Here  is the “world premier” of  the  ARWave demo – also see on youtube here.  Below are the slides from our panel: The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences, with Anselm Hook presenting on “10 reasons Why Ar Not a Flash in the Pan,”  Jeremy Hight, spoke on “Augmenting the Map,”  Sophia Parafina presented on “Citizen Sensor,” and I presented the “ARWave” project.  These slides are also posted on the Where 2.0 site.  Joe Lamantia was unable to come from Europe due to last minute obstacles, but you can check out his slide deck here. The videos of the Where 2.0 keynotes are up, and I highly recommend watching what went on at this watershed event.

We got so much positive feedback for the ARWave project at Where 2.0 that I am very excited about the next steps, and about our session at WhereCamp tomorrow.

WhereCamp will be at Google, Maxwell Tech Talk and the buzz continues!  The latest from WhereCamp is:  WE ARE OVER-SUBSCRIBED. HOWEVER PLEASE SIGN UP ANYWAY. THE EVENT TAKES PLACE OVER TWO DAYS. IF WE REALLY HAVE TO TURN PEOPLE AWAY ON SATURDAY YOU CAN STILL COME ON SUNDAY.  Hope to see you there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

*The news stand is to be the map.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARWave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real Time Social Augmented Experiences

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

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

Later Jeff wrote:

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

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

Augmented Reality Search

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

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

The ARWave Developers

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

Davide Carnovale @need2revolt

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

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

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

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

Thomas Wrobel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Letting people log in to different servers

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

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

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

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

Markus Strickler @kusako

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

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

The video above, The Imawik commercial, is a collaboration between In The Can Productions and Paige Saez for Makerlab

“The Imawik (ImageWiki) is a visual search tool for mobile devices. It allows for the ability to turn images into physical hyperlinks, conflating visual culture with a community-editable universal namespace for images.”

Paige Saez is an artist, designer and researcher.  In 2007 she founded Makerlab with Anselm Hook, an arts and technology incubator focused on civic and environmental projects.

Paige and Anselm (see my interview with Anselm Hook here, Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform: Interview with Anselm Hook) have been asking a very important question:

“Who Will Own Our Augmented Future?”

But most importantly, they have been actually developing applications (again see my interview with Anselm for more background on this), to allow people to play with, hack and explore and create with the physical world platform, and to imagine new possibilities for physical hyperlinking and augmented realities.  This is pretty important stuff, and kudos to Paige and Anselm for beginning this work before the big players – Google Goggles, Point and Find, and SnapTell came hurtling into the field of visual search and physical hyperlinking  – see this demonstration of translation and optical character recognition in Google Goggle’s.  Also check out Jamey Graham’s (Ricoh Research) Ignite presentation at Tools of Change, 2010 – Visual Search: Connecting Newspapers, Magazines and Books to Digital Information without Barcodes, for more see ricohinnovations.com/betalabs/visualsearch.

We are only just beginning to get a glimpse of how contested the social commons of the physical world platform is going to be – see the Yelp controversy.

As Paige points out:

“The lens that you are actually looking through was as important as what you were looking at. And democratizing that lens became the most important thing that we could possibly do.”

I am in total agreement.  One reason I have so much enthusiasm for ARWave (note: if you are interested in following the developer conversations there are several public Waves) is I see this open framework playing an important role in the democratization of our augmented views, by creating an open, distributed, and universally accessible platform for augmented reality that will allow the creation of augmented reality content and games to be as simple as making an html page, or contributing to a wiki.

Federation, real time collaboration, linked data – ARBlips that contain metadata that is usable for semantic searches, and modified wave servers that can listen to and respond to  SPARQL HTTP requests properly (see Jason Kolb’s many interesting posts on XMPP and Wave).  These are just some of the reasons why ARWave could revolutionize augmented reality searches and more! (see my presentation at MoMo13 – video here)

For more on real time social augmented experiences see our panel, The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences at Where2.0 2010, and don’t miss the Where2.0 conference which has been the crucible for the emergence of location technologies.

Augmented realities, proximity- based social networks, mapping & location aware technologies, sensors everywhere, linked data, and human psychology are on a collision course in what Jesse Schell calls the “Gamepocalypse”   See Jesse Schell’s Dice 2010 talk here, and check out his Gamepocalypse Now blog.  As Bruce Sterling’s notes in his post here:

*Another precious half hour out of your life.  However: if you’re into interaction design, ubiquity, social networking, and trendspotting, in the gaming biz or out of it, you’re gonna wanna do yourself a favor and listen to this.

And don’t forget to register now for Augmented Reality Event (ARE2010 in 2-3 June, 2010 – Santa Clara, CA).

Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, and Jesse Schell will be keynoting, and there is a totally awesome line up of AR innovators and industry leaders, including Paige and Anselm!

And:

You are in luck!

Here is a discount code for the first 100 folks to register to the event (before the end of March). Go to the registration page, type in code AR245 and “you’ll be asked to pay only $245 for 2 full days of AR goodness.”

“Watching AR prophet Bruce Sterling, and gaming legend Will Wright, visionary game designer Jesse Schell deliver keynotes for this price – is a magnificent steal.  And on top, participating in more than 30 talks by AR industry leaders will turn these $254 into your best investment of the year,” as Ori  put is so well on Games Alfresco!

If you want a preview of just how exciting it is to be involved in augmented reality right now check out Ori Inbar’s great round up on our latest monthly Augmented Reality Meetup NY (or as, Ori notes, we fondly like to call it ARNY.)  There is lots of video up now (much thanks to Chris Grayson, who  live streamed it).  Augmented Reality Magician, Marco Tempest, is an absolutely must see.  (developers note this is an awesome use of open Frameworks and OpenCV).   The video of the show includes a rare explanation of how it all works  – see here.

Talking with Paige Saez – “Software is candy now!”

Tish Shute: What interests me about ImageWiki is that you have thought about physical hyperlinking beyond the obvious of where to get your next good hamburger and beer, right?

Paige Saez: Right. It was interesting for me in just thinking about the two things. How do you design a tool to work in a way that people are getting value from it? And also, how do you make it work in a way where people can explore and hack it? I think the most interesting technologies, and this is probably something somebody else said sometime, are the ones that disappear, that we don’t see, instead we see through. They become just the intermediaries.  They don’t interfere with what we are trying to do.

It’s a struggle whenever you are developing a new way for people to get information or make something happen, because you are playing with magic a little bit. And you have to make it vanish the way a good magic trick makes an experience a magical one. But at the same time you also need to reveal just enough that you let people in and they can see how to change it and make it their own. That is the interesting tension for this space right now, the idea of augmented reality begins to lead the idea of a social commons for physical things. The Imagewiki project was a locus of just this tension. Tish you and I have previously discussed how difficult it was to even get people to understand the two concepts independently.

Tish Shute: Right, until recently most people hadn’t even heard the term augmented reality and I am not sure that a particularly high percentage of people would recognize it now despite the recent interest in smart phone apps.

