Category: Innovation

Topics covering brilliant people or breakthroughs I run across and want to highlight. It’s different than research because it shows “breakthroughs” or discoveries or people who are innovating. They may not have applications or even business value, but I think they’re innovative.

Categories
Events Innovation

Sizing Up CES 2013

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) marketing team chose to brand CES2013 as the "world's largest CES-signinnovation event." With 1.92 million net square feet of exhibit space and over 150,000 visitors (half of whom could be Korean), it is indisputably the largest trade show. The word "Innovation" was on banners and headlines everywhere. My eyes rolled and I sighed in pain as I waited in long lines for everything. Despite the express service shuttle buses and the noise being made about driver-less automobiles (although Google was not exhibiting), no one has innovated a new way to move so many individual people easily through spaces of these sizes. Perhaps patience is a cultural virtue of companies that exhibit at CES.

Finally, when I dove into the middle of Central Hall, I found over-sized televisions and cameras, but not what I was looking for. I spent hours, crawling around the enormous, sprawling booths of the Japanese and Korean consumer electronics "gorillas" including Sharp, Samsung (clearly the largest presence at the show in terms of footprint), Panasonic, Sony, Canon, Mitsubishi, showing screens that would not fit in any Swiss dwelling. These were interspersed with slightly smaller but still outlandishly large booths of Polaroid (I thought they were out of business!), automotive companies (in North Hall),  HiSense and others. CNET published this album of photos taken in the biggest CES2013 booths.

Only a year before, in January 2012, many of these same companies were showing Augmented Reality-enhanced products. But, in 2013, AR was not in evidence. I looked at dashboards and windshields, tablets and camera viewfinders. A crowd gathered around the Vuzix booth where the M100 was being shown. Vuzix received some attention from the media (here and here), but we didn't learn or see anything new. Motorola Solution's HC1, a head-mounted computer aimed at people in construction trades, was reportedly being shown but I didn't find it. Intel's demonstration of Perceptual Computing was the highlight in Central Hall. In an interview with the BBC, Mooly Eden, president of Intel Israel speaks about how gestures, gaze and voice will replace the touch computer human interfaces we have today. Patient, perceptive people staffing information booths assured me that the strategic planners who decide what warrants showing at CES just had different priorities this year: these new computer human interfaces. In the LG Electronics stand I ignored the curved TV screens and, with a little effort, found gesture as the interface for AR-assisted dressing room solutions provided by Zugara. It looked precisely the same as when I saw it over two years ago. Contrary to plan and despite my interest in new mobile displays (Samsung was showing Youm, the flexible displays about which it has also spoken for several years), I didn't linger in the Samsung Electronics booth.

In South Hall the situation and my mood improved. Here, AR was a little more in evidence as were key enabling technologies. I caught up with Kopin showing the Golden-i solution that it has partnered with Verizon to provide for first responders. In the Qualcomm booth, Vuforia's news items covered their cloud-based service that now permits users to add their own content as targets in a mobile AR experience (for example, the ModelAN3D application) and new text (as opposed to "simply" image) recognition capabilities.The first application to be enabled with this feature, Big Bird's Words, helps users find and learn new words in their environment.

The crowds around NVIDIA's Project Shield were thick and the reviews by Slashgear, Wired, Mashable, Droid Life and others were enthusiastic, with only a few exceptions. It certainly merits the many awards received. Why doesn't NVIDIA make this the first big AR-assisted power gamer platform?

A little further I met Limitless Computing, a small company that escaped my attention before, even though it has been featured in the media showing its AR capabilities. It launched its VYZAR 2D and 3D AR engine for producing mobile AR experiences at CES but I'm not sure what it really does different from the SiteSpace 3D which is highly valuable for industrial AR use cases where Sketch up is used with KML. This merits further investigation. Limitless marketing folks need a tutorial in AR terminology.

South Hall is also where I found the AR-assisted games by Sphero which made it on the PC World editors list of the 10 best CES2013 technology products (in 31 slides), and on which virtual reality and devices for 3D experiences were also featured. I found it odd that the  night vision companies I found in South Hall had never heard of Augmented Reality!

