Latitude

This post is guest-authored by Jack Graham as part of a series on augmented reality.

Part 1 – The Stuff Augmented Realities are Made of
Part 2 – Augmented Reality Steps Out of the Lab

Augmented reality is what the Industry Standard calls a “disruptive technology.” What this means is that certain types of organizations need to adapt to AR quickly, before those who have assimilated this technology eat their lunches.

If you’re a travel guide company, search engine, directory, local shop, or restaurant, AR has the potential to either benefit or damage your business.

The Risks

One is safety. If you’re walking down the street looking into augspace with your phone, you lose your peripheral vision. The first time I tried playing Spec Trek, I was having a great time — until I stepped into a very real pile of dog leavings while chasing down an AR ghost.

AR apps that allow public tagging of buildings leave homeowners and businesses vulnerable to harassment and vandalism via augmented reality sticky notes. And AR apps that do facial recognition threaten to further erode our privacy, taking away our ability to remain anonymous in public places.

The Benefits

The future of AR holds a great deal of promise. Better devices, such as heads up display glasses, are already appearing and will give augspace even greater immediacy, freeing the user from having to pull out their phone and look through it. (They should also reduces one’s chances of stepping in dog poop while chasing invisible spectres).

Gestural and wearable interfaces will let us click on an object or building in a scene and bring up information on it, or allow complex interactions with phantom objects (a la Tony Stark’s engineering software in the Iron Man movie).

Industry standards for tagging places and objects with AR content will allow apps to access public AR channels. And educational AR apps capable of recognizing parts in a machine from the scene in the user’s camera could be used to coach workers through assembling and maintaining complex devices.

Emergent AR Technologies

Two research projects generating tantalizing near term results are MIT’s SixthSense and a project at Cambridge University to create better outdoor positional tracking for camera-based apps. SixthSense is a wearable device (a pendant) created by MIT’s Fluid Interfaces lab.

Built on top of a cell phone, it uses the phone camera to recognize objects and a tiny projector to project information back onto the object. It could project information about a person it recognizes onto their chest or the status of your flight onto your scanned boarding pass. SixthSense is particularly interesting because it’s in the small class of working AR applications that don’t display their output on a device monitor of some type.

The Cambridge University effort addresses a more abstract problem: determining the exact position of a camera in relation to the scene it’s showing. For an example of why this is important, imagine a developer who wants put a block of color over a building in a navigational app to highlight it as the user’s destination. The block of color will need to change according to rules of perspective as the user moves closer to the building, or it won’t match up with the image of the building coming through the camera. The Cambridge team figured out how to generate a 3D model of a building using image recognition on the 2D camera picture. At the same time, the device collects GPS data. It can then distort the model — and any graphics tied to it — as the camera moves.

Future Implications for AR

In the next few years, we’ll see the emergence of open standards for building and tagging augspace, search engines selling premium AR placement, location based AR audio, and spam (along with spam filters). Farther out, augmented reality will completely transform how we compute. It will allow us to put a user-defined skin on reality, radiate and interact with personal area social networks, and wear graphics like clothing. It will enhance our intelligence, providing instant information on anything we look at and cueing us if we forget a name or a face. It will erase the boundary between the real and the digital, turning the world around us into a search engine whose results are displayed on thin air.

Jack Graham is Senior Interactive Producer at Vantage Travel in Boston. In his spare time he writes sci-fi, designs games, and habitually calls his Android phone a “jeejah.” His blog, which is about interactive marketing, social media, and emerging technologies, can be found by turning on your phone’s GPS and looking through the camera at: jackgraham.net/exmachina/

Header image courtesy of leonardlow’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

This post is guest-authored by Jack Graham as part of a series on augmented reality.

Part 1 – The Stuff Augmented Realities are Made of
Part 3 – The Promise of Augmented Reality: What to Expect

While not the only devices currently in use, smart phones are ideal platforms for augmented reality applications because they pack all of the needed capabilities. AR applications have also been created for handheld game consoles, PDAs, and computers.

A Few Notable AR Apps, & How They Work

Augmented reality applications are appearing rapidly. Directory apps like Superpages and Layar use GPS to find where the user is and the accelerometer to tell which way they’re facing. They then position markers over the scene based on user-entered search terms.

Enter “restaurant” into Superpages and point it down a busy commercial street, and your camera will show you the street with graphical tags positioned over every restaurant in your field of view. Thumbing a restaurant’s tag will bring up search results on it. If you’re too far away for the app to show any results on camera, you can switch to an overhead map view to look at a wider area.

SpecTrek for Android and Ghost Hunter for the Nintendo DSi are games that challenge the player to hunt down invisible ghosts. In SpecTrek, the ghosts show up as bogies on a radar-like display generated from GPS coordinates and a street map of the player’s location. When the player closes in on a ghost, he can switch to camera mode. The ghosts appear as graphics superimposed on the player’s real surroundings, growing larger or smaller with distance. The player points his AR crosshairs at his quarry’s virtual GPS coordinates to capture it. If the player gets too close, the ghost will notice him and run for it, darting and weaving in the player’s display as it does so.

