Conference Badges: Early Augmented Reality

December 3rd, 2009 by Tim Maly

When I was working on the idea of the pocket-device model of augmented reality versus the lanyard model, I realized something about conference badges that didn’t really fit into the piece.

photo credit: jdlasica

Conference badges are little ancient proto-augments.

They are a way for people to carry around and display metadata about themselves. The basic bit of data is “I am allowed to be here”. Most conference passes add to that details such as who you are and who you work for. Some conference badges add in slots for customization such as press-clippings, your business card or whatever else you feel like tossing in there.

Everywhere you go, there’s the badge, broadcasting who you are and whether you are authorized. Anyone around can take a look and grab your data (such as it is). They are – as in all the lanyard augments – public, passive, and always-on.

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Lanyards & Pockets

November 30th, 2009 by Tim Maly

I’d like to talk about augmented reality. Specifically, I’d like to talk about augmented reality, the things you carry in your pockets, and the things you wear around your neck.

Primer

AR basics: It’s an extension of the mobile Internet (that’s the one where people are walking around with computers disguised as phones in their pockets). The mobile Internet is what happens when devices become untethered from power, ethernet, and phone cords.

photo credit: tranchis

Let’s talk about finding a restaurant.

From the perspective of the Internet, it’s really not that interesting to know where my desktop is. It’s the same place it was yesterday and generally this fact cancels itself out. When I’m at home, a search for “Italian food” looks about the same whether I’m looking for a spot to meet a client for lunch downtown tomorrow or walking distance from my home tonight. So I have to put extra effort into telling the Internet my intentions (using other keywords and the like).

When a mobile like a Blackberry goes online, something important happens. You can’t assume that it’s in the same place that it was last time it connected. As location becomes variable it can become meaningful.

Equip a pocket computer with an Internet connection and GPS and it can start filtering “Italian restaurant” results by how close they are to the searcher. Give it a compass and a video camera and you can point your screen at things and get a video-game like overlay of the world. It can show you all kinds of stuff, such as which restaurants in your view have a 4 star rating or better. (I should note that I hate the overlayed reviews example, but it gets used a lot to illustrate the idea. More on this later.)

The notion is that there is a lot of metadata about the world which is only really relevant to people who are in a particular time and place. If the information superhighway was about bringing vast quantities of data to our fingertips in the home, augmented reality is about carrying that data back out and embedding it in the world. It’s about further blurring the line between the physical and digital. (For more, check out this overview by Will Wiles of Icon magazine.)

This is all in its very early stages. There’s a lot of excitement and money floating around, but we’re still very weak on actual useful applications running on usable devices. The eventual realization of these dreams will require a combination of hardware and software to really work. It’s not yet clear how that will look or behave.

So much for the basics.

Techno-Evolution

As the early engi-pioneers in flooding the physical world with metadata try to sort out how it’ll all work, I’ve noticed a curious process by which these devices are evolving into two distinct branches.

Let’s call branch 1: Things You Keep In Your Pocket. These are the iPhones, Blackberries, Androids and other smartphone-type things. The apps are stuff like Layar and Nearest Tube. Implicitly, I’ve been acting as if these are the only devices. Not so.

When I started writing this, it was a joke post. The title was Lanyards: Official accessory to your augmented reality and I was going to open with with this quip from Bruce Sterling:

I wish designers would stop imagining that customers really really want to carry imaginary geek-junk around their necks on lanyards. We all know that 99.995% of designers would rather be killed than wear a dorky lanyard, so why inflict that on the rest of us?

Bruce Sterling Beyond the Beyond

The joke would have been a string of photos from promotional material of people looking fabulous with near future tech toys hanging from their necks. Stuff like this:

Maptor by Jin-Sun Park and Seon-keun Park, featured on Yanko Design

So branch 2 is: Things You Wear Around Your Neck, AKA Technology on Lanyards. I’m fascinated by this branch.

