Category: Events

Category that includes reports or comments/announcements about events or conferences I’ve been to, am organizing or otherwise want to post about. The name of the event itself is the tag. The subcategories could be according to the topic of the event (e.g., mobile, AR, IoT, UX, etc)

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
Business Strategy Events

The Horsemen from Above

As I prepare for CES2013, I have themes with which to search for companies I'll visit and to organize what I'll learn there. One of these filters I use when thinking about a company's relative importance is its size. Another is the value proposition (to me and to the world).

A third way to think of companies is their culture. This one goes in many dimensions (East/West, Open/Proprietary, Off the books R&D vs. InHouse, etc), and is the topic of this post because I read a piece posted yesterday on TechCrunch about the importance of Samsung Electronics.

It's no surprise that business culture is very closely tied to the culture in which the company's employees work and live. For most people who have not lived and worked there, Korean business culture is very difficult to decode. This summary, on a website for Danes working in Korea, really seems to capture the essence:

The Confucian mind-set is a fundamental part of Korean culture. In accordance with Confucian principles, people of higher rank or age are treated with an explicit respect, both socially and in business matters. Employees of Korean companies have a strong sense of loyalty towards their employer and in any situation of conflict they are expected to seek confirmation or take the side of the employer regardless of the logic behind the arguments.

Confucian emphasis on education can be felt throughout Korean society. Koreans are in general very well educated and attach much importance to academic excellence and degrees obtained. The admission examinations for Korean universities are important events as the result of the examinations determine the future of thousands of young Koreans. Networks established during the high-school and college years often play a big role in the following career and throughout life.

It seems that spirituality is a theme in this post!

In the New Testament, the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride white, red, black, and pale horses. They represent Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, respectively. In 2011, as some predicted the Apocalypse in 2012, the metaphor was used in the business and financial press to analyze the impacts of businesses on the future of technology.

The TechCrunch post suggests that Samsung Electronics is reaching the same level of importance in terms of influencing emerging technology  trends and developments as are Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook (some analysts I read on this topic do not include Facebook on the list and, in its place, have found IBM to be a top technology influencer in 2013). Hence, Samsung would be the fifth horseman. If the goal is to emphasize how important a company is on mobile platforms, then Samsung is more important than Amazon and this list could be kept to four. And, in terms of size, they hit the mark. The New York Times reports that Samsung will reach $8.3B in profits in the quarter that ended December 31, 2012.

The problem that Western analysts face in deciding where to position Samsung is that they have low insights into how the company has achieved its success to date, and what Samsung is planning. Given the difference in corporate culture, it is difficult, as difficult as predicting how spirituality impacts other domains, for those surveyed for these rankings to calibrate how Samsung will shape mobile platforms in the next 12 to 18 months.

While at CES, I will be spending a lot of time in the Samsung Electronics booth, as well as those of many other Asian companies, and will continue my quest to better understand how they, despite their business cultures being very different from American and European, are going to impact mobile business opportunities, particularly in Augmented Reality fields, in the next year.

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
Events Internet of Things Standards

Sensors, Their Observations and Uses

There was a splash when my suitcase fell into the puddle next to the taxi outside the Exeter St. David's rail station last night. Although it was sunny under blue skies for both the days in London, while I was indoors attending the Open IoT Assembly, I was expecting rain in England and came prepared, I thought; it was the force of gravity that I had underestimated and caught me (and my suitcase) by surprise.

"More rain" announced the lonely receptionist at the White Hart hotel when I inquired about today's forecast. Instead the sky could not be bluer or clearer of clouds. Is the unpredictability of the weather an omen for the day? At least I won't be traveling with wet belongings on my way to the UK Met Office for the open session of the OGC meeting and back to the rail station this afternoon. 

I'm attending the meeting only for a few hours so that I can conduct in person meetings with the chairs and conveners of the IndoorGML Standards Working Group, the Sensors 4 IoT Standards Working group and other luminaries in the geospatial realm. I find it highly appropriate that the sensors I've used for weather have been so highly inaccurate today! I trust that my internal confidence about my meetings will serve me better today than they did last night.