Paige Saez: It’s very difficult to get people to understand the two concepts, and now you are adding in the third level of participation as well. So I don’t think it is impossible, but I do think it requires narrative. It is interesting that you were talking about the stories you heard this morning from the creatives at the event [Tish mentioned David Curcurito, Creative Director, Esquire gave an excellent presentation at Sobel Media event NYC] because it’s narrative and the attention to telling a story that help you walk through all of the ways you can understand how completely expansive this area is right now.

So I think we have to play with it, play with the space and the tools. I think we need to have an idea of what we want people to use the tool for, and we need to not only introduce them to the tool and the technology, but also introduce them to the concepts as well. So I see it as a three part process.

I’m really excited to be there with people, helping them do that. I think we need to do this face to face. I don’t think this can be only through a social network. The ImageWiki website is like one quarter of the entire picture, you know? The website is the resource center and the place where you can see people adding images, but what value is it to you to see an added image? It is more valuable for you to be interacting with the image or interacting with the object in the real world.

Designing for the experience of using the ImageWiki got very complicated very fast. I was trying to figure out the main thrust of the design for the UI for the ImageWiki and at a certain point I had to take a step back and say “Okay, this has to be good enough for now because we can lay it out and prototype as long as we want on the Web or mobile UI. What we need to be doing is going outside and actually aggregating and putting images into the database in order to see what exactly happens when we are adding.”  It’s not just like you are taking a picture of something and adding it to Flickr. Using the tool is very context specific and the information is context specific, and you can’t necessarily make that all happen at the exact same time. I think these are really fascinating spaces to be struggling in and I’m so glad to be working in this space.

Images by Chris Blow of unthinkingly.com

Tish Shute: Could you explain why we need ImageWiki? I mean I think I have ideas on this, but perhaps you can explain to me from you point of view why we need an ImageWiki, as opposed, to say, extending the image space of Wikimedia or something added on to Flickr.  I mean maybe something leveraging the geotagged photos sets and APIs we already have?

Paige Saez: Yes, definitely. It’s a really good question, I mean it really is. Like, do you need an entirely new place to be holding images outside of the places that we are already holding images? That’s a huge question; enormous. Especially when you take a look at the problems around that. Its’ exhausting for an end user. Who the heck wants to go and reload everything into yet another place, right?

Tish Shute: Right.

Paige Saez: Moreover, who is going to really bother? Another problem would be what happens to the existing datasets that people have already committed to? And then of course there is the problem of authority and explanations why….Gaining interest and authority in a space when nobody even understands why that space should exist in the first place. And those are just three, you know, off the top of my head problems with that idea.

And yet at the same time, I don’t actually know how else to go about thinking about the ImageWiki unless I think about it as it’s own thing. Then you start thinking about models of large independant image databases that exist already, examples of this from a product standpoint- references to consider. The Getty Foundation comes to mind. There are many other historical centers that have huge resources and images that are licensed out and used. So here we have a working example of people already doing this. But succesfully? I don’t know. We do have a ton of intellectual property rights and copyright issues and ownership and use issues with images currently. As a working artist these issues for me were a major red flag to consider. Working on the social commons for augmented reality starts paralleling issues found in digital rights management and intellectual property.

Tish Shute: But one good thing about Wikimedia, why I focused on Wikimedia, is Flickr and Wikimedia already use a creative commons licensing, right?

Paige Saez: Creative commons, you know they have their own resource center, too. But you know they haven’t been successful as great databases for images so far.

Tish Shute: What would you like to see that they don’t have? Like say maybe start with Wikimedia, right?

Paige Saez: There’s just still a lot of issues with how to encourage people to want to contribute. It’s hard to show the value to someone who doesn’t already understand the value for some reason. At least for me personally this is something I have run into frequently. I don’t know if it is necessarily what Wikimedia doesn’t have, I think it is a lack of understanding of what creative commons really means. And there is still a very strong sense of ownership and concern about creative property rights. Being paid to be creative is a tremendously difficult thing to do. People fear losing their livelihoods. They think this is possible. Is it? I dunno.

For example : Look at me, I take a photograph of something, I can sell that. And there’s a question about whether or not, as an artist, I want to have my photographs in a pool of images that is open and accessible when I could be making money on it instead. Now that is just an example. Me personally, I can see the value. But that is a common concern. The gist of the question being, ‘what value does it bring to give something away versus holding on to it?’ A hugely popular discussion right now.

This is the same crux of the problem we are dealing with when we talk about thinking about images in the social commons for the real world. It’s a conversation about ownership. It’s about, who does this belong to really? If I take a photograph of a Levi’s billboard, does that photograph belong to me or does it belong to Levi’s? We know the boundaries of that. But when the image becomes a living image, an image capable of transmutation; an image that provokes an action or hyperlinks to a product, experience, information….where are the boundaries in that?

Tish Shute: But how is ImageWiki handling that differently from Wikimedia, I suppose is my question.

Paige Saez: We haven’t solved the problem.

Tish Shute: Yes, I suppose it is not like we have fully solve the problem of a creative commons for images on the internet let alone the issues of a social commons for the real world! So neither one has solved the problem, right?

Paige Saez: Exactly. To be honest, it made my head spin. I realized we were building a web application and a mobile tool doing augmented reality, real time feedback on the world and suddenly we weren’t. Suddenly we were dealing with DNS and talking about physical hyperlinks and ownership and property. And basically at that point you just have to sit and really start looking at catching up on IP issues and figuring out how to deal with that space in a much more wholistic way. It became so important that we had to take a step back and go

“Oh my god I think we have really uncovered a real problem here.”

At the point when we were building out the tools we realized something was really going on with our project. Here we were thinking that this was just a beautiful experience of learning about the world around us. We really…Anselm and I both just really wanted this tool to exist. It was something that we both just really wanted to happen in the world, something that we felt really just thrilled to make. And we looked at and used it and realized that instead of it just being a beautiful experience, it was a fundamental shift in how we understood everything. That it impacted our world in the same way the Internet impacted our world. It was a fundamental shift in understanding. A sea-change.

So I put down the prototype and went back to researching, read a ton of books on IP and went and presented to friends, family, schoolmates and co-workers trying to explain the project and then the larger conceptual framework that had emerged from the project. I began using the metaphor of thinking about Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Thinking about a pipe that isn’t actually a pipe.

Tish Shute: Oh, yes!

Paige Saez: ..to try to help explain to people that the image that you see is actually not, you know, it’s not an image of a thing. It’s an image. And that image has a tone and that image has a voice, and that image was chosen. And there were decisions that were made through the interface of the camera, specific decisions that defined the view of what you were looking at. And that that wasn’t being acknowledged and that that was a fundamental part of what the ImageWiki was aiming to do. The lens that you are actually looking through was as important as what you were looking at. And democratizing that lens became the most important thing that we could possibly do.

Tish Shute: So the emphasis for you on ImageWiki was in fact the lens, even though you found obstacles to creating the interface, right?