I didn't have to explain mobile AR's benefits to the many young companies I found in CES2013's Eureka Park in the Venetian. There I met with folks from Innovega, Luminode, Precision Augmented Reality Works, 3DeWitt, among dozens of others. Of course, it was stimulating to see so many new products and people in such a short time, but there remains a lot of follow up before I can assess if CES2013 was truly worth the effort.

Categories
Innovation Internet of Things

Computer Vision on a Programmable Flying Board

Producing video content is said to be the way of the future. Every time I've attempted to develop a short video, I've found it difficult, orders of magnitude more effort than simply posting 500 words in a blog (and that is more difficult that it sounds). How are we going to overcome the barriers to video publishing? Perhaps a flying smart camera?

There will be many new tools coming out to help people who capture their lives (more or less continually) with video. For example, if using the Google Project Glass device, a person could log their lives (and their baby's life) and accumulate content quickly. But I've discovered since I started wearing the Looxcie X2 camera that it's not the capture of video that's the most difficult, it's making sense of it!

I'm bringing up these points because they converge precisely with a post I saw on TechCrunch. When the editors at TechCrunch announced in May that they were starting a series on "makers," as those who build hardware for business or pleasure are called in our circles, I perked up. In only the fourth episode, I learned about something that hits two of my key words: computer vision and programmable board.

The company featured in this video segment is Centeye, the maker of computer vision chips that have become the basis of the ArduEye, an open source project putting machine learning computer vision on Arduino.

Why is this important? Because it demonstrates that making sense of the video can be done with very little computational overhead. This diagram compares the vision chip with a CMOS camera that pushes all the pixels it captures to a CPU for storage or analysis (click on the figure to see an enlargement):

Now, this alone might not get your interest, however, in order to demonstrate the advantages of the low power/low computational overhead they put the board on a set of blades and made it into helicopter. You need to watch this video!

This might remind you of the Parrot AR Drone, but it's better because it doesn't require an iPhone.

Perhaps, in the place of or in addition to an HD camera on a pair of glasses, there could be a vision chip that helps to edit the captured content. This is already done in head mounted cameras for the defense sector, I'm told, however, it must be produced at low cost, low weight and low power consumption for the rest of us to benefit from these breakthroughs. I hope to see these chips used more widely when there are more people doing projects with ArduEye.

Categories
Business Strategy Innovation

Life is too short to be busy

In the past two months, there has been little time for idle thoughts about Spime Wrangling. The expression "Dawn-to-Dusk" to describe how hard a peasant worked in the fields in the middle ages or a worker in a South Asian sweatshop doesn't do justice to how fully engaged I've felt during the 2nd quarter of 2012. I've had to devote myself to my other (non-blogging) duties because I've been wrangling new spimes, while traveling. At least, that's what I've told myself.

I'm back. I'm still wrangling, and traveling, but I've readjusted my perspective on the "madness," the feeling of anxiety that something important might be slipping away. What order I may have been (or will be) able to impose on the world as we know it cannot be measured. Can't be done. It's like trying to quantify the size of the ocean or the impact that our sensor-izing the world (putting sensors everywhere) will have on society.

Don't try! The way spimes work (continuously producing, automatically, effortlessly) we are guaranteed that there's not just "something" that is escaping our attention while our attention is focused elsewhere, we are sleeping or otherwise relaxing, but rather, there's more that's escaping us than we will ever know.

Sounds like I'm heading into another of those "accelerating pace of change" pieces but I'm actually going the other way. Tim Kreider's June 30 New York Times essay, The 'Busy' Trap summarizes beautifully the point that I, and I think many other people, feel. The essay ends with the short sentence that I've used as the title of this post. Stop reading this post. Take a minute to absorb Kreider's suggestion that a break is in order.

