So much is happening I can hardly keep up with it all. The holidays finally behind us, Apple iSlate rumors flying, CES in full swing, Facebook trumping Google in U.S. markets, and so much client work I’ve neglected several feature stories I had hoped to publish by now. But much has been accomplished as well. After accepting responsibility for streaming the video for our future ARNY Meetups, I got busy trying out streaming services, testing hardware, and eventually building out a website that is larger than just our efforts here in New York.
ARMeetup.org
After the December 5th ARDevCamp that caught fire and sprouted many satellite DevCamps around the world, it seemed to have seeded the inspiration for AR Meetup Groups that are spawning like alien pods from a mothership. Our New York Meetup Group was organized by Ori Inbar, cofounder of Ogmento and proprietor of the blog, Games Alfresco. From the start we were coordinating with the Los Angeles Meetup Group where Ori’s business partner, Brian Selzer participates. The idea to stream video of our Meetup was largely to coordinate and network between the New York and Los Angeles groups. Once I decided to create a dedicated website for the streaming of our group, expanding the site to include the LA group was obvious. From there it was just a logical extension to seek out other like-minded AR Groups around the world to participate as well. Once I began introducing myself to the organizers of the various international AR Meetups and then introducing them to one another, and then spreading the word through Twitter and the various augmented reality business groups on Linkedin, it inspired other people in other cities to begin organizing groups of their own. It has been fascinating watching the grassroots efforts unfold.
The site, ARMeetup.org, currently has an embedded video page set up for each Meetup group, together with a Twitter stream for the hashtag associated with that group (and a link back to the Meetup page for each respective group). At the moment I’ve kept it very simple. While I intent to keep the straight forward execution, there are more features on the way.
January 19th, ARNY - Augmented Reality New York Meetup
Our second New York Meetup, and the first to be streamed, will be held at 75 Varick Street, at the offices of Porter Novelli. Just eleven days away, Ori has arranged for five speakers: Dana Farbo, President of Acrossair; Marco Tempest, a Magician; Craig Kapp, inventor of Whisper Deck; John Swords, partner in Circ.us and a fifth “Mystery Speaker” that he plans to surprise us all with.
To help us promote the Tuesday, January 19th ARNY Meetup, copy and paste the code below to add the above video to your site or blog:
Porter Novelli
Thanks principally to John C. Havens, the public relation firm of Porter Novelli has played host or sponsor to several augmented reality themed functions in recent months. On November 18th John was the moderator of the Augmented Reality panel at the Web 2Open Unconference, at New York Web 2.0 Expo, and the night before Porter Novelli hosted an augmented reality themed gathering of the New York Semantic Web Meetup Group. While I had met Ori previously, it was over the course of these two days that I got to meet many others I had previously only known online including Robert Rice, Chairman of the AR Consortium and Tish Shute, writer of UgoTrade. Below is Jack Mason, IBM Global Business Services, Strategic Programs & Social Media; speaking at the Unconference.
Join Us
As a result of launching the ARMeetup.org website, I’ve been fortunate to (digitally) meet some of the other organizers like Matt Trubow of the Manchester Meetup and Rob Manson of the Sydney Meetup. Since then Richard Alvarez has organized a new AR Meetup in Chicago and others such as Woontack Woo in Gwangju, South Korea, have been organizing to put together Augmented Reality Meetup Groups in their own cities. The goal of the ARMeetup.org site is to connect all of these far-flung groups into a global grassroots network. If you’re reading this, and there is not an AR Meetup in your city, then consider taking the initiative and organizing one yourself. If you need help organizing, you are encouraged to reach out to organizers of the other groups for advice. We all look forward to hearing from you.
Juan Enriquez is a businessman/philosopher who works as a genetics & biotechnology venture capitalist. His thinking could be broadly described as libertarian transhumanist — a sort of wet-tech Ray Kurzweil, sans the pseudo-spiritual trappings. I feel that he is one of the great minds of our day.
Juan is the former CEO of Mexico City’s Urban Development Corporation. He served in the Mexican government as Coordinator General of Economic Policy and also as Chief of Staff to Mexico’s Secretary of State. When in Mexican politics, he helped negotiate the cease-fire in Chiapas’ Zapatista rebellion. Today he lives in Boston where he was the Founding Director of Harvard Business School’s Life Sciences Project, and is now both CEO of Biotechonomy and Managing Director of Excel Medical Ventures.
Below I have collected a set of videos from a miscellaneous of speaking engagements by Mr. Enriquez.
Tuesday night was the first Augmented Reality New York Meetup. There were five quick presentations, and each was followed with a few minutes of Q&A.
Patrick O’Shaughnessey of Patched Reality - The 5 Lives of Criss Angel
Ohan Oda of Columbia University - Goblin XNA
Steve Henderson of Columbia University - Talk Maintenance
Noah Zerkin, Inventor - The Zerkin Glove
Ori Inbar of Ogmento - Put a Spell (spelling game), and Vampire Academy
There were no arrangements for anyone to film the Meetup presentations, so I made a few sample clips with my iPhone, and used them to make the teaser clip above (feel free to embed it and share it to help promote the group). Subsequently I have volunteered to bring a video camera to future events which we intend to stream on the web. The first two presenters I did not think to make a clip of, as I had already seen these projects presented before — I’ve already posted a video of Ohan Oda’s Goblin XNA presentation from the New York ARDevCamp; and Patrick O’Shaughnessey gave me a demo of his 5 Lives of Criss Angel AR puzzle over lunch, after the Emerge - Augmented Reality Unconference at Web 2.Open last month.
The real “Meetup” starts after the presentation, of course, where it’s all conversation with other people that share a passion for augmented reality.
I met Chris Brady of Chart Venture Partners and we discussed what kind of AR opportunities look ripe for their firm’s investment (Answer: Software based technologies with a short time-horizon to goto market. Most interested in software that has military and commercial/industrial applications but are staying aware of potential consumer possibilities. *Chris, let me know if I’ve got that right, or feel free to comment to clarify).
Tish Shute and I debated the possible mid-term ramifications of Google’s and Apple’s maneuvering in the mobile space, the mistakes of Nokia’s AR efforts and the long-term fate of the desktop/laptop computer form-factors in the coming mobile dominated world. We also talked about a comment I left on the blog of her friend David Oliver, and why Apple needs to have a search strategy. Tish made me an invitation see the work she’s been doing with augmented reality over the Google Wave Federation Protocol, and I gave Rob Kelley a crash course in the state of the industry and recent patent filings regarding augmented reality eyewear.
Brandhacker Meetup
On Monday night I went to see Joseph Jaffe speak at the Brandhacker Meetup. Jaffe is a wonderful presenter and it was nice to see him speak to a small crowd. Being Mr. “Join the Conversation,” the dialog was primarily Facebook, Twitter and user generated content focused, quite a world apart from the mobile AR circles I’ve been in for much of the past year. He was also promoting a new book he has coming out in early February titled, “Flip the Funnel”. I had a good conversation with a fellow named Stan Phelps who is writing a book under the working title of Purple Goldfish. Stan pointed me in the direction of B. Bonin Bough. I’ll see what comes of that conversation, and perhaps leave that story for another day.
This post is partially a response to Rouli Nir of Games Alfresco who wrote five predictions for 2010 in Augmented Reality. My site isn’t Augmented Reality specific, so I’ve posted three separate lists of five predictions each.
The first list has five predictions for Augmented Reality in 2010, the second has five predictions for the Internet in 2010, and because we’re at the beginning of a new decade, I’ve made five decade-long predictions.