Paige Saez: Yes. Definitely. That’s what I fell in love with first. I really wanted to be able to use my phone to learn about what kind of tree this was or to buy tickets for the band on the poster I just saw, or see a hidden secret. For me it was very much a story, a narrative experience that I just thought was magical. And that is how I fell in love with it, which is not where I ended up. Where I ended up was realizing it was a fundamental shift in not only my own understanding of how to use the world around me, but in our understanding of looking at the world.

Tish Shute: It would be pretty scary if an image DNS was basically in the hands of either one or very few people, right? I mean even ImageWiki would be stuck with this problem, that if you set up a bunch of servers, you are going to be holding a very, very large image database. I mean, whatever your motivation, right? I think at the minute that is why I am very into seeing everything through the lens of federation, I see that unless we have federation, these giant central, databases are inevitable aren’t they?

Paige Saez: Essentially, yes. I mean I wasn’t able to walk through it as quickly as that. It kind of just overwhelmed me. Looking back on it, it seems perfectly obvious. I was just like “Oh my god, what have we done? Like what is going on?” Particularly for me because so much of my life has been spent in art, it was really easy to immediately understand the connection between the view, the viewer, and what’s being viewed as all just different layers of ownership and understanding that it is a gaze. Right? We know that we are never able to look at something without passing judgment on it, but to see that become a part of the interface in a real-time fashion just blew my mind.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Paige Saez: I think you are right. Getty Images, Flickr images, no matter what you are always holding on to something and you have to be responsible for it. Right? So how do you deal with the responsibility but don’t take on too much ownership? Where is the boundary with that?

Tish Shute: And for me, the simple answer to that is loosely connected small parts, distributed systems and federation. Because there is only one way to be able to utilize these things is to have them distributed so that no one holds all the cards. Right?

Paige Saez: Definitely and I personally agree with you wholeheartedly. However, the idea of distributed power is a concept that most people just don’t know how to deal with.

Tish Shute: And it’s easier said than done because actually the root problems that you are talking about aren’t got rid through federation, because if someone really holds the, sort of, all the good image databases just because they have the potential to be federated, they may not choose to open them up on many levels.

Paige Saez: And even then you have to think about, sort of, like the next level of it, which is we want it to be all open and accessible, but everything is owned by somebody. Like, what really is public anymore, in general?

Tish Shute: And what is interesting though, regardless of what we speculate conceptually on this, we already set off down the road. I mean we have already several large…they are all in beta I suppose, Google Goggles, Point and Find, right? But we have applications that are beginning to implement this. They are beginning to implement search on it, and it is geo-located even if it’s not in an augmented view, right? So it is proximity based.

Paige Saez: Right, right. I mean maybe the solution is that if we follow that line of thinking then Flickr will be partnering with Google Goggles. And then my images would stay under my ownership through the authority of Flickr. And I would use Flickr as my place to add images and they would just be responsive via my devices via AR.

Tish Shute: That’s very interesting.

Paige Saez: Definitely I think so. It is also the shortest distance between things.

Tish Shute: Yes, and as Anselm kept pointing out, basically it is going to happen in the simplest way possible, really, regardless of the implications of that. But OK, getting back to ImageWiki. As you say neither Wikimedia nor Flickr were really designed to take this role, right?

Paige Saez: Right.

Tish Shute: With ImageWiki, you’ve had these ideas and a concern with the social implications of physical hyperlinking in your mind since it’s inception. Are there any design ideas you’ve come up with that you know, as opposed to sort of, as you say, connecting Flickr to Point and Find, or who knows, Google Goggles. How is ImageWiki going to be different, do you think? Is that a hard question at this point?

Paige Saez: It is, and it’s a great question, and it’s a question I really love to think about. I think we have to introduce the politics with the tools. It has to be acknowledged that it’s not just a place to hold information, that’s what I feel in my heart.

At the same time, is that too much for people to really grasp at one time? In my experience it really has been, so the design of the experience needs to allow for an understanding of the power of the tool and the level of authority that the tool offers, while not getting in the way of it; just using it. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, nobody will use anything if it isn’t valuable to them. And so I could talk for miles and miles and miles about how important it is that corporations don’t own all of the rights to all of the visual things in my life, right? For the rest of my life I could talk about that. The idea that advertising is dominating all of our views of anything in the world around us is horrifying. It doesn’t matter unless I can show somebody why it matters to them or how it affects them. It’s just that that is a tremendously difficult thing to explain through a user interface.

And I actually think that it’s great that tools like Google Goggles and Nokia Point and Find are here to do a lot of the hard work of showing people how it works. Recently somebody explained to me their experience of using Google Goggles. They went through this process of saying how the Google Goggles took a picture and then did this really complicated visual scanning thing over the image and it took a full minute.

And I said, “Well of course they did it that way.” And they said, “Well what do you mean?” I said, “Well, what they are really doing there when they are doing all these fancy graphics, is they are showing you how it works.” And even if it isn’t actually related at all to how it functionally works, algorithmically, that’s not the point. The point is that this gesture of the time taken to make it look like it’s scanning an image and going back and forth with pretty colors is giving people the time to process that as an experience. That’s a metaphor for what’s really happening. And these kinds of metaphors are crucial with user experience design. We have lots and lots of examples of them and how they work, and many of them aren’t necessary. Like you know, for example, the bar that shows you the time it’s taking for something to process.There is no relationship between that and reality. But it is really important.

Tish Shute: Yes those bars often have no relationship between the actual time..

Paige Saez: And that’s the thing. Like the idea of time versus our perceived understanding of time. Right? The length of time it takes for your Firefox browser to open and load your last 30 tabs, versus the reality of what’s actually happening. When you are doing that sort of research you are actually accessing millions and millions of places and points of interest all over the world, so we need more of that. We need more of the process shown. Anselm and I worked with a film maker named Karl Lind from In the Can Productions here in Portland to try and make a video about the ImageWiki. We made this little video and I can try to show it to you or send it to you if you want.

Tish Shute: One of the issues with this kind of visual search is that it is inherently dependent on large databases, regardless of where they are federated, are going to be very large. Right? I mean someone is going to have something big, and aggregated there. I suppose someone will figure out the challenges of federated search eventually but that is quite a big challenge!

So I suppose I am still trying to understand what ImageWiki can offer that we can’t get with any other existing service? How will their be a social commons and even a social contract for the world as a platform for computing and physical hyperlinks?

Eben Moglen brought up something when I talked to him about virtual worlds, he said we need code angels to let us know what was going on in the virtual space – who was gathering data and how, for example.

Paige Saez: Tell me more about that, I want to hear more about that.

Tish Shute: Eben suggested this metaphor for when I was asking him about privacy in virtual worlds. The fact that people just didn’t know that when they were pushing avatars around virtual worlds what metrics were being gathered on their behavior. And he basically said that what we need is code angels when we enter these spaces because having the rules of the game buried in a TOC was ridiculous.

Paige Saez: That is a really interesting idea.

Tish Shute: Maybe ImageWiki needs to be our code angel to navigate the augmented world. I mean that’s what I want to see it as. And when I hear you talk, what I hear is you talking in broad categories about what a code angel might be in the space of images and image links to the physical world. I mean that is what I hear from you.

