Month: January 2012

Categories
Augmented Reality Social and Societal

Pop-Up Poetry

I occasionally read using the Amazon Kindle application installed on my laptop, but eBook reading doesn't appeal to me. I prefer physical books. That's why this new publication written by Amaranth Borsuk and programmed by Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen, caught my eye. It's a physical book that can only be read using a webcam connected to the web. You point the book's page at the webcam to read the letters and watch the animations.

This work consists of letters exchanged between two lovers, "P" and "S." Some have called it poetry. Without a literary reviewer's mind or having read it myself, I can't say if it is truly a work of poetry but it is exciting to see how technology, paper and art continue to mingle in new ways.

I'm not thinking this is a practical or particularly enjoyable experience, in part because I don't care for the big marker approach to AR, but this is a natural progression following upon other "magic book" projects.

One of the most well-known is Camille Sherrer's magic book project Le Monde des Montagnes (2008) which uses Natural Feature Recognition (no markers) to detect the page you have shown to the camera and then superimposes animations on the live video of the page (the augmentation is only on the screen).

 

 

 

Imagine what this could be like if it were a graphic novel, like some other projects. I'm thinking here of Jack, the Time Traveller, a project developed by Julian Looser, Adrian Clark, Shunsuke Fukuden, and Katy Bang (while they were working at the HIT Lab NZ) for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image exhibition Screen Worlds. The book tells the story of Jack's journey through the history of cinema and his quest to find an interesting and well-paid job.

There are other ways to play at the intersection of print books and video. In one example of about the same time period as Jack, The Time Traveller (early 2011), Davy and Kristin McGuire created a 3D effect and digitally inserted characters into the story using video recorded with a Canon 5D Mark II projected onto paper.

"It tells the story of a mysterious princess who lures a boy into her magical world to warm her heart of ice. It is made from sheets of paper and light, designed to give a live audience an intimate and immersive experience of film, theatre, dance, mime and animation."

One of the many differences between these three important Magic Book projects and the first work I referred to above is that Between Page and Screen is available for USD 24.95 from Siglio Press.

Categories
Augmented Reality Social and Societal

AR-4-Kids

I've focused my attention on what adults can do with the real world when data is associated with people, places and objects in particular settings. When developing AR-4-Cities (with the AR-4-Basel project) and AR-4-Venues (with the AR @ Mobile World Congress 2012 project) the scenarios always involve an adult roughly the age of my daughters (21, 24 and 26).

Side note: These people are among the very oldest digital natives. In early 1987 the eldest "painted" pictures (in black and white) with a mouse on a Fat Mac. A few years later, the middle daughter's first machine, a Macintosh II, was connected to a 2400 baud modem but I'm really not sure she ever used it because there wasn't any content on the Web and it was horribly difficult to get connected. By that time I had graduated to the 9600 baud modem to connect to AppleLink and download e-mail. 

Okay, back to the future. Within months of the beginning of the mobile AR craze CNET senior writer, Daniel Terdiman, revealed the future of toys. With the exception of one trip to a Toys-R-Us to purchase an iTag AR-enabled Avatar Action Figures set, in February 2010 (and this was for an adult friend who could not obtain the Mattel merchandise in Switzerland), I have neglected the youth segment.

What an oversight! How many children have smartphones or tablets? The most accurate answer is more today than last year and fewer today than next year.

Plenty of people within the AR community recognized this trend early and have been working on it. Put-a-Spell, the first game Ogmento (an AR game publisher started by Ori Inbar) demonstrated about two years ago, featured a panda bear teaching children how to read with tiles (photo below).

And the category is expanding. The results of the survey of AR toys Christy Matte published on Techlicious today reveals the 2012 "crop" of AR for kids. I've never been to Techlicious before this article caught my eye. The topic is a good fit. Although I detest their slogan "We make Technology Simple," the site appears to be a technology portal for (young) women, probably the age of my daughters only not digital natives, where they can read reviews and make purchases. Recent blogs and feature stores are about Internet safety and the best tablets for children's books.