Augmented Reality - 2010 Predictions
1.OOH advertisers will finally wake up and notice mobile in general, and mobile augmented reality specifically, is marching into their sandbox. Free Advice: Companies working on a mobile AR marketing strategy would do good to get advice from OOH and DOOH marketers. Smart agencies and media management firms will begin to coordinate mobile and OOH strategies and some will even formalize this within their management structure.
2.Mixed-reality AR will spur a renewed interest in 3D virtual worlds, which will experience a revival.
3. Marker based Augmented Reality will not prove to be the savior of print publications. The novelty will die quickly (but marker based AR will be huge in OOH). However, tablet devices will come to the rescue of what we know of as “print.” (In a few more years time time actual paper publications will become the domain of Art periodicals and some high-end fashion magazines as they are frequently produced in much higher resolution [as high as 1200 dpi] than news-weeklies and other mainstream publications [300 dpi]. This will not occur in 2010, but will take a few more years to play out).
4. Before the year is out, a translucent AR tablet device will be available on the consumer market. The concept as shown at left is of the Red Dot Award winning design of Mac Funamizu. With transparent OLED perfected by multiple vendors and begging for a consumer application, I expect to see this form factor show up on the market quite soon.
5. Someone will introduce a pair of AR glasses in the under $500 price range. The performance will be disappointing and they will look silly. But they will be loved by hardcore geeks willing to go gargoyle. Their awkwardness in public places will make the “talking to himself” guy with the bluetooth earpiece seem positively normal. However, their oddity will stir enough commotion to put them on the mass-culture radar inspiring at least one joke from a late night host. They will be a modest financial success and will encourage others to enter the field. It will take another year, as the technology matures, for Apple to enter the market. Like the Apple/Harman Kardon speaker system, and the Apple/Nike iPod Sports Kit, Apple will bring in a high profile partner from the designer eyewear market (candidates include Calvin Klein, Ray Ban, etc.).
Internet - 2010 Predictions
1. In broadcast, media is expensive, and though production and creative development costs are high, they’re still cheap compared to media expenditures. Comparatively, online display media is dirt cheap. The shift in money allocation should be (modestly… at first) out of broadcast media and into digital production/creative (more sophisticated websites and higher quality online video content). This already happens — my anecdotal observation is that digital production and creative development spending is currently underreported. What I’ve observed for years in this business is that when money is needed for production of a digital project that was not budgeted for, clients will regularly pilfer from the largest pie — their broadcast media dollars — because ~$80k here and ~$20k there is hardly missed from a ~$20M+ pie. So my prediction is that marketers will begin to formalize this cannibalization of their broadcast media budgets and this shift will begin to be more accurately reflected in the numbers reported.
2. Apple will enter the search business.
3. MySpace will reemerge as much as a quasi-digital-music-label as a social media network, organizing all its bands’ tracks into a single searchable database with relational recommendations, and become a more serious player in the downloadable digital music business.
4. At the close of 2010 we will still not have an open-standard portable user profile across the major social media platforms. But Facebook Connect will begin to emerge as a default proprietary standard. By 2011/12 Congress will hold hearings on the issue of personal data portability and/or the DOJ will look into whether Facebook merits an investigation for anticompetitive behavior.
5. As content grows, and the demands on our time combined with the failure of search technology to meet our needs, content curation “filters” will emerge as a new form of “search” business model, particularly in niche search categories. Some will be people-driven, some will be algorithm-driven, the best will be a hybrid. This could emerge as a “feature” or “tool” in social media platforms like Facebook.
Predictions for the decade ahead.
Because we’re at the close of not just a year, but a decade, I decided to throw in another five focusing on society impacting technological change in the coming decade. Making predictions about the future can be hazardous, and more so the further out one looks. I’m wagering that the safest way to make such predictions about the future, short of inventing it yourself, is to extrapolate from existing trends and place some bets on which ones will win out. That is what I’ve employed as methodology. Though they are all outside the realm of my expertise, I have confidence in these predictions primarily because, in some capacity, they all already exist.
1. An amputee athlete that would have previously been a competitor in the paralympics will win Gold in the regular Olympics. Their medal will be contested by other “unenhanced” athletes and cause a crisis of identity of what it means to be “authentically human.” This will become a mass culture meme. There will be a headline grabbing story of a child self-amputating their own arm or leg out of envy for the cool bionic prosthetics. There will be copycats.
2. Upright bi-ped robots will walk among us. There will be a high-profile lawsuit resulting from a death from a malfunctioning robot, without malicious intent (or any sentient intent at all) — will the owner or the manufacturer be held liable, and in what capacity — That will open the legal can-of-worms over the future possibility of a robot deliberately taking a life. Our legal system will be in knots over artificial intelligence, and several generations behind the technology.
3. Late in the decade, video contact lenses will finally be out of the lab and available to consumers (video built into regular eye-frames will, by this point, already be considered a common feature.).
4. By decade’s end, at least 50% of cars on U.S. roads will be electric. Many of the same companies at the helm of the petroleum industry will diversify into other forms of alternative energy production — solar, wind, etc. — but they will no longer be referred to as “alternative” as they will simply be mainstream. You may be recharging your electric car at an Exxon/Mobil station powered by solar.
5.Desalination will grow to become a huge global industry.
So there you have it. Please feel free to leave your own predictions in the comments.
Saturday was the first annual ARDevCamp (Augmented Reality Developer Camp). Originating in San Francisco, with an East coast camp quickly organized in New York City. It was embraced with such enthusiasm that smaller satellite camps were organized in Amsterdam, Netherlands; Brisbane, Australia; Seoul, South Korea; Manchester, UK and others.
I’ve said many times that the community surrounding AR, especially mobile AR, is like Déjà vu from the early days of the web. There is something unique happening here, something technologically revolutionary, and the word is spreading.
The best thing about these events is meeting other people that share a common interest, that share your enthusiasm. I can talk about this with friends and business acquaintances… to a point. But I’m the one talking. Some have a top-line knowledge, but with most I’m sharing information and they’re asking questions. Among this circle, I’m in the median. A little more knowledge than some, but a lot less than many others. Seeing new things, picking up new knowledge.
The only formal presentation was Ohan Oda, showing his Goblin XNA project, part of his Ph.D. study at Columbia. One one his colleagues, Dr. Steven K. Feiner, Professor of Computer Science at Columbia shed additional light on the project. Matt Shapoff was industrious enough to get this live-streamed from his laptop:
Ohan Oda was kind enough to share his slide presentation.
The real highlight was finally meeting Noah Zerkin, whose worked I’ve followed and with whom I’ve corresponded, but only now just met. He was generous enough to let me demo a Microvision Nomad HMD. This older discontinued model was a monochrome display in red, which had a look eerily reminiscent of the Terminator.
Noah does NASA funded research in the Neurology Department Human Aerospace Lab at Mount Sinai Medical Center. He has particular expertise in dataglove technology, but is also a connoisseur of video eyewear.
After posting a tweet regarding the Microvision display, I received a message from a friend in California who works for NASA, inviting me to demo the Mars seamless virtual reality CAVE at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A “CAVE” system uses similar stereoscopic 3D technology as an IMAX theater wearing polarized lenses, but with screens projected onto the walls of a cube that the viewer stands inside of… and a “seamless” CAVE has a curved wall interior. I plan to take him up on his generous offer as soon as I can get back out West.
As the evening wound down, Steven Feiner, Tish Shute and Heidi Hysell appeared intent to talk augmented reality game-play into the night, but I had other plans.