Paige Saez: Yeah. No, I definitely agree with that. It is interesting. In that sense, it is kind of a protection layer. Is that what you are thinking?

Tish Shute: Yes, I suppose because we can’t be navigating a lot of complicated opt-ins and opt-outs just to get around our neighborhood safely (in terms of privacy (also see Eben Moglen’s definition of privacy here…) We will need a code angel that is sort of keeping up with you in real time!

Paige Saez: Right, right. I wonder how that would work in regards to images, though. That is a really interesting thing to try and put on an image. I guess why I am having such a hard time being specific about it, is I am just trying to work it in my head, thinking of a specific use case, like what would be an example of that?

Tish Shute: Well I suppose the example, and this is a crude one, is when you point your Google Goggles to the book jacket, the code angel, this is very crude, would say “You are right now drawing images from the Amazon database – they are collecting data such and such data from your search.

And then of course the ability to have crowd sourced tagging and corrections..

There was a wonderful book that came out last year on how we can have commercial intelligence -Dan Goleman’s new book: “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything”…

how corporations various different stakeholders, including their customers will drive corporations to do the morally right thing because they will lose the commercial support of customers who won’t support them unless they are more green, fairer, do the things we would like them to do whatever that happens to be – physical hyperlinking and tagging I guess would be a big part of this.

Paige Saez: Sort of a transparency issue. And that almost becomes a page rank algorithm in and of itself. I mean now we are really talking about search more than anything, and what tool becomes the dominant search tool. Anselm and I talked a lot about one platform… I mean eventually we will have a unified platform. It will…No matter what, for the Internet and for physical objects and visual objects in the real world. It will just be a matter of, literally, who can find the best and most valuable, most relevant information on a thing. Currently we just have it very proprietary.

Tish Shute: Yes.

Paige Saez: That definitely won’t last. It just can’t, because of the exact problem that you are raising. And we already know too much about resources and information as they pertain to products for us to ever go back to a time where we are not considering other ways of getting information about it anyway. Right?

Like I have the same concerns nowadays when I look at fruit. I look at a piece of fruit in the store. I would never just assume that the person who put the sticker on that fruit, anymore, is the ultimate authority necessarily. I would always assume at this point I could go online and go find out more information about a company. Issues about like eco-footprint or how much toxicity, or pesticides or whatnot are now totally accessible already.

So I am thinking when you look at that piece of fruit and that sticker for Google, say what you are describing, do we just go immediately to the company’s website, or is it even more specific? Do we know that the sticker on that piece of fruit is going to tell us specific information about that? Or are we just getting back the nutritional resources, or are we getting a listing of all of the different options out of a page rank algorithm that shows us, “Well this is the website for the fruit. Here is the nutritional information. Here are the last 15 comments on it.” It’s basically just a basic search.

Have you heard of Good Search?

Tish Shute: you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoodSearch

Paige Saez: Right.

Tish Shute: A code angel interface would have to give you options, wouldn’t it on possible views available?

Paige Saez: Yes. You are then talking about filtering your view. Then it really gets really interesting, of course. I don’t even know if we have a choice in that. I think we are really kind of hitting a wall with who owns the space and the platform. Is it just a basic search because we are already familiar with search? If you had an option to choose, say, “I want to look at this apple sticker and I only want to get…programmatically only looking at my friend’s opinions of this company.”

Or I have a safety valve on it that only shows me certain information based on what the code angel knows about me, my preferences, my age, things like that. Then that gets really, really interesting, because we are trying to do all that work right now just with social media and the Internet. We are already overwhelmed with too much information. It is already past the point of comprehension. So to think that we would actually drill down even more specifics is very interesting.

Tish Shute: That was a point Anselm made about the fact that once you are into this mobile, just in time, one view kind of situation, it is quite different than the Internet where you can bring up all these different screens and go to another website.

Paige Saez: Well yes, mobile is a different level of engagement. Very contextual. Much less information. Much more about timeliness. I don’t want to look an apple and get back a Google search. Oh my God no. That’s the last thing I want. I would love to be able to look at an apple and my phone already knows exactly what I want, information-wise, to get back from that apple. But I don’t know. It’s all contextual and personal. So I think the code angle concept you are talking about is really interesting because you still need to think about who is the person that is adding or creating those level filters- is it you, a filtered friend network, an algorithm? How much work is too much work? Where do we draw the line? How much of this are we willing to let the machine do for us?

Tish Shute: Right.

Paige Saez: And then of course once you have those filters in place, you need control over them. You will need to dial them up and dial them down, be able to choose and add new ones, so on and so forth. It becomes very modal at that point. For example, I want to change my view: To walk into a grocery store and instead of finding out information, I’d want to see where the hidden Easter egg puzzles were that my friends left last week because we’re playing a game.

I’m still really attracted to the creative opportunities with the ImageWiki. I’m really attracted to changing this experience from being a one-to-one relationship (from Corporation to Consumer) to an open-ended relationship (From Person to Person). If I look at a book jacket, sure I can find out where to buy the book, but that’s boring. Who cares? I’d like to find out a link to a story or an adventure or a movie or something unthought-of before.

How do we build that in? How do we encourage serendipity? Mystery? I think the ImageWiki is the space for building that in, actually. Not how, that would be the one place, right? That’s my really big fear is that this relationship just stays one-to-one. Click an image of consumable object, get back objects retail value. How completely dull. We have to do better than this.

Additionally, what if I want to take a photograph of a book, an apple, or something and I don’t want to pull back data. Instead, I want to pull back music, or I want to pull back a video, or I want to pull back a song, or lyrics, or a story, or another image. It’s just a hyperlink at the end of the day, you know? That’s all we’re really doing. Hyperlinks can pull back so many different things.

Tish Shute: And that’s one of the reasons I’m into mobile social interaction utility building, because without that, if we don’t have that way to do that in mobile technology…that’s very available on the Internet, as we’ve seen, with Twitter. These applications are very easy to do on the Internet. They’re not easy to do natively in a mobile application..

hey, I’m just promoting AR Wave again. I should shut up.

Paige Saez: Oh, no. I think it’s a fascinating concept, I really do. I totally agree. As we’ve talked about it before, it’s amazing that marketing and advertising are helping push forward AR, and it’s great. It’s fantastic.

But it’s also the worst possible thing that could ever happen because it is such a singular way of looking at an overall ubiquitous computing experience. There are other ways.

The best experience I ever had was trying to explain to people about physical hyperlinks. I had to walk them through it. Good interactive isn’t something you present or show, it’s something you do. Nothing beats just walking around and showing people with a device or a tool or something else.

I mean, God forbid it always stays in our computers and our phones. I really hope we don’t have to be stuck living our entire lives with these horrible interfaces. But for the time being, we will. Having an AR app show you a puzzle, or a mystery, or a game, or an adventure is a magnificent experience, totally overwhelming, and people get it right away. There’s no question; they totally understand.

Tish Shute: Yes, I agree.

Paige Saez: You walk them through the experience with a physical hyperlink and then you say, “Here, I could use this device and I could show you where to buy this thing, or I could use this device and we could start playing a game.” Then everybody gets it.

