AUG|RE

September 3, 2010

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 his works struck me as ripe for straight-ahead adaptation. In many cases these pieces would work even with poor position and orientation estimates - for instance I’d rather like to leave text like this, framed carefully at a beautiful location, maybe programmed only to appear when there’s a sunrise or sunset, or if the light temperature through the lens is just so.

Not A Bad World, Is It? 1984

I also really liked the ambiguity of the outlines on this work, and think it would be very powerful if it randomly appeared at beaches on overcast evenings, barely perceptable against the background.

Brother, Sister, 1987

There’s also something vaguely unsettling about the cloudiness of these kinds of scenes. It wouldn’t be a very difficult video-effect to pull off in real-time, and the combination of the unsettling background and the stark exclamatory text is powerful. You can imagine transitioning from a normal view to this kind of representation with a textual description of the death-toll from the witch trials when visiting Salem, for instance.

Ok, maybe that’s more of a visualisation than an art piece, but there are all kinds of video-editing tricks we could use to enhance the impact of AR pieces if we progress beyond literal representation.

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Filed under: Augmented reality AR art ed ruscha

June 19, 2010

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. It’s hard to make money off AR if you don’t own valuable data.

Layar: AR is the new mass medium, right now it’s what the web was in 1994 -> potential. Experience Economy.

Daniel Wagner: AR is a UI, and often the UI is bad.

Tish Shute: AR is a zero-click interface [to the world].

Will Wright: AR is a little delusional. AR might be better described as “Blended Reality”. AR is us trying to be psychic.

Gene Becker: AR is experience design for pervasive computing.

Mike Liebold: AR s a focal-plane view of the web.

Jesse Schell: We look out at the world through imagination - we’re not augmenting reality, we’re not even really augmenting “seeing”, we’re augmented imagination.

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(Notes: 1)

Filed under: metaphors ARE2010 AR augmented reality

April 29, 2010

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 supremacy I see politics.

This is a slightly different issue from the “unpleasantness filter” idea Charlie Brooker took a crack at. We’re a long way away (technologically) from that.

This problem is more immediate and insidious - when you can choose your data sources, confirmation bias will come into play. When your “view” on the world is carefully curated to match your personal preconceptions, the real world is no longer a common normalizing reality. Imagine what I’ll short-hand refer to as the “Tea Party” AR bundle - whipping subscribers into a righteous fury. As a counter-example there’s a real-time environmental impact layer for Layar in Copenhagen. The groups who might subscribe to these different kinds of views are probably non-intersecting. Your focus determines your reality.

At the last ISMAR this discussion came up in a panel in the Arts and Humanities track, and there was a general call for an “AR commons” that could be used to bridge the divide, but again, I think this comes from a misunderstanding of the medium and is not enforceable. Even if it were, the end result would no doubt be a tragedy of the (AR) commons.

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Filed under: AR augmented reality balkanization commons

April 27, 2010

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 problem for AR? I think the “AR browser” metaphor is partly to blame. You “visit” locations, similarly to visiting pages, and the browser will render the additional content there. It’s easy to extend the metaphor and expect spam. But really, if you’ve chosen a set of trustworthy mobile AR content providers - Google, Yelp, your favourite local AR art collectives - from where does the spam come? For me, the RSS Reader is a much better metaphor - you choose your content providers, they quietly push new data to you as it arrives, and you can subscribe and unsubscribe as you please.

There’s a dark future were we decide to opt in to spam (for a monetary return):

That’s quite the dystopia.

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Filed under: augmented reality mobile augmented reality spam

April 25, 2010

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 doesn’t help.

The story begins close to the object of interest because of what AR is really about. It’s not about fancy overlaid graphics, it’s not even really about the ability to overlay information at all (though that is a major plus).

It’s about directness - about removing “digital indirection”.

Digital indirection is all the extra steps you have to go through because you can’t ask your smartphone “is that <pointing> place any good”. Standing on the street you read the name. You start your restaurant review (web) app. You type the name in and do a search. You age a little, your company becomes bored. You finally get some reviews you’re pretty sure are from this place, but you can’t be certain because the name is common. Indirectness fails both ways.

In the AR use case, you point your device at the location, and it understands you’re asking about a very particular place. It then replies as unambiguously as it can, by rendering the reply right on top of the subject: that restaurant right there - here is what people say about it.