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

It is now nearly two weeks since the Google Wave preview launch and I am happy to say we have some AR Wave news. The diagram above shows Thomas Wrobel’s basic concept for a distributed, multi-user, open augmented reality framework based on the Google Wave Federation Protocol and servers (click on the image to see the dynamic annotated sketch or here).

Even in the short time we have had to explore Wave, some very exciting possibilities are becoming clear. Thomas puts some of the virtues of Wave as an AR enabler succinctly when he writes:

“Wave allows the advantages of both real-time communication, as well as the advantages of persistent hosting of data. It is both like IRC, and like a Wiki. It allows anyone to create a Wave, and share it with anyone else. It allows Waves to be edited at the same time by many people, or used as a private reference for just one person.

These are all incredibly useful properties for any AR experience, more so Wave is open. Anyone can make a server or client for Wave. Better yet, these servers will exchange data with each other, providing a seamless world for the user…..a single login will let you browse the whole world of public waves, regardless of who’s providing or hosting the data. Wave is also quite scalable and secure…data is only exchanged when necessary, and will stay local if no one else needs to view it.

Wave allows bots to run on it…allowing blips in a waves to be automatically updated, created or destroyed based on any criteria the coders choose. Wave even allows the playback of all edits since the wave was created.

For all these reasons and more, Wave makes a great platform for AR.”

There will be much more coming soon on Wave enabled AR because the Google Wave invites have begun to flow out to a wider community now. This week, many of our small ad-hoc group looking at the development challenges and implications of Google Wave for AR actually got into Wave for the first time.

Many thanks to all the people who have contributed to this discussion so far including: Thomas Wrobel, Thomas K. Carpenter, Jeremy Hight, Joe Lamantia, Clayton Lilly, Gene Becker and many others.

We will be setting up some public AR Framework Development Waves this week.  If you have any trouble finding them, or adding yourself to it, please add Thomas and I to your contact list.  I am tishshute@googlewave.com  Thomas is darkflame@googlewave.com  The first two are currently called:

AR Wave: Augmented Reality Wave Framework Development (developer forum)

AR Wave: Augmented Reality Wave Development (for general discussion)

The discussion so far has been in two areas. On the one hand, it is gear-heady and focused on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, code, development challenges, and interfacing to mobile, while on the other hand people have been looking at use cases and questions of user experience.

Distributed, “shared augmented realities,” or “social augmented experiences” – that not only allow mashups, & multisource data flows, but dynamic overlays (not limited to 3d), created by users, linked to location/place/time, and distributed to other users who wish to engage with the experience by viewing and co-creating elements for their own goals and benefit – are something very new for us to think about.

As, Joe Lamantia, puts it, now:

“there’s a feedback loop between which interactions are made easy by any given combo of device;/ hardware / software / connectivity, and the ways that people really work in real life (without any mediation / permeation by tech).”

Joe Lamantia whose term, “social augmented experiences” I borrow for this post title, has done some thinking about “concepts and models for understanding and contributing to shared augmented experiences, such as the social scales for interaction, and the challenges attendant to designing such interactions.” Check out Joe Lamantia’s blog for more on this later this week.

It is very helpful, as Joe points out, to shift the focus  back and forth between the experience and the medium.

It is super exciting to have clear evidence that shared augmented realities are no longer merely possible, but highly probable and actually do-able now.

I should  be absolutely clear about what Google Wave does to enable AR because obviously Wave plays no role in solving image recognition and tracking/registrations issues.  But, for example, Wave protocols and servers do provide a means to exchange, edit, and read data, and that enables distributed, social augmented realities.

Thomas explains how the newly named “AR Blip” works as:

“An AR Blip is simply a Blip in wave containing AR data. Typically this would be the positional and url data telling a AR browser to position a 3d object at a location in space.

In more generic terms, an AR Blip allows data of various forms (meshes,text,sound) to be given a real-world position.”

I have mentioned in other posts (here and here) that Wave can be used for AR as precise or as loose as the current generation devices can handle. And as the hardware and software for the kind of AR that can put media out in the world to truly immerse you in a mixed space, the framework  should  be able to handle this too.

(a note on the Wave playback feature – this opens up a whole new world of possibilities.  Check out this post on some of the implications of playback for writing!)

The use cases we have been coming up with are too numerous to go into in detail this post.  The open nature of an AR framework/Wave standard will lead to many new applications we have barely begun to imagine.  As Thomas points out, different client software can be made for browsing, potentially allowing for various specialist browsers, as well as more generic ones for typical  use. The multitudes of different kinds of data in/output that could be integrated in an open AR framework as it evolves are mind boggling.