My good friend Al Risi had the run of the Gibson Guitars NYC Showroom, in the former space of The Hit Factory recording studio, for a private birthday party for both himself and Jessica Daponte… and a few hundred of their closest friends. Our highlight was hearing jam sessions with both Kenny Kramme and Ric Agudelo. Two good friends, both drummers, neither of whom I had ever seen play.
Much of Sunday was spent following the Humanity + Summit (streamed live on TechZulu). This was the first event organized by The World Transhumanist Association since they changed their name to HumanityPlus (with the acquisition of H+ magazine, to which I contribute).
I watched all four of the speaker in the Artificial Intelligence series. Ben Goertzel’s presentation was particularly entertaining. Although it was streamed, it does not (yet anyway) appear to have been posted anywhere. Hopefully they will eventually post the lectures on the HumanityPlus website. There were many speakers, Alex Lightman, RU Sirius and Brian Selzer among others, whose talks I would still like the opportunity to see. If and when they do so I will update this page. Two clips:
Brian Selzer: Reinventing Reality with AR.
Ed Lantz: Pervasive Projections and Social Space.
You can view 36 videos from the Humanity + Summit in this directory.
And this officially begins the holiday season party week. How will anything live up to this weekend?
Two false starts not for length, it’s only 254 pages including index, but it has been a very busy year. I had interruptions.
The Invention of Air is the biography of Joseph Priestley, an enlightenment era intellectual who had a profound impact on the lives of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; the reigning American intellectuals among the founding fathers of the United States. Johnson is an excellent story teller who does a superb job of weaving the narrative of Priestley’s life into the tapestry of the revolution era British colonies, and shining a light on his influence upon the fledgling U.S. nation. First from across the pond, both as a friend and life-long pen-pal of Franklin’s; then as an author of international recognition who’s writing had a profound influence upon the thinking of Thomas Jefferson; and later in America, after fleeing British persecution, where he became a formidable figure — as an outspoken critic of the Adams administration — and close friend until death of Jefferson.
Priestley, a polymath, was an English theologian who denied the divinity of Christ, and believed that the concept of the trinity was a blasphemous corruption of Christian teaching, equating it to idolatry. Priestly set up the founding principles of the Unitarian Church in his seminal work, Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion. He was a pioneering electrician, inventor of carbonated water (soda-water), and the first published chemist to isolate Oxygen (O2); as well as a political philosopher and a lifelong educator. He, perhaps more than any of his peers, understood the political and theological implications of quickly advancing technology. His often quoted, “The English hierarchy has reason to tremble even at an air pump or an electrical machine,” should resonate with any learned person who has observed the impact of the internet on authoritarian regimes today. If early American history is of interest to you, the book is a must read.
I have in recent weeks observed the apoplectic fits rippling through the blogosphere and the new media community over Rupert Murdoch’s recent suggestions that News Corp could pull its content from Google’s search directory. Through the chorus of guffaws emanating from all corner I hear a faint whisper, “methinks thou dost protest too much.” If all of Murdoch’s competitors, opponents and enemies think this would be such a devastating move for him, why complain?
A gamble? Sure. But over the past few years this is what I’ve observed: About 2 years ago when Murdoch went after Dow Jones in order to acquire The Wall Street Journal, the chattering class said he was mad. He was a dinosaur chasing a dying medium. Today the Journal has the largest circulation of any daily paper in the US, even outselling that cat-box liner, USA Today (and the only major US paper who’s subscriber base is growing). When he paid $5 billion for it, they mocked that he had outrageously overpaid. Today, as papers across the country mothball their presses and shutter their doors, the Journal is worth even more. When Murdoch decided to put the Journal behind a pay-wall, it was derided as foolish. Today their model is the envy of the industry, and quickly being emulated by other top tier news brands of premium content. Now he is toying with pulling out of Google search results.
I can think of three exceptionally good reasons for him to do so.
Firstly, the visitors Google delivers are “low value” — They occasional read the non-premium content, and rarely convert to subscribers. The ad revenue from these visitors is lower than even their volume would suggest because they are far less targeted, so advertisers pay less to reach them. Certainly not negligible, but something they say they can survive without.
Secondly, regular readers of the Wall Street Journal come there as a destination. They have done an exceptionally good job of providing premium editorial content and analysis of financial news to an audience that respects and trusts their brand, and frankly can afford it. If, however, the Journal remains in Google’s news results page, they dilute their brand, to become just one more news sub-brand among many under Google’s search umbrella. So delisting from Google would also be an exceptional move to protect the Journal’s brand equity.
Thirdly, if Google is delivering non-converting traffic, and Bing is also delivering non-converting traffic, but Bing (having deep pockets but smaller market share) is willing to pay a generous amount for exclusivity, then there is a serious monetary reward for News Corp to drop Google.
On this point, Seth Godin (whom I rarely disagree with) is wrong. In reference to Murdoch, he writes, “Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.” A clever turn of phrase, but he’s speaking of marketing messages, and applying it to content. In short, he’s mixing his metaphors. In marketing, the message is a means to an end. With content producers, the content is the end unto itself. If one were to take Godin’s statement to its logical end, then bands should pay people to come to their concerts and Godin should pay people to read his books.
Another criticism is that if the Journal really is going to pull out of Google, they could do so at anytime. Therefore implying that Murdoch is bluffing. It’s as if these people are unfamiliar with earned media coverage. Why switch unsuspectingly in the dead of night when you can milk it in the press — among the talking heads, the blogs, the morning shows, and on and on — for a couple of months. As the saying goes, you can’t buy this kind of coverage.
What I see when I scratch a modern day new-media pundit is fear of change. It is not Murdoch that is afraid of change (he has taken huge gambles throughout his career), but the internet darlings that have grown comfortable with a single search engine and all free content. Murdoch is rocking the boat in their pond. He could potentially be a very disruptive game changer. If Bing got exclusive indexing of the Journal, how would that effect the market share in the search industry? 2 or 3 percentage points? More? Less? In the world of search, a couple percentage points translates into a lot of money. The real fear is that Murdoch could change the whole game — not for his own actions alone, but by those who follow his lead. If it works for the Journal, then why not other papers? The New York Times and The Economist are now experimenting with pay-wall models. What we’re talking about is Freemium. The Journal does have free content. You just can’t see the best stuff unless you pay (It’s a classic Freemium model that Web 2.0-ers should embrace.). And what if it works well for the Journal? What if others followed suit? This is what they really fear (And what Google should fear most).
Murdoch has both the money and the testicular fortitude to give it a gamble. I say, ‘More power to him.’ And if he can get a few other major publishers to do the same, I think it will be a very smart move.
Additionally, I have my own selfish reasons to cheer on such a move — I would like to see the search industry shaken up a bit. I’ve watched Google’s move into SaaS with free bundling to it’s search monopoly in one software category after another, and I wonder why nobody else draws parallels to the Microsoft/Netscape wars of the late 90s. I’d personally like to see at least 3 major players in search (Apple?). Competition is good, and a big-risk play against Google by News Corp could be very disruptive. A game changer that could create real opportunities. And to those (so-called) new media outlets that have grown use to the status-quo, well they’ll just have to learn to cope with change.
The amount of client work I’ve had over the last several months has monopolized most of my time, and I’ve found myself micro-blogging on Twitter more than the in-depth articles I write here at GigantiCo.
About two weeks ago Twitter began rolling-out “lists” to a small group of users to beta test. I was notified that I was chosen for one of these pre-launch accounts. I went about setting up a variety of lists, most notably one for Twitter accounts related to Augmented Reality — companies with related technology, bloggers, programmers, hardware, software — anybody who had anything to do with AR technology.
