile Architecture from Blair MacIntyre and the Georgia Tech team (image below)? Are you supporting the open standards based browser development too?

Jay Wright: Blair is going to continue to work on the browser effort. And it’s our expectation that he will use our SDK and technologies for vision pieces of the browser effort where appropriate. So they are certainly not mutually exclusive. I would just think about our technology as one element of what may be used in that browser, as I expect it would be an element of what any other app developer would put in their application, whether it be browser, or game, or whatever.

Tish Shute: Yes Now, this is an interesting question, which is sort of connected…I’m trying to keep some form of narrative for this! It follows from the question about Blair’s web-based standards browser. A few people have asked me why we haven’t heard more from Qualcomm in all these various standard discussions that are starting to come up. I mean is it just too early, or are you too busy, or what?

Jay Wright: No, let me explain. The type of standards that have come up so far have been around how HTML should be extended for geo-browser type applications. And while that’s interesting, I think the standards efforts that Qualcomm would be more likely to be associated with in the near term are those related to API’s that are hardware accelerated.

So one of the things that we are in the process of doing right now, Tish – because as you know, Qualcomm is a company that adheres to standards and strives to produce a leading implementation of those standards on our hardware and software – is we are in the process of determining what API set within the existing SDK should be standardized.

Tish Shute: Right.

Now, my next question is, “Who are the other players at this level of the AR stack in the standards conversation? Who else is working at that level?” Obviously, the AR Lab in Graz was, but now they are Qualcomm, right?

Jay Wright: They are still independent. Qualcomm is the exclusive industrial partner of the Christian Doppler Handheld AR LAB in Graz.

Tish Shute: Does this compete with, say, the work that other AR start ups are doing?

Jay Wright: Our intent is not to compete with companies that have done augmented reality technology. Our intent is to enable the entire ecosystem. So we would like to work with both Metaio and Total Immersion to find ways that they can benefit from our technology. That would be the hope – that our technology can kind of lift and float all boats in the ecosystem.

Tish Shute: There are not many implementations of vision based AR right now? I mean obviously Microsoft is doing stuff because they have Georg Klein now, right, and there is Google Goggles, Total Immersion, Metaio, and it will be interesting to see where Layar’s partnership with Kooaba will lead?

Jay Wright: Yes. I think there are relatively few commercial implementations of vision based AR stacks.

Tish Shute: One of Patrick O’Shaughnessey’s question is he wants to understand what features are going to be in the vision component, very specifically. Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Patched Reality, working with Circ.us, Edelman, and Metaio used the Unifeye SDK to do a vision based AR app for Ben and Jerry’s that’s been getting all the attention lately. He was a speaker at are2010.

He very specifically wants to know what features will be included in the computer vision component. He says, “I’m most interested in understanding what features are going to be in the vision component. Is it marker based?” Well I know it’s more than marker based. I saw some of it in Chris Cameron’s ReadWriteWeb write-up on Uplinq 2010. Is it “NFT? PTAM? other? Also, are you are integrating any backend services.” That is an interesting question!

Jay Wright: So let’s get to the features on the client side, the vision based features. There’s support for, what AR aficionados would know as natural feature targets, or image based targets. And we use those to represent, obviously, 2D planar surfaces.

The other thing that we are trying to do to set expectations, Tish, about where these can be used is to let people know that they work best in what we’re calling near-field environments. So the idea isn’t that you use the system to create a large scale AR system that can recognize buildings indoors and outdoors. It’s the idea where I can recreate 3D experiences that take place on surfaces that are in my immediate field of view, whether that be on the table in front of me, or on the floor, or on the wall, or on the shelf.

Also, when you talk about near field experiences, there are some other constraints that are implied. Like, if it’s in front of me and my immediate field of view is probably going to be pretty well lit. And lighting, of course, is an important requirement.

So we’ll support these natural feature targets, or image targets. And we also have support for sort of a hybrid marker image type. It’s something called a frame marker, which has kind of a black border with some dots on it.

Click on the image above or here to view Vision-Based Augmented Reality Technical Super Session video from Uplinq 2010

Jay Wright: So there’s this additional type. And the reason for this additional hybrid marker type is it has a lower computational requirement than a natural feature target. So the idea is these things can be used as game pieces or elements of play where I want to have a large number of them detected and tracked simultaneously.

So you can have, for example, one big natural feature target that serves as a game board or game surface, and you can use these other things as smaller game pieces. And when you put them out, different types of content can appear on them and do different things.

