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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking with Bruce Sterling, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AR used as interfaces for devices

Italian augmented robot from SEAC02 from brucesflickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

“Korean elegance at the Zenitum booth” – from brucesflickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly they had all heard about one another.  That’s a departure from earlier models of tech startup, where you usually have like three hippies in a local garage.  Now you’ve got German-American-Korean outfits like Metaio, and Total Immersion has a Russian affiliate.  They’re inherently multinational, both inside the company and out.

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Sterling:  Well, his visuals were good.

What AR means for artistic practice…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Sterling:  Maybe it’s for the best.

VC and AR Startup Action

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

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

Bruce Sterling:  Did they not preregister?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World as the Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Oh, yes, I guess so!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Illusive AR eyewear

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

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

Bruce Sterling: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Yeah, you’re right.

Social Augmented Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[thunder]

Tish Shute: Wow! What was that?

Bruce Sterling: Thunder storm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Sterling: That was very fun, yes.

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

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

Gamer Guys at are2010

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

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

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

Tish Shute: I know, right! [laughs]

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

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

Tish Shute: Yes. that would be cool!

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

Tish Shute: No.

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: One of the best features!

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

Tish Shute: [laughs]

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

The Man With the X-Ray Eyes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rudy Rucker gripping an Augmented Reality shoe” from brucesflickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Sterling:  Well, it’s possible..

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

Bruce Sterling: Right.

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

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

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

Tish Shute: Yes.

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

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

…to be continued in Part 2

Picture on the left Mirrorshades, picture on the right a Metroid Hud.

“Augmented Reality is like a Philip K Dick novel torn off its paperback rack and blasted out of iPhones,” Bruce Sterling in Beyond the Beyond

“a techno visionary dream come true – those are rare, really rare, you have to be patient,  it’s super cyberpunk”… Bruce Sterling, “At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry.”

The Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry continues to brighten, and now we have two augmented reality companies, Total Immersion and Ogmento, firmly established in Hollywood – the dream mother of so many of our augmented realities.

Ogmento is the most recent of these two pioneering augmented reality companies to set up shop in LA.  Total Immersion’s CEO Bruno Uzzan moved to LA from France two years ago, although he still has a fifty person RandD team in France.   Total Immersion began 10 years ago in the quiet, lonely, hours before the dawn of an AR industry.  But Total Immersion’s AR toys for Mattel, and augmented reality for Topps baseball cards, fired CNet writer Daniel Terdiman up enough to say, “I have seen the future of toys, and it is augmented reality” (see full post here on CNet).

Recently, I talked with  Ori Inbar, one of the founders of Ogmento and  the premier augmented reality blog Games Alfresco about his new venture in Hollywood. Bruce Sterling, @bruces, had some fun with my invention of brand new augmented reality trade jargon here!  Ori pointed out Ogmento brings two important new facets to the rapidly growing augmented reality field: firstly they are bringing leadership from veterans of the entertainment industry into augmented reality development. Brad Foxhoven and Brian Selzer from Blockade have partnered with Ori on Ogmento.  And, in an another important step forward for a young industry, Ogmento announced they will be acting as publishers for a fast growing cohort of augmented reality application developers and helping AR development teams out there bring their concepts to the market.

So I was very happy also to have the opportunity to talk with Brian Selzer.  Bruce Sterling pointed out in his seminal sermon from the flatlands at the Layar Developer Conference, AR is kind of a “Hollywood scene.” We have seen the web early adopter/developer/blogger community  embrace augmented reality browser experiences in recent weeks in an awesome wave of enthusiasm. Are Hollywood creatives equally smitten? For the answers see the full interview with Brian Selzer below.

Brian Selzer (www.brianselzer.com and twitter – brianse7en ) has an extensive involvement with emerging platforms:

“from launching dot com entertainment sites in the late 90′s to creating early versions of social gaming platforms, or bringing big brands like Spider-Man and X-Men into the mobile space for the first time.  Last year I was focused on bringing video game characters and worlds into the online space as UGC [user generated content] projects (mashade.com, instafilms.com).”