This weekend I began to hear from friends that I needed to have a look at Read Write Web. I was both flattered and humbled to learn that Marshall Kirkpatrick has named my “Augmented Reality Peeps” one of the Top 10 Lists You Should Follow on Twitter.
Some Background
QR Codes are a form of 2D barcoding technology widely used in Asia, especially Japan, as well as parts of Europe. These codes are placed on printed marketing materials, and when a user points the camera on their phone at the code and clicks, the phone reads the barcode and takes the user to a website (they are also widely used for things like phone numbers, digital coupons, and the like). Despite many years of use abroad, the technology has never seen mainstream adoption in the US.
The Case
In brevity, Dan argues that this failure of adoption in the US market is because there is no use for them here. He states (without siting a source) that phones with full keyboards have greater market share in the US than they do in Japan, and by extension that Americans are happy to type URLs into their phone and hence have no use for QR Codes (To be fair, he also states that carriers in Southeast Asia, “ensured that reader applications were installed on every device.”).
What I Have to Say About That
I completely disagree with Dan’s reasoning for QR Codes failure in the US, but I do agree with his advice to marketers (for now) to stick with URLs, at least until the related industries get their collective act together.
Speaking for myself, I’d much rather point my camera and click to get to a mobile website than type it in manually on a chicklet size keypad. And I’d speculate that, given the option, most other users would as well. The problem is a failure of adoption on the part of carriers and handset makers who have not chosen to include the software as a preinstall or even better, as part of the phone’s OS in the US market.
What Dan describes is not a preference on the part of Americans to manually type in URLs, but a high barrier to first-use. Once the app is installed, they never have to do all that work again. But it is a huge hurdle to expect of the user — a multi-step process — to download the software and install it on their phone, in order to use it for the first time. That is a failure of leadership and initiative on the part of both the mobile advertising industry, and of the carriers and the mobile manufactures.
As it is, individual campaigns have been burdened with the responsibility to introduce and educate about the technology: Each campaign that implements a QR Code has to promote not just their product/service, but also promote and educate the user about the technology. And then the onus to download and install the technology is on the users themselves.
So I disagree with Dan’s reasoning that the failure of adoption of QR Codes in the US is because users are just fine with typing URLs into their phone’s keyboard. But I do think, for individual campaigns right now/today, that URLs are the best stop-gap solution.
Another oversight of the argument is that it doesn’t even address the matter of US market penetration for mobile phones with qwerty keyboards vs mobile phones with cameras. For some sobering numbers: Mobile phones with full keyboards (including touch screen keyboards) make up 16% of the US mobile market vs ~80% for phones with cameras (Keyboard Source: Wireless Federation. Camera Source: I pulled it out of my, er, recollection).
There needs to be a coordinated adoption initiative among related industries so that campaigns can focus on their marketing goals instead of educating the public about the technology.
Furthermore, as marketers are aware, most short URLs are taken. Campaign specific URLs are generally longer, for the simple reason of availability. To make them easier to remember, smart marketers will opt to use a memorable phrase, tag line or slogan as the URL for a campaign. Given the choice between typing in an entire phrase on a phone size keyboard vs clicking one button, I’d say the QR Code wins hands down… if only the related industries could collectively get their act together.
Where I agree with Dan is that using URLs for a campaign today is the smart choice. The responsibility for educating the public should not fall on individual campaigns and the responsibility for installing the software should not fall on individual users, and until that problem is addressed, typing in a URL is the best option.
I do think Dan picked the right execution to criticize, but for different reasons — the choice of channel. This appears to be a magazine print ad. I would suggest that OOH is a more appropriate channel for such a mobile code implementation.
One More Thing
I have an intuition about this Ford campaign. The particular example given in this Ford ad is technically not a QR Code. The term QR Code specifically refers to an open standard bar-code created by Denso-Wave of Japan. What is shown in Dan’s example is actually one of Microsoft’s proprietary HCCB Codes. Microsoft is attempting to take on the QR Code open standard, and my intuition is that they may have subsidized this Ford campaign. While I personally prefer to see the adoption of an open standard, at least the campaign would make a lot more strategic (and tactical) sense for both parties involved if this turns out to be the case. But that’s speculation on my part.
Eyeglasses, as we know them today, have been around for about 800 years, give or take. In-eye lenses, for just over a hundred and modern contact lens for about 50. In our time of exponential technological advancement I don’t expect to wait half a century for this technology to mature, but we’re going to see augmented reality optics in a form-factor similar to eyeglasses long before we’re placing them directly onto our cornea.
I do, however, believe that the “through the looking glass” trend of AR applications for mobile devices that are coming on the market today will be a short lived, stop-gap solution until the adoption of AR eyewear. If mobile AR indeed takes off (and I believe it will), people will quickly tire of holding their smartphones out in front of their faces. This will ultimately lead to interesting partnerships between fashion eyewear manufactures and consumer electronics companies, not unlike the partnership between Nike and Apple in the personal fitness electronics space. For now we have several electronic manufactures, many who are most use to dealing with military clients, doing their best to design consumer focussed video eyewear. With mixed results.
Vuzix, the only manufacturer already in the market with a consumer level AR offering, is due to launch two new stereoscopic pairs with AR functionality before the holidays (Wrap 920 and Wrap 310 shown on top row, above). The launch date was moved back once, the 920s were originally planned for a Spring debut. Vuzix technology is similar to that used in standard video eyewear, but an attachment will add cameras to “see” in front of the lens, and play the camera’s video feed with data overlaid— not dissimilar to the AR apps currently available on the Android and iPhone now.
This is also the method that had been employed most extensively for augmented reality in commercial and research environments. WorldViz sells a VideoVision attachment for the NVIS nVisor. While these are state of the art in the AR eyewear space, the attachment alone costs about $12,000.00, and this does not include the NVIS unit which itself cost between $20,000.00 to $30,000.00, depending on the model. And neither price includes the software to run this rig. That’ll cost you extra. Sensics also has a commercial-grade offer in this space. While I don’t know anything about their pricing, I can vouch that they are equally as fashionable:
Besides their, um… avant garde styling, what distinguishes the Sensics and WorldViz/NVIS units from consumer-grade offerings is that both of these models display in HD. The experience is immersive. If you’ve ever played with regular (non-AR) video eyewear (whether 3D stereoscopic or simply 2D video glasses), you’re likely aware of the disappointing resolution. In the sub-$750 market, 640x480 is still standard fair. If you’re willing to spring for $1000+, then 800x600 is the top end of the consumer market. Resolution for the Vuzix Wrap models has not yet been disclosed (nor has the price), but I speculate that they will likely be 800x600.
Recent advancements by OEMs like Kopin (supplier to Vuzix, MyVu and others) and eMagin have increased microdisplay resolutions up to 1280x1024 on screens smaller than 1 inch. Both are now offering paired assemblies for stereoscopic eyewear. Kopin is actively seeking partnerships to take their newest technology to market in consumer products, while eMagin maintains their own consumer devision (branded 3Dvisor), marketing HMDs for the gaming market.
While there are many industrial applications for this technology in the fields of architecture/engineering, aviation and other training environments (not to mention entertainment/gaming), most of this research has been funded by military contracts. Peter Wood, a CD I worked with in the past, once said, “How great it would be if we could gain all the technological advances of World War III without having to fight it.” At risk of opening a debate over military policy, the reality is that (as has always been the case) a great number of recent technological advancements spring from research initially financed by military contracts and military related research. Indeed, as with most of these companies, Kopin’s largest clients are US military contractors.
What I find most interesting in this space is that, much like the market in TV displays, there are currently many different technologies emerging that are going to compete with one another. This should be a boon for the consumer— resulting in faster innovation and lowering costs.
