Category: Social and Societal

about either people in my network who I want to profile or about social uses for the technology I study. Behavioral or User Experience topics. This is also where I will put any post that has to do with inhibitions of using technology (looking funny in public), or trends in different societies/regions of the world

Categories
Augmented Reality Social and Societal

AR-4-Kids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Internet of Things Social and Societal

What makes a community?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
2020 Augmented Reality Social and Societal

Travel in 2020

Many of the use scenarios for Augmented Reality involve a person arriving in a new environment and wishing there was an instant guide, providing customized, in-depth assistance on demand. This precise use case is one of three described in the Open Mobile Alliance draft requirements document for Mobile Augmented Reality.

To complete the scenario, our technology-savvy traveler is going to need a few complementary products and services. The details were sketchy until I read this new study commissioned by Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, and published by The Futures Company.

The report, entitled "From Chaos to Collaboration" details a set of discrete 'enabling' technologies and innovations. For those in a hurry, probably traveling, the companies have conveniently issued the key findings in bullet format (below) and published an infographic (Click on this low resolution version to see the full size version).

Key findings

  1. The next generation of experience: Travel is increasingly about depth rather than breadth of experience. Technologies such as augmented reality, gamification mechanisms and smart mobile devices will transform the travel experience
  2. Automatic transit: Chips, biometrics, long range fingerprinting and near field communications (NFC) can be deployed in a more integrated way to fast-forward how people move around
  3. Payment with memory:  All data on payments made before and during a trip will be integrated, acting as a digital memory of expenditure leading to more personalised services delivering higher value and more profitable relationships
  4. Intelligent recommendation: As technologies make it easier for people to tag and review all aspects of travel experiences, the prospect of personal travel guides and mobile tour representatives will give travellers the tools they need to enrich their experience
  5. Taking the stress out of travel: Intelligent luggage tags and tickets will give greater reassurance whilst m-Health (mobile-Health) applications will allow travellers to manage and monitor their health and wellbeing as if they were at home
  6. The business tourist: Continued emphasis on the wellbeing at work may see the rise of the business tourist which will demand speed and efficiency as well as a home-away-from-home

An AR services developer could spend the rest of this year researching and developing their partner ecosystem for travel-related experiences. From this report alone one could define a fantastic channel strategy and several exciting business models. I wish other use cases for new technology were as well documented and thought out as this!

Categories
2020 3D Information Augmented Reality Social and Societal

Reality TV in 3D

I haven't regularly watched television in nearly 8 years. There isn't a television in my home or my office and when I'm near a television, it doesn't occur to me to turn it on. I am seriously out of touch with what this industry has to offer but my life doesn't lack content. It is just filled with media that I'm choosing to watch or to listen to, when there's time and interest. And, I don't use a terminal that has "channels" in the old fashion broadcast television style. 

I'm certainly not alone in making media choices on a daily or hourly basis via a device other than a TV set. In fact, the whole Web 2.0 and social media movement has provided entertainment "on demand" and just-in-time informational outlets for huge segments of society. And some televisions are already Internet-connected terminals capable of much more than only showing broadcast content.

Many consumers in 2020 will be buying and regularly using devices first introduced this year at the International Consumer Electronics Show. According to an IEEE Spectrum article on the upcoming CES, television is going to be prominently featured among the 2012 edition's announcements. Television sizes and resolutions continue to grow. But this year, as in the past two years, the theme is 3D TV. Manufacturers of displays and televisions are steadily improving what they provide for those who want to watch 3D content. The problem, some believe, isn't the idea that we need 3D, or that there is a shortage of 3D content. It's the glasses. We need solutions that don't require glasses. Stream TV's glasses-free Ultra-D 3D technology is among the popular tech topics for the past three weeks.

Perhaps one of the reasons that people are enamored with 3D is that it mimics reality, the real world. If we are looking for realism, perhaps we also want realistic content. Reality TV has grown and is not showing signs of going away. Unfortunately, from what I've seen of it, Reality TV doesn't have much to do with real Reality.

Reality TV in 3D is getting closer to what might be possible using one of the other hot segments on display at CES this year: eyewear for hands-free Augmented Reality.

Who says glasses are the problem? I and several billion other people wear glasses daily. At least a dozen companies, including Vuzix, the most well-known name in the segment, will show their latest eyewear at CES. While it will show off a lightweight dual-screen model, Vuzix has already disclosed that the next optical see-through displays they will release in 2012 will be monocles, not as shown in this illustration.