I began my own career in Hollywood doing motion control photography and creating software that bridged the language of robotics and servo motors with the visions of  film directors. Eventually our little company, NPlus1, moved on to 3D vision systems and image recognition stuff.  So yes, I have been really, really patient waiting for this particular techno visionary dream.  And, while I have been waiting for augmented reality to manifest, I have grown to love the internet.  But now, how awesome, It is OMG finally for mobile AR!

Augmented reality is busting out all over – through our laptops, our phones, on the streets, toys, baseball cards, art installations, sticky light calligraphy and more.

Many of my questions to Brian were directed at at how and when we will see augmented realities with near field object recognition, image recognition and tracking and, of course, the illusive eyewear.  As Bruce Sterling points out we are just at the very, very beginning – the dawn of an industry.  I created the photomontage below on the right to compliment Tonchidot’s illustration suggesting the evolutionary inevitability of holding our phones up (below on the left).  The Evolutionary Reality of AR will not end there.  It is just a step into eyewear, hummingbirds or Nano Air Vehicles, and more…….

The Evolutionary Reality of AR

Cartoon on the left by Tonchidot on the right a collage of a stock photo and the Pentagon’s Robot Humming Birds – “Nano Air Vehicles.”

While we finally we have, an affordable mediating device with the horse power, mindshare and business model to bring AR mainstream with the iphone.  The much anticipated Apple 3.1 Beta SDK to be released in September will not, I am sure, open up the Video API at the levels that augmented realities with near field object recognition and tracking require (I would love to be proved wrong though). But the magic wand to deliver even tightly registered AR graphics/media (that require a lot of CPU and GPU) to a wide audience is in our hands, so full access to may not be far off. And others, of course, can/will/might knock the iphone off its current pedestal.  AR made it’s mobile phone debut on the Android after all.

Like everyone else who loves AR, I wish that Apple would open up faster (and I wish Android would manifest on some rocking hardware). But we will see enough of the iphone Video API open for the next generation of mobile augmented reality games and applications to emerge in the coming months.

One of these will be Ogmento’s. Although Ogmento is in stealth mode, they have released a teaser for their first game, “Put A Spell,” developed by ARBalloon – screenshot below.  Ori did reveal to me in this interview that they are doing image recognition and using the Imagination AR engine.

As Brian notes, Hollywood has had the AR bug for a long time. AR has been everywhere in Science Fiction Movies and video games. Nintendo’s SPD3 head Kensuke Tanabe, “effectively the man in charge of overseeing all the Metroid franchise underneath original co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto,” explains the story of Metroid to Brandon Boyer of Offworld here (an image of a Metroid Hud on the right opening this post) :

“the idea of the different visors you use in the Prime games to interact with the world: the scan visor, for instance, set the game apart from other first person shooters in that the player was using it to proactively collect information from the world, rather than having the story come to them passively, in the form of cut-scenes or narration. “Prime could have adventure elements with the introduction of this visor,” says Tanabe, “That’s how we came up with the genre — first person adventure, instead of shooter.”

But as Brian points out:

“the light bulb has been lit and Hollywood is seeing that the software and hardware are here today to deliver these types of AR experiences in real life (to a lesser extent of course, but the path is getting clear).”

Talking with Brian Selzer

Tish Shute: Bruce Sterling’s sermon at the Layar Developer conference, “At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry,” was absolutely awesome. He spread the future feast/orgy of augmented reality before us  – and described many of the dishes we will tasting both delectable and diabolical.  One of the many things he points out is, AR is kind of a “Hollywood scene.” And, as Ogmento is one of only two augmented reality companies in Hollywood, I am interested to hear how it looks from your neck of the woods. We have seen the web early adopter/developer/blogger community  embrace augmented reality browser in recent weeks in an awesome wave of enthusiam – are Hollywood creatives catching the buzz?