Lumus Optical has another approach. Lumus, the Israeli supplier of military video components, has engineered a solution that projects a partially translucent image onto the inside of a specially designed eyeglass lens. The model (shown at top with the two Vuzix models) is a functional concept pair. Lumus is attempting to partner with consumer retailer who could buy the lens assembly, and incorporate it into their own form-factor.
In 2008 Apple was awarded a patent for a translucent augmented reality eyewear design that cleverly employs prisms and mirrors to move a laser projection from between the lens, and cast it onto the lens facing the eye. Apple, true to its culture, has not said a word about the filing or any forthcoming products employing such technology.
Microvision, manufacturer of laser pico-projector components, has also been awarded video vision patents, theirs for retinal laser scanner technology, over a decade ago now. With an existing clientele primarily in military suppliers, their pico-projectors have begun making inroads into consumer mobile devices. Perhaps encouraged by this consumer market success, they are aggressively seeking partners to take their eyewear technology into the consumer space.
Another technology with tremendous promise is transparent (and flexible) OLED. Everyone from Samsung to GE to Kadak to Philips and others have been experimenting with lightweight, flexible and transparent OLEDs. The potential here is obvious, as it is not difficult to imagine simply building a transparent curved OLED into the lens of a pair of glasses, obviating the need for much of the engineering gymnastics required to get the other display types in front of the eye without creating unnecessary bulk and obstruction. Thus far I’ve not seen a single prototype employing this technique, though the Samsung representative touting the technology in the video (below) made at the 2009 CES does mention it as a possible application. The second video is a demonstration by Sony of the malleability of their flexible OLED.
Unlike some other overhyped memes of the moment, these are proven technologies, some of which are already on the market, others that we can expect to see on the market in the next 12 to 24 months.
To read about the evolution of Virtual Reality eyewear, with an overview of virtual world marketing techniques, read the GigantiCo article, “Virtual Reality: Part 1”.
I’ve just witnessed one of the fastest meme-burns I’ve ever seen.
I learned about these video contact lenses from a New York Times article posted to Kurzweil AI back in April (And Washington University’s original press release dropped on January 17th.). I confess, I even tweeted this story myself back in June (while attending CAT, in response to a comment made by Mike Geiger). But the story laid dormant for most of the last six or seven months. Until a few weeks ago when IEEE Sprectrum did an in depth, four page story on the technology that was picked up by Dana Oshiro at ReadWriteWeb. With RWW’s large readership, the story took-off on Twitter. By Thursday WIRED Gadget Lab jumped on the bandwagon and set Twitter and the tech/media blogshpere ablaze. Robert Rice, Chairman of the AR Consortium, threw some cold water on the euphoria, in an attempt to reel people back in to reality… to little effect. I don’t wish to in anyway downplay the research being done by Babak Parviz and his team. Incrementally this will improve, and when it does I’ll be first in line. But that is at least a decade if not more away.
I write this as a sort of prologue to my next story, one I’ve been researching for a while, regarding Augmented Reality eyewear, I invite you to follow on to the next article, “Eye for an iPhone”.
I interviewed artist Sophie Kahn for the Fall 2009 issue of H+ Magazine. The new issue is now available to download. This is also the first issue with national print distribution. You should be able to pick it up soon at magazine shops and booksellers nationwide.
Congratulations to Ken Goffman (aka. R.U. Sirius) for the success of this venture. It is the right magazine at the right time and is really taking off.
When discussing Location-Aware Mobile Augmented Reality with clients or friends they are often initially mystified by how it works without using any form of tagging or QR codes. In short, this video is a visualization of the first conversation I usually have when the subject comes up. I’ve created it as a simple explanation to demystify the technology for those who are just becoming familiar with it.
The visual shown is not of any specific AR application, it is only meant to be a general representation of the underlying technology.
Mobile Augmented Reality continues to gain momentum and mindshare, amazing for a technology that few people have actually had the opportunity to experience yet for themselves. That’s about to change.
Up until now, most all mobile AR development has been done on the Android platform. On June 19th Apple launched the iPhone 3Gs. The uninitiated can be forgiven for thinking that the news was about video, and faster processing. Those who have been following AR knew better. The true significant hardware advancement was the addition of the magnetometer, more humbly known as a digital compass.
The magnetometer, together with the accelerometer (combination velocity motion meter and digital level meter), and the GPS, is the third and final electronic component to make the device completely location self-aware: it knows where in the world it is from GPS, It knows what direction it is facing from the magnetometer, and it knows what angle it is tilted at from the accelerometer. Only with this full set of components, combined with a live video feed, is the device able to support augmented reality applications. But that last caveat threw cold water on AR developers looking to release iPhone apps to take advantage of the new hardware. The iPhone has had the technical ability for a live video feed since the launch of its first version, but the API has not been available to developers. It was as if the new hardware was just a big tease.
An API (Application Programming Interface) refers to the “calling convention” that a programmer uses to access a feature in the operating system of a piece of hardware. For reasons of security, or propriety, the OS/hardware developer (here speaking of Apple) may choose to keep certain features off limits to third party developers. Much to the chagrin of the programming community, Apple has not yet made the API to the live video feed publicly available. Developers can technically access it, but it is a non-public API. In an open system this would not be an issue. But Apple keep notoriously tight control over their platform. Because applications for the iPhone are sold through the app store on iTunes, Apple can gate-keep which apps are made available to the public. And Apple will not approve apps for inclusion that attempt to access unapproved APIs. This tight control over Apple’s walled-garden has held back the release of AR apps that wish to take advantage of the new compass hardware.
On July 2nd a group of prominent iPhone software developers wrote an open letter to Apple diplomatically imploring them to make the live video-feed API accessible. Subsequent to this, the developers of AR apps brought together for the letter organized themselves into the AR Consortium, largely towards the goal of developing standards as well as provide a forum within the AR developer community to share ideas.
On July 14th I met with Ori Inbar, one of the members of the AR Consortium, and discussed these developments. In this conversation Ori shared with me the unexpected enthusiasm that their efforts received from Apple, who agreed to speak with them over their concerns. Apple was very supportive of AR development and future AR applications on the iPhone platform, but was holding off on releasing the live video feed API for some undisclosed technical reason. They were promised that an API would be made available at some point soon with much assurance that Apple was supportive of their efforts. But no timetable was given.
Later, on the same day as out meeting, Apple posted news on their iPhone developer site about the iPhone 3.1 SDK Beta (Software Developer Kit). It was in regards to new features that will be made available in the September release of iPhone OS 3.1— Specifically, it included access to API for the camera’s live video feed, finally making iPhone AR a reality.
The weekend of August 2nd saw iPhoneDevCamp 3, an annual gathering for the iPhone and iPod Touch developer community that is as much a training camp as a conference. At the event’s conclusion awards are granted. This year’s award for Best iPhone Open Source went to the iPhone ARKit, developed by Arshad Tayyeb, Charles Ruelle, Zac White and Chris Haseman.
It is still undisclosed at what date next month the 3.1 update will go public. And it currently takes two to three weeks for an iPhone app to make it through Apple’s review process for inclusion in the iTune’s app store. But by late September or early October iPhone AR apps should be flooding the market.
At about the same time as AR apps begin appearing on the market for the iPhone, several new Android models will launch in the US market. By year’s end Google expects between 18 to 20 models to be on the international market with about a third of those in the US, and the rest hitting the American marketing into early 2010 (including Sony-Erickson). The Android OS already has a significant number of AR apps available, this is due to the fact that the Android spec has long had the live-video-feed, GPS, magnetometer and accelerometer combo that makes this possible. On the feature front this means the iPhone 3Gs is Apple playing catch-up. But the Android platform has lacked the market share needed to mainstream the technology. Most, if not all of the Android developers are biting at the bit to port their apps to the iPhone, come September— Wikitude, Metaio, Layar, all the major Android AR developers have announced their intention to port their apps to the iPhone as soon as soon as the video feed API is made available.