But, for now, some  obvious use cases do come to mind:
eg.

- Historical environmental overlays showing how a city used to be/and how this vision may be constructed differently by different communities

- Proposed building work showing future changes to a structure/and the negotiations of this future (both the public and professionals could submit their own comments to the plans in context), seeing pipes, cables and other invisible elements that can help builders and engineers collaborate and do their work.

- Skinning the world with interactive fantasies

I asked Thomas to help people understand how Wave enables new interactions to data by explaining how Wave could enable citi sensing and citizen sensing projects (e.g. this one being pioneered by Griswold):

“Sensors, both mobile and static could contribute environmental data into city overlays;

Having these invisible aspects of the world made visible would create ways to improve sustainability, social equity, urban management, energy efficiency, public health, and allow communities to understand and become active participants in the ecosystems and infrastructure of their neighborhoods.

The key is reflecting this  kind of data back to people “making it not back story but fore story,” right where we are, right where it happens, as well as having it available for analysis.

As well as  creating new opportunities to interact/respond to/and enhance data, making visible the invisible as Natalie Jeremijenko’s work on Amphibious Architecture and Usman Haque’s project Natural Fuse shows, can also create new connections/understandings between humans and the non human’s that share our world, e.g. fish, plants, waterways.

At a more prosaic level  potential buyers of property could see more clearly what they are buying, city planners could see better what needs to be worked on, and environmental researchers could see more clearly the impact people are having on an area.

Also Wave can provide some of the framework necessary to begin to begin to address tricky problems of privacy. Sensitive data can be stored on private waves, e.g. medical data for doctors and researchers, but the analysis of the  data could still be of benefit to all, e.g., if it’s tied disease occurrences to locations and  relationships between the environmental data and health were…quite literally…made visible.

“The publication of energy consumption and making it visible as overlays, could help influence the public into supporting more energy efficiency companies and businesses. It could also help citizens to try to keep their own energy usage down, to try to keep their street in “the green.”

Thomas notes:

“With all of the above, it becomes fairly trivial to write persistent Wave-bots that automatically send notice when certain criteria are met (pollutants over a certain level, for example). On publicly readable waves, anyone can use the data in their local computers, process it, and contribute results back on a new wave. Alternatively, persistent remote severs could run Cron jobs, or other automated processing, using services such as App Engine to run wave robots.

All these possibilities become “free” when using Wave as a platform for geographically tied data.”

But of course this is just the beginning!

Recently, I talked at length with Jeremy Hight who has been thinking about, designing and creating shared augmented realities, that anticipate the kind of dynamic, real time, large scale architecture we now have available through Wave,  for quite some time now.   This is exciting stuff.

Modulated Mapping: Talking with Jeremy Hight about Layers, Channels and  Social Augmented Experiences

image from Volume Magazine (Hight/Wehby)

Tish Shute: I know you have been involved in locative media from its early days. Perhaps we can talk about how AR continues the locative media journey?

Blair MacIntyre gave me this distinction, recently: “AR is about systems that put media out in the world, and immerse you in a mixed space.  Even the current “not really registered” mobile phone AR systems are still “sort of” AR (e.g., Layar, etc).

Locative media/ubicomp/etc are very different, in that they tend to display media on a device (phone screen) that is relevant to your context, but does not attempt to merge it with the world.
The difference is significant, and making it clear helps people think about what they do and what they want to do, with their work. The locative media space though points toward future AR systems (when the technology catches up!).”

Jeremy Hight: The need is to finish the arc that locative media and early AR have started and to now truly return to the map itself, but as an internet of data, interactivity, channels of data , end user options like analog machines once were but in high end tools, a smart AI-ish ability for it to cull data for the user, and to allow social networking to be in real world places on the map both in building augmentation and in using and appreciating it..not hacks..which have their place…but a rhizome, a branched system with shared root,end user adjustable and variable..this is the key.

This takes AR and mapping and makes a possible world of channels in space and this eventually can be a kind of net we see in our field of vision with a selected percentage of visual field and placement so a geo-spatial net, a local to world wide fusion of lm into a tool and educational tool

VR[virtual reality] has greatly advanced, but in nodes as it has limitations…LM [locative media] is the same…AR [augmented reality] is the way.. it now has locative elements and aspects of VR integrated into its functionality and nodes…it is the best option with all of these elements, greater hybridity and data level potential a well as end user and community sourcing potential

I wrote an essay for Archis’ Volume, the architecture magazine on a near future sense of some of this….a visual net on the lens like ar but with smart objects and social networking and dissent.

