February 2012
1 post
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January 2012
1 post
November 2011
3 posts
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Art that might be ARt
I’m always keeping an eye out for pieces that either might already be AR, or would translate very well into AR. Two artists caught my eye recently.
The first is illustrator and artist Anna Emelia, whose work is very cosy and intimate which might translate well into the “doll house” perception of desktop hand-held AR for instance. She recently submitted this image on her blog,...
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ScandAR 2011 →
If you work, study or research AR in the Nordics check out the Call for Participation for the Second Annual Scandinavian Workshop on Augmented Reality, which will be held at Aalborg University, Dec 8th and 9th.
October 2011
3 posts
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Nokia City Scene is now publicly available →
The first public release of our mirror worlds work comes out just in time for ISMAR 11! Right now it’s Nokia N9 only, and we only have a handful of cities covered, but if you have an N9 get it! I’d be especially interested in hearing what people who follow this blog think.
What isn’t presented to the general public is our overall idea of how this fits into the mixed and...
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Nokia Maps 3D using WebGL →
Our colleagues in Berlin have been doing amazing things with the same sort of data we’ve been using to build our mobile mirror world applications - really nice work guys.
September 2011
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August 2011
1 post
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Enabling Large-Scale Outdoor Mixed Reality and... →
I’m very excited to be involved co-organizing a workshop at ISMAR this year on enabling large scale MAR. If you’re interested in participating, the research topics include (but are not restricted to):
3D geo-referenced data (images, point clouds, and models)
Algorithms for object recognition from large databases of geo-referenced data
Algorithms for object tracking in outdoor...
July 2011
2 posts
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“Fluent, convivial satiation of as many senses as possible”
– A good friend’s brilliant answer to “what makes a good meal” - but damn if that isn’t the perfect answer to “what would make a good augmented experience”.
June 2011
4 posts
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AR Books
As an example of how fast things are moving in AR consider augmented books. In 2008 I was blown away by “Haunted Book” by Camille Sherrer of ECAL and the ever amazing EPFL CV lab. I can’t seem to find a video of that work, but “Magic Book” by the same artist looks similar:
This ran on a laptop, and the graphics are strictly flat sprites. The natural feature...
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Performance aids
I was at Sónar festival in Barcelona this weekend, and one of the things that stood out for me what how important visuals have become for live electronic music artists. It makes sense electronic acts would lead the way here, both because of familiarity with technology, and a certain boring guy-with-laptop sameness of performance that doesn’t create energy like a live rock-band can. The...
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There's no such thing as "Virtual Space"
tl;dr: “Virtual space” is a poor metaphor, we shouldn’t take it too literally, especially when hypothesizing about the legal ramifications of putting things “in it”.
The topic of who owns virtual space (in front of existing advertising billboards outdoors, in museums and other curated spaces) comes up often in discussions about AR and its implications, and for me...
May 2011
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WatchMVI_7513-desktop by thesystemis on Flickr. (IR, Kinect based) Face tracking, plus projection AR. Ubiquitous projection in performance based or experiential spaces (night-clubs, concerts etc) is something to start considering - your device can hand over the augmenting to the environment where available - especially interesting for self-augmenting.
April 2011
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Consenting to Hallucinate - via Quiet Babylon →
Instead of people plugging decks into cyberspace and participating in a mass consensual hallucination of pure mind, we’re working on overlaying those hallucinations on the world. In some cases, we’re projecting those hallucinations right out into the street.
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Great discussion on the definition of... →
This touches a lot on the “Seeing” talk by Jesse Schell at ARE 10:
However, all of this is really based on some very subtle and blurry differences between constantly evolving technologies. It’s also strongly based on the realist assumption that “Reality” exists “out there”. But I think there is quite a strong case to be made that Reality is actually...
Survey on Experiences of Mobile Augmented Reality... →
Tampere University of Technology are running a survey on Experiences of Mobile AR. If doing it For Science! is insufficient motivation, there’s a chance to win some Amazon gift vouchers.
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Tangible Proxies
Some of the nicest AR interaction revolves around “tangible interaction” - augmenting physical objects that you can touch and hold and feel, where the augmentation responds to your handling of the object.
One of the great unappreciated advantages to “magic lens” style cell-phone AR is the screen acts as a “tangible proxy” for interaction with the virtual...
March 2011
4 posts
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Bringing AR to mobile web-browsers
Opera’s tech demos implementing device camera stream and sensor orientation in a mobile browser clearly indicate that Blair McIntyre, Alex Hill and the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech have it right with Argon: mobile sensor-based AR is moving towards open web APIs for content definition, styling and placement. If Opera have any say, soon HTML5 is going to mandate everything...
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You can't force AR
A bunch of artists gathered together under the “AR art manifesto” have staged a couple of AR “happenings” now, in various US sites. I find their work very interesting, but also quite misguided. I’ll declare my biases upfront: the sort of meaningless postmodern nonsense theses of the manifesto rub me the wrong way (I half hope it’s another Sokal affair), so that...