Brian Selzer:  It was a thrill to hear Bruce Sterling mention Ogmento. I devoured all of his Cyberpunk books back in the 80′s, along with writers like Gibson, Rucker, Shirley… To me, sci-fi writers are the visionaries who define and influence our technological paths into the future. They make science and tech sexy enough to want to manifest those experiences in the real world. Clearly Bruce sees the AR industry as being sexy. I love that he called it “a techno-visionary dream come true… and super-cyberpunk.”  And yes, kind of a Hollywood scene.

Hollywood creatives caught the AR bug before they knew what AR was.  Look at science fiction movies and video games to see AR everywhere. Terminator, The Matrix, Minority Report, Iron Man.. the list goes on.  Look at any video game with an integrated heads-up display.  It’s clear Hollywood loves AR.  It’s only been in the past few months though that the light bulb has been lit and Hollywood is seeing that the software and hardware are here today to deliver these types of AR experiences in real life (to a lesser extent of course, but the path is getting clear). So yes, the buzz is here and it’s strong.  With that, we all have to be prepared for the good, the bad and the ugly as AR goes mainstream.

It certainly goes to show how young this industry is when Ogmento and Total Immersion are currently the only AR companies based in Los Angeles. It’s very exciting to be the only company right now demonstrating a natural feature tracking (markerless) iPhone experience in Hollywood. We are in talks to bring some very big brand and properties to the mobile AR space. The goal is to deliver experiences that create added engagement and value to the consumer.

Tish Shute: Also in his landmark sermon Bruce Sterling noted that augmented reality has been around for 17 yrs and now at last we are seeing the dawning of  an augmented reality industry. What inspired you to take up the challenge of launching an augmented reality company in Hollywood?  Oh congrats that Bruce Sterling name checked Ogmento in his list of companies that prove that this really is the dawn of an industry!

Brian Selzer: I’ve always been involved in emerging platforms… from launching dot com entertainment sites in the late 90′s to creating early versions of social gaming platforms, or bringing big brands like Spider-Man and X-Men into the mobile space for the first time.  Last year I was focused on bringing video game characters and worlds into the online space as UGC projects (mashade.com, instafilms.com). Working with all these great CG game assets, I continued to think about what’s next, and that’s when I started to follow AR very closely and started engaging with those who were pioneering in the space.

I remember swapping instant messages with Robert Rice (@robertrice) right after the 2008 Super Bowl.  We were not chatting about the football game, but rather about some of the commercials that aired during the event as a sign that AR was making its way into the mainstream.  A lot of people became aware of AR for the first time when the GE SmartGrid commercial aired.  There were all these YouTube videos popping up of people blowing on holographic wind turbines.

The commercial that really got me excited though was the Coke Avatar commercial.  In that commercial people in the city were sporadically being portrayed as their digital persona’s, avatars, gaming characters, etc..  For me that spot did a great job showing how many of us already have these ‘alter egos” that live in cyberspace, and how the line between these worlds can sometimes be blurred. I remember watching that commercial and thinking that is exactly the type of experience I’d like to create with mobile AR.  I want to overlap the virtual world into our every-day reality. Why cant I bring my World of Warcraft or Second Life persona with me into the real world?

I am big on the notion of “Games and Goals.” I believe that games have the power to motivate people in a very powerful way. By challenging ourselves while playing a game we can climb mountains.  Augmented Reality is the perfect platform to bring gaming into the real world.  By mixing the virtual world with the physical world, this added layer of perception provides a very powerful experience for something like a role-playing game.

One of my earlier social-gaming projects was a website called Superdudes.  This was a “Be Your Own Superhero” concept that celebrated and motivated kids to create superhero avatar/persona’s online, and we gave members all sorts of games, challenges, and rewards, some of which carried into the real world. The site recognized members for teamwork, creativity, volunteer work and things like that. So the Superdudes were often involved in charity events and benefits to help children.  Everybody called each other by their Superhero names, and the line between fantasy and reality were being blurred.  This project really got me thinking about what happens when you take positive role-playing like this and mix it into the real world.  I started to work on a plan for location-based activist missions for points and rewards, but never got to complete that. So I have some unfinished business here.

