Fairy Fate, a home-made game not unlike PlayStation’s Eye of Judgement.

Augmented Reality story telling done for a university project, AR Gekijou (AR Theatre).

Love Plus+ Promotional Video

Age of Virtual Consent

First and foremost, I want to fix a cumulative error. Remember that game we played as children, Telephone, where a sentence was passed from one person to another by whispering, and the final iteration ended up totally different? Every iteration of this story slightly alters minor details and cumulatively results in changes that might make a pretty big difference in regards to attitudes towards Love Plus. None of the girls in this game are 12. I think I can figure out how this one happened, but none are twelve, and none are pre-High School.

Vacation With Your 12-Year-Old Virtual Girlfriend!? Seriously!?

Allowing an older man to take his pre-High School aged girlfriend on vacation to do whatever he wants with her, even if it’s just pretend, is an outrage. It is apps and materials like these that promote this mindset that make men look for and expect a static, subservient woman who will fulfill his needs at the touch of a button. — TechLand

In North America, our typical journey through grade school is as follows: Elementary = Grades 1 through 5. (5 years); Middle School = Grades 6 through 8. (3 years); High School = Grades 9 through 12. (4 years) with some variation depending on Junior High, or Secondary. In Japan, a typical journey would be as follows: Elementary = Grades 1 through 6. (6 years); Middle School = Grades 7 through 9. (3 years); High School = Grades 10 through 12. (3 years). When the grade of a student is expressed in Japanese, it is usually written as School Level + Year (ex: High 1, Middle 3, etc). Writers of a select few guilty articles may have looked up the characters of Love Plus on sources like Wikipedia, and seeing “High 1″ might interpret it as Grade 9 rather than grade 10. (The ages of the charaters are never disclosed by Konami, however, their grade levels are. Ages are being calculated by average age at particular grade.) As such, the reported assumed ages of the characters versus their correct assumed ages are as follows:

Nene is a third year high school student or 14 or 15 years old, Manaka is a year younger and little Rinko is just 12 or 13. Even by Japanese standards, where the age of consent is 13, Rinko is a bit young to be the centre of attraction for the 20-somethings who seem to be hooked on the simulation. — TechEye

Nene => High 3 Japan => Grade 12 => ~17
Manaka => High 2 Japan => Grade 11 => ~16
Rinko => High 1 Japan => Grade 10 => ~15

I don’t want to argue about ages of consent (we aren’t even really talking about sexual relationships in this anyways) or age gaps, but I really believe that age 12 and age 15 are pretty different. While you might not agree that dating a high-schooler is appropriate for a 20-something, 15 is definitely not as outrageous as 12.

 

Moral Panic and News of the Weird Revisited

Something about this whole fiasco is very reminiscent of an incident where CNN “stirred up gratuitous controversy” about the game ‘Rapelay’ (a portmanteau of rape and play). This prompted erotic-comic author Takeshi Nogami to write a response, which I believe summarizes my feelings regarding both the Rapelay and Love Plus issue almost perfectly:

Men and women are equals in politics and in the law. Your society and ours are no different there. Moreover, the crime rate statistics for both general crime and sex crime in Japan are, with all due respect, several times lower than in the United States. Did you, for instance, fear for your safety while walking the streets of Akihabara, or Ikebukuro (holy ground of hentai books for women)? They’re probably many times safer than the streets of New York, let alone those of the suburban housing districts around. (And guns are illegal, too.) Furthermore, in our Akihabara and Ikebukuro, there is no persecution of men or women alike, or of sexual minorities like homosexuals. We all live together in peace, expressing ourselves freely.

It also goes without saying that human trafficking and violence against women are serious crimes in Japan too. As a Japanese citizen, I am deeply offended by the insulting implications of that so-called expert who associates Japanese people at large with heinous criminals. Is hentai detrimental to the upbringing of children? Yes, it some circumstances it may well be the case. It certainly true, for instance, of that game you reported about. I am an average citizen with a younger sister and two nephews; I can relate to your concerns. And precisely as such, I beg to differ with your argument. Those products are developed for rational adults. You surely don’t believe that a rational adult would be influenced by such a game into committing rape, do you? — Takeshi Nogami

Nogami has an excellent point, and in the case of Love Plus, there isn’t even any sexual relationship involved. Why do we fear and hate a game and group of people who are hurting no one? While these relationships being built are virtual, the fear and association people are making to pedophilia and ‘sexual perversion’ are very real. Why do we fear virtual relationships when we are fine accepting video games in which we kill each other?

