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.
A blog about mixed and Augmented Reality
April 15, 2011
Consenting to Hallucinate - via Quiet Babylon
April 13, 2011
Great discussion on the definition of Mixed/Augmented Reality
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 generated inside our minds. All our experiences are processed through our senses so in that way all Reality is Mediated.
April 1, 2011
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 objects. If we want to interact with augmentations that don’t correspond to physical objects using a heads-up display we run into trouble.
There’s no such thing as “intangible interaction” - even in the folk record, when we’ve “interacted” with intangible things like “spirits”, we’ve resorted to tangible proxies like ouiji boards. The purely intangible stuff, like psychic visions, tended to be read-only too.
Most of the scenarios in this AR concept video try to solve this problem by projecting the AR elements on to a proximal plane (desktop, palm etc) that can act as a tangible proxy, but this leads to some trade-offs - the biggest of which is taking a 3D technology and limiting it to (sometimes awkward) 2D interaction.
Maybe this is the best we can do with HUDs without kitting ourselves out with haptic handware and giving ourselves gorilla arm or tennis elbow trying to interact with things that just aren’t there. Or maybe this is the killer flaw with HUDs - the “Holy Grail” of AR - you can see, but you can’t touch - HUDs are just a tease.
March 16, 2011
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 necessary to do sensor based AR with a couple of lines of javascript, and then any old web-dev can roll an AR view.
Mobile web browsers aren’t necessarily the most logical or best mobile AR platforms, but being able to initiate an AR mode from a normal webpage without downloading an app is huge. (Somebody needs to come up with an “AR mode” icon.) Having each site be an entry point to its AR content is a readily understood variation on the subscribe-to-layers solution. If you want to see what Yelp says about this restaurant fire up yelp.com. If you want to book it for next wednesday start from opentable.com instead.
However, I feel the real gold here is to be had if someone can figure out search. Providing an AR “search this view” would allow search providers to determine, purely from zero-click camera-view queries not only which businesses or landmarks are people most interested in (in aggregate), but which of the results they return for a spatial search are most selected and by whom. This is the fodder of “spatial page rank”.
The really experiential stuff is still going to require a stand-alone app, as will computer-vision based solutions, but bringing AR to mobile web-browsers is the best way to take AR mainstream. Once it’s there, people won’t call it AR anymore, it’ll still be “the web”, just the web you can see right in front of you.
March 8, 2011
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 may have a hand in my negativity.
Most (all?) of their exploits seem to involve “sticking it to the man” by placing AR content somewhere supposedly illicit: the New York MoMA, the Venice Biennial, and most recently, the White House, all using Layar. Their reasoning is AR is tied to location, and they can use it to add content to these places without any approval of the owners of the physical space. I have two problems with this premise.
The first is, AR is (especially now, and probably forever) an inherently opt-in technology. You can place as many AR art pieces as you like in the lobby of MoMA, but unless a) people have explicitly tuned to the right layer and b) they actually care to look at what you’ve placed, it really, really doesn’t matter. There’s too much emphasis on the significance of the placement, which is trivial in this medium, and not enough emphasis on creating good AR art, which is hard.
The second problem is, well, it’s lame - like “AR graffiti” lame. You want to make graffiti art? Locate your metaphorical balls and go and make graffiti art: transcend some actual norms and/or laws. Making polite, sterile, digital, opt-in art and then presenting it as a subversive “infiltration” just doesn’t cut it.
Finally I think it’s the wrong way round: rather than try injecting AR pieces into popular venues, I’d like to see someone focus on AR pieces so compelling that people are willing to travel to see them. That would be revolutionary.
March 1, 2011
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 servers at Nokia reveals an interest-map of LA:
But one thing that’s apparent to mixed reality folk is we’re really only discussing 2D location based service data right now, and there’s a big opportunity in moving our data models to 3D, where we can interact with it in mixed reality modes where appropriate, generating a spatial 3D “interestingess” map of the city, with much finer granularity - which buildings or facades or objects to people interact with the most, and which of all the spatial data associated with those objects to they prefer to interact with for a given context, and for how long - all this is potentially amazing data.
At the second day a film by Timo Arnell was shown, which using a long-exposure technique similar to the BERG lightpainting to visualize WiFi levels in the city. This also resonates with Matt Biddulph’s presentation:
Not with our normal tools, no. But mobile mixed reality approaches allow us to visualize WiFi strength, or air quality or any spatial data we can acquire and index, giving us a view on the hidden data cloud the city is starting to be enveloped in. Let’s make it a 3D cloud, and let’s visualize it beautifully.
March 1, 2011
Like the BERG light painting video this video from Timo Arnall is a great inspiration for AR visualizations.
(Source: vimeo.com)
December 4, 2010
This 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 30, 2010
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.
November 29, 2010
After being hown in public at Nokia World and presented at ISMAR (winning best-demo, which is very gratifying - good work Petros!) I guess I can share a bit about what our team at Nokia Research Center has been working on, and why I think it’s significant for mixed and augmented reality right now. Unfortunately we don’t have our own shiny video just yet, so here’s one courtesy of mynokiablog.com.
Nokia City Scene is a mobile mixed-reality service (running on the Nokia N900) for viewing panoramic street imagery on mobile devices. It’s quite a lot like Google Streetview, and in addition it has full 3D understanding of the environment - our pipeline and backend teams have integrated 3D building models, terrain data with the panoramas, so we can tell if you’ve clicked on a building (and which building), on the ground, or in empty space, and respond accordingly. Building models also allow us to place content on and correctly aligned with the building facade, no matter which panorama you view the content from. Similarly, we can compute a visibility model for any panorama, determine occlusion etc.
One interesting thing about these kinds of panoramic mirror worlds is they allow AR style interaction locally without having to hold your phone in front of your face, and even more interestingly they allow AR style interaction remotely. If AR takes off in a big way, a certain set of interactions will become common, and people will expect to be able to interact with locations with those interactions, whether those places are their current location, or remote.
While the tracking problem is insufficiently solved to allow really good precise tracking in outdoor environments, using a mirror world instead of AR for city-based outdoor use skirts two problems: inaccurate content placement by users, and inaccurate positioning of content for user consumption. It also allows users to avoid the “pointing the camera” style interaction, which some people find uncomfortable in public spaces.
Finally I suspect that a general tracking solution will be built upon these kinds of complete, 3D city models, so it’s exciting to anticipate that this might be the foundations for a general urban tracking solution.
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