In addition to using such appliances to display digital content over the real world (AR), extending them with a couple of cameras (particularly dual cameras for stereoscopic capture) could give us Reality TV in 3 dimensions with a first person point of view. Imagine that you could tune into the life of a famous person or an animal, seeing the world from their eyes. Could this be reminiscent of the feeling we get from following prolific people on Facebook or bloggers ("life bloggers")? Only, in the scenario I'm proposing, text and photos would be replaced with a live stereo video and audio feed. Will this redefine what people consider to be entertaining or boring?

Will this be television in 2020 or just an ordinary pair of glasses?

Categories
Internet of Things Social and Societal

Do you believe (in IoT)?

Larry Smarr’s early December article in the New York Times, An Evolution Toward a Programmable Universe, poetically explains how over the next ten years we and everything around us will be connected. The potential societal, economic and health benefits of the Internet of Things come bursting out of Smarr’s paragraphs like from a pastor on the pulpit. While I’m firmly persuaded that such benefits are possible, I also anticipate that there might be risks.

Another example of the NYT’s campaign to raise public awareness of the IoT was published on December 17. The Internet Get Physical rose to be most popular article of the day (or week, I’m not sure). As the author, Steve Lohr, points out, the Internet of Things is relevant to the general population because it can have an impact on both the health of our planet and business health.

Across many industries, products and practices are being transformed by communicating sensors and computing intelligence. The smart industrial gear includes jet engines, bridges and oil rigs that alert their human minders when they need repairs, before equipment failures occur. Computers track sensor data on operating performance of a jet engine, or slight structural changes in an oil rig, looking for telltale patterns that signal coming trouble.

Sensors on fruit and vegetable cartons can track location and sniff the produce, warning in advance of spoilage, so shipments can be rerouted or rescheduled. Computers pull GPS data from railway locomotives, taking into account the weight and length of trains, the terrain and turns, to reduce unnecessary braking and curb fuel consumption by up to 10 percent.

Thomas Friedman’s thought piece early this week about technology (and network-connected things) in cities (smart cities) is asking readers (especially those in the GOP) to consider how technology innovation produces employment and fuels economic recovery.

When taken individually, each of these is beautifully formulated. Together they read like a hymn book of future (particularly IoT) technology.

I point out the trend because I wonder what is behind it, and what readers who are not following this field closely, but who closely take in every NYT feature and editorial, think of these repeated praises. Is there an element of faith in the goodness of technology resembling the faith some place in God? Have there in the past been similar, concentrated efforts to promote one technology sector as the savior of the planet? Are readers reassured by the thought that technology is going to come to their rescue? Will the general public be disillusioned if (when) such benefits take longer than predicted to materialize?

Categories
Augmented Reality Social and Societal Standards

Virtual Public Art Project

Some believe that experiencing art in digital forms while interacting with or set in real world settings will be a widely adopted use case for Augmented Reality. People will be able to experience more examples of artistic expression, in different places and to contribute by expressing themselves through their software and mobile devices. Projects to explore the interaction of digital and physical objects are quite popular at the annual SIGGRAPH event.

One of the earliest projects using the Layar AR browser for artistic expression in public (and private) spaces is the Virtual Public Art Project begun in March 2010 by Christopher Manzione, a New York City artist and sculptor. Manzione created the VPAP by publishing his creations in a dedicated layer. The site says:

VPAP is the first mobile AR outdoor art experience ever, and maximizes public reception of AR art through compatibility with both iPhone 3GS and Android phones using the free Layar application.

Artists around the world have invested in putting their digital work into the VPAP layer. Projects like this one certainly have the potential to dramatically change how people interact with one another and with art, especially if they are also able to leave their comments or opinions about the artist's work.

One of the limitations of the current VPAP, and perhaps a reason it has not received attention since the fall/winter of 2010-2011, is that it is only viewable on one browser. If there were standards for AR formatting, as there are today for formatting content viewed in a Web browser, then any viewer application, capable of detecting the user's context such as the AR browsers from wikitude and metaio (junaio) would also provide access to the artists' work. In an ideal world one source of content could offer all users the same or similar experiences, using their software of choice.