I also wrote of these things for immersive graphic design, spatially aware museum  augmentation, education through ar and lm and nod to the base interface of eye to cerebral cortex in layered and malleable augmentation in my essay “Immersive Sight” a few years back

image [above] is simple illustration of a possible example on a screen or in front of eye where in a mondrian show..the graphic design of information actually builds as one moves

(key is calibrated spatial intervals and related layers of further augmentation which is logical due to location and proximity)

from immersive sight on immersive graphic design: “The design can work with this in a way that creates an interactive supplemental set of information that is malleable, shifts based on location, builds and peels away as one moves closer to a work and plays with the forms of the works and the elements of the space itself. The sequence can contain many different elements and their interplay (both in the field of vision and in terms of context and layers of information). This is the model of sections of augmentation turning on and off at key points as individual spatial and concepts moments and nodes.

Another interesting possibility is that individual points of augmentation don’t turn off, but instead are designed to build as one moves in a direction toward a specific part of the exhibit. The design can work in a sequence both content wise and visually in terms of a delay powered compositional development and style in which each discreet layer of text and image does not fade out, but builds on each other into a final composition. This can form paintings similar to Mondrian perhaps if it is a show of similar works of that era or it can form something much more metaphorical and open interpretation of the space and content but utilizing a sense of emergence spatially in terms of the composition (pieces laid bare until final approach for effect).

Each section will be well designed, but they build in layers as one moves until finally forming the final composition both visually and in terms of scope of information or building immediacy. The effect can be akin to taking a painting and slicing it into onion skin layers laid out in the air at intervals, each the same dimensions, but only one section compositionally of the greater whole. This has many semiotic applications beyond its potential aesthetically and as spatialized information possessing a sense of inter-relationship as one moves.“

Tish Shute: One of the things I found very inspiring when I read your papers was that your ideas are not all dependent on a model of AR that would necessarily require goggles, back packs and lots of CPU/GPU – not that that wouldn’t be nice, but that even using “magic lens” AR of the kind smart phones has enabled in an open distributed framework would open up a lot of new possibilities for what you call modulated mapping wouldn’t it?  What kind of social augmented realities might be enabled by a distributed infrastructure like this [AR Wave]?

Jeremy Hight: right….I see that as wayyy down the road…most important is the one you talk about as it is more immediate and thus more essential and needed. Eventually the goggles will be like a contact lens and a deep immersive ar version of  this will come, that to me is certain, but a ways down the road.  An incredible amount is possible now, and this is a more pragmatic move as opposed to the more theoretical of what is a few steps from here. Thus it is more important and essential now. Tools like Google Wave are taking what even 2 years ago was more theoretical discussions of what may be and instead introducing key elements to a more immediate, powerful, flexible level of augmentation. What have been hacks and isolated elements are to be integrated and social networking, task completion, shared tools and graphics building and geo-location.

Tish Shute: I think some people question what augmented reality has to bring to the continuum of location based experiences that other forms of interface/mapping do not?

Jeremy Hight: right….and the schism between its commercial flat self and tests with physics etc and in between …there are a lot of unfortunate assumptions it seems as to where ar and lm cross and how ar can be many things beyond deep immersion or the opposite pole of a hockey puck having a magic purple line etc….like lm is seen as either car directions or situationist experiments with deep data…..the progression to me is deeply organic….and now augmentation can be more malleable, variable and end user controlled.

Tish Shute: Yes, it is really exciting time for AR.  Historically AR research has gone after the hard problems of image recognition, tracking and registration because we have had available to us these dynamic, real time, large scale architectures like Wave available (until now!),  so less work has been done on exploring the possibilities for distributed AR fully integrated with the internet and WWW hasn’t it?

A distributed augmented reality framework such as we have envisaged on Wave would  allow people to see many layers from many different people at the same time. ‬And this kind of model has been part of your thinking and fundamental to your work for a while, hasn’t it? But it is a very new idea to most people to think about collaboratively editing layers on the world, and to be able to view  augmented space through channels and networked communities?  Could you explain some of the ways you have explored these ideas and how they could be explored further now to create meaningful experiences for people?