Despite cool temperatures, overcast skies, it's summer in Western Europe. Time for holidays. Millions of people are, whether they choose or not, going to feel their output, perhaps even their productivity, drop sharply. Either by choice, precisely as Kreider has done, or by default, because so many others have gone for some idle time on the beach, we are entering the slow period of the year. And it is overdue! I will be using it to digest and to summarize the trends I've seen in the first 6 months of this year.

Categories
Innovation Social and Societal

In digital anima mundi

Each year the producers of TED bring beautifully-articulated, thought-provoking content to the world. Those of us who are not invited or choose not to attend the event in person get free access to these talks in the weeks that follow the end of the live production. My first session from the 2012 TED program was by Peter Diamandis about our fascination with negative trends and the concepts he has captured in Abundance, the book.

An example of abundance in the world/on the web is the page on which Gene Becker of Lightening Laboratories shares his notes and slides of an inspirational talk he gave last week on a SXSW stage. Thank you for sharing these, Gene!

 

Categories
3D Information Augmented Reality Innovation

Playing with Urban Augmented Reality

AR and cities go well together. One of the reasons is that, by comparison with rural landscapes, the environment is quite well documented (with 3D models, photographs, maps, etc). A second reason is that some features of the environment, like the buildings, are stationary while others, like the people and cars, are moving. Another reason for these to fit naturally together is that there's a lot more information that can be associated with places and things than those of us passing through can see with our "naked" eyes. There's also a mutual desire: people –those who are moving about in urban landscapes, and those who have information about the spaces–need or want to make these connections more visible and more meaningful.

The applications for AR in cities are numerous. Sometimes the value of the AR experience is just to have fun. Let's imagine playing a game that involves the physical world and information encoded with (or developed in real time for use with) a building's surface. Mobile Projection Unit (MPU) Labs is an Australian start up doing some really interesting work that demonstrates this principle. They've taken the concept of the popular mobile game "Snake" and, by combining it with a small projector, smartphone and the real world, made something new. Here's the text from their minimalist web page:

"When ‘Snake the Planet!” is projected onto buildings, each level is generated individually and based on the selected facade. Windows, door frames, pipes and signs all become boundaries and obstacles in the game. Shapes and pixels collide with these boundaries like real objects. The multi-player mode lets players intentionally block each other’s path in order to destroy the opponent."

Besides this text, there's a quick motivational "statement" by one of the designers (this does not play in the page for me, but click on vimeo logo to open it):

 

 

And this 2 minute video clip of the experience in action:

I'd like to take this out for a test drive. Does anyone know these guys?

Categories
Augmented Reality Innovation

Square Pegs and Round Holes

For several years I've attempted to bring AR (more specifically mobile AR) to the attention of a segment of media companies: those that produce and sell print and digital content (of all kinds) as a way of bringing value to both their physical and digital media assets (aka "publishers").

My investments have included writing a white paper and a position paper. I've mused on the topic in blog posts (here and here), conducted workshops, and traveled to North America to present my recommendations at meetings where the forward-looking segment of the publishing industry gathers (e.g., Tools of Change 2010, NFAIS 2011).

I've learned a lot in the process but I do not think I've had any impact on these businesses. As far as the publishers of books, newspapers, magazines and other print and digital content (and those who manage) are concerned, visual search is moderately interesting but mobile AR technology is a square peg. It just has not fit in the geometry of their needs (a round hole).

With their words and actions, publishers have demonstrated that they are moving as quickly as they possibly can (and it may not be fast enough) towards “all digital.” Notions of extending the life expectancy of their print media assets by combining them with interactive digital annotations are misplaced. They don’t have these thoughts. I was under the illusion that there would be a fertile place, at least worthy of exploration, between page and screen, so to speak. Forget it.

After digesting this and coming back to the topic (almost a year since having last pushed it) I’ve adjusted my thinking. Publishers are owners and managers of assets that are (and increasingly will be) used interactively. The primary difference between the publisher and other businesses that have information assets is that the publisher has the responsibility to monetize the assets directly, meaning by charging for the asset, not some secondary product or service. Relative sizes and complexity of digital archives could also be larger in a company that I would label “publisher,” but publishers come in all sizes so this distinction is, perhaps, not valuable.