(There is also a branch 3: Things You Wear On Your Head, but it’s gone dormant for some reason. It’s possible that through convergent evolution, branch 2 will come to look very much like what branch 3 might have been. Branch 4 is, I suppose, Things Embedded In Other Things. This’ll be when your car’s windshield has data displays glowing at you. Imagine a fighter jet’s HUD and you get the idea. The hold an image up to a webcam apps fall into this as well.)

Pockets

Right now, branch 1 apps are the most successful. They spread parasitically by running on top of devices that are already popular. There’s a lot of gee-whizery here. They make your boring old phone/computer/thing act like magic. It’s something you can pull out and show your friends. They are socially acceptable, because everyone you know already has a mobile phone.

They are also, for the most part, party tricks.

Take a look at the Nearest Tube demo again. Leaving aside the jittery icons, imagine yourself trying to use that thing to get around. It has arrows pointing you to the nearest stations but those arrows point as-the-crow-flies. You are in a city – in particular, you are in London. If there is one thing I can tell you about the route from your current location to the nearest tube station, it’s that it’s not a straight line.

View Larger Map

You are left holding your phone in front of you, constantly adjusting for the turns in the road. Sometimes you have to point the thing up into the sky, depending on where the icon stacking has seen fit to put your particular destination. Compare that to the (suddenly) old-fashioned Maps technique of showing you a birds-eye view of the surrounding area and a turn-by-turn suggested route.

Lanyards

The lanyard devices are quite different from the pocket ones. They are not even a little socially acceptable. No one looks good in a lanyard and if you are the kind of person who moves around much, they are get in the way all the time. They’re uncomfortable. They chafe the neck and if the thing on the end is at all heavy, they cause soreness. They evoke high school coaches with stopwatches and perky tour guides with clipboards.

They also imply a very different mode of interaction than the pocket devices.

Pocket augmented reality tends to being active, burst-use, and private. It uses tiny screens on a personal device. No one else is meant to see what it shows beyond the person holding it. You have to actively decide to take it out and make use of it, and it spends most of its time in sleep mode in your pocket.

In contrast, lanyard augmented reality is passive, always-on, and public. These are fuzzy boundaries, but take a look at a few prototypes and you’ll see what I mean.

I’ve already pointed to Maptor, a GPS device that projects a map of your immediate surroundings onto a nearby surface. Yanko’s pitch for it talks about how useful it is because no one need ever know you are lost. They gets this exactly backwards.

Lost and don’t want anyone to know? Projecting a glowing map will probably blow your cover. You are much better off pulling out your Droid and pretending you are looking at text messages while you find your way.

On the other hand, being able to unfurl a map where everyone in the group can see? That’s something missing from tiny screens. With Maptor, a group of people can gather around and point to the things they want to talk about, taking navigation back to the shared collaborative experience that it was when we had paper maps.

The Vicon Revue. Image from Reportages Photos

The Vicon Revue is a fish-eyed camera that hangs around your neck and takes photos every 30 seconds. This is perfect for reconstructing whatever happened after tequila number 5 or for self-incrimination at trial.

It’s also perfect for illustrating the passive part of lanyard augmented reality. With a pocket device, you need to pull it out of storage to start using it. You need to decide in advance that there’s something you want to capture. The Vicon reverses that. It’s always recording. Your decision is when to turn it off and, when you get home, what to edit out.

MIT’s Sixth Sense. Image from Dustin Kirk’s blog

Sixth Sense combines the camera and projector into a kind of mega-lanyard hybrid. Watch the demo here and see if you can feel the difference between that and a pocket device.

In its current state it’s clunky and socially clueless (the best moment is when it projects metadata onto the hapless acquaintance). It’s the kind of thing that only experimental engineers and conference-goers could love. But it’s also a fundamentally different attitude about the world and how the digital should bleed into it.

It’s always running, always scanning, always recording, and always waiting for instructions. Even picture-taking is changed. The act of framing the image you want isn’t taking a picture, not really. It’s telling the device which pictures to keep.