I think it would be fantastic to be able to show up to some type of fun event with friends, and everybody could see each others alter ego personas standing before them. When you can turn the world into a playground, and use the power of gaming to make a positive impact on the planet… well, I don’t think there is anything better than that.  These are the types of projects that drive me, and I think AR is the best platform to support these types of social gaming experiences.

Tish: Does Ogmento have any RPGs under development?  I noticed in the Google Wave on RPG someone has been working on doing something with the Dungeons&Dragons API.  I am interested in exploring the web of protocols underlying Wave as a transport mechanism for multi-person, mobile, AR experiences (not requiring downloads), on an open global outdoor AR network. If not Wave, what do you see as the potential infrastrucure and protocols we could harness for an open augmented reality network?

Brian:  Ogmento has a deep background in video games and we interact regularly with most of the major game publishers. As a company we are not so much developing our own RPGs right now, but rather exploring what mobile AR extensions make sense for existing brands.  There are many limitations to location-based gaming, but a global AR network is exactly along the lines we are thinking.  Lots of discussions are taking place on protocols, platforms, API’s, and there are numerous ways to approach this.  We need to be able to use what’s available now and continue to refine and customize for AR’s specific needs and issues as we progress.

In general though, Ogmento is focused on what types of experiences can be had today and over the next couple of years. I still think we are several years out from a truly open augmented reality network.  We are certainly looking at launching our own “Ogmented Network” which would support some fun treasure hunt type experiences, or add an entertainment layer on top of traditional outdoor marketing campaigns.

Tish: I don’t know whether you have read Thomas Wrobel’s ideas for an open augmented reality network that I just published here on Ugotrade.  The principals he talks about are very important for augmented reality to become a major part of our lives – .  Considering the difficulty open networks can pose for emerging business models how can we fund the development of an open framework for augmented reality?

“a future AR Network, I mean one as universal and as standard as the internet. One where people can connect from any number of devices, and without additional downloads, experience the majority of the content.
Where people can just point their phone, webcam, or pair of AR glasses anywhere were a virtual object should be, and they will see it. The user experience is seamless, AR comes to them without them needing to “prepare” their device for it.”

Brian: I think funding for these types of projects will definitely come from Venture Capital groups in the near future.  It’s early in AR, but the VC’s are watching and deciding which horses to bet on.  Until that time, it’s about service work, and developing AR experiences for others with what is possible today. That work will help fund internal development of original AR products, and platform development.

Tish: How did you get started with Ogmento?

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 were coming from different complimentary 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, you can see how much more compelling it can be when the game invites the player to be actively moving around during the experience.

Tish: I am interested in your perspective on how we can create the kind AR experiences that really embody what has always been so exciting about AR – the tight alignment of graphics and media with real world objects and ultimately a rich immersive 3D experience, so I am going to hit you with a bunch of those, “Is this really eyewear or vaporware?” questions.  The real deal eyewear changes everything!

While eyeware is a big challenge technically and aesthetically,  I am pretty sure that there are several outfits out there that can pull off the optics and projection. 
Will the entertainment industry get excited enough to put a major push into delivering the eyewear in short order instead of the 5 to 10 year project that some people still think it is?    The business development challenge is bigger perhaps than the technical obstacles perhaps? What is your view on this?

And, perhaps, the eyewear is a clear example of a need for partnerships. For example, we have seen efforts from companies like Vuzix and Lumus, and recently a Japanese Company, Masunaga.

I have no reports from people who have tried the Maunaga eyewear yet.  But,  limited by small field of view, and tethered, currently eyewear offerings, available at a reasonable price point, are not workable solutions for augmented reality experiences. But the problems are not insurmountable. What will facilitate the real deal?  


It seems that it is critical to start creating hardware relationships now. The industry is costly and slow moving and as Robert Rice put it to me in a recent conversation, “once the software cat is out of the bag, its going to go wild and if the hardware isnt there, its going to stutter.”

As Ori notes some of the hardware companies like Intel and others don’t seem to be paying enough attention to AR.  Ori points out they don’t see the demand yet.  But in order to create an awesome AR experience and demand from a mass audience, don’t we need to work in conjunction with hardware designers?