Publishers are both feeding and reliant upon the digital media asset production and distribution ecosystem. Some parts of the ecosystem are the same  companies that served the publishers when their medium was print. For example, companies like MarkLogic and dozens of others (one other example here), provide digital asset management systems. When I approached a few companies in the asset management solution segment, they made it clear that if there’s no demand for a feature, they’re not going to build it.

Distribution companies, like Barnes & Noble and Amazon, are key to the business model in that they serve to put both the print (via shipping customers and bookstores) and digital (via eReaders) assets in the hands of readers (the human type).

Perhaps this is where differentiation and innovation with AR will make a difference. I hope to explore if and how the eReader product segment could apply AR technology to sell more and more often.
 
 

Categories
3D Information Augmented Reality Innovation

Improving AR Experiences with Gravity

I’m passionate about the use of AR in urban environments. However, having tested some simple applications, I have been very disappointed because the sensors on the smartphone I use (Samsung GalaxyS) and the alogrithms for feature detection we have commercially are not well suited to show me really stable or very precise augmentations over the real world.

I want to be able to point at a building and get specific information about the people or activities (e.g., businesses) within at a room-by-room/window-and-door level of precision. Instead, I’m lucky if I see small 2D labels that jiggle around in space, and don’t stay “glued” to the surface of a structure when I move around. Let’s face it, in an urban environment, humans don’t feel comfortable when the nearby buildings (or their parts) shake and float about!

Of course, this is not the only obstacle to urban AR use and I’m not the first to discover this challenge. It’s been clear to researchers for much longer. To overcome this in the past some developers used logos on buildings as markers. This certainly helped with recognizing which building I’m asking about and, based on the size of the logo, estimating my distance from it, but there’s still low precision and poor alignment with edges.

In 4Q 2011 metaio began to share what its R&D team has come up with to address this among other issues associated with blending digital information into the real world in more realistic ways. In the October 27 press release, the company described how, by combining gravity awareness with camera-based feature detection, it is able to improve the speed and performance of detecting real world objects, especially buildings.

The applications for gravity awareness go well beyond urban AR. “In addition to enabling virtual promotions for real estate services, the gravity awareness in AR can also be used to improve the user experience in rendering virtual content that behaves like real objects; for example, virtual accessories, like a pair of earrings, will move according to how the user turns his or her head.”

The concept of Gravity Alignment is very simple. It is described and illustrated in this video:

Earlier this week (on January 30, 2012), metaio released a new video about what they’ve done over the past 6 months to bring this technology closer to commercial availability. The video below and some insights about when gravity aligned AR will be available on our devices have been written up in Engadget and numerous general technology blogs in recent days.

I will head right over to the Khronos Group-sponsored AR Forum at Mobile World Congress later this month to see if ARM will be demonstrating this on stage and to learn more about the value they expect to add to make Gravity Aligned AR part of my next device.

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
3D Information Innovation Research & Development True Stories

What will your next gesture invoke?

When Alvaro Cassinelli, the winner of the 2011 grand prize at Laval Virtual, the largest annual Virtual Reality conference, was asked by the Guardian what motivated him to develop a platform using Augmented Reality and everyday objects to represent a user's request, his reply revealed something to which we should all pay attention.

Cassinelli said "non-verbal communication was (and still is) the most reliable device I have when I want to avoid ambiguity in everyday situations." He was referring to the fact that as a South American living in Japan, there are many times when communication is unclear.

One doesn't have to be living with cultural and linguistic barriers to need gestures. I learned the value of technology-assisted non-verbal communications 20 years ago. During one of my first sessions using a personal videoconferencing system in my home office with a client who was then working at Apple, his words and his gesture did not align! He said "maybe" in response to a recommendation I made, but the posture of his head and the position of his hands said "no way." This was an "ah ha" moment that convinced me how valuable technology could be to share non-verbal communications when meetings involve a remote participant.