Tish Shute: So then I have a question, because one of the things Anselm said to me when he wanted me to refer back to you is that he feels that the direction for ImageWiki should be perhaps to focus less on the technology and more on just the actual, I suppose, gathering of the images, how they’re going to be annotated, the metadata, right? But my question to him was, the problem if you do that, without the platform, there’s no experience or motivation for people to do that. Right? Is there?

Paige Saez: Yeah, I agree with you on that one. I’m curious what his…I think the reason why he wants to do that is he wants to be able to show people examples via the resources. Like to be able to show someone a library, essentially, which I think makes sense with some people. I definitely think that some audiences would really relate to that. For me, it doesn’t make sense because I’m just very experiential. I need to do it and I need to show other people how to do it and I need to grow that way. I think that at the end of the day, those are great ways to go about doing it. It’s just it’s a huge thing to do in either direction.

What Anselm’s really thinking on, I believe, is more about exemplifying how we read and understand images culturally. Then you’re really getting into Visual Studies and Critical Theory which is what I did for my Masters at PNCA. I worked on the ImageWiki while I was in grad school, it was something I was doing for fun. Independently of my studies, the project lead to issues on democracy and objects and property and I ended up right smack in the middle of what I was studying; the nature and cultural analysis of images Questions like, ‘what exactly do we get out of images?’ and how all these different things are happening in an image, and people get tons of totally different things out of an image depending on many factors.

The questions I began to ask myself got very philosophical. Questions like “Is this apple red? Is this apple red-orange? Is this a small apple? What’s my understanding of small versus your understanding of small?”

Because you supposed that you needed a text backup to the search, how would I be able to search for an apple? Because what if my understanding of apple is red and your understanding of apple is green. And so if I’m looking for a green apple, am I looking for the same green apple as you? It’s all semantics, sure. But at the same time, it gets bigger and bigger, and it’s fascinating.

Tish Shute: Google Goggles seem to work best on book jackets, basically.

Paige Saez: But book jackets are actually perfect for this. Book jackets are perfect for this problem, because book jackets are specifically designed art. So at the end of the day, we are still talking about creative works, artistic works, that have been designed as a communication tool. But that is not something that people can own. Creative works that are designed are a communication tool, with varying levels of skill to be sure, but still something anybody can do. What we need to do is we need to be using that language. We don’t need to be trying to reach as far as facial recognition. We need to develop our own logos, our own brand, our own…I mean not brand. Brand is a bad way of saying it. Another way of saying it would be like, just use it. Develop a visual language that we can use that is as effective and as well utilized as book jackets or the movie posters or something.

Tish Shute: What are some of the use cases for ImageWiki you would like to develop first?

Paige Saez: My dream…I have like four or five use cases that I want to see happen. One of them is I walk down the street and there is a new poster for my favorite band. And I can just go up to the poster and I use my device, whatever it looks like, and I download the latest album. It’s transactional. I am able to just plug in my headset and walk down the street and the transaction is done. I saw something I wanted. It was beautiful. I was able to get it and I was able to move on in my life. And that is totally possible.

Another one would be I walk down the street and there is a piece of graffiti. And I am able to use my device to find out who the artist was that made it and to give them props, and to point my other friends to the fact that the piece is there and it will most likely be there only for a short period of time- information retrieval and socialization.

Or, use my device to find an Easter egg, to find a narrative puzzle that ends up going on for weeks, and everybody is involved, and we are all playing this game together. Adventure-based, non-linear experiences. I want playfulness, not just purchases.

Tish Shute: Did you think of piggybacking on the Flickr API for geo-tagged photos as a way to work with those databases or not?

Paige Saez: Yeah, we definitely thought about that.

Tish Shute: And why did you decide not to, for any reason or…?

Paige Saez: Ultimately, we just…we were such a small group, we just had to tackle certain things at a certain time.

Tish Shute: Right. And you were so prescient, you were working slightly before we had the mediating devices, weren’t you? You were just before the mobile devices really got adequate for this.

Paige Saez: Yeah. We started on it…I believe it was January…No. December 2007. Basically, the iPhone had just launched like maybe six months prior or something like that.

Tish Shute: But not 3G and not 3GS, right?

Paige Saez: Not 3GS. It was the first generation iPhone. We built the ImageWiki before the App Store existed.

We knew that the App Store was coming out. And we knew that the App Store was going to be the biggest thing in the whole world. I remember getting into multiple fights with friends about how revolutionary the iPhone and the App Store were going to be and people thinking I was totally crazy; people just thinking I was absolutely nuts for being so excited about it.

It sucks that it is a closed proprietary system, but the App Store has done something for software that nothing has ever done in the whole world. Software is candy now. It’s candy. It is like when you are waiting at the grocery store at the checkout line and you are stuck behind somebody, and you have got all these little tchotchka’s, candy bars, magazines, nail-clippers and things. That is the equivalent of software now. It’s become an impulse buy, which is amazing. Nobody would ever have thought…that is actually revolutionary. That’s huge.

Tish Shute: Steven Feiner, who is one of the founding fathers of augmented reality said to me during a conversations at the ARNY meetup that one reason that augmented reality, despite the hype, is manifesting very differently from how virtual reality burst onto the tech scene is that it is about affordable apps on affordable readily available hardware.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But also key to the next wave of AR, as I discussed with Anselm Hook in this post on Visual Search, Augmented Reality and a Social Commons for the Physical World Platform, will be a view constructed through complex “hybrid tracking and sensor fusion techniques” (Jarell Pair), cooperating cloud data services, powerful search and computer vision algorithms, and apps that learn by context accumulation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking With Brady Forrest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brady Forrest: No, not yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each person had there own set of sound.

Pic from extramatic‘s Flickr stream here

Tish Shute: Wow! Awesome.

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

Tish Shute: At what distance could you detect people?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But relatively speaking, an iPhone is not that expensive.

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

We need to work across all platforms probably.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brady Forrest: No. Not yet.

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

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

Brady Forrest: This is not the year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we’ll see how useful they find it.

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

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

Brady Forrest: Well, how do you make money?

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

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

Tish Shute: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute: But it is a bit of a mystery to me why Microsoft haven’t done more with Photosynth.  As I noted in my previous post, Nokia’s ImageSpace is beginning to do what many thought Microsoft would do with photosynth two years ago.  And “photo-based positioning systems” -  3d models of the environment to cover every possible angle, and then software that can work out in reverse based on a picture precisely where you are and where your facing could be hugely important to AR.  But that brings me to another mystery why haven’t we seen more from Nokia in this space yet – the N900 doesn’t have a compass?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest news at Where 2.0, 2009 came from the Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group. Tyler Bell, announced Yahoo! Placemaker and the opening up of the GeoPlanet data set, “all of the WOEIDs [Where On Earth (WOE) IDs] available as a free download under Creative Commons in June” (see Brady Forrest’s post for more details).