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AR and City Data
I attended Cognitive Cities in Berlin over the weekend - a great conference with some really good talks and a very informed audience.
I’ve mentioned before I love projects that aggregate data into something actionable, but I’m also a sucker for a good visualization - there were examples of both: Matt Biddulph illustrated how visualizing the frequency of map-tile queries to their...
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December 2010
2 posts
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WatchThis is great: live video of the audience at a MIA concert is projected behind the stage, then the blank Facebook icon is projected on top of found faces as the camera pans. Part audience participation, part artistic statement, part spectacle, all good.
November 2010
3 posts
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ScandAR →
The first annual Scandinavian (Nordic?) workshop on Augmented Reality is being held at Aalto University on the 9th and 10th of September. I’ll certainly be there on the 9th at least, looking forward to meeting more Nordic AR researchers, professionals and enthusiasts.
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September 2010
2 posts
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Art that might be ARt
I visited the fatastic Moderna Museet in Stockholm recently, they had an exhibit of the works of Ed Ruscha that got me thinking. I’ve been thinking a lot about the creative possibilities of mixed reality lately - I’m getting fatigued by “floaticons” on camera views, and I think we’re missing out on “magic” part of the magic lens metaphor.
A couple of...
August 2010
2 posts
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The specific to the general
Have you noticed how specific Google’s sub-pages are nowadays? I often find I have to go to Google Scholar, even to find a paper I know by name and author, because their standard search won’t return it. Google is good for web-pages, but Google Scholar is needed for finding papers.
Do you remember how bad service provider landing pages used to be in the bad old days of the...
July 2010
3 posts
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AR for responsive citizenry
I was coming out of my favourite public sauna with some friends tonight, when we thought we witnessed from a distance someone getting beaten up by a group before they moved on. Other people were closer and seemed to be observing, it was near to a busy street, and we wondered if someone had called the authorities. We didn’t want to take a chance, I’m well aware of the insidious...
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June 2010
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ARE 2010 notes
Here are (paraphrased from my scribbles) some of the descriptions and metaphors the different speakers at ARE 2010 gave that really stood out for me.
Bruce Sterling: AR is at 9am - not the dawn, but the start of the work day. AR makers need to become “experience designers”. AR can bring “enlightenment”.
Metaio: AR is in danger of becoming the second second-life....
Augmented Reality Event 2010
The bad news is Augmented Reality Event 2010 is over, and if you missed it - boy did you miss out. Ori, Tish and whurley organized an amazing conference with a fantastic, warm atmosphere and stellar speakers (myself excluded).
The good news is they’ve set a date for next year: ARE2011 May31-June2, tentatively located at the same venue in Santa Clara. Believe me, you want to be there.
My...
May 2010
2 posts
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WatchJonsi is playing Flow Festival here in Helsinki later in the summer - I’m really excited to see him, and I fervently hope they bring the whole set shown here. There’s lots of talk about “AR experiences” nowadays, and this is a first step. It’s very exciting to have artists making commercial art with AR: the technology is maturing into a useful medium. They clearly...
AR P2P
In the glorious future, when we have a general outdoor AR tracking system, our mobile devices are going to need data. A lot of data. Apart from all the content we’ll be downloading to use to augment the areas were in - tasty 3D, animated, shiny, fat content - we’ll probably need some kind of fairly dense 3D model of the surroundings we want to track against.
Both model and content...
April 2010
4 posts
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AR Balkanization
So, if we hypothesise that AR will act more like a feed reader than a browser when gathering data, and is really just a UI layer for whatever data you feed it, we come to a looming problem: nobody is going to have the exact same view of the AR enabled world. Vernor Vinge covered this somewhat with his “belief networks” in Rainbows End, but where he saw fictional networks vying for...
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AR isn't a Browser, it's an RSS Reader
When a mobile AR browser pans around a town square, it’s not discovering the content as it pans - the data doesn’t reside in that geographical location. You, or your application, have selected one or more data sources that refer to that place, and will render the relevant data when the view is appropriate.
With this in mind, why do people assert that spam is going to be a big...
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AR with utility
I’m a bit worried that many AR applications are trivial - not in implementation, but in application. Visualizing tweets, pretending you’re Iron Man in front of your monitor - these are unserious applications.
Adam Greenfield has a great post in his series on the future of cities and read-write urbanism, where he calls for elements of the city to be interactive, necessitating making...
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Mobile AR and the Restaurant Use-Case
The stereotypical Augmented Reality use case that starts: “so you’re standing outside a restaurant, and you want to know if it’s any good…” Why?
It doesn’t start with “you’re on the metro to the center” - sure you can find information about restaurants there - same as anywhere with network, and frequently with very good tools, but AR...