Brian: It’s fun to think about who will eventually deliver a great hardware solution for AR glasses. It will happen. It would be cool to see somebody like an Oakley or Nike partnered up with a company like Vuzix to deliver something people actually might wear in public.  Perhaps a hardware manufacturer like Apple or Nokia will bring us something like the iSight or the NGaze down the line.  I’d love to see a set of glasses designed by Ideo.  Microsoft or Sony are already playing with technologies like Project Natale and the EyeToy, so I think its only a matter of time before they deliver an eyewear solution. I would even look to the toy companies to eventually make an investment here.

Gamers will be the early adopters, and in a few years we may start to see people running around in the park wearing glasses with headsets, but it will be acceptable because it’s clear they are using them for a game.  It’s going to take a very sexy and stylish piece of hardware for everyday people to be willing to wear AR glasses in public while going about their everyday business.   It’s like the recent cover of Wired magazine where Brad Pitt is wearing a mobile headset in his ear, and the editors point out that even he can’t pull that look off, so why do you think you can.  When AR glasses come in designer frames, and you can’t tell them from non-AR glasses, to me that’s when things get really interesting from a mass-adoption perspective.   Compare how many people were carrying around a mobile phone in the 80s to now.  I think it will be the same thing with glasses.

I was in an AR pitch meeting the other week at a very significant media company, and brought up the point that today’s handheld Smartphones will eventually evolve into tomorrows Smartglasses. My comment was quickly shrugged off as sort of a sci-fi notion that was irrelevant to the business at hand.  Probably true, but I think it is important to understand where digital media and entertainment is going, so you can adapt quickly, and evolve into those spaces more naturally.  The more we see people walking around with their Smartphones in front of their face (like a camera), the sooner it will be that we make the jump to eyeglasses as a key hardware device for AR experiences.

At Ogmento, we definitely are working on AR experiences with the hardware and software available today.  We will get some product out this year, and 2010 will be a banner year for markerless mobile AR in general.  I think the entire AR community is looking forward to bringing this technology to the mainstream in the form of games, marketing campaigns, virtual docent apps, and much more.  It might not be the full experience we are all dreaming about for some time, but we can see the path and the true potential, and it’s pretty spectacular.

You mention the tight alignment of graphics and media with real world objects.  That is really our focus. A lot of well-deserved attention is going to the browser overlay “post-it” approach right now, which uses compass and GPS.  We are focused on markerless natural feature tracking, so once you identify something that is AR enhanced in your environment, you can interact with that integrated experience.  On an iPhone that can be as simple as using your touch screen to interact.  When you are wearing glasses, it becomes more about visual tracking. There are lots of smart people thinking through these issues. Many of which you have interviewed. It is my hope that there are exciting collaborative efforts to be had in the coming months to get us all there together and faster.

Tish: Bruce touched on some of the hard problems that have to be solved for augmented reality – and he noted for instance security needs to be tackled in the early stages. Robert made a nice list, “privacy, media persistence, spam, creating UI conventions, security, tagging and annotation standards, contextual search, intelligent agents, seamless integration and access of external sensors or data sources, telecom fragmentation, privilege and trust systems, and a variety of others.” Will Ogmento be leading the way in solving some of these hard problems?

And, won’t trying to solve these hard problems for networked AR in walled garden scenarios one company at a time lead to a lot of reinventing the wheel wasted energy?

Brian: These are all important issues, and again there are a lot of smart people thinking about solutions to these problems on a daily basis.  Ogmento is interested in partnering with developers and supporting their efforts as a publisher of mobile AR experiences.  While we intend to roll up our sleeves in these areas, we are currently more focused on taking AR mainstream with the hardware and software available today.  As the industry evolves, so will Ogmento. As the opportunities evolve, our ability to make a greater impact tackling these issues will be realized.

Tish: Another area of development that could really kick AR into high gear might be creating augmented reality hotspots  where we use can deliver the kind of location accuracy/instrumentation necessary to create interesting AR experiences (partnership with Starbucks, perhaps ?!).  Augmented reality hots spots, could deliver the kind of high quality AR experience that isn’t possible ubiquitously at the moment, and may be a real way to get people really exploring the potential of AR now, rather than later?