WhereCamp 2009 was held immediately after Where 2.0 and was a great place to chew on the events and ideas of Where 2.0.  In the picture above Anselm Hook addresses the WhereCamp morning circle in the courtyard outside the Social Text offices in Palo Alto. Anselm pointed out to me:

“there are interesting implications of placemaker in combination with other yahoo assets – in particular YQL – placemaker by itself is neat – but placemaker combined with everything else is a natural missing piece that is a big enabler.  Yahoo has been impressive.”

With all the Geo platform power available to us now, also (also see New Geo for Devs from Google I/O), there isn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind Brady is right when he said, just before the Where 2009 conference: “Location is no longer a differentiator it’s going to become oxygen” (quote from WebMonkey).

The Yahoo! GeoPlanet team at WhereCamp – Tyler Bell, (talking to Brady Forrest in picture on the left) is sporting his spatial junkies T-Shirt. Photo on right, Aaron Cope, Tyler Bell, Martin Barnes, Gary Gale.

WhereCamp was alive with key figures from the social geography movement who knew the power of these new tools (see some of my photos of WhereCamp on Flickr here).

The importance of the Yahoo! announcement really became clear to me at WhereCamp where I attended sessions all day Saturday including the Curating Big Data Session led by Tom Carden, Stamen Design and Aaron Straup Cope, Flickr, (see Aaron’s slides from his Where 2.0 presentation on “The Shape of Alpha” here and video here).

Anselm Hook, a prime mover for WhereCamp, is a leading philosopher of place making and veteran software developer who led Platial engineering and is now at web consultancy http://makerlab.com. If you missed Anselm at WhereCamp he will be presenting on, Ubiquitous Angels at The OpenSource Bridge, Portland, Oregon, June 17th -19th, 2009.

Anselm describes where he thinks the challenges are:

“We should be mapping information that in some ways has been historically unmappable because it is 1) not valued or is 2) actively seen as threatening or is 3) simply too hard to map using traditional tools.”

The WhereCamp Schedule

The Shape of Alpha

Screen capture from Aaron’s Where 2.0 presentation on “The Shape of Alpha. Original photo from Flickr user “NickIsConfused”.

Aaron Straup Copes’s work on “The Shape of Alpha” puts key questions about curating big data center stage.

Firstly, the exploration of what it means to curate/collaborate over meaning from “the abundance of data produced in the precise but distant language of machines” (also see The Interpretation of Bias (and the bias of interpretation). The Shape of Alpha uses a process of reverse-geocoding to translate machine-generated geographic data into place names that people can understand and relate to.

The shapefiles are built with nothing but geotagged photos and some code called clustr (written by the brilliant  Schuyler Erie – co-author of Mapping Hacks). Anyone can make these shapefiles. You can get the shapefiles out of the  Flickr API. Aaron has been keying off WOEIDs (Where On Earth (WOE) IDs) but as Aaron noted you can key off anything you like – tags are an obvious choice.

Wow! You can reinvent mapping with this stuff.

Very importantly, “The Shape of Alpha,” tells us something about how we relate to place versus location. The emotions, disputes and behavior related to place also emerge through crowd sourced corrections.  For more see this very evocative post by Aaron about corrections and treating airports as cities.  There is a glorious thread/riff and ode to the genius of  J. G. Ballard pursued by Aaron and Dan Catt in their posts (also see Dan Catt’s, J.G. Ballard, Flickr, naked singularities and 3-letter airport codes, and Aaron pointed me to this brilliant “geo-detective work” on Concrete Island, by Mike Bonsall .

Dan Catt created geobloggers and “seeded the geotagging community around the Web.” I met Reverend Dan Catt (Twitter @revdancatt ) at Where 2.0 when he was kind enough to share part of his seat so I could join a very interesting discussion with Aaron on The Shape of Alpha.

As Aaron points out they decided to treat “the airport itself as the town…”  not (only) because they admired the work of J.G. Ballard,  “but because it is the right thing to do.”

Dan Catt has excellent blog posts “describing the nuts and bolts of how ‘corrections’ works.”  Aaron points out,  “in the nerdier of the two Dan sums it up nicely by saying”:

“On a slightly more philosophical level, it’s a never ending process. We’ll never reach a point where we can say “Right that’s in, all borders between places have been decided.” But what we should end up with are boundaries as defined by Flickr users.

…

For us, it’s a first small step into an experiment, and actually a pretty big experiment as we’re potentially accepting “corrections” from our millions and millions of users. We’re not quite sure how it’ll all turn out, but we’re armed with Maths, Algorithms and kitten photos.”

Psychosynthography – “Wearing Geography as a Perfume”

Psychosynthography screen capture from Aaron Straup Cope’s Where 2.0 presentation . Original photo from Flickr user,  “NiteLynx.”

As I mentioned before, many of the ideas raised at Where 2.0 were unpacked and worked through at WhereCamp. For example, Aaron introduced a word psychosynthography in the last 24 seconds of his talk at Where 2.0.

So I spent as much time as I could listening to Aaron at WhereCamp, and asking him about psychosynthography and more (post of this interview upcoming).

Aaron urged the Where 2.0 audience to pay attention to the Psychogeography movement seeded by Guy Debord, and “to wear geography like a perfume.”

Joseph Hart writes in a “New Way of Walking” psychogeography is:

“a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”

Curating Big Data

Tom Carden, Stamen, (picture above) paired with Aaron for the Curating Big Data session. Tom noted:

“The Curating Big Data session for me was an attempt to learn from other attendees (as opposed to teach/lead, as with the Stamen session, “Real Time Web-Based Visualization and Mapping”).  Also, it was an excuse to get Aaron to recap parts of the Flickr Shapefile story for WhereCamp folks, and to get *input* on how to do more things like it. I was a bit disappointed that nobody had really good examples for us, but I was happy with Brad Stenger’s suggestion to look into the upcoming census data as a relevant area.”

Aaron’s work on the The Shape of Alpha and The Corrections project shows, as Tom noted:

“what you can do once you have 150 million geotagged photos, and millions of users who are willing to say I took this thing here and my name for that place is …..”

And part of the significance of opening up the GeoPlanet data set is that now:

“we can try and start talking about the same places, as far as, [for example], these shape files go. So if you are interested in what comes out of the Flickr shape files project and but you also have your own opinion about what shape those places are so the IDs have be open you have to be sure that you are talking about the same thing in the first place.”

And, as Tom pointed out, collaborating over geo data informs us about curating any big dataset:

“it should lead to an overarching discussion about any kind of dataset geo or otherwise and ways in which we can talk about it, and think about patterns for improving that data, for collaborating, even on things like cleanup.”

Warp speed geo-genius Andrew Turner, Fortius One, took these excellent notes for the “Real Time Web-Based Visualization and Mapping” (on left) and “Curating Big Data” (on the right).

