Telepathy & WeWork Labs

Telepathy has just completed a US roadshow, culminating in the opening of US offices at WeWork Labs in San Francisco. The relationship between Telepathy and WeWork began via a twitter conversation between myself and Andrea Harrison, triggered when Robert Scoble favorited a tweet about Telepathy.

Takahito Iguchi, Telepathy’s visionary founder and CEO has left for Tokyo today, but will be returning shortly to relocate his personal residence to the bay area, and run the company’s operations out of WeWork Labs in San Francisco.

We have many to thank, hard work to do, and exciting milestones to share on the coming horizon.

I captured the video above at WeWork Labs in New York City, using two Sony Bloggie HDs.

Telepathy Press Conference in New York City

On Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013, Telepathy held a press conference in New York City at the offices of Resolute Digital. As Minister of Propaganda for Telepathy, organization of this event was my responsibility.

Participation in the press conference included the media outlets CNet / CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, TechCrunch, GigaOM, BetaBeat, BusinessInsider, Fast Company, All Things D, Harvard Business Review, PandoDaily, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Creators Project, Yahoo! Tech and others.

These photos, by Jakop Nazaretyan, document the event. If you would like to use any of these photos for editorial purposes, you can reach out to me and I can supply high resolution files under Creative Commons license of Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). I can be reached at: email [at] chrisgrayson [dot] com

Catering was provided by HTE Events.

Anonymity & Privacy in the Digital Public Sphere @ Parsons

I was invited to speak to students at Parsons, The New School for Design, on the subject, Anonymity & Privacy in the Digital Public Sphere. The lecture covered the loss of privacy in public space by technologies deployed by the state, by technologies deployed by the private sector, reactions by art and culture, and the empowerment of the citizen via new wearable mobile interfaces. A video of the lecture, and some slide highlights can be seen below:

TEDxSiliconAlley 2012

TEDxSiliconAlley 2012 was held on December 3rd, 2012, at Terminal 5 in New York City.

Headlining the event were Ray Kurzweil & Juan Enriquez. Juan was the first speaker to sign on, only one week after TEDxSiliconAlley 2011, Juan tentatively agreed to speak at 2012’s event. It would take several more months to get Ray signed on. The date of December 3rd was ultimately determined by the one single day in late 2012 when the busy schedules of both Ray and Juan made them available to appear in New York City at the same time.

The theme of the event was “Rise of the Machines” which all speakers were asked to use as the starting point for their talk, to be interpreted as strictly or as loosely as needed, to produce their best presentation. As curator, in addition to signing Ray and Juan to headline, I structured the day to include a series of keynote talks, alternated with shorter talks given by New York City based mobile and geolocation based tech startup founders. This expanded on my own opening talk at TEDxSiliconAlley 2011 — the premise being that, with the US being the world’s largest smartphone market, and New York City being the US’s largest smartphone market, and furthermore, New York City being not just the largest market for hardware devices, but also that New Yorkers’ use the greatest amount of data services on a per capita basis, of any mobile market, hence New York City is the ideal testbed for mobile tech companies, and therefore an ideal location to launch a mobile startup. Furthermore that as a policy matter, city government should be pursuing policies that support mobile development specifically, as an area of growth to foster. As with all of my curation, effort was invested in achieving gender balance.

Keynotes were given by:
Ken Segall, Author of Insanely Simply. Creative Director of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign who coined the name iMac.
Bre Pettis, Founder & CEO of Makerbot, who had just appeared on the cover of WIRED Magazine.
Jincey Lumpkin, Esq., CEO and Chief Sexy Officer of Juicy Pink Box and sex columnist for The Huffington Post.
Francesca Ferrando, Philosopher of Posthumanism, then a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, and author of Italian best seller, Belle Anime Porche.

Short talks were given by:
Vanessa Dawson, Founder & CEO of Evry.
Foy Savas, Co-Founder & CEO of Loudly.
Sameer Parekh, Founder & CEO of Falkor Systems.
Ori Inbar, Co-Founder of Ogmento and Founder of AugmentedReality.org.
Ding Ding, Founder & CEO of TunTunTuTu.
Vivian Rosenthal, Founder & CEO of GoldRun.
Jim Kovach, COO of CrowdOptic.
Jason Sosa, Founder & CEO of Immersive Labs.

