Lots of things happened while I was gone. While catching up on the latest AR news from the past couple weeks, one word kept coming up over and over again.
BEYOND
I think “beyond” and belief are closely connected: beyond implies belief in the existence of *something* outside a perceived boundary. When there are multiple pieces of evidence of things existing in this “beyond”, belief solidifies and is reinforced by our experience. Augmented Reality by nature is dependent on “beyond” and belief — it’s what makes magic, it’s what seduces, it’s a promise of some payload (information or other). When augmented reality is a window to this “beyond”, what could solidify the belief that something is there more than the ability to have multiple synchronous windows?
I really like this idea. It’s saying loudly and clearly “The data is here! The objects are really here! You don’t believe me? Take a look at all these other windows!”
“Beyond” is a driving force; a siren. The data we cannot see creates a new Manifest Destiny calling us to stretch our territory from the real into seemingly uncharted augmented land… an untapped source of some awesome potential.
Well? Maybe it’s not that exciting. The augmented land so far *is* charted, carefully crafted to maximize its utility, maximize brand loyalty, maximize tourist information, or maximize my social media presence. Even so, I like where this is going. To infinity… and beyond!
Good on you, V2_ Institute. You’ve really brought together a truly diverse group of participants from all walks of life and work. Apart from the hum-drum of the regular “AR” (*ahem*… AR-GPS or Augmented Navigation really…) players from Layar and Wikitude, it looks like they had a fair collection of creative, abstract, narrative and magic augmented reality demonstrations and concepts. Presentations looked a bit bland… I really have a problem with these phrases and terms like “re-create the past” when the example shown is no more than a static 3D model plastered over a physical POI (I could have just taken a brochure from somewhere and held it up for a similar enough effect). Ah well. Inviting the ‘big boys’ over to play is a necessary evil for events like this.
Here’s a “teaser” video of the event. Perhaps more video content is on the way? (Please?)
Layar and Wikitude are special guests at first ever Ecosystem event for people in Augmented Reality. Hosted by V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media and PortalToYourDreams. Artists mingled with developers, city planners and industry in this interactive cross-sector gathering. Special talks on fashion business, aura recognition, AR storytelling and the magic couch :-)
First thing I pulled from my fishing nets this morning was a nice matome/roundup of computer vision demos on Youtube which included a demo for “BriefCam”. The narration was a bit painful to go through, but the demo itself was impressive. BriefCam indexes, summarizes, and compresses events in video logs from surveillance cameras in a way I can’t quite explain ((maybe that’s why the narration was in staccato)), and most certainly sparked my imagination in terms of the future of computer vision capabilities in augmented reality environments — particularly the possibilities of compressing perception of time.
“This video shows an augmented reality application we have developed to use as an experimental testbed for evaluating what components of an AR experience contribute to a user feeling “present” or immersed. In this experiment the participants are presented with a virtual hole that drops three stories and are asked to perform tasks around this “pit.” Their heart rate, galvanic skin response, and skin temperature are measured while the participant is shown different versions of the pit. The goal is to develop quantitative and qualitative methods for measuring how immersed a user is in an AR experience and to develop guidelines for people building AR applications.”
This is really cool. I’m always interested to see experiments related to the psychological effect of AR and mixed reality in general. Their website contains a little library of publications related to their research in AR as well.
I’m not sure when exactly this page was put up (last-modified date is in October), but this is the first time I’ve come across this page from Fujitsu Japan’s website. In the about section of their site, Fujitsu overviews several design concepts and areas of research they intend to cover for the year. 2009 was the AR-heavy “New Generation Experience” proposal which consists of 3 topics of research, 5 key concepts, and 20 sample scenarios. I’m sad to say I didn’t catch this before, because they put a lot of effort into slick diagrams I would have loved to see about 6 months ago. The research topics are pretty broad, bland, and what you would expect of any consumer electronics company, but the key concepts and scenarios are pretty fun. Let’s dive straight in, shall we? (I don’t see any English version of this page so I will do my best and translate and summarize.)
For any of you confused about the title of today’s entry and its (loose) relevance to augmented reality, keep on reading — it’s a line from Improv Everywhere’s Grocery Store Musical. Over the past two years we’ve seen a lot of amazing functional and eyecandy examples of augmented reality all over YouTube and the “blogosphere”, showcasing augmented reality technologies such as Layar and SekaiCamera (to name a couple mobile examples) and ad or promotion based AR novelties from companies like BMW and General Electric. So, back to the title… while each of these AR examples are pretty cool on their own, from time to time, I wish we could squish all these fruits together. Yes, there are events like ISMAR which bring together augmented reality enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, researchers and scientists… but there a few examples of AR that I’d like, perhaps naively, to get mashed up into a single ‘platform’.
I’m going to be honest here and openly admit that my ideal mash-up is sort of aiming for a Dennou Coil-esque augmented reality platform, and why not? Dennou Coil‘s augmented reality world was such a delightfully playful yet fairly fleshed out vision of AR, and has been a source of inspiration and excitement for augmented enthusiasts everywhere.
For any of you confused about the title of today’s entry and its (loose) relevance to augmented reality, keep on reading — it’s a line from Improv Everywhere’s