I don't know when I'll have an opportunity to use the new AR-enhanced toys, if ever, but it's clear that children who play with these in 2012 will find AR in other aspects of their lives perfectly normal. And, in 5 years time, the users of these products will marvel if they arrive in a new place and discover that there are no local points of interest available. It will be like a Christmas tree without gifts under it or going into the Sahara dessert without water.

Categories
Augmented Reality Events

Augmented Olympics

The London 2012 Olympic Games are fast approaching. I'm eager to see the extent to which Augmented Reality could be applied to this global celebration of human athleticism. I'm keeping a list of all the campaigns and applications being developed for this special event. Today the first instance was entered in my list. If you want access to this list, send me a message.

BP America recently launched as a component of its Team US support, a campaign using AR to raise public awareness of the US Olympic team.  They've worked with rising stars in archery, cycling, gymnastics, track & field and swimming, as well as some athletes with handcaps shown in the graphic below, to develop content (video clips and photographs). In addition to populating their web site, they had the help of New York City-based Augme to package the content into AR experiences triggered by using trading cards.

 

The system seems a bit of a stretch. There are a lot steps for users, even if they are sports fans.

Imagine this:

  1.  BP America will need to spend a few (certainly 5 figures) dollars and weeks letting people know that there are trading cards in upcoming issues of Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine.
  2. Then, after buying the BusinessWeek and finding a card, the user will need to follow instructions leading them to a web page where they can launch the image recognition. A press release says that the app is also available for mobile (I was unable to find it, but let's assume for the moment that it's available on iTunes)
  3. Finally, if they are able to get the software to work, the Internet connection is high speed and their computer is sufficiently powerful, they will need to have a web cam. All included in a smartphone, of course.
  4. Those with all the components will then raise the trading card in front of the webcam or smartphone.

I'm not a BusinessWeek subscriber and will probably not find these cards, but I'd really like to know how the use of AR in this scenario is going to bring more value to sports fans than watching the videos and looking at photos already on BP America's web site.

I'll contact the people at Augme who designed the campaign and ask if I can see the statistics on this experiment in a few months time.

Categories
Innovation Internet of Things Standards

ITU Initiatives Help it Remain Relevant

The International Telecommunications Union is a standards development organization based in Geneva, Switzerland and over the past 30 years has published very important specifications for telephony and networking. Over the past decade, and especially the last 5 years, as the Internet expanded and overtook telephony as the principle vehicle for personal communications, the IETF and other standards bodies seemed to take a leadership role in communications standards.

Membership attrition drove the ITU to search for new agendas and redefine itself in the new world. Periodic examination of goals and missions is necessary in any organization, but particularly important for one whose members or customers must pay fees and seek justification for their expenses. I think that, for the ITU, the results of this process of soul searching are beginning to bear fruit.

I'm currently following the ITU Joint Coordination Activity on Internet of Things standards, which began in May 2011, and have attended two meetings of this group. Its survey of the IoT standards landscape will be very valuable to many groups when published. The motivations and the process are very complementary to the work the AR Standards Community is doing. I'm also highly impressed by and seek to attend and observe future meetings of the Internet of Things Global Standards Initiative (IoT GSI). In this group representatives from these seven ITU Study Groups work together:

  • SG 2 – Operational aspects of service provision and telecommunications management
  • SG 3 – Tariff and accounting principles including related telecommunication economic and policy issues
  • SG 9 – Television and sound transmission and integrated broadband cable networks
  • SG 11 – Signalling requirements, protocols and test specifications
  • SG 13 – Future networks including mobile and NGN
  • SG 16 – Multimedia coding, systems and applications
  • SG 17 – Security

This cross Study Group approach is very effective to address such a fundamental "cross domain" topic as standardization for the Internet of Things.

Recently the ITU TSAG (Telecommunications Standards Advisory Group) made two announcements that caught my eye and demonstrate other results of their efforts to stay relevant in the future as a standards body. The first is the formation of a new group focusing on Bridging the Gap: from Innovation to Standardization. One of the common objections to standards is that they stifle innovation so confronting this head on is an excellent initiative. The focus group's results will be released during an event in November 2012.

Second, the ITU TSAG announced that it is initiating another (parallel to the IoT JCA) "landscape" analysis activity on the topic of Machine-to-Machine communications. This charter for this new activity (pasted below from the announcement page for convenience) is currently open for comment.