Soon all mobile phones will be “smartphones.” Even the smartphones of today are already smarter than the average desktop system was a mere few years ago. These mobile devices have become the tip-of-the-wedge for ubiquitous mobile computing. While the touchscreen, and especially the iPhones multi-touch interface, is a leap past the interface conventions of past mobile devices, they still fall very short of the capabilities of a high-resolution computer monitor with full-stroke keyboard and mouse. And the AR apps coming online are going to quickly expose the limitations of this interface. In a short matter of time people will grow impatient of walking about holding their phones out in front of them. Bluetooth earpieces with accompanying microphones (with noise cancelation at that) are already widely available. The visual interface is now the weakest link. Such bluetooth devices will eventually evolve to take over all the responsibilities of not just hearing and speech, but sight as well. At that time the mobile device will remain in the use’s pocket, purse or possibly on their wrist.
The magnetometer compass was first described in 1833, about contemporaneous the earliest form of accelerometers. They’ve had two centuries to get better, smaller and cheaper. It would take another two centuries for the launch of the United States Air Force owned Global Positioning System (GPS) in 1995. Soon after engineers began laboratory experiments with these devices in convergence with one another. But it would take another decade before the components were cheap enough and small enough, and some people were clever enough, that they came together in a consumer level device.
To predict where these technologies are headed, look for potential points of convergence. Objects and yes, People, will be tagged and linked. Through AR the web will soon permeate the physical world. As the world of “things” become networked, AR will become the lens that we use to view this content, and lens is the appropriate term: The mobile phone screen as AR lens is a stop-gap solution that will only be used until consumer grade video eyewear provide a user experience that meets consumer expectations on quality and are esthetically pleasing enough to meet consumer fashion sensibilities.
And this is all coming over the horizon very quickly. The next 12 to 18 months are going to be a very exciting time in mobile computing.
The productivity gains from investing in large monitor(s) easily outweighs their cost, especially as the price of desktop real estate continues to fall. Though most of the advertising industry has caught on, it occasionally astounds me to learn that there are companies (and even a few agencies) that have not received this wisdom.
The photo above is the desk of my home office (I provide this schematic to clients when I work offsite, if they inquire about my home-studio accommodations).
If you’re one of those unfortunate to have management that views screen size/resolution as some sort of luxury or worse, status symbol (like say, a chair that is comfortable and ergonomic), then below are some links you can use to bolster your case— Multiple studies on the productivity gains of using multiple and/or oversized monitors.
All of the research in the links below was done about two or three years ago, so price-per-inch for large monitors has fallen even more since this work was done.
When, in the late 80s, Apple saw a need for a suite of business software for their new Macintosh platform, they decided to subcontract the development to a software company named Microsoft. The RFP was for three applications: a word processor, a spreadsheet and a slideshow for business presentations. Much like their IBM deal for DOS, Microsoft proposed to develop the apps but retain ownership for a good deal less money than selling it to Apple outright. In 1989 Microsoft released Office for the Macintosh, containing Word, Excel and PowerPoint. A year later, they introduced the same package for their own OS, Windows. While Apple made a premium product with a proprietary OS, Microsoft developed their Windows OS with similar Mac like graphical interface features, built to run on the same x86 (PC compatible) architecture that had made their MS DOS the default industry standard… and now running the same suite of business software available on the Mac. This story will, of course, be common knowledge to most readers as it is among the most famous business parables in modern corporate history.
And history is known to repeat itself.
With the iPhone, Apple today reigns supreme. Just as the introduction of the Macintosh did to the personal computer market in 1984, the iPhone has single handedly reshaped the mobile phone market since its introduction. But things are about to get ugly.
In January 2007 Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Within months, before the iPhone was even available for purchase, rumors had already begun to swirl that Google was in overdrive to develop a touchscreen mobile OS, but built on an open standard that could run on many different handsets. In spite of official denials, by fall photos of prototypes were beginning to leak. Initially slow to get traction, over the next several months multiple vendors will be introducing new models, and Google Android clones are about to flood the market.
Motorola, once a dominant force in mobile phones, has lost so much market share it may abandon the mobile market all together. It is betting the farm on Android. Or as Tal Liani put it, “Motorola has one bullet left in its gun.” Just a few years ago the Motorola razor was the top selling phone on the planet, and pwned its competitors in design awards as well. How quickly the mighty can fall.
The future is unwritten, and betting against Apple doesn’t look like a winner’s strategy. But then neither does betting against Google. One thing is for certain. The writing is on the wall, and Apple and Google are on a collision course in the mobile market that is about to look very familiar.
The name “iPhone” is a misnomer. It is not a phone. It is pocket sized computer that, among other features, also happens to include a phone. The Apple iPod-Touch is sometimes portrayed as a crippled cousin of the iPhone— an iPhone somehow lacking its primary function. A more accurate analogy would be that the iPod-Touch is a portable pocket computer, and the iPhone is a premium version of the iPod-Touch that happens to have one extra feature. This is not entirely semantic. The iPod-Touch can do everything the iPhone can do, including connected functions like browsing the web via a wifi connection. Even for iPhone users, a wifi connection is preferred for internet activity beyond a basic search. Most people that have an iPod-Touch have a home wifi, and wifi at the office is now pretty well standard. It is standard campus-wide at every university. In every internet cafe. Every coffee shop. Many parks. Shopping malls… Wifi connectivity is on it’s way to becoming ubiquitous throughout many urban areas.
But the iPod Touch doesn’t have a microphone… yet. At least not for, oh, another month or so. Leaks abound that, like the iPhone 3Gs, the new iPod-Touch will feature video, including both a camera and microphone. The first iPod-Touch with a microphone. Forget video, this opens the door to Skype style IP telephony— internet calls over wifi.
A reasonable long-term strategy for Apple would be the elimination of the “phone” all together. It is conceivable that the iPhone was merely the stop-gap all along. Use the carriers to gain market share, have two models— one with a phone, one without. Then when the phone version reaches critical mass, and wifi penetration meets critical mass, who needs the carrier anymore? At least in urban areas (where Apple sells the majority of their phones anyway). Need it for the wide spaces in between or simply en route? There’s a solution for that. Thank you AT&T for subsidizing the cost until economies of scale could bring the price down to earth (don’t complain, you made a good run of it).
Some may scoff at the idea that Apple would drop the phone version entirely. True, probably not anytime soon. But don’t be surprised if an iPod Touch with a microphone quickly begins to cannibalize iPhone sales. Recall that it wasn’t long ago that most scoffed at the idea of completely ditching landlines for mobile.
Two years ago Microsoft acquired aQuantive, a third-party-ad-server and digital media management firm. Previous to this aQuantive acquired Razorfish and merged it with their online advertising arm, Avenue A. The merged company had been operating under the name Avenue A | Razorfish, until earlier this year when it was announced that “Avenue A” would be dropped from the name. Though Avenue A was the acquiring firm, Razorfish has stronger brand equity in the industry. Many viewed this as a tell-tale sign that Microsoft was preparing to put it up on the block. Microsoft’s acquisition of aQuantive was made in response to Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick. aQuantive’s media management arm was Microsoft’s business unit of interest; the banner ad and website dev components of the Avenue A | Razorfish subsidiary simply came as part of the package and were widely expected to be spun off from the start. Since this time, Microsoft has rebranded aQuantive as “Microsoft Advertising”.