Categories
Events Internet of Things

IoT via Cloud Meetup in Zurich

The other day I traveled 2 hours and 45 minutes from Montreux to Zurich and 2 hours and 50 minutes home following a 2-hour meetup group meeting at the ETHZ. It was a classic case of my desire to meet and speak with interesting people being sufficiently strong to outweigh my feeling that I have too much to do in too little time. See Time Under Pressure. Fortunately, I could work while on the train and, in keeping with my thinking about Air Quality, I (probably) didn't contribute to the total Swiss CO2 emissions for the day. And what is really amazing is that the meetup was worth my investment. I previously mentioned that I was looking forward to catching up with Dominique Guinard, co-founder and CTO of EVRYTHNG, a young Zurich start up, and co-founder of Web-of-Things portal.

Dom did not disappoint me or the 20 people who joined the meetup. In addition to great content, he is an excellent presenter. He started out at a very high level and yet was quickly able to get into the details of implementations. He included a few demonstrations during the talk and a couple of interesting anecdotes. We learned that his sister doesn't really see the point to him sharing (via Facebook) the temperature readings from his sunspot gadget. And how he was inspired when WalMart IT management came to MIT for a visit and mentioned that they were considering a $200,000 project to connect security cameras to tags in objects in order to reduce theft. In 2 days, Dom (and others, I presume) had a prototype showing that the Web of Things could address the issue with open interfaces. My favorite story during the talk brought up the problems that can arise when you don't have sufficient security. Dom was giving a demonstration of Web of Things once when a hacker in the audience saw the IP address. He was able to go into Dom's server and within minutes (during Dom's talk) the power on his laptop shut off!

In addition to Dom's stage-setting talk, we had the pleasure of having Matthias Kovatsch, researcher in the Institute for Pervasive Computing at ETHZ, and the architect of Copper, a generic browser for the IoT based on Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Matthias presented the status of the projects on which he is working and the results of an ETSI/IETF plugfest to which he went in Paris. The consolidated slides of the IETF-83 CoRE meeting include the Plugtests wrap-up slides (slightly edited). It's really exciting to see how this project is directly contributing to part of the standards proving process!

In addition to these talks, Benjamin Wiederkehr, co-founder of Interactive Things, an experience design and architecture services firm based in Zurich, gave us great insights into the process and the tools they used to achieve the new interactive visualization of cell phone use in Geneva. Learn all about this project by visiting Ville Vivante web site, in collaboration with the City of Geneva.

Valuable evening, folks! Thank you for making another trip to Zurich worth the effort!

Categories
Events Internet of Things

Where EVRYTHNG Connects

Over the past 10 days I've been traveling and participating in important workshops and events in the US so writing and posting to this blog has been infrequent. My recent face-to-face meetings involved those attending the AR-in-Texas workshops, followed by the participants of the Fifth AR Standards Community Meeting that I chaired in Austin. Then, I participated in the Open Geospatial Consortium's quarterly Technical Committee meetings. I'm currently in San Francisco to attend the New Digital Economics Brainstorm.

I haven't counted but I estimate that within a week's time, during and between these events, I've met with over 100 people individually or in small groups. During the trip just prior to this one, the five days of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I met and spoke with at least that many and probably closer to 200 people.

A significant slice of these (the majority, I am guessing), are people with whom I have a history–simply meaning that we may have spoken by Skype, phone or in person, or exchanged some e-mail. Our meetings in the physical space, however, differ from those we conduct virtually. We all know that the Internet has formed far more links between people than physical contacts could ever hope to make, however, meeting in person still brings us value. How much? Well, that's difficult to measure in time and in terms of revenue. Certainly they provide me sufficient value to warrant my leaving my office to attend meetings! I could probably ramble on and reflect further about this interpersonal on-line/in-person communication dichotomy but one tangent I want to explore with you is slightly different.

When I'm traveling I also come into contact with many many objects. Products, places, things. I wonder how many objects (new ones, old ones, ones I've seen/encountered before) I come into contact in a day. What value do these bring to me? How would I discover this?

Think of a ‘Facebook for Things’ with apps, services and analytics powered by connected objects and their digital profiles. With billions of product and other objects becoming connected, tagged and scannable, there’s a massive opportunity for a company that can provide the trusted engine for exchanging this active object information.

One of the companies that is responding to the opportunity is EVRYTHNG. I hope to see many new and familiar people in the room on April 3 in Zurich when I'll be chairing the next Internet of Things face-to-face meeting featuring the start up EVRYTHNG. Why should you be there?

