Tag: AR-Eyewear

Categories
Augmented Reality

Augmented Vision 2

It’s time, following my post on Rob Spence’s Augmented Vision and the recent buzz in the blog-o-sphere on the topic of eyewear for hands-free AR (on TechCrunch Feb 6, on Wired on Feb 13, on Augmented Planet Feb 15), to return to this topic.

I could examine the current state of the art of the technology for hands-free AR (the hardware, the software and the content). But there’s too much information I could not reveal, and much more I have yet to discover.

I could speculate about if, what and when Google will introduce its Goggles, as been rumored for nearly 3 months. By the way, I didn’t need a report to shed light on this. In April 2011, when I visited the Google campus, one of the people with whom I met (complete with his personal display) was wearable computing guru and director of the Georgia Institute of Technology Contextual Computing Group, Thad Starner. A matter of months later, he was followed to Google by Rich deVaul whose 2003 dissertation on The Memory Glasses project certainly qualifies him on the subject of eyewear.  There could, in the near future, be some cool new products rolling out for us, “ordinary humans,” to take photos with our sunglasses and transfer these to our smartphones. There might be tools for creating a log of our lives with these, which would be very helpful. But these are not, purely speaking, AR applications.

Instead, let me focus on who, in my opinion, is most likely to be adopting the next generation of non-military see-through eyewear for use with AR capabilities. It will not be you nor I, or the early technology adopter next door who will have the next generation see-through eyewear for AR. 

It will be those for whom having certain, very specific pieces of additional information available in real time (with the ability to convey them to others) while also having use of both hands, is life saving or performance enhancing. In other words, professional applications are going to come first. In the life saving category, those who engage in the most dangerous field in the world (i.e., military action) probably already have something close to AR.

Beyond defense, let’s assume that those who respond to a location new to them for the purpose of rescuing people endangered by fire, flooding, earthquakes, and other disasters, need both of their hands as well as real time information about their surroundings. This blog post on the Tanagram web site (where the image above is from), makes a very strong case for the use of AR vision.

People who explore dark places, such as underwater crevices near a shipwreck or a mine shaft already have cameras on their heads and suits that monitor heart rate, temperature, pressure and other ambient conditions. The next logical step is to have helpful information superimposed on the immediate surroundings. Using cameras to recognize natural features in buildings (with or without the aid of markers) and then altimeters to determine the depth underground or height above ground to which the user has gone, floor plans and readings from local activity sensors could be very valuable for saving lives. 

I hope never to have to rely on these myself, but I won’t be surprised if one day I find myself rescued from a dangerous place by a professional wearing head-mounted gear with Augmented Reality features.

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
Augmented Reality Policy, Legal, Regulatory

Spimes and the Law

Until a technology (or suite of technologies) reaches a critical mass market "mind share" (defined as there's high awareness among those outside the field but not necessarily mass market adoption), there's little attention given to legal matters. Well, the big exception I'm aware of in the domains I monitor is the attention that mobile network operators give to what goes over their infrastructure. Their sensitivity is due to the fact that operators are, under national regulatory policies, responsible for how their services are used and abused.

Although spimes are too diverse to be recognized as a trend by the mass market, Augmented Reality is definitely approaching the public consciousness in some countries. One of those is the United States. AR is on several 2012 top technology trend lists (post on Mashable, BBC ran a four minute video piece on AR in New York City during a prime time TV news magazine, hat tip to Brain Wassom for this one).

With over 50% of the US cellular users on smartphones (according to Flurry report quoted on Tech Crunch on December 27, 2011), and a very litigious society, Americans and American firms are likely to be among the first group to test and put in place laws about what can and can't be done when combining digital data and the physical world. In June 2011, during the third AR Standards Community meeting, an attorney practicing geospatial law in the US, Kevin Pomfret, spoke about the potential legal and regulatory issues associated with AR.  He identified the potential liability associated with accidents or errors during AR use as one of the issues. Pornography and content for "mature audiences" was another area that he highlighted.

This week, Brian Wassom blogged about legal topics that he believes will be important in 2012. Below are my responses and thoughts about the points made in Wassom's post.

1. The first Licensing Model for AR Content. I'm a stickler when it comes to vocabulary. Although often used, the term "AR content" is a misnomer. What people are referring to is content that is consumed in context and synchronized with the real world in some way.  In this light, there are really two parts to the "AR content" equation: the reality to which an augmentation is anchored, and the augmentation itself.

Wassom's point is that, in 2012, a business model around premium AR content will be proven. I hope this will happen but I don't see a business model as a legal matter. There is a legal issue, but it is not unique to AR. There certainly are greedy people who cross the line when it comes to licensing rights. Those who own the information that becomes the augmentation have a right to control its use (and if it is used commercially with their approval, to share in the proceeds). There's never been any doubt that content creators, owners, curators and aggregators all have a role to play and should be compensated for their contributions to the success of AR. However, when information is in digital format and broken down into the smallest possible unit, what is the appropriate  licensing model for an individual data field or point? How those who provide AR experiences will manage to attribute and to license each individual augmentation is unclear to me. Perhaps the key is to treat augmentations from third parties the way we treat digital images on the web. If the use is non-commercial, it can be attributed, but there is no revenue to share. When the use is commercial, in "premium AR experiences," the entity charging a premium fee must have permission from the owner of the original data and distribute the revenues equitably.

2. The First Negligence Law Suit. Wassom believes that people whose awareness of the physical world is impaired by augmentations so completely that they are injured would feel that they can put the blame on the provider of the AR experience. He's got a point, but this should be nipped in the bud. I think those who provide platforms for AR (applications or content), should begin their experiences with a terms and conditions/disclaimer type of agreement. It may take one negligence or liability suit to drive the point home, but over time we will all be required to agree to a clause which releases the provider from responsibility for the actions of users. Why don't people publishing AR experiences preempt the whole problem and introduce the clause today?

3. First Patent Fight will be over Eyewear. I'm following the evolution of hands-free AR hardware and agree that it is not going to be much longer before these are commercially available. Nevertheless, it will require that more than 100,000 of these to be sold before it will be worth anyone's time and money to go after the provider of the first generation of eyewear for consumer use. In my opinion, it will take several generations more (we are already in the second or third generation) before the technology is sufficiently mature to be financially viable. So by that time, a completely different cast of characters will be involved. Why would anyone with patents in this area want to stifle the innovation in hands-free AR in 2012 with a patent fight?

4. Trademarks. I'm looking forward to the day when the term "Augmented Reality" completely disappears. If there begins to be trademark claims around the term in 2012, so much the better! Then people will begin to drop the term to refer to what will be commonplace anyway and we can accelerate the time necessary to just accept that this will be a convenient and compelling way to live.

5. AR frowned upon by family values and fundamentalist religious groups due to explicit content. It is clear that adult content drives the growth of many technologies and AR is unlikely to be different so I agree with Wassom that the adoption of AR in this market is inevitable. It is likely to provide a very clear business case for premium content so, from a financial point of view, this is all good. Having pedophiles using AR would not be surprising and certainly not desirable, but I don't think the technology making AR possible will be treated any differently from other technologies. It's not the technology to blame. It's human nature.