Included in the program was the Sundance award winning short, TOMO, by special effects artist and director, Paul Catling. The stage set featured sculptures by the artists Christopher Conte and Sophie Kahn.

Jon Carin, keyboardist for Roger Waters and previously of Pink Floyd, The Who, Psychedelic Furs and others, was also to have performed, but the date ultimately conflicted with Roger Waters’ practice dates for the Hurricane Sandy relief concert, Jon was required at band practice and had to cancel. It is difficult to estimate some industry specific numbers, but total hurricane damages for New York State are estimated at $33B, and losses for events held in New York City in the immediate aftermath of the Hurricane are said to have exceeded $500M. Our event was no exception. We had sponsors pull out and average single day ticket sales dropped from almost 30 tickets a day to zero sold on the day of the hurricane, and did not recover above single digit sales until after election week. I pulled a lot of favors, and only with tremendous effort on the part of our whole team did this event happen at all — and of particular note, the efforts of Judith Currin, long time business colleague, and producer who deserves as much credit for this event as myself.

Curatively and Critically, the event was a huge success.

Like many such projects, there are those small unexpected moments that overshadow the rest of your day. For TEDxSiliconAlley 2012, that moment would come for me at the day’s conclusion. An after-event dinner had been planned at Blue Fin. It was a very small group in attendance including Danielle and myself, Ding Ding, her boyfriend Derek Lei and two of his Google colleagues, Brian McNamee of event sponsor Resolute Digital, Ray Kurzweil, Juan Enriquez and a couple of others. When I invited Ray and Juan to headline together I was well aware that they both lived in Boston-Cambridge — both futurist writers and both multiple TED Talk speakers, though Juan’s circle is more affiliated with Harvard where he previously taught, and Ray’s circle is more in the orbit of MIT where he once studied. On soliciting them as speakers, my presumption was that they likely knew each other well. However, over the course of dinner conversation Ray and Juan exchanged business cards. If I made one small contribution to the network effect of the universe that day, it was introducing Ray Kurzweil and Juan Enriquez — the two had never met.

Later the same week news would break that Ray Kurzweil was joining Google as Director of Engineering.

Chris Grayson writes Giganti.Co

For the redesigned relaunch of GigantiCo, my girlfriend helped me take this portrait photo. The concept was inspired by the photo art from two famous album covers: Lou Reed, Street Hassle and Frank Zappa, Strictly Commercial.

SxSW 2012: Augmented Reality = ARPA's Original Vision of Web

The presentation above SxSW 2012: Augmented Reality = ARPA’s Original Vision of Web, was presented at SXSW, in Austin TX, on March 13, 2012 in the 900 seat lecture hall of Hilton 6FG. I was joined by Heidi Hysell. Two weeks prior we performed a dress rehearsal of this same lecture at Theodore von Kármán Auditorium at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. The dress rehearsal was valuable for both the stage time, and feedback from a room full of rocket scientists. JPL is home to both NASA’s rocket design center, and Mars rover programs. NASA kindly honored us with a private tour of the grounds, including some non-public areas, such as the Mars rover test lab.

Below is the lecture description from SXSW literature:

Using a variety of original source material, Chris Grayson will give an overview of the global network, as envisioned by thinkers at ARPA before the creation of the ARPAnet. Examples include J.C.R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” 1960; Douglas Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect,” 1962; and Ivan Sutherland’s “The Ultimate Display,” 1965. Some focus will also be given to the people and personalities involved. Heidi Hysell will provide the technical explanation for many milestones in the evolution of the Internet, making the case that the human interface to the network has historically been limited by the available technology, and with Augmented Reality, we are now entering an era that truly begins to deliver on the original vision.

Future M @ Microsoft N.E.R.D.

I was invited by Robert Tercek to speak on his Mobile Frontiers Panel at Future M, held at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center. I was invited to speak on coming innovations in augmented reality that would have the greatest impact on mobile computing in the near future.

I structured my talk in five parts.