DAMN. Just…damn. That is beyond disgusting.

Sickening.

These words are pretty strong for that which is just a game. There are other games take the experience beyond the living room. Some games, like Pokemon, influence waves of tourism so young children can collect stamps of their favourite Pokemon and battle in stadiums set up around the nation — extensions of the game into real life.

All hope is lost for anyone who takes this sermon seriously.

… children are building relationships with all these pokemon creatures… little reclusive power-filled monsters… Pokemon is a game that teaches children how to enter into the world of witchcraft, how to cast spells… Pokemon world is a world of the demonic — of the Satanic.

I’m pretty sure most of us find that this sermon is going a little over the edge. Pokemon are not met with the same level of fear, outrage and confusion as Love Plus. Why is it so scary when we start virtualizing other people? This example of selective neo-luddism (we embrace Facebook, computers, television, online shopping but reject virtual relationships) is, I can only guess, deeply rooted in a fear of replacement. It is entirely likely, however, that these LovePlussers might not be looking for a replacement at all. Maybe they have a certain type of person in mind, and have found that girls of this criteria simply do not exist or are not ‘accessible’. Calling this replacement (as in, replacing “real relationships” with virtual ones) wouldn’t be appropriate since there’s no potential candidate meeting this criteria in the real world.

These men will probably never procreate so eventually their creepy genes will be erased from humanity.

While I respect the opinions of others who may find that LovePlus and similar games are not for them, I have to express some concern over the proliferation of these fear mongering articles when they pin this phenomenon, similar phenomenon or along the same lines, as this, as exclusively Japanese, and examples of ‘why Japan is so f***ed up’.

See Japan, this is why we don’t apologize for dropping nukes on your sorry asses, things like this make us think we did the world a favor and should have dropped a few more.

Shortly before the Love Plus story blew up, I happened upon an article that describes why people love to find weird stories about other countries, how it stigmatizes those other countries, and how people are really good at filtering out the weird things from their home country.

… when we–or our students–hear shocking things about the cultures in which we travel or study or work–there’s a greater tendency to place some kind of importance on the strange news. (At least, in my experience.) We and they lack context and have difficulty judging the representativeness or even the veracity of such news items. Japan is particularly plagued by this, as countless American and British news outlets thrive on repeating stories about strange things that just appall my Japanese friends, who usually identify the reported incident as some kind of fringe activity (if they’ve even heard of it).

Japan is definitely quirky, but every place has its quirks–we just are a lot better at filtering out “home quirkiness.”

In all fairness, Japan does have some history and culture that makes it particularly warm to the idea of virtualization, but the continuation of this weird/wacky news from Japan trend is getting to be a bit much.

Fair commentary by Roland Kelts around 4 minutes in regarding the influence of animism, moe and kawaii culture, and the place of games like these in sub-cultures of sub-cultures in Japanese society.

Can non-animist cultures warm up to virtualization, and more importantly (hehe), augmented reality? Yes, I think so. Communities like Second Life (as ‘wacky’ as they are, too) are great indicators of this. Every day we virtualize and simulate when I plow our fields in Farmville, massacre in Mafia Wars, and connect with others we’ve only known online.

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!

… plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, drag and drop it, zip, unzip it…

Have our technological pursuits changed since the inception of the AppStore? Probably not. We’ve always been pushing for harder better faster stronger. The labs still exist, augmented reality is still researched and developed across academic institutions. But something about the AppStore changed our attitude about technological convenience, and very strongly affects the Augmented Reality ™ industry’s position on AR’s role as a tool of technological convenience. This, combined with the sensitivity AR and AR ™ enthusiasts and professionals to Gartner’s Hype-cycle, made a hypersensitivity to the practical use of our beloved technology.

Very pleasing to see some connection between augmented reality technology and spirit/the paranormal being made and visualized in an interactive manner. Using technology to see and destroy/interact with spirits is very reminiscent of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a source of inspiration for TI and Hanwa.

No idea where exactly this is. The white paper refers to it as simply “Dark Ride: Ghost Hunt”. Total Immersion’s website does list another attraction with the “Dark Ride” label, (les ANIMAUX du FUTUR [Animals of the Future]), which was also referred to as a “Hidden Reality Ride” — a very charming and appropriate terminology I think, given that this augmented reality does imply that an alternate or unseen world is already there, waiting to be revealed, an idea that other augmented reality demonstrations and applications are sadly without.