Jeremy Hight: right..exactly…modulated mapping to me can be an amazing tool for students…back end searching data visualizations and augmentations based on their needs…while they do something else on their computer or iphone…that can be amazing..and not deep immersive..The map can be active, malleable, open source fed, and even, in a sense, intelligent and able to adapt. The possibility also exists for this map to have a function that based on key words will search databases on-line to find maps, animations, histories and stories etc to place within it for your study and engagement. The map is thus a platform and yet is active. Community is possible as people can communicate graphically in works placed on the map and in building mode in the tool. All the tropes of locative media are to be in a mapping system of channels of augmentation and a spatial net. The software by design will allow development on the map and communication like programs such as second life but in mapping itself.

image from Parsons Journal of Information Mapping Volume 2 (Hight/Wehby)

I wrote an essay a few years ago for the Sarai reader questioning the traditional map and its semiotics and need to reconsider – then did work looking into it and what those dynamics were and they got into 2 group shows in museums in Russia…so it actually was my arc toward modulated mapping…an interesting way to it! But yes the map itself..this is a huge area of potential and non screen based alone navigation etc. I see now that my 2 dozen or so essays in lm,ar, interface design and augmentation have all also been leading in this direction for about 10 years now

Tish Shute: I  love immersive visualization but can we “return to the map – the internet of data” as you mentioned earlier and produce interesting augmentation experiences that go beyond locative media’s device display mode without having the goggles, for example, through the magic lens of or smart phones?

Jeremy Hight: yes, absolutely.  the map in the older paradigm is an artifice born often of war and border dispute and not of the earth itself and its processes…the new mapping like google maps is malleable, can be open source, can read spaces and can be layers of info in the related space not plucked from it as in the past..this is amazing. the old map also was born of false semiotics/semantics like “discovery of new lands” or ” pioneer”  while the places were there already and names often were of empire…now this is no longer the case

Tish Shute: So geoAR is an a better way to express a new social relationship to mapping? And how does this fit into the evolving arc of locative media that evolves into augmented reality?

Jeremy Hight:…early lm was mostly geocaching and drawing with gps..it took new paradigms to invigorate the field  a lot of folks focus on tools and what already is, cross pollination can ground ideas that are more radical…a metaphor in a sense to place what can be in a familiar context.

Tish Shute: one of the great disappointments in VR has been its isolation from networked computing and also, up to now, augmented reality – to achieve an immersive experience with  tight registration of media/graphics have to create separate system isolated from the internet and power of the web.

Jeremy Hight: yes….this will change. vr is to me an island but ar takes a part of it and shifts the paradigm and new things open this way. Do you know the project “life clipper”? friends of mine..doing interesting things..they are a clear bridge betwen lm and ar….and from vr

in ar augmentation and what is being augmented become fused or in collision or in complex interactions as a means to a larger contextualization and exploration of what is being augmented..this is true in immersive or non ar….huge potential

vr is a space, now can be surgery which is amazing. but not layered interaction, thus an island and graphic iconography on a location can use symbolic icons which opens up even more layers (graphic designer/information designer in me talking there I suppose..)

Tish Shute: Yes !  talk to me more about layers and channels I think this is one of the most interesting questions for me  in augmented reality at the moment – what can we do with layers and channels and the new possibilities on connections between people and environments that these can create?

The ability for anyone to post something is critical to the distributed idea but one of the reasons I am so excited by Google Wave is I am fascinated by the playback function. How do you think this will enable new forms of collaborative locative narratives (nice post on Wave playback here ).

Jeremy Hight: We are in an age of cartographic awareness unseen in hundreds of years. When was the last time that new mapping tools were sold in chain stores and installed in most vehicles? When was the last time that also the augmentation of maps was done by millions (Google map hacks, etc)? The ubiquitous gps maps run in automobiles while people post pictures and graphic pins to denote specific places on on-line maps.

The need is for a tool that combines all of these new elements into an open source, intuitive layered and rhizomatic map that is porous (like pumice, organic in form yet with “breathing room” ),ventilated (i.e: adjustable, a flow in and out), and open (open source,open access,open spatialized dialog).

I wrote of this in my essay “Revising the Map: Modulated Mapping and the Spatial Interface .”( http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/02/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf )

image from Parsons Journal of Information Mapping (Hight/Wehby)

Tish Shute: One mapping project I really like is Mannahatta.  How could distributed AR contribute to a project like Mannahatta?

Jeremy Hight: that is a good example..imagine taking manhattan and having channels of options to overlay, that being an excellent option, and imagine being able to even run a few at once with deliniating icons..you can augment a space with history, data, erasure, narrative, scientific analysis, time line of architecture, infrastructure, archaeological record etc….endless possibilities, and this agitates place and place on a map into an active field of information with end user control…and open options for new layers

Tish Shute: and do you think we could do interesting things with AR on a project like Mannahatta even with the current mediating devices we have available – i.e. our smart phones as obviously the rich pc experience of Mannhatta has built for it’s web interface would not be available as AR at this point?