Brian:  Agreed. I see a great opportunity here with this approach.

Tish: Although there are many obstacles to Green AR – the energy hogging servers at the backend for starters! Last week I had a conversation with Gavin Starks, AMEE, and Robert Rice and Jim Purbrick about how to work with AMEE and the technology available and encourage Green Tech AR development (see an early exploration of green tech AR from Pachube here).

We came up with the idea of holding a competition perhaps centered around a targeted instrumented space. But I would really love to hear your thoughts on the topic of Green Tech AR (the energy hogging servers at the back end being the first cloud on the horizon!.)  Cool GreenTech AR imaginings, social gaming ideas, RPGs, not even necessarily even tied to the immediately practical, would be like rain in a drought!

Brian:  I go back to “Games and Goals”… If you make environmental and other activist efforts fun and rewarding, more are likely to be motivated and participate.  Can you imagine having a personal “carbon footprint stat” floating over your self at all times? Or over your home or factory?  How would that change your behavior?  We all love stats. Look at how the Nike+ campaign has used technology and gaming to motivate people to run.  I think there is a lot that can be done to make being green fun. It starts with the individual, and spreads from there.  Keep me posted on that one!

Tish: I would also like to explore further the RRW suggestion that ambient intelligence is both the Holy Grail of AR and possibly snake oil:

“The holy grail of the mobile AR industry is to find a way to deliver the right information to a user before the user needs it, and without the user having to search for it. This holy grail is likely in a ditch somewhere beside a well-traveled road in the district of the semantic Web, ambient intelligence and the Internet of things. Be wary of any hyped-up invitation to invest in a company that claims to have gotten the opportunity right. What we’ve seen in the commercial industry to date is a rather complex version of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.”

So Holy Grail, Snake Oil, or a ditch somewhere….?

Brian:  I instantly think of Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s character is being bombarded with holographic ads personalized with his name and to his current situation.  In the future, Spam is a nightmare, especially when it knows who you are.  I think the key thing here is delivering “the right information”, and we still dont have that down. I do see a day where we can truly customize what comes to us, how we want it, when we want it.  My future vision of ambient intelligence is the ability to “turn everything off” if I want to… block out the stimuli and replace it with images of nature, or natural surroundings, etc.  Where I live in Los Angeles, we have those digital billboards everywhere, so it’s like advertising overload wherever you look (hints of Blade Runner).  I personally don’t mind them, but I know there is great debate on there being simply too many billboards everywhere. So AR would only add to the noise of life by adding yet another digital overlay of information, right?

Perhaps the holy grail is to use technology to filter things out. AR might become a solution to leading a simpler life, or a perfectly customized life if you want that. Ultimately the control needs to be with the individual.  I guess I am talking about something like TiVo taken to the extreme.

Tish: And then that other biggy – augmented reality search! I am asking this next question of  Wikitude and Sekai camera too and now I must also ask Acrossair and several others I guess! Obviously a huge area of opportunity in this broader landscape that uses location-awareness, barcode scanners, image recognition and augmented reality is to harness the collective intelligence – a whole new field of search. There is the beginning of a discussion on this in the comments here.

What will it take, in your view, to become a leader in augmented reality search?

Brian:  I’m more of a content guy, so I tend to focus on things like UI, quality of creative, etc..  From that perspective, I am looking forward to evolving beyond the “post-it” text overlay user-experience we see now in AR search. I was impressed with the TAT Augmented ID concept and hope we start seeing more smart design solutions like that emerging in the space.  There are some great new design approaches coming out of the location-aware space that should be applied to AR search. I’ve been studying the heads-up display designs being used in video games, and re-watching movies like Iron Man for ideas. This is another example where Hollywood has painted a polished picture of what AR can and should look like, and the masses have already accepted these design approaches.  So from that perspective, from my view the leaders in search will be delivering sexy, smart and simple solutions. It’s all about the S’s.