Latitude

The iPad Haiku Contest voting is closed. @JulieVanK received first prize with @InSoOutSo and @lefauxfrog as runners-up. @luciuskwok and @jonacon remain honorary haiku finalists.

Last week we launched The iPad Haiku Contest to capture some of the quirky, well-informed, on-the-fly feedback we were hearing about the new tablet.

We’re offering $100 to the individual with the best haiku, and $25 each to 2 runners-up.

We received excellent response to the contest and had difficulty narrowing all the entries down to a manageable number—5 finalists—for open voting.

Vote Now

Click on a haiku below to vote for it.

Only one vote per person will be counted. Voting open through Friday, Feb. 12th, 6pm EST.

You can also submit your votes by tweet or text message. Either:

Tweet @poll the keyword associated with your preferred haiku. Only tweet the keyword and do not preface the keyword/author name with an “@” symbol. (ex. @poll luciuskwok)

OR

Send an SMS to 99503—only from US numbers—with the keyword of your preferred haiku. (ex. SMS to 99503: julievank)

Live-Polling Results

The Twitter usernames of the haiku authors are displayed in bold text below. So give ‘em a nod (and a follow). These usernames are also the keywords used for Twitter/SMS voting.

Latitude is a research-fueled consultancy at the forefront of learning how users interact with physical and electronic media. We use generative research methods and Web-based technologies, engaging participants in creative exercises to articulate—and propose solutions to—key problems affecting organizations of all types. Learn more about Latitude here, or email life-connected@latd.com.

Live audience polling by PollEverywhere; header image courtesy of mattbuchanan’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved

Series Recap: 3 Emergent Trends for Device-Content Experiences

User “needs” are now growing expectations created by emerging solutions.

This post is part of a series which discusses three high-level themes we’ve deduced from emergent technologies like the ones showcased at CES last month.

Our first theme centered on seamlessly shifting media across devices: the user desires (“problems”) & current solutions, as well as the potential opportunity spaces, surrounding this increasingly desired experience.

Theme #2 – See Me, Hear Me, Touch Me: Growing Expectations for Immersive Content Experiences

Audiences get a multitude of options for deep interactions with content, from touchscreen tools to information-rich apps on connected TVs, to… yes, we’ll say it—3D.

Thus, mainstream adoption of new technologies faces the additional hurdle of converting a “wish” into a “need.”

User needs in this space aren’t “problems” per se, but rather growing expectations created by the emerging solutions. In other words, as possibilities for greater immersion with content increase, so too will user desires.

This means innovators in this space must understand that mainstream adoption of new technologies faces the additional hurdle of converting a “wish” into a “need.”

What Do Users Desire to Make Their Content Experiences More Immersive?

Information

• Problem (Growing): What song is in this commercial? Viewers increasingly crave in the moment details about content—currently engaging in multi-screen/gadget behavior to solve the need. But, as this expectation grows, the desire to eliminate a second device will too.
• Solution: Gracenote’s MediaLink provides in-the-moment program information about scenes, songs, actors and more, and goes the extra media-shifting mile with its “smart synchronization” feature, automatically shifting music and video mid-stream as users move across devices.

Play

• Problem (Growing): The desire to engage with characters and storylines in playful ways deepens, as does the expectation for “virtual couch” interactions with friends/family while viewing.
• Solution: Social viewing options expand with internet-connected TVs integrating Skype calling (though, for now, TV-viewing must halt when a Skype chat begins), online viewing room tools like Zorap, and content providers taking offline integrations to the next level (ex. Bravo recently announced a partnership with FourSquare).

Visceral

• Problem (Latent): While audiences aren’t necessarily screaming to get closer to content in a literal sense, the mainstreaming of touchscreen and motion control tools sets a new expectation for rich visceral interactions.
• Solution:
  • Touch was everywhere at CES this year, but especially impressive was Light Blue Optics’ Light Touch holographic laser projection (HLP) technology and its limitless possibilities to turn any flat surface into a touchscreen.
  • 3D – Also everywhere, with Panasonic leading the pack. But challenges persist, as 3D remains for now a solution to a much less immediate “problem.”

Read the follow-up post, which identifies opportunity spaces for immersive content experiences.

Latitude is a research-driven consultancy for technology and media companies. We work with clients to discover and develop opportunities for next-generation content, software, and communications technologies through a combination of web-based applications and innovative research methods. Email ischulte@latd.com to learn more about working with Latitude.

Header image courtesy of good-karma’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

The iPad Haiku Contest voting is closed. @JulieVanK received first prize with @InSoOutSo and @lefauxfrog as runners-up. @luciuskwok and @jonacon remain honorary haiku finalists.

long vacation gone
busy people flock to jobs
and misspell “ipod”

Latitude is sponsoring a Haiku Contest around Apple’s iPad launch!