In 2004, when I started working with the partners of the EU funded (FP 6) Augmented Multiparty Interaction project, one of the objectives of using computer vision was to analyze the non-verbal communications in gestures and to compare these with the spoken words during a business meeting. One of the conclusions of the project's research was that computers can detect when there is a discrepancy between verbal and non-verbal signals, but they cannot determine which of the two messages is the one the user intended to communicate.

If and when gestures become a way of communicating our instructions to a digital assistant, will we all need to learn to use the same gestures? or will we individually train the systems watching us to recognize the gestures we designate? These are a few of questions I raised in the position paper AR Human Interfaces: The Case of Gestures. I don't have the answers to these questions, but I'm certain that it will take multiple disciplines working together over many iterations to get us to an optimal balance of standard and personal gestures, just as we have in other forms of communication.

Cassinelli won a prize for innovation and I'm confident that he's on to something, but it will be several more years before gestures are reliable for man-machine interfaces.

Categories
Innovation Research & Development

Innovation Research

INSEAD has published its Global Innovation Index for 2011.

"The overall GII scores provide a composite picture of the state of each country’s innovation performance. The Report stresses leaders by index, by income group and by region.

"Switzerland comes in at top place in the overall GII 2011 rankings (up from position 4th last year) on the basis of its strong position in both the Input and Output Sub- Indices (3rd and 2nd, respectively). Although the country does not top any individual pillar, it places within the top 5 in three Input pillars (Institutions, Market and Business sophistication) and both Output pillars (Scientific outputs and Creative outputs)."

Source: INSEAD (2011) Global Innovation Index

Another interesting point to examine is where China is positioned on the scales of R&D users and R&D importers. From the LiftLab, this is part of a post by Marc Laperrouza on his "Time to look east" blog. Marc pulled out this chart and made the comment below.

"As with many synthetic indexes, it is always worthwhile to dig further into the data. It turns out that China has a number of strengths and weaknesses. Among the former, the report lists patent applications, gross capital formation, high-tech imports and exports (a large majority are MNC-driven).

Among the latter, one can find regulatory quality, press freedom and time to start a business. True enough, both business and market sophistication have notably increased over the years and so has scientific output.If China aims to reach the top 20 or higher it will have to work hard (and fast) on its institutions."

Categories
Innovation Research & Development

3D City Models and AR

Google StreetView was certainly a trail-blazing concept and it has entered the mainstream. But it was not the first service and Google isn’t the first company that had the concept to collect data about the physical world by driving a specially equipped vehicle (with one or more cameras, high performance GPS and other sensors) through space. Decades earlier, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked on this concept in order to permit the vehicles landing on the moon (or other spatial bodies) to record their immediate environment. Earthmine is a pioneer not only in the capture of the real world (using designs developed by the JPL) but also to explore business models based on this data sets. What do these have in common? They proved that the ambitious goal of digitally “capturing” the real world in a form that supports navigation through the data afterwards, was possible.

As the technologies developed in these projects have evolved and become more powerful–in every dimension–and competitors have emerged based on other maturing technologies, systems are detecting the physical world at higher and higher resolutions, and the data gathered produce increasingly more accurate models at lower costs.

Instead of “manually” building up a 3D model from a 2D map and/or analog data, urban environments are being scanned, measured and modeled at an amazing speed, and at lower cost than ever before. Fascinating, but to what end?

In the AR-4-Basel project, we seek to make available to AR developers accurate 3D models in order for the digital representation of the real world to serve as the basis for higher performance AR experiences. The concept is that if a developer were able to use the model when designing experiences, or the placement of content, they would have a virtual reality in which to experiment. Then, when in the real world the user’s device with a camera would automatically extract features, such as edges of buildings, roofs, and other stationary attributes of the world, and match those with the features “seen” earlier in the digital model. The digital data would be aligned more accurately and the process of augmenting the world with the desired content would be faster.

In order to determine if this is more than just a concept, I need to find and receive the assistance of 3D city model experts. Here are a few of the sites to which I’ve been in search of such knowledge:

This process is proving to be time consuming but it might yield some results before another solution to improve AR experience quality emerges!