Spinning off Razorfish will allow Microsoft to pursue media accounts that could appear to be in conflict with Razorfish’s roster of clients or even direct competitors of Razorfish itself, and allow it to compete more aggressively with Google’s DoubleClick.
On Sunday evening The Financial Times reports that the sale of Razorfish is being handled by Morgan Stanley. Razorfish is a widely respected brand, and leader in digital innovation. Clients include Levis, Intel, Coca-Cola, Sony, Kraft, Visa and others.
Of the major players, Interpublic has financial issues of its own that place it out of the running. Aside from that, Interpublic already owns R/GA, and therefore has much less incentive to jump at a Razorfish sale. WPP has been going through some trials of its own, as has it’s trophy agency, Ogilvy. WPP already walked away from a deal to buy Razorfish last year and it seems even less likely now.
The Financial Times article that broke the story makes much about a Friday announcement of a “strategic partnership” between Microsoft Advertising and Publicis business unit, VivaKi. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Financial Times are overplaying this development. Microsoft Advertising is currently trying to cut deals with all the major agencies and I see nothing significant about the timing of this particular deal. I also take note of the fact that, as of the time of this writing, VivaKi’s homepage, rather than publicizing anything about the Microsoft deal is instead boasting of their relationship with DoubleClick (Google’s ad-servering arm, and Microsoft Advertising’s #1 rival).
Omnicom powerhouse, BBDO just completed an internal merger of its major NY interactive shop, Atmosphere, with another of their global digital shops, Proximity. Their agency portfolio also includes Tribal DDB (the first digital shop to win Advertising Age Global Agency of the Year), and TBWA/Media Arts Lab (digital shop to Apple). Their digital portfolio is strong. My bet is they pass.
Havas CEO, Vincent Bolloré has been talking up acquisition in the press all month (as has Publicis). Bolloré is hunting for deals, and Razorfish would be quite a prize. Havas is in the game.
Some might consider MDC a long shot, and I have no idea of their cash position for such an acquisition, but with the high flying Crispin Porter + Bogusky in their general portfolio this gives them a pre-existing Microsoft relationship, and would also put Razorfish in very good company.
Tokyo based Dentsu has been shopping overseas for acquisitions, and recently snapped up hot independent New York shop McGarryBowen (and their upstart interactive arm, Continuity). If they’re still shopping for bargains and looking to further expand their portfolio outside of Japan, Razorfish would have to look enticing.
Though a very long-shot, I also wouldn’t rule out a suitor from outside of the advertising arena. Razorfish could very well be attractive to a technology/software company.
It could be Publicis, but I’m going to buck the conventional wisdom and say it could as likely be Havas, Dentsu or MDC Partners. I could even see a very competitive bidding war.
Full disclosure: Of the firms discussed in this article, in the past I have worked for and/or consulted for WPP, Ogilvy, Havas, Omnicom, Atmosphere, Dentsu, McGarryBowen, Continuity, Morgan Stanley and I’m currently consulting for a subsidiary of Interpublic Group. Nothing in this article is derived from any insider information, and is entirely gleaned from reading the trade/business press together with my own personal insights. I have never worked for Razorfish.
Many of the links in this article are for video demos. Rather than having a string of 30+ videos cluttering and breaking up the article, I’ve chosen to set up a separate video page. When you click a video link, it will open a second window. You can view the related video as well as navigate all of the other videos from this window. If your monitor is large enough to permit, I would even suggest leaving the second window open for the videos to cue each video when needed, as you read through the article. To differentiate the video links from other links, links to videos are each followed by a “¤”. To open the window now, click here ¤.
While social media in general, and Facebook and Twitter specifically, have been monopolizing mainstream media’s coverage of online trends, augmented reality is getting a lot of inside-the-industry exposure, mostly for its undeniable wow factor. But that wow factor is a double edged sword, and advertising has a way of turning trends into fads, just before they move on to the next brand new thing. So for this article I wish to focus on practical applications and augmented reality with clear end user benefits. I’ve deliberately chosen not to address entertainment and gaming related executions as it is beyond the scope of this article and frankly merits dedicated attention all its own. And perhaps I’ll do just that in a future article.
Can it Save the Car? The automotive industry was an early adopter. Due to the manufacturing process, the CAD models already exist and the technology is very well adaptive to showing off an automobile from a god’s eye view. Mini ¤ may have been first off the pole position, with Toyota ¤, Nissan ¤ and BMW ¤ tailgating close behind. Some implementation of AR will soon replace (or augment) the “car customizer” feature that is in some form standard on all automobile websites.
The kind of augmentation that is so applicable to automotive is also readily adaptable to many other forms of retail. Lego ¤ is experimenting with in store kiosks that feature the assembled kit when the respective box is held before the camera. Because legos are a “kit” the technology is very applicable in-store, however I find the eCommerce opportunities much more compelling. Ray-Ban ¤ has developed a “virtual mirror” that lets you try on virtual sunglasses from their website. Holition ¤ is marketing a similar implementation for jewelry and watches. HairArt is a virtual hairstyle simulator developed for FHI Heat ¤, maker of hair-care products and hairstyling tools. While demonstrating potential, some attempts are less successful ¤ than others (edit: I just learned of a better execution of an AR Dressing Room by Fraunhofer Institut). One of the most practical, useful implementations I’ve seen is for the US Post Office ¤— A flat rate shipping box simulator (best seen). These kind of demonstration and customization applications will soon be pervasive in the eCommerce space and in retail environments. TOK&STOK ¤, a major Brazilian furniture retailer, is using in-store kiosks to view furniture arrangements, though I personally find theirs to be a poor implementation. A better method would be to use the same symbol tags to place the AR objects right into your home, from the camera connected to your PC. And that’s just what one student creative team has proposed as an IKEA ¤ entry for their Future Lions submission at this years Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. A quite sophisticated version of this same concept has also been developed by Seac02 ¤ of Italy.
To Tag, or not to Tag? A couple of years ago I wrote here about QR codes. A couple of weeks ago, while attending the Creativity and Technology Expo, I was given a private demo of Nokia’s Point & Find ¤. This is basically the same technology as QR codes, but uses a more advanced image recognition that doesn’t require the code. Candidly I wasn’t terribly impressed. The interface is poor and the implementation is so focused on selling to advertisers that they seemed oblivious to how people will actually want to use it, straightjacketing what could be a cool technology. Hopefully future versions will improve. Most implementations of augmented reality rely on one of two techniques— either a high degree of place-awareness, or some form of object recognition. Symbols similar to QR codes are most often used when the device is not place-aware, though some like Nokia’s Point & Find don’t require a symbol tag. Personally, even if the technology no longer requires it, I feel the symbol or tag-code is a better implementation when used for marketing. We are still far from a point where everything is tagged, so people won’t know to inspect if a tag-code is not present. Furthermore, the codes place around on posters and printed material help build awareness for the technology itself. Everything covered here thus far has been recognition based augmented reality.