One reason is that co-founder Dominique Guinard will be talking from his company's perspective about:

– What is the Web of Things?
– Web of Things: How and Why?
– Problem Statement: Hardware and Cloud Infrastructures for Web-augmented Things
– Web-enabling Devices and Gateways
– Active Digital Identities (ADIs)
– EVRYTHNG as a storage engine
– Problem Solved: Connecting People & Products
– Vision: Every Thing Connected
– Projects and Concrete Example of How and Why ADIs are Useful.
– Using our cloud services and APIs to build your next internet of things / web of things applications.

Let's connect in Zurich!

Categories
Augmented Reality Events

Aurasma at GDC12 and SXSW12

I was unable to attend the Game Developers Conference last week in San Francisco, but it sounds like it was a good event. I enjoyed reading Damon Hernandez's post on Artificial Intelligence. Damon and I are working together on the AR in Texas Workshops March 16 and 17.

At GDC12, Aurasma was in the ARM booth showing Social AR experiences. During this video interview David Stone gave some numbers and his excitement about the platform nearly leaves him speechless.

The SXSW event is going on this week and Aurasma is there as well. In Austin, Aurasma broke the news about their partnership with Marvel Comics. This is could have been good news for the future of AR-enhanced books. Unfortunately, the creative professionals who worked on this demonstration let us down. Watch the movie of this noisy animation showing what the character is capable of doing, and ask yourself "how many times does a "reader" want to watch this?"

I fear the answer is: Zero. Is there any aspect of this experience sufficiently valuable for a customer to return? I could be wrong.

What more could the character have done? Well, something related to the story of the comic book, for starters!

Categories
Augmented Reality Events Standards

Interview with Neil Trevett

In preparation for the upcoming AR Standards Community Meeting March 19-20 in Austin, Texas, I’ve conducted a few interviews with experts. See here my interview with Marius Preda. Today’s special guest is Neil Trevett.

Neil Trevett is VP of Mobile Content at NVIDIA and President of the Khronos Group, where he created and chaired the OpenGL working group, which has defined the industry standard for 3D graphics on embedded devices. Trevett also chairs the OpenCL working group at Khronos defining an open standard for heterogeneous computing.

Spime Wrangler: When did you begin working on standards and open specifications that are or will become relevant to Augmented Reality?

NT: It’s difficult to say because so many different standards are enabling ubiquitous computing and AR is used in so many different ways. We can point to graphics standards, geo-spatial standards, formatting, and other fundamental domains. [editor’s note: Here’s a page that gives an overview of existing standards used in AR.]

The lines between computer vision, 3D, graphics acceleration and use are not clearly drawn. And, depending on what type of AR you’re talking about, these may be useful, or totally irrelevant.

But, to answer your question, I’ve been pushing standards and working on the development of open APIs in this area for nearly 20 years. I first assumed a leadership role in 1997 as President of the Web3D Consortium (until 2005). In the Web3D Consortium, we worked on standards to bring real-time 3D on the Internet and many of the core enablers for 3D in AR have their roots in that work.

Spime Wrangler: You are one of the few people who has attended all previous meetings of the International AR Standards Community. Why?

NT: The AR Standards Community brings together people and domains that otherwise don’t have opportunities to meet. So, getting to know the folks who are conducting research in AR, designing AR, implementing core enabling technologies, even artists and developers was a first goal. I need to know those people in order to understand their requirements. Without requirements, we don’t have useful standards. I’ve been taking what I learn during the AR Standards community meeting and working some of that knowledge into the Khronos Group.

The second incentive for attending the meetings is to hear what the other standards development organizations are working on that is relevant to AR. Each SDO has its own focus and we already have so much to do that we have very few opportunities to get an in depth report on what’s going on within other SDOs, to understand the stage of development and to see points for collaboration.

Finally, the AR Standards Community meetings permit the Khronos Group to share with the participants in the community what we’re working on and to receive direct feedback from experts in AR. Not only are the requirements important to us, but also the level of interest a particular new activity receives. If, during the community meeting I detect a lot of interest and value, I can be pretty sure that there will be customers for these open APIs down the road.

Spime Wrangler: Can you please describe the evolution you’ve seen in the substance of the meetings over the past 18 months?