In the face of multiple proprietary technology silos (and client applications with projects requiring wide, browser-neutral audiences), some AR experience developers offer services based on a single back end with interfaces to each of the publishing platforms. Examples include the Hoppala Augmentation by Hoppala Agency, BuildAR by MOB Labs and MARways by mCRUMBS. In each case, these platforms streamline the publishing process for the content creator to have the widest possible reach.

Will they also need to write interfaces to the next AR browsers? What will these platforms be capable of when Web browsers also support AR?

I guess these are not questions on which artists should be spending their time.

Categories
Augmented Reality Events Research & Development Social and Societal

Algorithmic City and Pattern Language

The Mobile City Web portal and the blog of Martijn de Waal are inspirational to me. He introduces many concepts that, although they do not use precisely the same words/vocabulary, they mirror what I've been thinking and seeing. One of the posts on The Mobile City from March 2011 is a review by guest contributor Michiel de Lange of a compendium of articles about technology in cities edited by Alessandro Aurigi and Fiorella De Cindio.

The Augmented Urban Spaces (2008) would be the basis for a great conference on "smarter cities" and Internet of Things.

Another post that I found stiulting is Martijn's report of the Cognitive Cities Salon he attended in Amsterdam, Martijn highlighted a talk given by Edwin Gardner entitled "The Algorithmic City" which I am sorry to have missed and, unfortunately, I have not found the slides on-line (yet). From what Martijn writes, the subject of Algorithmic Cities is currently theoretical but one can imagine a day when it will become common place.

The Algorithmic City is the result of urban planners using algorithms as part of their process(es). Quoting from the Mobile City blog post published on July 3 2011:

"So far algorhithms have shown up in ‘parametric design’ where all kinds of parameters can be tweeked that the computer will then turn into a design for a building or even a complete city. Gardner is not so much interested in this approach. The problem is that there is no relation between the paramaters, the shapes generated and the society that is going to make use of these shapes. Social or economic data are hardly used as parameters and the result is ‘a fetishism of easthetics’, at best beautiful to look at, but completely meaningless.

Instead, Gardner takes inspiration from Christophers Alexander‘s book A Pattern Lanugage."

I'm not sure if there is a connection between the theoretical work of Gardner and a video of the next version of a software solution provided by Procedural (a startup based in Zurich purchased by ESRI on July 11, 2011), called CityEngine but somehow the two come together in my mind. Using CityEngine, design algorithms are manipulated using the simplest of gestures, such as dragging. It's not a software platform I'm likely to have need for in the near future, but I hope that urban planners will soon have opportunities to experiment with it, to explore the Algorithmic City concept, and that I will witness the results. Maybe someone will build an AR experience to "see" the Algorithmic City using smartphones.

Categories
Business Strategy Internet of Things Social and Societal

Shaspa-Shared Spaces

Oliver Goh of Shaspa Research said in an interview with Into Tomorrow during CES2010 that "smart technologies" should solve real world problems we experience. That oversimplifies the situation a bit, I think. The types of problems we as individuals want technology to solve will be different based on our circumstances (age, home vs business, country of residence, culture, etc) and the challenges facing businesses also vary widely depending on the domain, currency fluctuations and so forth.

So how could one device detect any circumstance and be ready to respond? Good question! One which I hope to be able to ask about the Shaspa Bridge.

According the Shaspa web site where I found this diagram, their technology connects sensors, gathers data and supports software for decision making and management of resources. Their applications are focusing on shared living and working spaces–hence the name "Sha" for Shared and "Spa" for Spaces.

Sounds remarkably reminiscent of the applications built on the Pachube platform using sensors in the environment or on a smart phone to inform decision making.  But the companies with which Shaspa seeks to do business are quite different and, although there is reference on the site to open and interoperable solutions based on standards, the concepts of Open Source and building communities of users and developers are noticeably absent from their positioning.

Shaspa has some points in common with WideTag in that there is a social media component to the platform. And, similarly to WideTag over the past year, Shaspa does not appear (based on its web site "news" section) to be making much noise. The most recent posting on SlideShare is already over 24 months old. The company could be conserving resources for when there are greater opportunities for businesses serving the developers of solutions based on the Internet of Things, or busy actually doing projects which are too sensitive to make public.

Could Shaspa be one of the companies which will get a positive boost from the recent acquisition of Pachube?
 

