Category: News

about any announcement that merits receiving a few minutes of reflection

Categories
Augmented Reality News

Skin in the Game

Those who read this blog are more than likely among the group that shares some level of conviction (maybe not as strongly as I do!) that Augmented Reality is going to be important. We are a small minority, but April 2012 will represent an important historical milestone. Perhaps it is as important as the June 2009 release of Layar's AR browser in terms of demonstrating that AR has traction, has graduated from the laboratory, captured imaginations and will have huge commercial impacts.

In the past three weeks many more people are finally getting to see the signs that indicate how important Augmented Reality will be in the future. The curtain that formerly prevented people from knowing how much investment was truly happening is dropping. Major companies are now following Qualcomm and putting resources into AR.

They are putting "skin in the game" and that's what it takes to convince many (including the mobile pundits such as Tomi Ahonen and Ajit Jaokar) that AR has passed a treshhold. In case you didn't catch it, Tomi posted on his blog, Communities Dominate Brands, on April 11, 2012 (probably the shortest blog he's ever written!) that he has seen the light and he can now believe that AR is the planet's 8th mass medium.

Twenty-eleven was a slow year for AR revenue growth but those who were paying attention could see small signs of the growing captial influx. Intel had already demonstrated its interest in AR by investing in Layar in late 2010 and in Olaworks in early 2007 and expanded its investments (e..g, in Total Immersion). Texas Instruments, Imagination Technologies, ARM, ST Ericsson and Freescale all revealed that they have established programs on their own or in partnership with AR companies to accelerate AR on mobile platforms.

But, with only a few exceptions, these announcements by semiconductor companies were "me too," forced by the apparent (media) successes of Qualcomm's Vuforia and Hewlett Packard's Aurasma. These last two companies have heavily contributed to the media's awareness of mobile AR, but, sadly, also contributed to the perceived image that AR is a gimmick.

We can now pinpoint the catalytic event when AR is taken more seriously: the 9:00 AM PDT April 4, 2012 announcement by Google that confirmed prolific rumors that it is indeed working on see-through head-mounted displays (posted on TechCrunch here). Many jumped to the conclusion that these are AR glasses, although the applications are not, strictly speaking, limited to AR.  A blog called Glasses from Google calls them "a new paradigm in computing."

While the figures have not been (and never will be) disclosed by Google, I estimate that the company has already invested well over $4M, approximately ten percent of the entire AR industry revenues in 2011, to get to its current prototype (even one that reboots regularly). And (most likely) without reaching far beyond its internal intellectual properties and a few consultants. Note that, in light of the Project Glass announcement, the Google acquisition of Motorola Mobility for total of about $12.5 billion is very strategic. It surpasses the October 2011 $10 bilion Hewlett Packard acquisition of Autonomy by only a few billion dollars. Very big Skin in the Game.

While the global media has for 15 days steadily reported on and speculated about Project Glass, and the video broke social media records, this is not the only example that there have been and are new investments being made in mobile AR in April 2012. Tiny by financial standards, but significant developments nevertheless, include the Olaworks acquisition, and today Total Immersion has announced that  Peter Boutros, a former Walt Disney VP will be its new president. And Google isn't the only company that's working on eyewear for information. For example, Oakley's Apri 17 announcement that it has been working on an eyewear project shouldn't have taken anyone by surprise but managed to make the headlines.

What and who is next?!

And how much skin will the next announcement be worth?

Without strong business cases this second question will be the most difficult to answer and, for this reason, it is a topic to which I have recently written another post.

Categories
Augmented Reality News

Intel’s First Full Acquisition of Korean Firm, Olaworks

The Korea Herald is not where I normally get my news. Nor do I regularly visit The Register (whose tag line is "Biting the Hand that Feeds IT"). But today I visited both in order to learn more about Intel's $30.7M acquisition of Olaworks.

In case you are not familiar with it, Olaworks was one of the early companies to dedicate itself first to computer vision (primarily face recognition) and then to apply its intellectual property to solve Augmented Reality challenges. The founder of Olaworks, Dr. Ryu Jung-hee, has been a long-standing friend and colleague and one of the most outgoing Koreans I've met. Ryu has attended at least four out of the past five AR Standards Community meetings and miraculously shows up at other events (e.g., he accepted my invitation to come to the first Mobile Monday Beijing meeting and showcase on the topic of mobile AR, and presented about Olaworks during the first AR in China meeting, one year ago).