NT: The evolution of this space has been rapid, by standards development standards! This is probably because a lot of folks have thought about the potential of AR as just another way of interfacing with the world. There’s also been decades of research in this area. Proprietary silos are just not going to be able to cover all the use cases and platforms on which AR could be useful. 

In Seoul, it wasn’t a blank slate. We were picking up on and continuing the work begun in prior meetings of the Korean AR Standards community that had taken place earlier in 2010. And the W3C POI Working Group had just been approved as an outcome of the W3C Workshop on AR and the Web.

Over the course of 2011 we were able to bring in more of the SDOs. For example, the OGC and Web3D Consortium started presenting their activities during the Second community meeting. The OMA Mob AR Enabler work item presented and ISO SC24 WG 9 chair, Gerry Kim, participated in the Third Meeting in conjunction with the Open Geospatial Consortium’s meeting in Taiwan.

We’ve also established and been moving forward with several community resources. I’d say the initiation of work on an AR Reference Architecture is an important milestone.

There’s a really committed group of people who form the core, but many others are joining and observing at different levels.

Spime Wrangler: What are your goals for the meeting in Austin?

NT: During the next community meeting, the Khronos Group expects to share the progress made in the newly formed StreamInput WG. We’re just beginning this work but there’s great contributions and we know that the AR community needs these APIs.

I also want to contribute to the ongoing work on the AR Reference Architecture. This will be the first meeting in which MPEG will join us and Marius Preda will be making a presentation about what they have been doing as well as initiating new work on 3D Transmission standards using past MPEG standards.

It’s going to be an exciting meeting and I’m looking forward to participating!

Categories
Augmented Reality Events

AR@MWC12

I'm heading to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, the annual gathering of the mobile industry. It's always an exciting event and I meet a lot of interesting companies, some with whom I'm already acquainted, industry leaders, some new to the segments on which I focus but well known in mobile, and others that I've never heard of.

When I arrive in Barcelona on Sunday, I'm going to begin using the MWC AR Navigator, an application developed by mCRUMBS in collaboration with GSMA, the organizer of MWC, to make getting around the city and the event easier and efficient as possible (and with the assistance of AR, of course).

On Monday Feb 27 my first priority will be the Augmented Reality Forum. This half-day conference is sponsored by Khronos Group and four Khronos member companies: Imagination Technologies, ST Ericsson, ARM and Freescale. Through the AR Forum presentations, these companies are driving mobile AR awareness and sharing how their new hardware and open APIs from Khronos will improve AR experiences.

After the presentations, I will be moderating the panel discussion with the speakers. Join us!

In the following days, my agenda includes meetings with over 50 companies developing devices, software and content for AR experiences. Many of those with who I will meet don't have an actual booth. Finding these people among the 60,000 attendees would be impossible without appointments scheduled in advance (and the aid of the MWC AR Navigator)! Are you attending MWC and want to set aside a quick briefing with me, please contact me as soon as possible.

If you haven't booked meetings but want to see for yourself what's new for AR in 2012, I recommend that you at least drop by these booths for demonstrations:

  • Imagination Technologies – Hall 1 D45
  • ST Ericsson partner zone – Hall 7 D45
  • ARM – Hall 1 C01
  • Freescale – AV27
  • Qualcomm – Hall 8
  • Nokia/NAVTEQ – Hall 7
  • Alcatel-Lucent – Hall 6
  • Aurasma (HP) –Hall 7
  • Texas Instruments – Hall 8 A84
  • Intel – Hall 8 B192
  • VTT – Hall 2 G12
  • mCRUMBS and metaio – Hall 2.1 C60
  • HealthAlert App
 – Hall 2.1E65
  • Augmented Reality Lab – Hall 
2H47
  • Blippar – Avenue AV35
  • BRGR Media
 – Hall 2 F49
  • Pordiva – Hall 2 E66
  • wöwbile Mobile Marketing – Hall 7 D85

These are not the only places you will see AR. If you would like me to add others to this list, please leave a comment below.

Categories
Augmented Reality Events Standards

Interview with Marius Preda

On March 19 and 20, 2012 the AR Standards Community will gather in Austin, Texas. In the weeks leading up to the next (the fifth) International AR Standards Community meeting, sponsored by Khronos Group and the Open Geospatial Consortium, experts are preparing their position papers and planning contributions.