First I gave an introductory set up what is known as weak AR, where device orientation within the environment is entirely determined by internal sensors, and no computer vision technology in involved. Typical of the kind of AR most people are familiar with in mobile devices.

I then proceed to cover a company named CrowdOptic (discloser, I have since become an Advisor to CrowdOptic), who use the cumulative sensor data across many phones, to create a sensor web, so individual devices are not an island, and calculate where line-of-sight from multiple devices converge. Clusters of line-of-sight intersections create point of interest that can be used at events for media purposes, security purposes, and other uses.

Next I cover “data exhaust”, the explosion of data being created by individual’s mobile computers (I hate calling them “smart phones”), that then creates a sea of big data, too dense to comprehend unaided. Therefore I predict a coming explosion in data visualization to make sense of the deluge of data being generated.

I move on to computer vision, and specifically focus on facial recognition software, and the tremendous activity taking place in that field, as former security grade software makes its way down to the consumer space.

I then conclude with the coming consumer grade video eyewear devices, highlighting the technologies of both Lumus Optical of Israel and giving particular attention to a prototype design out of Japan called “AR Walker” developed in partnership between NTT docomo and Olympus.

Special thanks to Robert Tercek for inviting me to speak.

Engage! Expo – AR, State of the Market

The SlideShare above titled Face Tracking & Face Recognition in AR, is from my presentation at Engage! Expo, at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, on February 16, 2011, as part of the panel, Augmented Reality: The State of the Market. I was also joined by Ori Inbar and Alpay Kasal. The slides can also be downloaded here as a PDF.

ARNY - January 18, 2011

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On Tuesday, January 18th, ARNY - Augmented Reality New York held our 13th meetup. In November of last year we lost our regular venue, due to Mark Gorton’s legal woas — OpenPlans is (or was) solely financed by Gorton. OpenPlans continues to operate, but had to bring on tenants. The gorgeous penthouse loft with panoramic skyline views, for which we will be forever grateful to Sophia Parafina, is no longer available to us … so our homeless band of ARgonauts had to find new shelter from the New York winter. Matt Quint found us wandering aimlessly over the ash covered snow dunes of Manhattan. He took us off the streets, gave us warm clothes and two WiFi passwords. We have now taken up new, if temporary residence at a Columbia Business School lecture hall. But enough about our Odyssey, let’s move onto the real story.

At our January meeting, Gene Becker, Augmented Reality Strategist at Layar gave a demonstration of the Hoppala! content management system (CMS) for building AR layers for the Layar Mobile Augmented Reality Browser, without the need for coding. He also shared an augmented reality journalism project created by Stanford University’s Historical Archives.

Artist, Amir Baradaran, previewed the launch of an art intervention with overtones of political activism, launching later this month involving the Mona Lisa, at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Sid Gabriel, a San Francisco augmented reality developer and the organizer of our sister meetup in the bay area, ARdevMob, gave us a preview of how he is using his LightNucleus platform to augment a live dance performance here in New York this week.

Noah Zerkin, who is a technician on NASA-funded neurovestibular research at Mount Sinai Medical Center, as well as data-glove, haptic and fully immersive interfaces research at Integrated Realities, is an expert in augmented reality hardware. He gave us his thoughts on the state of the industry in augmented reality eyewear with a focus on the Raptyr glasses recently unveiled by Vuzix, earlier this month at CES.

You are invited to join our live audience on February 15th. ARNY - Augmented Reality New York meets on the 3rd Tuesday of every month. Matt has generously reserved for us the use of his lecture hall for February, so we will again be meeting at Columbia University.

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Announcements:

Events:
AR Summit @ Engage Expo! - New York, February 16
GeoWorld Summit - New York, May 12
ARE - Augmented Reality Event - Santa Clara, CA, May 17 & 18
Augmented Reality Summit - London, June 16

Jobs:
Layar - US Distribution Manager - San Francisco Bay Area, Fulltime

CES 2011

This past week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there was a great deal of fanfare surrounding 3D TVs, and tablets, tablets everywhere but none that you can actually buy. However, this focus on flat screen 3D and Android tablets overshadowed other innovations on display.