"The Focus Group will initially focus on the APIs and protocols to support e-health applications and services, and develop technical reports in these areas. It is suggested that the Focus Group establish three sub-working groups:

  1. “M2M use cases and service models”,
  2. “M2M service layer requirements”, and
  3. “M2M APIs and protocols.”

Strong collaboration with stakeholders such as Continua Health Alliance and World Health Organization (WHO) is foreseen. The Focus Group concept allows for greater operational flexibility and crucially allows non-ITU members and other interested organizations to participate."

Although e-health applications are not all that interesting to me, I believe the concept of developing technical reports focusing on different areas will be very productive. And, as with the IoT-GSI, the M2M focus group will also be complementary to other ITU-T Study Groups, especially Study Groups 13 and 16, and to other relevant UN agencies, SDOs, forums/consortia, regulators, policy makers, industry and academia. I'll be observing this activity when they meet and work closely with the IoT-GSI in Geneva next month.

Categories
Augmented Reality Innovation True Stories

Augmented Vision 1

Yesterday I wrote a few thoughts and plans I have about Augmented Humans. In what seems like more than sheer coincidence, I immediately began to see connections to this theme. Today, by following a series of links that seemed to have nothing to do with the topic ("is this how it's supposed to work?" I asked myself), I stumbled upon this early October 2011 piece on Tanagram's blog about Rob Spence.

According to the post, Rob is working is now a consultant for Eidos Montreal. As part of his consulting gig, he shot and produced this video.

The 12-minute piece compares what today's Augmented Humans experience and have with the future vision presented in the recently released Deus Ex – Human Revolution.

Note that Tanagram’s Firefighter Augmented Reality Mask is featured in this video.

Categories
Augmented Reality Events Internet of Things Research & Development

Augmented Humans

Augmented humans are at the epicenter of a scenario for the future that Ray Kurzweil has been popularizing for over 20 years. To recap the central thesis of his life's work, including the book The Singularity is Near published in 2005, Kurzweil promotes the notion that technological singularity is the inevitable result of our research on genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (including artificial intelligence). Whether one believes the trends to which he points will go as far as Kurzweil predicts (in which some of those born human and who live among us today will live far longer than any earlier specimens of our race and will, at the same time, benefit or suffer from "superintelligence") or not, research is continuing unabated in these domains.

Some findings of basic and applied research in areas at the core of the Singularity will be reported by those who will present papers during the third annual Augmented Human conference. This conference whose proceedings will later be published by the ACM focuses on augmenting human capabilities through technology for increased well-being and enjoyable human experience. The program committee solicited contributions on the following topics (this list pasted directly from the conference call for papers, which closed earlier this week):

  • Augmented and Mixed Reality
  • Internet of Things
  • Augmented Sport
  • Sensors and Hardware
  • Wearable Computing
  • Augmented Health
  • Augmented Well-being
  • Smart artifacts & Smart Textiles
  • Augmented Tourism and Games
  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Bionics and Biomechanics
  • Training/Rehabilitation Technology
  • Exoskeletons
  • Brain Computer Interface
  • Augmented Context-Awareness
  • Augmented Fashion
  • Augmented Art
  • Safety, Ethics and Legal Aspects
  • Security and Privacy

I'd like to hear what these folks are doing. However, I'd also (maybe even more) like meet and get acquainted with flesh and blood Augmented Humans. One whom I met a few years ago at a conference is Rob Spence. Rob is a documentary filmmaker who lost an eye and decided, with the help of Steve Mann, one of the original first-person webcamera video streamers, to have a wireless video camera fitted into his prosthetic eye. Rob kept a blog about the experience for several years but moved it three years ago this month to another host and seems to have been closed. Here's a 2010 interview with Rob published on the Singularity University's blog. According to Rob Spence's web site, visited today when researching this post, he's working on a documentary for the Canadian Film Board. So, at least for now, his story is private.