Through the Looking Glass Location-aware augmented reality usually refers to some form of navigational tool. This is particularly noteworthy with new applications coming to market for smartphones. As BlackBerry hits back at the iPhone, Android’s list of licensees grows and the Palm brings a genuine contender back to the table with the new Palm Pre, there is huge momentum in the smartphone market that not even the recession can slow down. I personally think the name “smartphone” is misleading as these devices are far beyond being a mere ‘phone’. Even a very smart one. They are full-on computers that, among many other features, happen to include a phone. In my prior article on augmented reality I focused on the iPhone’s addition of a magnetometer (digital compass). This gave the iPhone the final piece of spacial self-awareness needed to develop AR applications like those coming fast and furious to the Android platform. Think of it like this— The GPS makes the phone aware of its own longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates on the earth, the compass tells it which direction it is facing, and the accelerometer (digital level-meter) determines the phone’s degree from perpendicular to the ground (this is what lets the phone’s browser know whether to be in portrait or landscape mode). Through this combination of measures the device can determine precisely where in the world it is looking. There is already a fierce race to market in this highly competitive space. Applications like Mobilizy’s Wikitude ¤ (Android), Layar ¤ (Android) and other proof of concepts seeking funding like Enkin ¤ (Android) and SekaiCamera ¤ (iPhone) are jockeying for the mindshare of early adopters. Others have developed proprietary AR navigational apps such as IBM’s Seer ¤ (Android) for the 2009 Wimbledon games. Two months ago when Nine Inch Nails released their NIN Access ¤ iPhone app, there was no iPhone on the market with a built-in compass, so the capability for this level of augmentation was not yet available, but a look at the application’s “nearby” feature gives a hint at the kind of utility and community that could be built around a band or a brand using this kind of AR. View a demo of Loopt ¤, and only a little imagination is needed to see how social networking can be enhanced by place awareness, now add person-specific augmentation tied to a profile and the creepy stalker potential is brought to full fruition, depending on your perspective. And there are other well established players in the automotive navigation space that have a high potential for crossover. The addition of a compass to the iPhone paved the way for an app version of TomTom ¤. Not to be outdone, a Navigon ¤ press release has announced that they too have an iPhone app in development. How long before location-aware automotive navigation developers choose to enter the pedestrian navigation space?
Some Assembly Required It seems everyone wants some AR business from IKEA. Another spec project by a student at the University of Singapore proposes an assembly instruction manual for IKEA ¤ furniture. In a more sophisticated application on the same line of thought, BMW ¤ is experimenting with augmented reality automotive maintenance and repair technology. Note in that video that he is not doing this in front of his laptop camera, nor is he holding his smartphone in front of his face. He’s wearing special AR eyewear. The potential for hands-free instruction and tutorial is as obvious as it is unlimited. Consider any product you purchase that comes with instructions (You do read the instructions, right?). A municipal construction crew repairing a broken water pipe could effectively have X-Ray vision, seeing where all the pipes are under the road, based on schematics supplied to their eyewear from city records.
Seeing is Believing When it comes to Virtual Reality, I’ve had a mantra that none of this will really take off until we’re in there versus looking at there. I believe augmented reality will be the catalyst that pushes digital eyewear into the marketplace. Virtual World applications are, by their nature, not location dependent. In many ways that’s the point— you can be anywhere. And sitting at your computer or game console and looking at a screen is a well established all-purpose interface. Place-aware augmented reality, on the other hand, is location dependent— Walking down the street holding your smartphone in front of your face is not a long-term solution. In only a short couple of years, a bluetooth earpiece ¤ has gone from being the goofy guy walking down the street who looks like he’s talking to himself, to a common everyday accessory, even fashionable. What works for your ears is now coming to your eyes— a hands-free visual interface in the form of eyewear. Some variation of this concept has been around for a long time ¤. Slow to improve, even most contemporary models are less fashionable than a Geordi LaForge’s visor, but slowly they are improving.
The Vuzix Wrap 920AV (at left), prototype premiered at the 2009 CES in Las Vegas, are the newest consumer class digital eyewear marketed for augmented reality applications. WIRED Magazine’s Gadget Lab feels their most significant feature, “comes from the fact that the company finally hired a designer aware of current aesthetic tastes.” Significant to the 920AV’s is that: A. They boast ‘see-thru’ video lens that readily lend themselves to augmented reality applications, and B. They are stereoscopic (meaning they have a separate video channel for each eye, required for 3D). They are meant to hit the market in the Fall, and are being pushed as an iPhone compatible device. If they are smart, they will do a bundled play with a “killer app” such as SekaiCamera or similar product. They have the potential to be the ‘must have’ gift for the 2009 holiday season. Not to oversell them, I have not personally demoed them yet so I don’t know if they will deliver on the hype, but they look as though they will be first to market, and their product will be the leading contender in the immediate future. Here is a demonstration of a prior Vuzix model ¤ (behold the fashion statement). Using symbol-tag based augmented reality, this man places a yacht in his living room.
If the quality of the user experience fails to live up to expectations, Vuzix has many pretenders to the crown. Fast followers like Lumus (at left) and others are trying to get products to market as well. Then there are MyVu, Carl Zeiss, i-O Display Systems and others who have video eyewear products and are likely candidates to come forward with AR offerings. Add to that a technical patent awarded to Apple last year for an AR eyewear solution of their own and it is clear this could quickly become a crowded and competitive product category. This video titled Future of Education ¤, while speculative, is a splendidly produced and rather accurate projection of where the technology is going.
Where to From Here? We’re moving in this direction at exponential speed, the pace of progress is only going to keep moving faster. As we see the convergence of augmented reality with mobile and mobile with ear and eyewear, there are another set of convergences just over the horizon. We’re on the threshold of realtime language translation ¤. This is an ingredient technology and, like a spell-checker, will soon be baked in to all communications devices, first of which will be our phones. The Nintendo Wii brought motion capture into our homes, and technologies like Microsoft’s Project Natal ¤ are converging motion capture with three dimensional optical recognition, so no device is needed. And everything, both real and virtual, will soon be integrated into the semantic web. Intelligent agents will assist us with many tasks. While most of this intelligence will occur behind the curtain, as humans we like to personify our technology. It won’t be long before our personal digital assistant could be given the human touch. How human?
NOTE: In the references below, I’ve included a list of firms that have created some of the pieces shown here or the technologies used.
I promised readers here they would be first to know, should anything come of my talks with H+ Magazine. Well, for issue #3 I received my first assignment. I’ve actually been a little tardy with my update— it’s been out for several weeks (I have been very busy).
I was asked to contribute an “Art” article. After considering various artists, and presenting Ken with some options, I eventually interviewed Christopher Conte (whose work some may recall I covered here once before at GigantiCo). We met over dinner at Yaffa, and at a later date I had the unique pleasure of photographing a couple of Mr. Conte’s pieces. A really swell guy too, I might add. I was given four pages to layout to my liking (only some minor font changes were made for the final edition, to better integrate my layout with the rest of the magazine).
Ken Goffman (aka. R.U. Sirius) has pulled together a great team and the whole process was a really good experience. I’m now discussing further assignments from H+ and hope to be an ongoing contributor.
Oh, and did I mention? They used one of my photos of a Christopher Conte sculpture for the cover.
Friday, January 8, 2010 at 06:06PM 
and 
. I have also included his lectures on each book in the videos below.
,” the dialog was primarily Facebook, Twitter and user generated content focused, quite a world apart from the mobile AR circles I’ve been in for much of the past year. He was also promoting a new book he has coming out in early February titled, “
”. I had a good conversation with a fellow named Stan Phelps who is writing a book under the working title of 
4. Before the year is out, a translucent AR tablet device will be available on the consumer market. The concept as shown at left is of the 
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After two false starts, I finally completed Steven Berlin Johnson’s 
(You see what he did there with that Oxford comma?).
The amount of client work I’ve had over the last several months has monopolized most of my time, and I’ve found myself micro-blogging on Twitter more than the in-depth articles I write here at GigantiCo.
next several months multiple vendors will be introducing new models, and Google 
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If the quality of the user experience fails to live up to expectations, Vuzix has many pretenders to the crown. Fast followers like 