Tish Shute: Yes, that’s nice! And the other thing I noticed was the virtual buttons. How well developed is that?

Jay Wright: The idea behind virtual buttons is, in addition to supporting augmentation, we want to support interaction. And we think there are going to be different types of user interaction with augmented reality content. It may be hand tracking and finger tracking, but another compelling form we’ve identified so far is the ability for me to touch particular surfaces and have an event fire within the application..

So virtual buttons are rectangular areas on image targets that a developer can define, and they serve as buttons. So you can create a target that is a game board, for example, and define certain regions. And when the user covers that region with his hand, like pushing a button, your application can detect that event and take some action.

Tish Shute: Nice! And what is the documentation on these capabilities that is offered by Qualcomm…For example Yohan Baillot, who is interested in integrating eyewear-based AR systems with smartphones asked. How deep does this go? Will there be full documentation on Snapdragon, people who want to work at that level? Is there a chip SDK?

Jay Wright: . Qualcomm’s model is to work with providers of the operating systems and deliver functionality of the chip through the operating system. So many operating systems APIs will take advantage of functionality that’s in the chip. But there is no separate chip SDK per se.

Tish Shute: I suppose that does come up a little bit with one of Anselm Hook’s questions, because there is some overlap with Google Goggles here, isn’t there, in terms of what you’re doing, right? Are you going to work closely with Google Goggles ?

Jay Wright: Google Goggles is performing what we’ve described ‘visual search’. So the idea is you take a picture, send it to the cloud and identify it and the results come back. I think if we see Google Goggles go in a direction where there’s an AR experience that would be a good area for us to collaborate with Google.

Tish Shute: Anselm Hook is very interested in having some kind of open standard around this physical tagging of the world, right, – the physical world as a platform. But I suppose that’s down the road but is there a plan to start talking about open standards here – visual search with image recognition? That’s a very powerful combination. (see my interview with Anselm Hook here).

Jay Wright: I think it is. And we’re very interested to hear from developers and others that have ideas about how they would want to integrate with the functionality that we have to best enable those kinds of combined experiences.

Tish Shute: Well, I know Anselm has a lot of very important ideas on that.

Jay Wright: I’d be very interested in hearing those because we want to do everything we can to enable the maximum number of applications and best user experience for anything that people want to do.

Tish Shute: Let’s go back to some specific questions about the platform, right? For example Yohan Baillot asked, “Is it arbitrary image/tag recognition supported? Is the tag / image specifiable by user? Is face recognition supported?” Not yet, face recognition, right?

Jay Wright: Not yet.

Tish Shute: What are the plans with that?

Jay Wright: I think we’ve identified it as an interesting area and something that there’s some interest in, but have not made a decision on a particular technology direction.

Tish Shute: You’ve answered some of these but 3D model based vision tracking. Yohan’s question was, “Is 3D model based vision tracking supported (that is recover the pose of the camera using a known 3D model and a 2D camera view of this model)?”

Jay Wright: That’s something we’re looking at very closely, but again, don’t have a plan, or don’t have a future date for.

Tish Shute: And you said with the natural landmark tracking that’s not supported, right?

Jay Wright: I don’t know if I know what that means, Tish. But we don’t have any APIs that provide compass or GPS functionality other than already exists in the operating system. So if you want to take advantage of the compass or other sensors, you can absolutely do that, but the SDK does not currently provide anything different or anything more than already exists in the OS.

Tish Shute: This is an interesting question, “Is Snapdragon offloading some processing to the GPU, if any?”

Jay Wright: Certainly rendering functionality that utilizes OpenGL is being offloaded to the GPU. We’re currently in the process of determining multiple methods for offloading functionality between both symmetric and heterogeneous cores on Snapdragon. Which would include the GPU, the apps processor, and DSPs.

Tish Shute: No one has truly solved optimizing the GPU/CPU for mobile AR yet have they?

Jay Wright: That really gets to the heart of the optimization here. Which pieces ought to be operating on which cores and when, and why? And that’s something that we’re looking at very closely.

Tish Shute: Right. The only AR – that is truly 3D media tightly registered to the physical world has been done for military and medical (and that has often been with a locked of camera!). But to take mobile AR to the next level I think many developers would like access to the CPU/GPU, for example a developer interested in the future of eyewear like Yohan?

Jay Wright: We’re very interested in hearing what kinds of tools developers would like to see.

