Month: October 2012

Categories
3D Information Events

IndoorGML Workshop

In-person meetings with domain experts are extremely important to my continued growth and to my contribution to the advancement of others. In Korea this week I'm enjoying a full week with OGC members and others in the Korean technology community. I could write at length about all that I learned in the first day during the public opening sessions hosted by the Korean Ministry of Land, Transportation and Marine (but my time is so heavily booked I must choose the topics on which I prepare a post carefully!).

The first IndoorGML Workshop, which I chaired today, was worth the many hours of travel. There were approximately 40 people in the workshop. Only 20% of those in the room said that they were researchers. Another 10% said that they considered indoor topics to be the focus of their work. And, only one person raised a hand when I asked if there were any users in the room. That was very interesting considering that, in my opinion, we are all users of indoor technologies every day. Perhaps my definition of a "user" was not clear. 

The goals of the workshop were clear and simple to express: we wanted to brief people about the status of the IndoorGML specification and to hear from six invited speakers about what they are doing that could benefit from IndoorGML or contribute to the greater utilization of IndoorGML. Having clear goals doesn't necessarily make them them easy to achieve but in this case the contributions fit the bill.

Each speaker spoke excellent English (they were all Korean-based) and was well prepared. They spanned the gamut from describing a new tool to edit IndoorGML files to the requirements of Martime management services for defining the use of indoor spaces in ships carrying passengers. Between these were two mobile application projects (one for use in the Coex Center where the 82nd OGC Technical Committee meetings are being conducted) and two projects used indoor navigation with robotics. 

After each talk I thought of connections between these speakers, their projects (all but one new to me) and some of my past and current projects. I look forward to following up with each and using the workshop as a springboard to new dialog in the future.

The presentations will be available in the next few days on the IndoorGML Workshop web site so that others may also benefit while requiring less travel time and cost.

Categories
Augmented Reality Events

InsideAR 2012

InsideAR, conducted earlier this week in Munich, was an outstandingly well-balanced event. It was also a sizable “AR industry insiders” gathering produced without a professional event organization. We were nearly 500 participants for two jamb-packed days. Thanks to metaio for producing this exceptional human experience!

What made it different and sufficiently exceptional for me to be thinking about it for days, even to the point of inspiring me to dedicate this post to the event? First, the people. There were people from every continent and segment of the ecosystem. For example, I had the pleasure of being introduced to Ennovva, an experience design and AR development company from Bogota, Columbia. There was a smattering of American companies that don’t frequently make it to European AR industry events: Second Site, Vuzix, and Autodesk. Of course, the European community of AR developers was well represented, and there were many loyal metaio customers who have been using AR with highly quantifiable results, such as Lego, Volkswagen and IKEA. Smaller companies were also in good standing. There were Asian partners and customers in attendance. There were newbies seeking to be introduced to AR as well as founders of the industry, such as Daniel Wagner and Ron Azuma.

metaio's announcements were also important and impressive. Junaio is coming along nicely but so are Creator and metaio Engineer.

Representing the technologies for AR, many of metaio's large partners were there—ARM, NVIDIA, ST Ericsson among them. And, notably, the hosts even welcomed their competitors. I chatted with representatives from Qualcomm, Wikitude, MOB Labs, however, didn’t see any Layar folks in attendance (Martin Adam, of mCRUMBS, was showing Layar-based experiences).

The presentations were (with only one exception) outstanding. Each day there were several sessions featuring metaio products. Watch the keynote here. On stage, the balance between live demonstrations and slideware was admirable, making the new product announcements compelling and strategies easy to understand. Clearly, engineering at metaio has been very busy over the past year, but so have those who operate the company’s communications systems. The company even launched a new industry magazine!

Audience attention was still high before lunch on Tuesday when I shared the community's vision for open and interoperable AR and how this group of dedicated people is working together to approach the diverse challenges. See slides here and video of the Open AR talk here. I expect to see some of the new faces who came up to me after the talk at future community meetings.

In the exhibition space, metaio and its partners showcased AR through many fantastic demonstrations, permitting visitors to touch and use AR in specific use cases and domains, such as automotive, games and packaging. The Augmented City, one of my favorite domains for AR to bring value to citizens and managers of urban settlements, was highly featured in sessions and in the demonstration area.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching, speaking and catching up with the whole metaio team—from the co-founders to the very newest employees (wave to Anton Fedosov and congratulation for the smooth landing!). They all moved together like a well-oiled team and event production machine, from the front desk to the staff meeting areas in the loft and made us feel like part of their family. It was also an opportunity to put faces to names I recognized. Irina Gusakova, who was an invaluable resource by e-mail prior to InsideAR2012, made me feel like we were long lost friends.

Finally, it seems trivial to some but in my experience it is important to fuel the body as well as the mind. Beverages were always plentiful and the food was authentic and available when needed. A visit to Munich would not be complete without Octoberfest and metaio saw to it that we finished in style under a tent in the center of the city’s annual festivities. This event is definitely on my calendar for 2013!

Categories
Augmented Reality

Is it Augmented Reality?

Television. From a former life I vaguely remember this broadcast medium that was (and still is for some people) provided on a screen in a defined sequence of segments called "shows" in an order defined by something that was called a "program." The content is professionally produced and sometimes approaches the real world. Then there is this genre of television called "reality TV" but that's something else.

Companies that prepare content for broadcast sometimes mix a video signal from a television camera with a digital data stream in such a way that one (the digital data) overlays the signal from the camera, synchronized in real time so well that the viewer can imagine that the line is "drawn" in perspective in the real world. The most clear case of this is the first down line in America football. A line appears on the television over the video to show the viewer where the ball stopped on its way to the goal. Those who are in the stadium cannot see the line.

A recent article published about Augmented Reality (principally about the use of AR in medical use cases) on the National Science Foundation web site described the experience of seeing first-down line on television as an example of Augmented Reality. Unfortunately, the differences between composing a video in the studio and sending out to millions of viewers over a broadcast communication medium and composing an AR experience in real time on a user's device for viewing from precisely one pose are too numerous to be overlooked.

Here are a number of ways the two differ:

#1 pose: the content that is captured by the television camera is destined to be broadcast to a mass audience. It may be broadcast globally, locally, but it is still a one-to-many signal. In a broadcast technology studio the user (the individual for whom the composed scene is visible), the viewer's pose (context and position with respect to reality) is in no way utilized to create the experience (remember "AR Experiences"). In television there are "viewers" and in AR there are "users."

Test: If the viewer looks 180 degrees from where the composed scene is rendered, no longer viewing the television at all, the scene (first down line overlay on the video signal) is still there. If an AR user looks away from the point of interest, the augmentation no longer appears.

#2 real time: see point #1. Broadcast looks like it's real time, but it's delayed with respect to what the user does.  If you replay the same sequence of frames captured by the television camera, say 5 milliseconds, an hour or a year later, the same overlay will be possible. The AR experience requires that all the elements be exactly the same to reproduce the same AR experience. By definition, every AR experience is unique because we are unable to travel backwards in time to repeat a moment in the past.

#3 reality: What the user sees on the TV screen is digital overlay over digital media. It is composed centrally by software in the studio. Is the television camera operator's point of view the "reality"? Yes, but only for the operator of the camera.

I understand that the mobile device-based AR experiences we have today suffer from the same weakness in the definition of "reality".

My conclusion is that "broadcast AR" is a misnomer. It may be helpful to introduce the concepts of digital overlay but should not be confused with "real" AR. Over time, as more people have AR experiences of their own, we will have less need to use poor analogies to define AR and there may even come a day when we will be able to drop the label "AR" entirely.