On my way to Where 2.0 I took the train from SFO to San Jose which was a delight but a little slower than I imagined. So, unfortunately, I arrived on Tuesday just after Michal Migurski (Stamen Design), Shawn Allen (Stamen Design) presented  Maps from Scratch: Online Maps from the Ground Up. This was on my MUST attend list and it was a wonderful opportunity to get into, “Real Time Web-Based Visualization and Mapping.”   I did get a chance to talk to Michal and Shawn a bit later in the conference but I will try to catch up with them soon for an in depth story.  Below is  Shawn Allen’s map of overlapping data sets from, “Trees, cabs and crime in San Francisco:”

Another follow up I am really looking forward to making is with Liz Barry and her work on S+EM, “an environmental mapping and social networking design project that links New York City trees with the people who care for them” (also see, Creating a Greener San Francisco Tree by Tree).  Also I got a chance to talk to another fellow New Yorker (we have to travel to the West Coast to find time to chat!), John Geraci of DIY City who presented DIY City:  An Operating System for Cities.

Machine Intelligence and Human Intelligence

Aaron Cope, Flickr, on the left is talking to Andrew Turner on the right the CTO of FortiusOne (see Andrew’s presentation at Where 2.0, “Your Own Private Geo Cloud”)

Many of the most interesting conversations happened in between sessions at WhereCamp and Where 2.0.

I caught this one in which Aaron Cope and Andrew Turner where discussing some of ideas Aaron raised in his presentation, “Capacity planning for meaning in the age of personal informatics” (see Aaron’s blog post, Tree planting and tree hugging in the age of personal informatics). The core question they were discussing was what happens when you wire the world at the scale people are talking about and it breaks… Aaron argues that you already have a whole class of people in systems operations that can tell us a lot about how to answer this question.

Ryan and Anselm shared the pulpit for the morning circle pulpit with Ross Mayfield of Social Text who was the generous host to WhereCamp.

Social Reality Mining

“As it stands today, we have no idea what terms and limits of a cloud based citizenship of the Google Caliphate will entail and curtail. Some amalgam of post-secular cosmopolitanism, agonistic radical democracy, and post-rational actor microecomics, largely driven by intersecting petabyte at-hand datasets and mutant strains of Abrahamaic monotheism. But specifically, what is governance (let alone government) within this?” from Benjamin Bratton’s talk at ETech 2009 (picture above), Undesigning the Emergency: Against Prophylactic Urban Membranes.

The other big take away from WhereWeek – Where 2.0 and WhereCamp, was not so much news, but a confirmation of something that has been pretty clear for a while now. (Check out Brady’s posts on reality mining at Where 2.0 last year).

We are moving headlong into the era of reality mining with all its myriad possibilities from: “hedonistic optimization” (this term came from Stig Hackvan when I asked him about some of the ideas central to the HeadMap Manifesto -more about HeadMap later in this post); to new forms of marketing (social reality mining the inside to predict if someone is going to trade business cards in the next 120 seconds – Alex “Sandy” Pentland, MIT, Where 2.0);  to stuff that matters to save us from mass extinction like distributed sustainability – greening production and consumption and our cities; to open government;  empowering indigenous communities (also see Rebecca Moore’s Indigenous Mapping: Emerging Cultures on the Geoweb Presentation); and not to be forgotten, the troubling possibility of new forms of social control.

Smart phones are powerful networked sensor devices in the palm of our hand

As Sandy Pentland MIT pointed out in his Where 2.0 keynote, “Reality Mining for Companies, or, How Social Networks Network Best,” mobile phones have created an ubiquitous instrumented reality that goes way deeper than location awareness. Smart phones are powerful networked sensor devices in the palm of our hand that know a lot more about us than location. With proximity, motion, (accelerometers), voice, images, call logs, email – what is enabled is not just knowing where people are but knowing more about them.

Many of the issues raised by Adam Greenfield in Everyware and in my interview with Adam were on my mind during WhereWeek, also questions that were distilled and explored in this presentation by Matt Jones last year, Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics and Timo Arnall’s presentation, The Web in the World.

Google Wave, Pachube  Feeds, Sensor Networks and Microsyntax!

Visualizing 24 hours of Pachube logs, feeds all around the world -  built with Processing.

I found myself really wishing Pachube founder Usman Haque had been able to come to Where 2.0 this year – Usman was originally on the Where 2.0 schedule but had to drop out. My small contribution to WhereCamp was to discuss Pachube, Natural Fuse and OpenShaspa in the, Urban Eco-Managment session (see my interview with Pachube Founder, Usman Haque here).

Pachube announced – mapping mobile feeds in realtime, with 3d datastream value time & location based graphing just before Where 2.0.

And, as I was writing up this post, I was delighted to see this post by Bruce Sterling on Pachube Feeds and his challenge, offering:

“(((Extra credit for eager ubicomp hackers: combine this [pachube feeds] with Googlewave, then describe it in microsyntax. Hello, 2015!)))”

Also Anselm Hook, who has an extensive background in video game development, made an interesting point about Google Wave to me:

“btw – there is a preexisting metaphor for the wave – the wave is notable in that it is making the web like a videogame – its bringing real time many participant shared interaction to the web”

“Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.”

For more on microsyntax see microsyntax.org

Aaron pointed out to me re microsyntax:

“This is ultimately the “magic word” problem, which is essentially the semweb vs. google-is-smarter-than-you problem.”

I will have some more questions for Aaron on the the “magic word” problem in my upcoming interview post.  At the moment I am busy studying some of the thoughts in these links.

http://delicious.com/straup/magicwords

http://www.slideshare.net/straup/the-papernet/22

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/16/edfg.html

http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/schedule/paper/135

Privacy: Towards a Win Win and Community Sensing

While a key element of  Yahoo! Geo Technologies portfolio of platforms, FireEagle, not only gives an important set of tools to allow people to “share their location with sites and services through the Web or a mobile device” but also offers up some vital privacy tools, the community sensing work of Eric Horvitz takes privacy and data sharing into new terrain.

Eric didn’t have time to discuss his privacy work in his Where 2.0 presentation, Where, When, Why, and How: Directions in Machine Learning and Reasoning about Location, – it came up in his very last slide. But I ran up after his talk with my trusty old ipod recorder in hand, and got the part we missed! Fascinating stuff that will be the subject of an upcoming interview post. Here’s a little taste of what is to come. Eric describes one of the directions his team will be exploring.

“One thing I want to do, on our research team, I’d like to develop something very simple for people to use. A challenging problem with privacy is usability and controls. Aunt Polly and Uncle Herbie just don’t get all these authentication controls and sliders, nor do they want to invest in figuring them out. They also don’t get why they’re being asked with pop up windows to yes or no to various questions and so on. One Idea is having a useable privacy lens, that you can hold up anywhere and it tells you what you’re showing anybody or any organization, what does the world know about you. And you would like to have buttons to turn sharing off for some items. You’d also like to have a way to go back in time and view prior sharing and logging over periods of time, and to have buttons to push to say erase that segment of your logs.”

Understanding the social implications of what it means to live in an instrumented world is a topic that we cannot afford not think about. But luckily there are lot of people who have been thinking pretty deeply about this for a while now.

And I did my best at both Where 2.0 and WhereCamp to seek out as many of geothinkers as I could, and do interviews wherever possible (I have not had time to mention everyone I talked to in this post but hopefully all the interviews will get on Ugotrade soon!)