Tish Shute: What is the best forum for discussing feature specifics?

Jay Wright: To provide feature requests to us?

Tish Shute: Yes. And discuss them.

Jay Wright: if people go to qdev.net/AR there’s an application up there for the private beta program. So if people do have ideas about features or other things they would like to see, they’re welcome to submit [their requests and ideas] there.

Tish Shute: I also have some questions about the specifics of the competition. Some people are a little confused about some things. Yohan asked, “What is the expected form of the project? Lab demonstration? Specific capability? Complete end to end system?”

Jay Wright: The only requirement is that they submit an Android application that we can then get running on a device. So if it has a backend component or backend server that it works against, great. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But that’s really it. There’s no limit to the application category. It can be a game, it can be a museum tour, it can be a children’s learning game or learning experience. It can really be anything. The idea is we want to find experiences for which AR delivers some unique value. We’ll be announcing more specifics about the competition in the near-future.

Tish Shute: Right, because some people weren’t sure about the Unity being separated whether it was biased towards games. And it’s not really, is it?

Jay Wright: Unity is a bias toward just rapid development for 3D, I think. It’s most commonly associated with games, but there are also a lot of Unity customers that use it for medical simulations and other types of applications that aren’t really games at all.

Tish Shute: Yes. It’s very flexible, I know. You did bring up the backend services again. Are you thinking of offering any of that?

Jay Wright: There is a backend tool that we offer. And the backend tool is what you use to generate your targets. So if you want to create or use a particular image for a target in your application, you upload it to our target management application, and then it will evaluate that target and tell you how well it will work. So as you know, certain images are more likely to be recognizable than others. And so there’s metrics in that application that will give you some feedback.

And then you can download your target resource from the website that you can then incorporate into your application project.

Tish Shute: So this is available at the moment to people who are in the private beta and not to…you know, all of this information and documentation, right?

Jay Wright: That’s correct.

Tish Shute: So that’s an incentive. Now, just to encourage people to submit to the private beta is the other thing that people seem confused about. In one part you say 25 developers. And some people have thought that meant it was limited to 25 individuals. And some people have like maybe four people on their team, so they were going, “Well, are we going to be accepted because we have four developers, or do we count as one because we are all working at the same project?”

Jay Wright: it’s just 25 companies.

Tish Shute: OK. I think we’ve gone through the questions. Just to clarify and maybe give some incentive for people to apply to the private beta…the big advantage of getting in the private beta, aside from getting a month’s start on the competition, is that you get a chance to input, right?

Jay Wright: Yes. A chance to provide feedback, get early access to the technology. And then we are also providing a free HTC phone.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes. I forgot the phone. Yes, right. In the requirements, though, you basically seem to be asking for sort of a full app…some people get reticent about delivering their full application plan, right?

Jay Wright: Yes. I understand that. People should just reveal what they are comfortable talking about. Just so you understand the constraint on this end, this is early technology and we’re trying to understand exactly what the support requirement is going to be. And we have limited supported resources at this time, so we want to make sure that we can focus the resources that we have on folks that are really going to use the technology and have a sound plan to actually build something. So that’s really the motivation behind limiting the size of the private beta.

Tish Shute: OK. Yes, it’s good to reiterate that. We’re down to the last question that I have, and then I’ll ask you if there is anything that I missed. You say you are partnering with Mattel. Who are the developers? Because I mean Mattel isn’t an augmented reality development team.

Jay Wright: Mattel used a subcontractor, Aura Interactive.

Tish Shute: Nice. But that’s your only partner that I saw, right? Why Mattel?

Jay Wright: Well, to launch a new technology, companies will often find showcase partners to demonstrate compelling uses of it. And we thought Mattel and the Rock’em Sock’em™ toy was a great example of combining augmented reality with an existing toy.

Tish Shute: And I think people agree with you on Rock’em Sock’em (see Chris Cameron’s RWW post).

Jay Wright: And there’s other showcase partners and applications that we will continue to work on to kind of spur the ecosystem and show what is possible.

Tish Shute: OK. Now, is there anything I’ve left out that you think? What’s the core of this narrative that we need to get across, and if I’ve left anything out that is a key piece?

Jay Wright: I think you’ve done an excellent job of covering all the bases, Tish.

Tish Shute: [laughs]

Jay Wright: I think the important overriding message to get across is that we really see ourselves in an enablement role here, and that we are trying to provide….we’d like to provide fundamental technology that helps all developers build content for the real world.

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…