I'm currently reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a work of fiction by Haruki Murakami. The central character (unknowingly) has his brain rewired as part of an experiment and it (his brain) is programmed for him to live the rest of his life "reading" dreams from the skulls of unicorns. It's a gracefully written story. Although stories of people whose bodies and minds have been altered to become "augmented humans" make for excellent works of fiction, of a blog, and probably a documentary, I suspect that the paths humans pursue towards this goal are filled with failed attempts. Interesting to note the last two bullets on the list of topics covered at the AHC. There's confirmation of my concern.

At Laval Virtual, the largest industry event dedicated exclusively to Virtual Reality, Masahiko Inami, a professor in the School of Media Design at the Keio University (KMD), Japan, is giving a talk entitled "Initial Step Towards Augmented Human". Here's the session description:

What are the challenges in creating interfaces that allow a user to intuitively express his/her intentions? Today's HCI systems are limited, and exploit only visual and auditory sensations. However, in daily life, we exploit a variety of input and output modalities, and modalities that involve contact with our bodies can dramatically affect our ability to experience and express ourselves in physical and virtual worlds. Using modern biological understanding of sensation, emerging electronic devices, and agile computational methods, we now have an opportunity to design a new generation of 'intimate interaction' technologies.

This talk will present several approaches that use multi/cross modal interfaces for enhancing human I/O. They include Optical Camouflage, Stop-Motion Goggle, Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation and Chewing Jockey.

Although probably less shocking and hair-raising than the talks at the third AHC, this session should also be very thought-provoking and practical for those working in the field of Virtual Reality. I'll try to make it to both of these events to get fully informed about all aspects of Augmented Humans.

Categories
Augmented Reality Business Strategy

Frog Design’s Top Tech Trends in 2012

Frog Design's post on top technology trends for 2012 is highly insightful. First, the graphic. It's Alice who just can't resist a peak into the future!

Then the list of trends begins with the trend on which I spent considerable time with in 2011 and see expanding in 2012: using mobile AR and similar interfaces to engage with the data available (published by) Smart Cities.

Although many others saw its potential a decade ago, and numerous cities have been working on it since this decade began, there's still a lot of research to do before a basic formula emerges, a set of best practices or guidelines shakes out. Here's how Frog Design's Chief Creative Office describes the modern city:

"The modern city is becoming a pointer system, the new URL, for tomorrow’s hybrid digital–physical environment. Today's Facebook will be complemented by tomorrow's Placebook. Explosive innovation and adoption of computing, mobile devices, and rich sources of data are changing the cities in which we live, work, and play. It's about us, and how computing in the context of our cities is changing how we live. A digital landscape overlays our physical world and is expanding to offer ever-richer experiences that complement, and in emerging cases, replace the physical experience. In the meta–cities of the future, computing isn't just with us; it surrounds us, and it uses the context of our environment to empower us in more natural, yet powerful ways."

This description assumes, thought isn't explicit about having a sensor-rich environment (aka Internet of Things). Isn't the "digital landscape overlaying our physical world and expanding to offer ever-richer experiences" a beautiful image?

Many of the other 14 trends are also well synchronized with the topics of this blog.
I hope you will find this presentation as valuable as I have. I recommend that you view in full screen mode.

Tech Trends 2012  

 

Categories
2020 Research & Development

Abundance, the book

For me the word "abundance" is associated with a positive, peaceful state of mind. In essence, it's the opposite of viewing the world from a place of need, fear or greed. And it's a fantastic title for a blog, a movie, a company, or a book. Wish I had thought of it!

In the forthcoming book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, the authors, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, suggest that our future will be shaped by four emerging forces:

  • the exponential technologies,
  • the DIY innovator,
  • the Technophilanthropist, and
  • the Rising Billion.

The terms aren't defined on the portal and the first chapter doesn't introduce them either, but the marketing of the book is beautifully well aligned with the title in the sense that it makes the potential reader feel the abundance they (those who are promoting the book) have to share with the rest of the world.

Those who pre-order the book are promised a bundle of benefits. Customers who place an order before February 13, 2012 on the book's portal will receive:

  • access to Singularity University’s private graduate training video library (covering AI, robotics, computing systems, neuroscience, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, energy, and innovation);
  • a $1200 gift certificate toward attendance at SU’s 7-day Executive Program at the NASA Ames Campus in 2012;
  • free online access to view Transcendent Man, a documentary film chronicling the life and controversial ideas of Ray Kurzweil; and
  • an invitation to a meeting with the book’s authors via webcast.