HeadMap Manifesto

In the bar of The Fairmont on the last night of Where 2.0, I heard some of the history of Where 2.0, GeoWanking, and The HeadMap Manifesto from Sophia Parafina, Director of Operations for OpenGeo and Rich Gibson, programmer, GeoWanker,  Gigapanner and co-author of Mapping Hacks with Schuyler Erie and Jo Walsh (Jo did a lot of key early work on bottom up urban informatics but unfortunately couldn’t make it to WhereWeek this year).

Check Gigapan.org out! “The GigaPanSM process allows users to upload, share, and explore brilliant gigapixel+ panoramas from around the globe.”

Also I interviewed Paul Ramsey, Senior Consultant, OpenGeo, so more on OpenGeo is upcoming (see Paul’s Where ReCap). Justin Deoliveira (OpenGeo) and  Sophia Parafina did a session, GeoServer, GeoWebCache + OpenLayers: The OpenGeo Stack, which unfortunately I missed as it was before I arrived Tuesday.

I met Rich Gibson at Etech 2009 playing Werewolf and Rich introduced me to his co-author on Mapping Hacks and alpha geek supreme, Schuyler Erie, who also wrote the clustr code that The Shape of Alpha uses.

Joshua Schachter founder of Delicious and the GeoWanking mailing list, [and GEOURL - and MemePool!] now at Google came to WhereCamp and was mobbed by a small crowd eager to get their hands on one of the developer G Phones he was handing out from a large box.

GeoWanking, which is now run by O’Reilly Media, has been the incubator for all things location aware and “neogeography” discussions since 2003 – check out ‘sproke for a Paleogeography vs Neogeography (which, as Sophia notes, was a common topic of discussion at Where 2.0) smack down in which geowanking rules in the form of a list traffic comparison.

Sophia and Rich shared some of their perspective on the early days of GeoWanking and the creation of the HeadMap Manifesto with me and pointed me to many other people to talk to. The prime mover of the Headmap manifesto, Ben Russell, has retired from the scene – perhaps bored by seeing a radical vision gone thoroughly mainstream, or exhausted by the rigors of carrying an idea through the early blue sky years, or just s simply doing something else? I don’t know.

The HeadMap Manifesto is still vibrant today even as much of what it envisaged has already been realized. HeadMap assembled the future in a poetry of fragments:

“you can search for sadness in new york people within a mile of each other who have never met stop what they are doing and organize spontaneously to help with some task or other.”

Anselm explained to me what powered all this social cartography revolution, from his POV, was actually IRC.

“We had a channel on IRC called “#geo”.  And many of us met there.  I met Ben Russell at MathEngine in the UK. Ben and I were fascinated by the future of maps.  Ben, Jo and I met Schuyler, Dav, Dan Brickley (who worked for Tim Berner’s Lee who invented the Web), Rich Gibson, Joshua Schachter (who was just a geek at Morgan Stanley at the time ) … and the snowball took off….  many others.

We stormed ETECH ( Schuyler met Jo there).  We got invited to FooCamp. Schuyler was married to Jo by Marc Powell (Food Genome) and lived at his house.  We pushed so hard on the social cartography revolution.

I did a spinny globe for geourl – a project by some hacker named Joshua Schachter…  we were all friends for years and we had never even met.”

“Can AR researchers harness these new approaches to index reality?”

Radiohead’s laser (as opposed to video) clip made using Lidar

If you have read my interview with Ori Inbar, you will know how excited I was to attend The Mobile Reality panel.  The video is up and it is really awesome to hear Raven Zachary (on twitter @ravenme) get into the fray with augmented reality.

The main take away for me from the Mobile Reality panel was that we shouldn’t get too hung up on the difficulties of achieving fully immersive visual augmented reality and twiddle our thumbs waiting for the long anticipated sexy lightweight eyeware – which is still in a coming soon phase (for more on immersive augmented reality see my upcoming interview with Blair MacIntyre). Because, in the meantime, there are plenty of delightful and useful ways to augment our experience of the world – and not all of these augmented realities rely soley on smart phones as John S. Zeleck showed in his presentation on “Wearable Sensory Substitution Device for Navigation.” Also I had an interesting discussion at lunch with Ori Inbar about the use of audio for augmented reality projects.

Where 2.0 clearly demonstrated that we have an unprecedented amount of information from mapping our world, Ori Inbar noted in his conference roundup. Ori writes:

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

As Ori noted Earthmine and Velodyne’s Lidar showed off two new approaches to mapping the world that have potential to create new opportunities for augmented reality:

“Earthmine uses its own camera-based device to index reality, at the street level, one pixel at a time. They have just announced Wild Style City an application that allows anyone to create virtual graffitis on top of designated public spaces. However, at this point, you can only experience it on a pc!”

Lidar, Ori notes, has also embarked on a mission to map the outdoors. But, the question Ori highlights is:

“Can AR researchers harness these new approaches to index reality?”

Brady Forrest inspects John S. Zelek’s “Wearable Sensory Substitution Device for Navigation” at Where Fair before putting it on and being guided by sensory nudges at the cardinal points in the belt.

Coolest Mobile Locative Media App. at Where Fair

Atsushi Shionozaki of Place Engine – “a core technology that enables a device equipped with Wi-Fi such as a laptop PC or smart phone to determine its current location,” demoed the coolest location aware mobile app in Where Fair – Oedo Yokai. Working with ethnologist, Dr. Hiro Kubota and artist Atsushi Morioka, “Oedo Yokai” is Koozyt’s “first attempt to cross IT (Location Information) and Folkloristics.”

“The Japanese “Yokai” are known to dwell and appear at specific locations. They can frequently be seen within the grounds of shrines and temples, believed to be the border between this world and the afterlife, or in more common places like on a hill or at a crossroads. If the “Yokai” symbolize the mystery, legend, and lore associated with places, as our interests fade from actual locations, the rol, es they play in modern day society will diminish, and the “Yokai” might then cease to appear at all.”

I love this idea of bringing the ancient spirits of place back into our lives with our new tools of location awareness.

Odeo Yokai also reminds me of Aaron Straup Cope’s work on “the idea of every spot being a “history box” which he explained is “one of the threads behind the ‘nearby’ project at Flickr.”

The Food Genome

I cannot end this roundup of WhereWeek without a mention of The Food Genome.

“Food Genome is a big hungry brain that scours the internet, trying to learn everything there is to know about food.”

Watch out for the upcoming launch of this project, it stole the show with an exciting presentation at WhereCamp. You can follow @foodgenome on Twitter now.

To get one of the gorgeous Food Genome brochures you had to ask Mark Powell a good question. Notice an eager hand reaching out in the picture below. I asked, “how would the basic building blocks of the food genome be licensed?” I got my brochure and a rain check on an answer to my question.

The Ubiquitous Media Studio

Another highlight of WhereCamp was hearing from Gene Becker about his new project, Ubiquitous Media Studio which will be located in Palo Alto. The project is still in the early stages of devlopment but it sounds really exciting. I am looking forward to being involved from East Coast.  If you’re curious where this is going, follow @ubistudio on Twitter to stay updated.