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My favorite little show stealer was a manufacturer of modular robotic parts (and the software to run them) named RoboBuilder. They have both consumer grade and professional product lines for their modular parts. They are seeking a wholesale partner to bring their consumer product to the US market. Their little guy is very reminiscent of Plen, the Japanese “hobby” Robot famous for skateboarding and roller-skating. While the Japanese have a deep cultural connection and are generally recognized as the world leader in robotic toys, this Korean native just became my favorite new entry into the hobbyist robot market.

Also of note, eyewear made a strong showing at this years convention, particular in award recognition. For instance, Vuzix took honors in the CES Innovation Awards for their Raptyr 3D Augmented Reality glasses. Though I don’t have any video of them to share at this time, stay tuned, Vuzix will be our headlining guest at ARNY - Augmented Reality New York, in February.

Polaroid hit it out of the ballpark. The business arrangement between Lady Gaga and Polaroid was negotiated by Hollywood talent agency, William Morris Endeavor, and Polaroid’s PR Agency, Weber Shandwick. This has proven a stroke of brilliance. The rumors of Polaroid’s death have been greatly exagerated. After the rise of digital photography took their core automatic camera business down in flames, Polaroid has made various attempts at rebirth over the past decade, twice under new ownership and management (and twice filed for bankruptcy). In its current incarnation, PLR IP Holdings has created new value for the brand by developing their own stable of halo products, while leveraging their brand equity with licensing deals to other manufactures. It is a little known fact that Polaroid first made its name in polarized sunglasses (hence the name Polaroid). Their big move back into sunglasses and designer polarized-lens eyewear for 3D TV viewing was very smart; with a legitimate historical connection to the brand. Bringing in Lady Gaga to introduce the brand to a new generation — and giving her a contributing role in their product line beyond mere spokesperson — has been positively brilliant. Polaroid commanded serious mindshare at CES, and their Polarez GL20 Camera Glasses, to be sold under the Polaroid Grey Label and unveiled at CES by Lady Gaga herself, were a show stealer. I’m enthusiastic to see where Polaroid goes from here, they’re going to be an exciting brand to watch.

I would personally like to thank Jon Pollock for giving me a private viewing of the GL20 glasses, where I made the above video, as they were not on display to the public. I would also like to thank Colleen Sarenpa who was so helpful and informative. Thank you both, you’re doing a great job reviving a legendary brand.

If you find that Lady Gaga’s video glasses need some complimentary trousers to complete your cyborg wardrobe, you can go for Cyberdyne’s HAL exoskeleton. CES saw this Japanese firm’s first exhibit here in the states. Though the torso component (not shown in the video) enables the wearer to effortlessly lift many times their own weight, the legs are principally being marketed as a mobility option for the handicapped (I cobbled together my video from the glimpses I was able to snatch when Spike TV showed up. I was actually the only person there at Cyberdyne’s booth when Spike unexpectedly arrived. A crowd formed rather instantly. I’ve tried to find Spike’s coverage of this, but it appears they never published it to their website. Perhaps it ran on their cable station).

I must concede that my poor video does not do Arial Burton’s technology justice. The glass enclosure is not needed, but I believe it is a safety issue (don’t want to blind anyone with a laser). The device uses a focused laser in such a way that it naturally terminates in a “plasma spark” in midair. This plasma spark creates the “pixel” in the air. This will be an interesting technology to keep an eye on. They’ve more than tripled the resolution in the last year, and will likely do it again next year. They also tell me that they plan to launch a full color version “soon.”

Of the various video goggles on display at CES, the Recon goggles made for snow-sports were the most practical. Giving a heads-up view of important statistics while barreling downhill, they aim to introduce models catering to other goggle and helmet wearing sports over the course of the next year. Their execution is well thought out, their build quality in solid, and they are delivering on a genuine desire in the market for a quality device to deliver location based data while moving downhill. This information may all already be present in a user’s smartphone, but that is not a form factor with practical application in the context of a downhill run.

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I would also like to thank Chris Brogan for inviting me to be interviewed, and discussing my new role at Humble. When the interview has been published, I will be sure to share it.