That's a lot for $24. I pre-ordered my copy before I wrote this post.


Categories
Augmented Reality Events Standards

AR Standards Community

When we place a phone call, we don't insert a pre-fix for Blackberry phone, a different prefix for calling someone who uses an iPhone and another for Android users. A call request is placed and connected, regardless of the device and software used by the receiver's handset.  When people publish content for the Web (aka "to be viewed using a browser"), they don't need to use a special platform for Internet Explorer, a special content management system or format for Opera Software users, another for Firefox users, and another for those who prefer to use Safari. And, as a result of substantial effort on the part of the mobile ecosystem, the users of mobile Web browsers can also view the same content as on a stationary device, adapted for the constraints of the mobile platform.

With open standards, content publishers can reach the largest potential audiences and end users can choose from a wealth of content sources.

Augmented Reality content and experiences should be available to anyone using a device meeting minimum specifications. If we do not have standards for AR, all that can and could be added to reality will remain stuck in proprietary technology silos.

In the ideal world, where open standards triumph over closed systems, the content a publisher releases for use in an AR-enabled scenario will not need to be prepared differently for different viewing applications (software clients running on a hardware platform).

The community working towards open and interoperable AR will be meeting March 19-20 in Austin, Texas to continue the coordination activities it performs on behalf of all content publishers, AR experience developers and end users.

If you can come, and even if you are unable to meet in person with the leaders of this community, you can influence the discussion by submitting a position paper according to our guidelines.
 

Categories
Events Internet of Things

Makers at IoT ZH

The second meeting of the Internet of Things Zurich meetup group was an enormous success! In the audience, we had an excellent mix of artists, programmers, Do-it-Yourself-ers, students and academics, people from businesses interested in learning about IoT.

Now what?

Growth. To say that this group is large would be an exaggeration because Switzerland is a small country and we only began in earnest a few weeks ago. But by Swiss standards, this group of passionate people, the "makers" of the local IoT industry, is respectable (61 as of this morning). And there were over 50 people gathered in the ETHZ venue to learn from entrepreneurs. 

Experience. Few have it and everyone wants it. The goal of this session was to hear from those with experience in the IoT about lessons learned to date.

We began with great content from Cuno Pfister, Oberon microsystems (slides), Thomas Amberg, Yaler.net (slides) and Simon Mayer, not technically an entrepreneur (he's a PhD candidate at the ETHZ Distributed Systems Group) but a real good guy who shared with us what's happening on the Web of Things side (slides).

During his introduction, Cuno framed the world (loosely speaking) as those who are "corporates" and have a set of characteristics that make them risk averse, although they have (or perhaps as a result of their) resources, and the "tinkerers" those he called "makers." Makers are characterized by:

  • no legacy business models
  • focus on personal growth
  • generating new ideas
  • cost-sensitive (low financial resources) and work on their projects in their spare time
  • attracted to and frequently adopt open systems

After the talks, I took a poll of the people in the room to ascertain the composition of this community. Approximately 30% of us are already "makers" in some fashion. We didn't define this or require people to demonstrate that they have this status through an exam! Presumably even those who are already experimenting want to improve. Of the remainder, many–over half of the room–aspire to become "makers."

With this in mind, there's an excellent opportunity to organize more community meetings and to explore other programs that will permit people to get proficient with IoT tools quickly and with limited resources. I'll be talking to our local experts and more makers in coming weeks to see what we can do about fulfilling this desire and addressing the needs.

Categories
3D Information Augmented Reality Internet of Things Research & Development

Clear Directions Ahead

During the 2011 Geneva Auto Show (almost a year ago), BMW shared with enthusiasts its Vision ConnectedDrive prototype. "Assisted by sensors integrated into the headlights and taillights, a head-up display on the ConnectedDrive Concept can list information on the road ahead in a 3-dimensional format."