Jeremy Hight: yes….k.i.s.s right?   these projects do not have to only be immersive and graphic intensive……take how people upload photos onto google maps….just make that on a menu of options, there are some pretty cool hacks already..
…options is key, a space can have a community as well, building on it in software, and others navigating it, i see it near future and down the road..always have with ar really

image from Volume Magazine (Hight/Wehby)

Jeremy Hight: and yes, a lot of people focus on ar as its limitations and processing power needs as a major road block

Tish Shute: so do you see AR on smart phones adding any value to a project like Mannahatta?

Jeremy Hight: yes…that it can be integrated into other similar works and even disparate but cloud linked ones…so a place can be “read” in diff ways on the iphone….beyond its map location, and more can be possible if you are there…others away, so it becomes channels of augmentation

Tish Shute: AR like locative media puts who you are, where you are, what you are doing, what is around you center stage in online experience but it also “puts media out in the world” – people I think understand this well as a single user experience but we are only just beginning to think about how this will manifest as a social experience – could explain more about modulated mapping as an experience of social augmentation?

Jeremy Hight: Modulated Mapping is a tool that will allow channels to be run along the map itself. This will allow one to view different icons and augmentations both as systems on the map and in deeper layers of information (photos, videos, animations,  visualizations, etc) that can be turned on and off as desired. The different layers of icons and data may be history, dissent, artworks, spatialized narratives, and annotations developed that are communally based on shared interests, placed spatially and far beyond. The use of chat functionality in text or audio will be open in building mode and in mapping navigation/usage as desired. This also allows a community to develop or augment in the spaces on the earth. These nodes can be larger and open or small and set by groups in their channel. The end result is an open source sense of mapping that will also have a needed sense of user control as one can select which layers of augmentation they wish to see and interact with at any time. It also will incorporate all the functionality of locative media in mapping software and mapping. In building mode and in map mode, icons will be coded to represent within channels (remember that the person using it has selected channels of augmentation from many based on their current interests and needs). Icons will be coded as active to show work in progress in cities and the globe to both invite participation and to further agitate the map from the sense of the static as action is visible even with its icons as people are working and community is formed in common interest/need .

locative media got a buzz for “reading” places…when I helped create locative narrative that was what blew me away back in 2001…that we could give places a voice by placing data from research and icons on a map……this meant lost history or augmentation was possible as kind of voices of a place and its layers…….I called it “narrative archaeology.” We now have tools that can push these ideas and concepts farther..much farther…and with a range beyond what was before, and then the map was just a tool….but now we are returning to the map itself…..and this as place as much as marker..this is where ar takes the ball to use a bad metaphor

also that project could only work if you came to our spot of a 4 block augmentation and with us there to lend you our gear…we are far beyond that now but it had its place

Tish Shute: How do you see “in context” AR and something we might call “context aware” cloud computing models interacting?

Jeremy Hight: sure…and I must add that I have issues with cloud computing as much as it is a good idea...

Tish Shute: because of loss of autonomy?

Jeremy Hight: tivo is simply a hard drive…but it keyword reads and gives  suggestions..that is the is cro magnon link to what can be

Tish Shute: The nice thing about Wave is because of the Federation model, the cloud model and local store ur own data models should work together.

Jeremy Hight: yes..that is better…..loss of autonomy also opens up the arbitrary which is the flaw of search engines as we know it…even Bing fails to me in that sense

Tish Shute: how do you mean, could you explain?

Jeremy Hight: spiders  cull from words  but cull like trawlers at sea …. tested Bing with very specific requests.. it spat out the same mass of mostly off topic results….
I wonder if there is a way to cull from key words and topics from a user…not Orwellian back end of course…but from their preferences, their searches etc..

Tish Shute: did you see the discussion on search in the AR Framework doc? AR search will be a massively important thing that will take a lot of intelligence and all sorts of algorithm development won’t it?

Jeremy Hight:It also has one area of key functionality that moves into more intuitive software. Upon continued usage, the mapping software will “learn” and search based on key words used and spheres of interest the user is mapping or observing as mapped and will integrate deeper data and types of animations, etc. into the map or will have them waiting to be integrated upon user approval as desired. Over time the level of sophistication of additions and of search intuition will increase dramatically. The search can also, if the user wishes, run in the back end while working in the mapping program, or in off time as selected while doing other tasks. It also can never be used if one is not interested. One of the key elements of this mapping is that it is not composed of a closed set or needs user hacks to augment, but instead is to evolve and deepen by user controls and desired as designed. Pre-existing data,visualizations and augmentations can be integrated with relative ease.