Columbia University’s ARMAR, or Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair, uses AR goggles to help army personnel perform repairs on equipment. ARMAR flags parts in a device with AR tags, guiding the user through the steps in a repair job. ARMAR links to damage control systems, showing the user where on the equipment repairs must be made. The prototype uses an Android phone as the handheld portion of the interface.

Not all AR apps make deep use of locative technologies. Some are simply toys, but no less clever for it. For the 2006 World Cup, Siemens developed Kick Real, a game that lets you kick an AR soccer ball with your real foot on the phone’s screen.

Pop-AR

Some readers might wonder why I’ve not so far mentioned the Esquire Augmented Reality Issue or the toy line for Avatar, both of which were well publicized applications of AR.

The Avatar toys let the user hold a card with fiduciary markers in front of their web cam. The software then draws a three-D graphic over the space delineated by the markers and moves it around as the markers move. On screen, it looks like the user’s fingers are disappearing into a solid object — a helicopter or an alien Na’vi.

Esquire’s AR issue does a similar trick with the pages of the magazine. While slickly executed, both efforts use AR in its most limited form, in that they require a computer and a webcam. This combination of devices breaks the immediacy of viewing through a palm-sized mobile and pretty much shackles the user to a desktop while using the app. The experience is more like at-home greenscreening than true AR.

To conclude, tomorrow’s post will discuss likely future developments in AR.

Jack Graham is Senior Interactive Producer at Vantage Travel in Boston. In his spare time he writes sci-fi, designs games, and habitually calls his Android phone a “jeejah.” His blog, which is about interactive marketing, social media, and emerging technologies, can be found by turning on your phone’s GPS and looking through the camera at: jackgraham.net/exmachina/

Header images courtesy of orse’s flickr & idrewuk’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

This post is guest-authored by Jack Graham as part of a series on augmented reality.

Part 2 – Augmented Reality Steps Out of the Lab
Part 3 – The Promise of Augmented Reality: What to Expect

“The universe is an intelligence test.” –Timothy Leary

AR: LSD of the Future

Viewed as history, the psychedelic movement of the 1960s looks like pure hedonism. Yet thoughtful proponents of LSD — people as various as Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary — saw it as a way to expand consciousness and enhance intelligence. In some sense, the psychedelic movement was an early attempt to put a graphical user interface on reality, enriching our experience of the world by tapping into all of the information our limited human perceptions were missing. As it turned out, lysurgic acid diethylamide was a terrible platform for doing this, because while psychotropics offered a pleasurable user experience, the GUI didn’t let you pull up any information that wasn’t already in your brain.

But what if we did have a technology able to put an overlay on our perceptions as vividly and immediately as a hallucinogen, while giving us control over the experience and the ability to map useful information from the internet onto the physical world? Augmented reality (or AR), a technology that is now making the leap from the drawing board into the marketplace, is exactly this.

Augmented reality uses a device, at present usually a smartphone, to layer graphics, text, and sometimes sound over real world objects viewed through the device’s display. It’s the opposite of virtual reality. Where VR attempts to create worlds inside the machine, AR brings the data and analytical power of the machine out into the real world by superimposing it on our senses.

Current AR Applications

Present AR applications are primitive relative to the long term potential of this technology, but no less useful for it. Wikitude Worldbrowser, an AR travel guide, lets travelers point their smart phone camera at their surroundings and superimposes information from its database on landmarks that it recognizes. Google Goggles uses image recognition to identify objects or places and pull up search engine data on them. Goggles is very useful when buying wine; it can analyze the label, letting you quickly establish whether that ten dollar bottle you’re considering is a lucky find or fermented swill. And the game AR Tower Defense for Nokia’s Symbian phones will use any surface in your house as an AR battlefield given a little help from fiduciary markers.

How AR Actually Works

The technology stack underlying most AR applications includes:

• Cameras and displays. Most AR apps use the device’s camera to display whatever the device is pointed at and then draw graphics over the scene. In many cases, the app analyzes camera images to gather information about the scene. In other apps, the camera is used only to show the user the scene, with the device’s other senses (GPS, etc.) providing the application’s input.
• GPS & other location-finding techniques. Some of the most useful AR apps are locative, feeding the user data about her surroundings once her position is established. On a finer level, the accelerometer present in some devices may be used by an application to position graphics over the scene based upon which direction the device is pointed.
• Image & facial recognition. Image recognition technology is at the core of apps like Google Goggles. AR apps that use facial recognition to pull up information on people around you are in development.
• Fiduciary markers. Image recognition technology can’t always identify objects reliably, so some AR programs scan the scene in the camera for blocky, geometric markers on objects or surfaces. These fiduciary markers are designed for machine-readability. Apps can then use information gained by reading fiduciary markings to position graphics on the user’s display. Fiduciary markers are a relative of other machine readable markings like bar and QR codes, but they’re designed to be scannable from farther away.

In tomorrow’s post, we’ll look at some AR applications already in the marketplace.

Jack Graham is Senior Interactive Producer at Vantage Travel in Boston. In his spare time he writes sci-fi, designs games, and habitually calls his Android phone a “jeejah.” His blog, which is about interactive marketing, social media, and emerging technologies, can be found by turning on your phone’s GPS and looking through the camera at: jackgraham.net/exmachina/

Header image courtesy of daisy’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.