I am pleased to be able to share a recent interview with one of the participants of the upcoming meeting, Marius Preda. Marius is Associate Professor with the Institut TELECOM, France, and the founder and responsible of GRIN – Graphics and Interactive Media. He is currently the chairperson of MPEG 3D Graphics group. He has been actively involved in MPEG since 1998, especially focusing on Video and 3D Graphics coding. He is the main contributor of the new animation tools dedicated to generic synthetic objects. More recently, he is the leader of MPEG-V and MPEG AR groups. He is also the editor of several MPEG standards.

Marius Preda’s research interests include 3D graphics compression, virtual character, rendering, interactive rich multimedia and multimedia standardization. And, he also leads several research projects at the institutional, national and European and international levels.

Spime Wrangler:  Where did you first learn about the work going on in the AR Standards community?

MP: In July 2011, during the preparations of the 97th MPEG meeting, held in Turin, Italy, I had the pleasure to meet Christine Perey. She came to the meeting of MPEG-V AhG, a group that is creating, under the umbrella of MPEG, a series of standards dealing with sensors, actuators and, in general, the frontier between physical and virtual world.

Spime Wrangler:  What sorts of activities are going on in MPEG (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG11) that are most relevant to AR and visual search? Is there a document or white paper you have written on this topic?

MP: Since 1998, when the first edition of MPEG-4 was published, the concept of mixed – natural and synthetic – content was made possible in an open and rich standard, relatively advanced for that time. MPEG-4 was not only advancing the compression of audio and video, but also introducing, for the first time, the compression for graphics assets. Later on, MPEG revisited the framework for 3D graphics compression and grouped in Part 16 of MPEG-4 several tools allowing compact representation of 3D assets.

Separately, MPEG published in 2011 the first edition of MPEG-V specification, a standard defining the representation format for sensors and actuators. Using this standard, it is possible to deal with data from simplest sensors such as temperature, light, orientation, position to very complex ones such as biosensors and motion cameras. Similarly for actuators. From the simple vibration effect today embedded in almost all the mobile phones to complex motion chairs such the ones used in 4D theatres, these can all be specified in standard-compliant libraries.

Finally, several years ago, MPEG standardized MPEG-7, a method for describing descriptors attached to media content. This work is currently being extended. With a set of compact descriptors for natural objects, we are working on Visual Search. MPEG has also ongoing work on compression of 3D video, a key technology in order for realistic augmentation of the captured image to be provided and rendered in real time.

Based on these specifications and the significant know-how in domains highly relevant to AR, MPEG decided in December 2011 to publish an application format for Augmented Reality, grouping together relevant standards in order to build a deterministic, solid and useful model for AR applications and services.

More information related to MPEG standards is available here.

Spime Wrangler:  Why are you going to attend the meeting in Austin? I mean, what are your motivations and what do you hope to achieve there?

MP: The objective of AR Standards is laudable but, at the same time, relatively difficult to achieve. There are currently several, probably too many, standardization bodies that claim to deliver relevant standards for AR to the industry. Our duty, as standard organizations, is to provide interoperable solutions. This is not new. Organizations, including Standards Development bodies, always try to use mechanisms such as liaisons or to cooperate rather than to compete.

A recent very successful example of this is the work on video coding jointly created by ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG and published individually under the names MPEG-4 AVC and h.264 respectively. In fact, there is exactly the same document and a product compliant with one is implicitly compliant with the second. My motivation in participating to Austin meeting is to verify if such collaborative approach is possible as well in the field of AR.

Spime Wrangler: Can you please give us a sneak peak into what you are going to present and share with the community on March 19-20?

MP: I’ll present two aspects of MPEG work related to AR. In a first presentation, I’ll talk about the MPEG-4 Part 16 and Part 25. The first is proposing a set of tools for 3D graphics compression, the second an approach on how to apply these tools to scene graph representations other than the one proposed by MPEG-4, e.g. COLLADA and X3D. So, as you can see, there are several AR-related activities going on in parallel.

In the second presentation I’ll talk about the MPEG Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF), and MARBle, an MPEG browser developed by the TOTEM project for AR (currently available for use on Android phones). ARAF is an ongoing activity in MPEG and early contact with other standards body may help us all to work towards the same vision of providing a one stop solution for AR applications and services.

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.