Tish Shute: One of the things that Joe Lamantia points out about social augmented experiences is that they will operate across a number of different scales – conversation > product design & build team > neighborhood / town fixing potholes > global community for causes. How do designs for channels and layers change across these different social scales?

Jeremy Hight: quote myself …”The “frontier” is often defined as the space just ahead of the known edge and limit, and where it may be pushed out deeper into the previously unknown. The frontier in the world of ideas is not the warm comfort of what has been long assimilated; and the frontier in the landscape is not of maps, but of places beyond and before them⁄

The border along what has been claimed is not only that of maps – it is of concepts, functions, inventions and related emergent industries. Ideas and innovations are like the cloud shape that briefly forms around a jet breaking the sound barrier, tangible yet not fully mapped into measure. It is when things are nailed down into specific entities, calibrated and assessed, that the dangers may inflict themselves – greed, competition, imitation, anger, jealously, a provincial sense of ownership either possessed or demanded”. (from essay in Sarai reader). Otherwise channels and augmentation do not have to be socio-economically stratifying or defined by them. We built 34n  for almost nothing on older tools.

image from 34north 118west  (Spellman/Hight/Knowlton)

The ar that is not deep immersion can be more readily available and channels can be what end users need like the diversity of chat rooms or range of Facebook users among us.

I had two moments yesterday that totally fit what we talked about.  I went to west hollywood book fair and traditional directions off of mapping for driving directions were wrong and we got lost…our friend could only get a wireless signal to map on itouch and we had to roam neighborhoods then we called a friend who google mapped it and we found we were a block away….so a fast geomapping overlay with an icon for the book fair on some optional grid service or community would have made it immediate.  Then at the book fair talked to a small press publisher who is trying to map works about los angeles by los angeles authors on a map..she was stunned when I told her it could be a kind of google map feature option

it also has great potential to publish and place writing and art in places..both for commentary and access. imagine reading joyce in chapters where it was written about and then another similar experience but with writers who published on a service into their city.

Tish Shute: The challenge of shared augmented realities is not just a matter of shipping bits around, but also of how it we will use channels and layars – to create and negotiate different, distributed perspectives, understand a shared common core/or expressions of dissent (this came up in an email conversation with Simon St Laurent).

Jeremy Hight: well my example earlier could have been communal in a way too..a tribe sort of augmentation channeling ….like subscribing to list servs back in the day but of augmentation communities/channels, and for folks to build and use in shared live form, coordinating too

Tish Shute: one good thing though about building an open AR Framework is that as bandwidth/CPU/hardware gets better shared high def immersive experiences could be supported by the same framework..

Jeremy Hight: excellent

Tish Shute: were you thinking of the image recognition and tracking with this example?

Jeremy Hight: yeah….like scanning across a multi channeled google map augmentation with diff icons and their connected data…and poss social networking and fle sharing even in that mode…and rastering etc….could be cool with google wave - on the map..then zooming in a la powers of ten..(eames film).

-I have pictured variations of this for a few years now in my head like the example of my friends and I yesterday…we could have correlated a destination by icons in diff channels..one being lit events within lit channel in l.a map…maybe things streaming on it too…remote info and video etc… that would be awesome

Tish Shute: So many of the ideas in you paper on modulated mapping (see here) are brilliant use cases for shared augmented realities. Perhaps you could talk more your ideas about locative narrative because this is something I think is at the core of the kinds of experiences that a distributed AR Framework would make possible?

Jeremy Hight: on the project “34 north 118 west” we mapped out a 4 block area for augmentation of sound files triggered by latitude and longitude on the gps grid and map and the map on the screen had pink rectangles that were the “hot spots” where the augmentation had been placed.

image of interactive map with map based augmentation connected to audio augmentation on site for 34north 118west (Spellman/Hight/Knowlton)

We researched the history of the area and placed moments in time of what had been there at specific locations ….I called this “narrative archaeology” as it allowed places to be “read” by their augmentations…info that was of the place beyond the immediate experience (diff types of info) that otherwise would be lost or only found in books or web sites elsewhere. there now are locative narratives around the world but they need to be linked.  from humble origins “narrative archaeology” went on to be recently named of the 4 primary texts in locative media which is pretty amazing to me…but it is growing

- the limitations then were what I called the “bowling alley connundrum” – the specifc data had to reset like pins…..and was isolated….this led me to think about ar back then and up to now.  How these could lead to much more from that point, data that would be more layered, variable , fluid..yet still augmented place and sense of place and social networking within data and software

lifeclipper to me is a bridge

Tish Shute: But Life Clipper is isolated from the internet currently is it?