Links:
Augmented Reality Video Gun White paper October, 2009
Total Immersion Amusement Parks
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (IMDb)

Event Program Outline and Information (Dec 4th, 2009)

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 :-)

For more intellectual and creative stimulation, visit the V2_ website.

Augmented Reality in Quartz Composer used to generate OSC messages to manipulate parameters of Buffer Override as an insert in an audio track.

Just a preview, and how you can use the ARDJ software with ableton… basically me messing around with it. Talking about the software a bit and how it works. :) Enjoy!

Get the software free at http://www.lipert.net/ardj

A lot of buzz around AR has been around its use as a means to either modify the information we see about the world around us, gaming, or ‘magic’ (as described in a previous post). Earlier this last week we saw AR not as a result, but as a means input or control in “Home automation through augmented reality” which used QR codes as markers to activate objects around the house. The end result does not involve any augmented or modified vision or perception, but rather, real life changes in physical objects and environments (on or off, dark room or bright room). This example very loosely qualifies as ‘augmented reality’ in my book, but is not undeserving of attention from the AR community as a example of computer vision with (long winded) real world application (not efficiency, but visible to us without aid of a device). ARDJ sort of follows this same track in its purpose– it provides an alternative means of control of particular parameters. The end results is again, not visual. AR or not? Meeeh—- but it is a reminder that AR doesn’t have to be related to navigation or information overlay, and can exist as a broader, more creative technology allowing for organic human gesture and manipulation to come into play.

A final project for DVFX 2009 at Georgia Tech. The video is an advertisement for a Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab project to create an augmented reality storytelling application. One of the examples for this project was Alice in Wonderland, which serves as a basis for our video.

Technical details available via Create Digital Motion.

A virtual pit by Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab

“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.

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vFrame, a stop-motion concept video for outdoor AR social gaming.

vFrame is ‘yet another’ concept video for an AR social gaming platform, but their decision to use stop motion for their concept video made it unique enough to set it apart from the rest.

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“Augmented Reality as a Tool for Improving the Utility of Information” by Prof. Bruce Thomas (University of South Australia)

A reasonable introduction and ‘matome’ of augmented reality technology.

Aru Majiro - Mascot of ARmagic

Good morning everyone. Have a good weekend? I found a couple more resources to add to the previous list of Augmented Reality developer tools, kits, APIs etc.

• iPhone ARKit: an objective C kit for making augmented reality apps for iPhone; API modeled after MapKit. http://github.com/zac/iphonearkit/
• ARmagic: a Windows-based authoring tool using ARToolKit libraries to aid in creation of marker-based augmented reality applications. http://www.i-t-business.com/ar-chudoku/index.php?pi=top [JP]

Technically I should be waiting until next week for another edition of Did You Miss It?, but this one was just too exciting for me to let slide. Students and researchers from Project Juvenile at Reality Media / Mobile Communications Lab at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto have made an augmented reality game based on the world of Dennou Coil. System includes an HMD and ‘Data Glove’ (made with InterSense IS900), and incorporates many functions and items seen in Dennou Coil, such as metatags. Documentation video and links just after the break.

Project Juvenile 2009 [JP]
PJ2009′s Dennou Coil [JP]
Setup Diagram [JP]

ARmedia Plug-in for Google SketchUp (and ARexporter)
http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/en/products/arplugin_su/info.php

rtPozAR (Real-Time Poser AR) [JP]
http://foilskin.seesaa.net/article/119695691.html

ARDeskTop [JP]
http://wiki.livedoor.jp/wah_wah_hawah/

ARToolKit
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

ARToolKit Professional & osgART
http://www.artoolworks.com/Home.html

NyARToolKit (Java ARToolKit) [EN/JP]
http://nyatla.jp/nyartoolkit/wiki/index.php

FLARToolkit (Flash ARToolKit) [EN/JP]
http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en

ATOMIC Augmented Reality Authoring Tool (Front end for ARToolKit)
http://www.sologicolibre.org/projects/atomic/en/index.php

LinceoVR
http://linceovr.seac02.it/

HandyAR
http://ilab.cs.ucsb.edu/projects/taehee/HandyAR/HandyAR.html

PTAM (Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces)
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/

Expect revisions and additions to this list in the future.

PozARToolkit and rtPozAR source and documentation available at http://foilskin.seesaa.net/ [JP]

Documentation at: http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/perception/VolumeSlicingDisplay/index-e.html