We’ve heard some wonderfully astute, humorous, and just downright interesting commentary on the new tablet—and the big issues surrounding it, such as lack of flash support, questionable utility (in light of smartphones), renewed hope for print media companies, and eBook pricing disputes—to name a few.

We’d like you to give us your reactions to the iPad–in haiku.

Rules

Each individual may submit up to 3 haikus. Haikus must be in English, and conform to a 3-line format with 5-7-5 syllable count. (Examples here.)

Haikus can be tweeted to @latddotcom, or emailed to life-connected@latd.com.

Prizes & Voting

One first prize winner will receive $100. Two runners-up will receive $25.

All submissions must be in by Friday, Feb. 5th at 11pm EST. We’ll begin open voting for the finalists on Tuesday, Feb. 9th.

Latitude is a research-fueled consultancy at the forefront of learning how users interact with physical and electronic media. We use generative research methods and Web-based technologies, engaging participants in creative exercises to articulate—and propose solutions to—key problems affecting organizations of all types. Learn more about Latitude here, or email life-connected@latd.com.

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

Cartoon by Jessica Reinis.

Jessica is an analyst for Latitude Research with proclivities for creative doodling and human-centric technology projections. She is the leading analyst on the current Latitude 42, an innovation study on Web technology featuring children ages 12 and under (read more on this study). Currently, her other focus areas include digital content access and new payment models, as well as next-gen advertising.

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.

Contributing editor: Kim Gaskins.

This cartoon was inspired by a new TV prototype from MIT’s Media Lab that achieves “a level of interaction that nobody’s ever been able to do before.” (Chris Grayson brought to our attention that Apple had actually patented something similar in 2006.)

The concept is “an everyday LCD screen [that] has been modified to ’see’ the world in front of it in 3D” and respond to it accordingly. (Gestures are the new remote!) Gestural interfaces, of course, constitute a core foundation of MIT’s SixthSense technology, and are being incorporated increasingly into everyday personal electronic devices.

Cartoon by Jessica Reinis.

Jessica is an analyst for Latitude Research with proclivities for creative doodling and human-centric technology projections. She is the leading analyst on the current Latitude 42, an innovation study on Web technology featuring children ages 12 and under (read more on this study). Currently, her other focus areas include digital content access and new payment models, as well as next-gen advertising.

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.

Gone in a flash?

It was going to end with a whimper that much seemed for sure. Long gone were the days when we had first met. Awkwardly fumbling around, not knowing what to say or how to say it. But I could see the writing on the web: HTML 5 was coming and it was coming soon–my long relationship with Flash would end.

I primarily use Flash to get video content on the web and, with the new video specification in HTML 5, I could foresee using Flash less and less—until I finally cleared it off my computer to free up a few extra bytes.

Or so I thought.

First, a quick bit of background

HTML 5 is the latest alteration to the underlying specifications for how the web is all put together. Among other great benefits it includes a video specification so developers can place and control video along with other interactive elements on a web page. This is important because Flash doesn’t work on all platforms (hello, iPhone), and it can crash, taking your browser with it. So, with HTML 5, you won’t need to plug anything into your browser to make it play video; it will just work. It also allows the rest of the page to talk to the video element which opens the door to some mind-blowing interactions.

In slightly oversimplified terms, the way video is played back on your computer is by using a codec. The codec specifies how video files are compressed from the raw video into a smaller package that can be easily viewed from the web. The more efficient the compression, the better the quality of the resulting video. People who work with video on the web are constantly involved in a balancing act between the best looking picture and a lower file size to accommodate people with different connection speeds.

The major issues

There are ongoing disagreements regarding which codec to use; on the one hand, Apple with their Safari browser, wants to use the H.264 codec. This produces the best (as of the status quo) picture quality for the least amount of bandwidth. But it also costs money to use; adopters of the format have to play licensing fees.

On the other side of the debate, Mozilla with their Firefox browser, support the Ogg Theora format—which has slightly worse picture quality and takes more bandwidth to stream; however, it is free to use (“unencumbered” by licensing fees).

Experience the difference for yourself

… at DailyMotion –which is a supporter of the Theora codec and has started converting some of its library to the open standard. (Make sure you use Mozilla 3.5 to view the openvideo site. On all other browsers, bizarre playback artifacts occurred, at least in my experiences.) But the Theora looks just plain worse than the H.264 version.  Try out any video on the open site; its corresponding video on the regular site will look better thanks to the H.264 codec.

In my follow-up post, I’ll discuss the industry happenings in more details, with some larger implications for what it all may mean. I’ll also include some predictions of my own for the future of web video.

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

As an application-developing research company, we couldn’t help but pass this along.

xkcd cartoons, by randall munroe, are licensed under (cc); this image reproduced with permission.