Jeremy Hight: yes…ours was too.. that is what google wave makes possible.. our project only ran on our gear..in 4 blocks…with additional auxiliary info online, and not malleable..but hey 2001 and all..

Tish Shute: so the sites for 34 north 118 west are still active though?

Jeremy Hight: oh yeah!

Tish Shute: nice I really like sound augmentation – have you seen Soundwalk?

Jeremy Hight: yes, very cool.. we chose sound only as it fought the power of image..instead caused a person to be in a sense of two places and times at once

Tish Shute: and in 2001 that was definitely a visionary project!

You must be very excited that finally the pieces are coming together to make this stuff scale!

Jeremy Hight: I can’t even tell you!! it is funny..i have known that this would come..just waited and waited…

..knew it needed the right people and tools..

..so the bowling alley connundrum led me to develop my project shortlisted for the iss (international space station)  as I thought a lot about how points and works are not to be isolated…but connected  and should be flowing in diff parts of a map….to open up perspective and connected augmentations , but also to think about the map again…not as a base only. then moved into my work with new ways to visualize time and it all really began to gell.  The ideas first were published as an essay (http://www.fylkingen.se/hz/n8/hight.html) and later my project blog (http://floatingpointsspace.blogspot.com/)

Tish Shute: One thing I noticed when I was reading your paper is how you have been exploring non-euclidian geometries.  Could you explain how this is part of your idea of modulated mapping?

Jeremy Hight: Yes, this first came to me when my wife was reading to me from a book on the Poincare Conjecture and I was hit with a new way to measure events in time and after months of sketches, schematics and research came to see how it could also be connected to a geo-spatial web of projects and augmentations.  It was published in the inaugural issue of Parsons School of Design’s Journal of Information Mapping which was an exciting fit. I call it “Immersive Event Time”(http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/01/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf)

so the last 3 years I have been working on how it could all work as channels of augmentation, and building and navigation as open and community in a sense as well as ai capability that was the time work especially. how time as experienced within an event is not a time “line”  but points on and within a form….and how this model is better for visualizing events in time and documenting them. it actually sprang form reading a book on the poincare conjecture, popped a bunch of other stuff together so one could visualize an event in time as like being in the belly of a whale..with time as the ribs..and our measure of time as the skin…and moving within it….hoping this will be used as educational tool

and this also can be tied to ar and map again…how documentation of important events can be kept within icons on a google map..then download varying visualizations based on bandwidth and desired format

Tish Shute: I have been thinking about is the new forms of social interaction/agency that these kinds of augmentations of space/place/time will create.  it seems there are two poles – one is the area Natalie Jeremijenko explores of shifting social relations from institutions/statistics to real time/location based/interactions and new forms of social agency.  The other pole completely is more like the cloud based AI and perhaps crowd sourced machine learning.

Your ideas explore the possibilities of both these poles.  And certainly one of the big deals of distributed AR integrated with would be the possibilities it opened up both for new forms of networked social relationships and for new ways to draw on network effects.

Jeremy Hight: and cross pollinations within …that is what my mind goes to

Tish Shute: The other night I met Assaf Biderman, MIT, from the Trash Track team. Trash Track doesn’t utilize AR but I could see that there are possibilites there.
What do you think?

Jeremy Hight: yes, absolutely, there can sort of skins on locations that user end selection can yield …like channels of place….and can range from pragmatic core to art and play and places between….how this recalibrates the semiotics of map…more than just augmentation as seen as a kind of piggy back on map..map becomes interface and defanged platform if you wil, interestingly my more poetic/philosophic writing led me here too

Tish Shute: I know they are at very different poles of the system but I do wonder how AR can bring some of the level of social agency/interaction that Natalie Jeremijenko works on into a productive interaction with the kind of innovations in Machine learning that Dolores Lab style machine learning!!and others are pioneering?

Jeremy Hight: Natalie’s genius to me is in practical functional tech that also opens deeper questions and even new openings of what is needed..amazing layers in her work that way.. succint yet deep..very deep

Tish Shute: Yes – I a just writing a post about her work – I find it deeply moving the way she has delved into the possibilities to using technology to open us up to our world.  One of the reasons I find distributed AR so interesting is because it will make it possible for all kinds of people to create and use augmentation in their lives and communities.

So to return to how a distributed AR framework could contribute to a project like Trash Track?