Not only am I pleased for Ryu and the 60 employees who work for Olaworks, I'm also impressed that an analyst concluded that one reason for the acquisition might be Olawork's facial recognition technologies. At present LG Electronics, Pantech, and HTC make use of Olawork’s face recognition technology in their phones. Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told The Reg that Intel’s decision to acquire was probably informed by the growing popularity of face recognition software in the consumer space. In fact, Texas Instruments recently shared with me that they are very proud of the facial recognition performance they have on the OMAP. Face recognition could be used for a lot of different applications (not just AR) when it is embedded into the SoC, as an un-named source suggested might be Intel's intention since Olaworks seems to be heading for integration with another Intel acquisition, Silicon Hive.

Another analyst speculating on the acquisition, Bryan Ma of IDC, sees the move as one of many steps Intel is taking to "prove it’s better than market leader ARM in the mobile space. It has been trying to position Medfield as a better performance processor using the same power consumption as ARM,” he told The Reg. “In the spirit of this it would make sense for Intel to move for technology and apps which can harness that horsepower to differentiate it from ARM.”

I'm not familiar with the Korean investment landscape but it may be important that the Private Equity Korea article on the acquisition makes a point about Intel's acquisition of Olaworks being the first full Korean acquisition the chip giant has made. It seems that we rarely hear about Korean startups in the West and I suspect that one reason is that the most common exit strategy of a young Korean company is acquisition by one of the global handset manufacturers (LG Electronics, HTC, or Samsung), or one of the large network operators. It's perfectly logical, not only from a cultural point of view but also because the Korean mobile market is large and has a long history of having its own national telecommunications standards.

After NTT-DoCoMo's launch of its 3G service in October 2001, the second 3G network to go commercially live was SK Telecom in South Korea on the CDMA2000 1xEV-DO technology in January 2002 (10 years ago). By May 2002 the second South Korean 3G network was launched by KTF on EV-DO and thus the Koreans were the first to see competition among 3G operators.

I hope that the Olaworks exit signals the opening of Korean technology silos and an opportunity for other regions of the world to benefit from the advances the Koreans have managed to make in their controlled 3G network environment.

Categories
Augmented Reality Events News

hARdware Makes the Headlines

Announcements featuring Augmented Reality are numerous at CES this year. When one steps back from the noise, it appears, as it has most of 2011, that the buzz is primarily coming from the hardware side of the ecosystem. In the limited time I have to absorb from the deluge of CES news I can't begin to capture everything, but just consider:

Where are Intel, ARM, NVIDIA, Imagination Technologies and the other important chip vendors with their eye on mobile?

One can argue if Nokia is a hardware or a software company but it's all three: hardware/devices, software/applications and services/navigation. Nokia's City Lens, being demonstrated at CES, is a great example of urban AR. It's not clear which cities will have it or how many POIs there are. It looks like its only available on the Nokia Lumia 900′s at the moment. Uses onboard sensors to change view modes (held flat, the map shows up on the screen, held upright, list view shows up). OK, so it's rotation-aware. I wonder if this uses any Wikitude technology.

A notable exception to this hardware-centric line-up is Aurasma's announcement about its new 3D engine. Adding 3D puts the platform practically on par with Total Immersion and metaio, at least in terms of feature sets. The technology is featured in a video spot on the LA Times Web site. This and another nice piece in The Guardian is great for raising consumer awareness of AR. The Guardian wrote about the pterodactyl flying around Big Ben. And a video showing a prehistoric monster invading Paris.

There's enough AR-related news and excitement in the first three days of this week to fill a month!

Categories
3D Information Business Strategy News Research & Development

London’s Imperial College

On July 27, 2011 the UK Research Council awarded a £5.9m grant to the “digital city exchange” programme of Imperial College. According to the press release, the funds are to be used to establish a new research center focusing on “smart cities” technologies.

A multidisciplinary team, involving businesses, public administrations and academia, is being put in place to use the city of London as a test bed for emerging smart cities hardware, software and processes. The article in the Financial Times very perceptively puts the focus on the following statements issued by spokesperson, David Gann, the head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at Imperial College.

"New sensors and real-world monitoring can be combined with “cloud computing” to bring greater efficiency and new services to cities. For instance, data about peak traffic periods and local sensors could be used to avoid congestion for supermarket deliveries.

“London, with all its economic and social diversity, will be a very good place to launch some of these capabilities into new cities around the world and create new jobs and growth. The act of invention is at the point of consumption.”

Another article about the grant emphasizes, as did the press release, more of an urban planning angle.