Categories
Internet of Things Policy, Legal, Regulatory Social and Societal

Smart Cities and Big Citizens

The AR-4-Basel project is a framework by which public data about a city, the city of Basel more specifically, can be put in the hands of Augmented Reality developers using a variety of tools and platforms and to encourage the development community to be creative. Many scenarios for AR in urban environments are for consumers. The end goal being that if we knew more about our immediate environments, we might make different decisions.

The departments of the city of Basel with whom I'm in communications are primarily thinking of the Internet of Things, and AR in particular, as a professional tool, enabling people to do their job more efficiently when in the field, perhaps to save on resources/reduce waste (increase efficiency) and to make better decisions which might impact their lives or those of others.

So, in the context of this project, I'm spending a lot of time speaking with experts and reading the opinions of those much more informed in these matters of "smart cities" than I. Martijn de Waal is one of those that has invested highly of himself in this topic and clearly "gets it."

One of the posts that I found particularly enlightening is a "dialog" of sorts between Ed Borden of Pachube and Adam Greenfield of Urbanscale. Rather than read my paraphrasing, please read it.

At this point, the jury is out on if these are really different positions and if different, which of these positions best characterizes the situation. It is early enough that cities (BigGov) and their managers (politicians) could "wake up" and take a more active role in their own technology use. But not all citizens want or should be participating in the decisions that require having all (and some of it sensitive) data. And, it is definitely true that citizens can and should be involved in some of these services which primarily benefit them.

I look forward to seeing this dialog continue and to learning more from the experts in this field. Maybe as a small citizen of a small urban area in a small country, I will be able to make a difference in how others live.

Categories
Social and Societal

A Time Before

It's easy to remember the pre-Twitter era. Bluebirds flew by us without notice. We could compose thoughts in full sentences, paragraphs, even. Hashtags were called "pound" signs and e-mail was the primary means of communication. We could pretend we were unaware of what others anywhere on the planet were doing at any point in time.

But today, it doesn't seem that there was a time before blogging, before Web 2.0, before WordPress, before people wanting (or needing) to express themselves in words and pictures to others who might have an interest and the time to read, to comment and write their own blogs.

It's even more difficult to remember a time before mobile phones, before finding your friend in a crowd by calling them, a time when the most common question asked on the phone was not "where are you?" because you could only be at the place where the phone was attached to the wall.

There have been a million blog posts about the speed with which we, as individuals and as members of a larger society, are changing. And even a million more posts about the disruption that all this "connectedness" has caused and will cause. Being more connected, more closely connected seems the direction in which we are inevitably heading.

Spimes are hyper-connected. In fact, they don't exist without being connected intermittently or continually. It will not be long before people will be unable to remember today, a time before all their objects were sensing, tracking and being tracked. A time when only "big things"  like trucks, trains, planes and ships containing valuable goods and people were tracked. It's not clear at what point the connectedness reaches its peak.

Will it ever? Will there ever be a time when people say "well, that's sufficient" to their state of connectedness and awareness of their world and turn their attention elsewhere?

 

Categories
2020 Social and Societal

Back to the Future

It's difficult to get the right mixture of technology, philosophy, sociology and history into a 10 minute talk about the future. It takes a lot of preparation and the results vary with the audience to whom you are speaking.

Gerd Leonhard, a futurist who lives in Basel but works around the world, is a master at pulling together concepts from a wide variety of sources and using examples that are meaningful to his audience. I've just watched the first episode of GerdTube about Free and Freemium. This topic is particular appropriate for him to be speaking about in a free video series because Gerd seems to be an expert at giving away his knowlwedge (via Twitter– he has 19,000+ followers, via Facebook, G+ and lots of other channels, including, via YouTube). At the same time, Gerd exudes a sense of being highly successful from a consulting point of view.

I look forward to watching more episodes of GerdTube!

In her presentation (available on YouTube here) at the Future Internet week in Budapest Hungary, Lara Srivastava, also balanced these forces remarkably well, identifying the key issues for the future as well as the opportunities for the Internet of Things, without neglecting the past. It's difficult to say where, precisely, we are in the evolution that, for Srivastava and others, began six years ago but still has a long ways to go before becoming mainstream.  One of her predictions is that we must envisage a day when the public can edit and publish directly into and with the Internet of Things, as we do with our social media on the Web today. That, she predicts will lead to chaos. But chaos is not all bad. Random genetic recombinations are at the very heart evolution, in fact. So celebrate chaos? That requires balance, lots of it!