Augmented Reality for drivers was also a feature of last week's Consumer Electronics Show. For example, Pioneer Electronics revealed a display that mounts in place of or below the rear view mirror of any model car to project road information for quick consultation without obscuring the driver's view of the road. The photo below is from the CNN article covering Mercedes-Benz's introduction of what it terms "the Future of Driving.

While everyone acknowledges that a date for commercial release of these technologies has not been set, the direction of research and development in the automotive industry is clear: more sensors, more mobile connected services for the user/driver, more in the driver's field of view. More and better sensors are already available for those who can pay the premium price. Also, in an automobile where miniaturization and low power consumption are not as important as in a smartphone, we can anticipate more advanced and more accurate sensors, including cameras, to appear.

Furthermore, the justification of new gadgets on the basis of driver and road safety appeals to many constituents from the individual driver to the regional and national transportation authorities who have (potentially) fewer troubles with traffic congestion. I haven't read anything about the policies or regulations treating the use of AR in cars, but I wouldn't be surprised if some were introduced.

One of the enabling technologies for these applications is the pico projector. MicroVision is one of the early providers of these technologies, while a neighbor, also in the state of Washington, the Human Photonics Laboratory at University of Washington is another. Other enablers are the variable opacity screen materials (aka Smart glass) which can be manufactured today. And to receive information from the cloud, without interfering with the user's mobile phone service, and perhaps using different protocols, we may have machine-to-machine (M2M) mobile communications. In the case of a high end car, the extra radio (its cost, its weight or power requirements) are not obstacles.

Categories
Internet of Things Social and Societal

What makes a community?

There's thousands, perhaps millions of posts about community development best practices, especially since this has become a career track for many. I'm not a trained professional community manager but have accumulated enough experience in the domain to feel that I can start a community.

A few months ago I founded the Internet of Things Barcelona and the Internet of Things Zurich meetup groups in order to contribute to and participate in a global network of folks also interested in IoT projects: Madrid, New York, London, Amsterdam (are there others I've missed?). Both IoT-BCN and IoT-ZH had their first meetings in the first week of December 2011.

I love Barcelona and it is definitely a hot bed of innovation but this group had not had time to ramp up before our meeting. We were only 5 dedicated and curious people who did not know one another and we just had a casual chat about what we think Internet of Things will become, although none of us had any hands on experience.

In Switzerland, the first IoTZH meeting was in Bern. It was co-located with the Mobile Monday Switzerland 28th meeting. The room was full to capacity and many of the attendees were people with whom I've crossed paths in the past 7 years in Switzerland. Although it really wasn't the case, this felt like a room of my closest friends and we shared out pleasure while listening to the well-prepared content delivered by the five invited speakers. The venue is also easy to access and warm. Based on the success of the IoTZH meeting I contacted several folks and we organized our second meeting in Zurich.

Based on these experience, and many others I've had in the past 20 years doing evangelism through community development, I suggest that there are a few key requirements for a community to feel alive and to grow:

  • a variety of people who share an interest but from different levels or points of view. Although it's rare to have this, if everyone is at the same level, there's not a feeling of potential for personal or professional growth. The topic of interest can be broadly or narrowly defined. I really like communities in which there's a balance of academic people (students, faculty or researchers) and people with business backgrounds and interests.
  • critical mass is another key ingredient that really distinguishes a community from just a "group". There's not a magic number for all communities, but for communities sharing a technology interest, regardless of whether they are meeting face-to-face or virtually, the number is close to 100. More is better!
  • novelty is another component that certainly helps a community. What I mean is that the members feel that they are part of something that's not easily repeatable. New topics to be discussed, new problems to tackle, new speakers, even new meeting places which involve a bit of risk. Novelty helps members feel the adventure with each phase and, for many, that's enough reason to return.
  • finally, at least one person or a small group must feel personally responsible for the care and nurture of the larger group. Without a lot of love and devotion, beverages and food for those that meet in person, a community doesn't function well. But there's also logistics: a meeting venue, invitations, a hashtag and a twitter handle. The founder or leader doesn't have to live in close proximity to others but needs to feel passionate and, in this situation, members usually respond.

It's getting easier, with tools on the Web, to form, to nurture and to participate in communities. That said, they don't have to be permanent. If a community lacks one or more of the components above, it's time for it to close, quietly or with a splash!