It's very exciting to have this center establishing itself, although the size of the grant does not seem in line with the ambitions and objectives as they are described, and there should be others of its kind connecting to it as well.

Categories
Augmented Reality News Research & Development

Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition

On July 22 2011, Google acquired PittPatt, the Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition Team, a privately-held spin out of CMU Robotics.

Three questions jumped out when I learned of this acquisition.

  • Why? Doesn't Google already have face recognition technology?
    Unfortunately, based on the publicly available information, it's not clear what is new or different about PittPatt's technology. Okay, so they have an SDK. There are several possible explanations for this acquisition. Maybe the previous facial recognition technology Google had acquired with Neven Vision in August 2006 then released as part of Picasa in 3rd quarter 2008 (it appeared in Picasa as early as May 2007) was insufficient. Insufficient could mean inaccurate too often, too difficult to implement in mobile, not scalable. That doesn't seem likely.
    Maybe the difference is that the PittPatt technology was working on video as well as still images. YouTube already has a face recognition algorithm, but it is not real time. For AR it would be valuable if the face recognition and tracking performs reliably in real time.
    Another possible explanation has to do with IP. Given the people who founded PittPatt, perhaps there are some intellectual properties that Google wants for itself or to which it wants to prevent a competitor to have access.
     
  • What are the hot "nearby" properties that will get a boost in their valuation as a result of Google's purchase?
    Faces are the most important attribute we have as individuals and the human brain is hard wired to search for and identify faces. Simulating what our brains do with and for faces is a fundamental computer vision challenge. Since this is not trivial and so many applications could be powered by face recognition (and when algorithms can recognize faces, other 3D objects will not be far behind), there's always a lot of resources going into developing robust, accurate algorithms.

     

     

    Many–perhaps dozens–of commercial and academic groups continually work on facial recognition and tracking technology. Someone has certainly done the landscape analysis on this topic. One of the face recognition research groups with which I've had contact is at Idiap in Martigny, Switzerland. Led by Sebastien Marcel, this research team is focusing on the use of such highly accurate facial recognition that it can be the basis for granting access. KeyLemon is an Idiap spin off using the Idiap technology for biometric authentication to personal computers. And, there is (almost certainly) a sizable group already in Google dedicated to this topic. 
     

  • What value added services or features can emerge that are not in conflict with Google's privacy policy and haven't been thought of already/implemented by Google and others?
    This is an important question that probably has a very long and complex, multi-part answer. I suspect it has a lot to do with 3D objects. What's great about studying faces is that there are so many different ones to work with and they are plastic (distort easily). When the algorithms for detecting, recognizing and tracking faces in video are available on mobile devices, we can imagine that other naturally occurring and plastic objects would not be too far behind.

I hope Eric Schmidt is proven wrong about there not being facial recognition in the future of Google Goggles and similar applications and we see what is behind the curtain in the PittPatt acquisition!

Categories
Internet of Things News

Pachube Acquired by LogMeIn

The news broke earlier today that Wobrun, Mass-based LogMeIn, a provider of software to remotely access computers and mobile devices, acquired Connected Environments, the provider of Pachube for approximately $15M cash. In its press release, and the investor relations conference call that followed, LogMeIn said that it intends to leverage the acquisition to expand its Gravity platform while leaving the existing team in place. Usman Hague, the founder of Connected Environments and the individual most closely identified with the company's vision, wrote a sincere post about his hope for the future on his blog.

Pachube (pronounced Patch Bay) has been around for nearly 4 years (the service was launched in 2008) and has had a tremendous impact on the development of concrete Internet of Things projects.  I hope that this continues and, with the resources of the parent company, expands in the future.

A few words from the LogMeIn press release:

"The Pachube Service and User Community

Pachube is an Internet of Things pioneer.  Their service offers real-time monitoring and management of any type of connected device. Pachube makes it easy for people to connect their devices and sensors to its service, to publish data, and to receive data and instructions from other devices. The Pachube service also collects and stores the published datastreams for further analysis and visualization. Using the Pachube service, individuals, developers and businesses can create applications, services and products that leverage the data created by these connected devices. In doing so, Pachube empowers people to share, collaborate and make use of the information generated by the world around them.  Currently, Pachube users send more than seven million datapoints to the service each day."

The Pachube community is, in my mind, the most valuable asset of the company which cannot quickly be rebuilt. I wonder if LogMeIn will be able to nurture and to grow the community which is composed largely of people who are very firmly devoted to open source.

What do you think?