Jeremy Hight: what about using it for community, dissent and awareness raising then?  like Natalie’s work but building like a communal work of multiple points, like the old adage of the elephant and the blind men  sorry..metaphor – like one of my points in immersive sight was how one could take augmentation as multiple works sort of turning the faces of a thing or place…and how this would make a larger work even in such a flow so people moving in a space could also build..

what of ar traces left as people move calibrated to user traffic and trash as estimated in an urban space…like it goes back to chris burden in the 70′s making you know that as you turn the turnstyle you are drilling into the foundation and may be the one that collapses the building?

so their movements leave trash. Natalie is all about raising awareness to cause and effect and data , space and ecology. love that.  so maybe …
a feedback loop , artifact and user end responsibility can leave traces …trash…

.. cybernetics vs ecology and human waste

Tish Shute: could you elaborate?

Jeremy Hight: brain fart…that the mass of trash people leave is a piece at a tiime….and how like the space shuttle mission when it was argued first true cybernaut occured….one cord to air for astronaut..one for computer on their back to fix broken bay arm…if there is a way to build on that and in relation to the topic…..how this can go further, that machines do not waste as much…as ar is a means to cybernetic raise awareness..eh..In a sense it is like  the space shuttle mission when arguably the first true cybernaut occurred….one cord to air for astronaut..one for computer on their back to fix broken bay arm…if there is a way to build on that and in relation to the topic…..how this can go further, that machines do not waste as much…as ar is a means to cybernetic raise awareness..eh.. hmmm... sensors etc…wearables too – could be eco awareness with data and machine and human

what about a cloud computing system with a slight ai in the sense of intuitive word cloud and interest scans…..so as one moves through say new york they can be offered new ai data and services as they move ? could also be of eco interests? concerns about urban farming, eco waste, air pollution etc….perhaps with (jeremijenko element here)  sensors placed in locations and these also giving data reads in public areas  with no input but hard data itself……hmm..could be interesting

it can also give info of the carbon footprints (estimated prob unless data is public record somehow) of chain businesses  and data on which are more eco friendly as well as an iconography color coded and icon coded to the best places to go to support greening and eco friendly business?  and the companies could promote themselves on this service to attract eco aware customers who would be seeing them as kindred spirits and helping the
larger effort?

kind of eco mapping..and ar on mobile app

what about sensors that read air pollution levels, levels of solar radiation (to aid with skin protection in shifting light values in a city space..ie put on some skin cream now…), light sensors that detect density and over density in public spaces…to use the old trope in art of reading crowds in a space..but instead could indicate overcrowding, failing infrastructure in public spaces (which is a congestion that leads to greater pollution levels as well as flaws in city planning over time..), and perhaps a tie in to wearables……worn sensors  on smart clothes….this could form a node network of people in the crowds ….and also send data within moving in a space…

here is a kooky thought… what of taking the computing power and data of people moving in a space..and not only get eco data and make available to them levels of
data..but make possibly a roving super computer…crunching the deeper data of people open to this……a hive crunching deeper analysis of the space, scan properties from sensors, and even a game theory esque algorithm of meta data if say 40 people out of 50 hit on a certain spike or reading…and even their input…..I worked in game theory for paleontology in this manner for a time as a teen….a private project……   the reading can lead to a sort of meta read by what hits most consistently..as well as in their input..text of what they experienced, observed,postulated,analyzed even…. this could be really interesting…even if just the last part from collected data and not from any complex branching of servers..

I thought at 19 or so that the flaw in paleontology was in how so many larger theories were shifting exhibitions and larger senses of things like were there pre-historic birds that were mistaken for amphibean and then back again….so why not make a computer program and feed all the papers published into it and see what hits were counted in terms of an emerging meta theory…and landscape of key points being agreed upon…this data would be in a sense both algorithmic and a sort of unspoken dialogue …came from a lot of study of game theory one summer…

hope this makes some sense…I forgot to mention that I originally planned to be a research meteorologist and my plan in middle school or so was to get a phd and develop new software to have a global map and then run models of hypothetical storms across it in real time animations of cloud forms, radar and wind analysis/fields, barometric pressure spaghetti charts etc….and to also do 3d cut away models of storm architectures…so been into visualizations of complex data and mapping for a long time!

Tish Shute: Wow let me think about this one!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Pookatak, he explains :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are plenty of opportunities such as:

Art Gallery

Demonstrations

Tutorial

Workshops

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

Interview With Ori Inbar

Making Augmented Reality Commercially Successful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish: So what are you working on these days?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why you should participate in ISMAR 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Augmented Reality and Becoming Greener.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Pong for Augmented Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Composing Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish: It goes beyond overlays really?

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

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

Pookatak Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Illusive Eyewear for Immersive AR.

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

Tish:OK lets talk about goggles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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