The projector is also very different from the private screen for all the reasons that Maptor is different from Maps on your phone. Other people can interact with the data. When he looks at the toilet paper and his rig tells him it’s OK, his roommate can be standing next to him and seeing the same conclusion. The digital isn’t being edited onto a video of the world, it’s being literally projected into it.

The name of the application speaks to the ambitions of the project. They want something that is so wholly integrated into your life that it feels like part of you.

It’s early days here in the augmented reality field and if the early developers keep making dorky devices, let’s cut them a little slack. After all, the Apple ][ became the Mac.

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The Objectless Office – Dematerialization 3

November 5th, 2009 by Tim Maly

Part of a series: Dematerialization

There were a lot of new buzzwords in play in 1999 when I was taking calls for our local Telecom’s ISP. This was 1999, just before the dotCom bubble burst; an exciting time that demanded exciting verbiage. Multimedia. Information Super-Highway. eVerb-of-your-choice.

My favourite was “Paperless Office”. We used to use it as a kind of curse word. An invocation said while waiting for copies of the meeting’s agenda to be printed so that if could be distributed, doodled upon, and then thrown away.

photo credit: Corey Holms

The computer was meant to herald an end to paper documentation but paper multiplied instead. Easy editing + cheap and fast laser printing changed the relationship we had to paper. Real world filing disappeared, as it became easier to just print a new copy if the document had gone missing. Perfection trumped conservation and every discovered typo meant a complete reprinting of all 7 copies of the 50 page report or proposal.

Think about what’s happening here. Documents are undergoing an transition from object to data. The paper copies become physical instantiations of the data but they’ve stopped being the data itself. There’s this sort of adolescent transition in progress, while we – the users of the data – aren’t sure how to treat it, so we end up with these bizarre hybrid entities that slide back and forth between digital and physical, all the while leaving behind recycling bins overflowing with the dead husks of stale snapshots.

A decade later, we’re slowly starting to come to grips with this. Very few of my friends own printers anymore – they feel like a costly burden. We prefer to avoid printing at all if we can, resorting to a trip to the copyshop only when absolutely necessary. The fact that we have to do this at all shows how much of the rest of the world that we’re interfacing with still fetishises paper. So we resort to hacks, using scanned signatures and fax-to-email services to generate much documentation, essentially resorting to forgery to navigate our way through the paper bureaucracy. Adolescence is still in progress.

If all these visionaries are right about the path that manufacturing is going to take, we are in for an even worse transition with objects. Just like with paper, the promise of 3d printers is a blurring between data and objects. Bruce Sterling calls these hybrid things Spimes. Data that gets instantiated in the physical world for a time, before being reclaimed, recycled and sustainably mined for future use.

Scenario: You buy a Spime with a credit card. Your account info is embedded in the transaction, including a special email address set up for your Spimes. After the purchase, a link is sent to you with customer support, relevant product data, history of ownership, geographies, manufacturing origins, ingredients, recipes for customization, and bluebook value. The spime is able to update its data in your database (via radio-frequency ID), to inform you of required service calls, with appropriate links to service centers. This removes guesswork and streamlines recycling.

Bruce Sterling – Viridian Note 00422: The Spime

I think and hope that Sterling is right about the end point, but the transition terrifies me.

Think spam is bad? Fax spam is worse. Object spam will be worse, still. Will be? I should say that it already is. Every time you go to a conference or sales event and come back with a sack full of unwanted tchotchkes that you’re going to toss, you are glimpsing the objectless future. We’re going to be drowning in the stuff. Moreso, I mean.

The problem is fundamentally a materials(marketing?) one. Taken individually, “disposable” and “durable” are each fine selling points. The problem is that over and over, we cram these features into the same stupid objects. The usual culprits – water bottles, disposable tupperware – are all there, but it goes bigger than that. My cellphone has a 3 year contract. When the contract is over, my provider is going to try to sell me a new phone, which will be 4-8x more powerful than this one. I intend to buy it.

Is this a consumer problem? If we started selling cellphones that were designed to decay after about 2 years of use, how would that go over? We’d be run out of town for selling cheap product, I think. There’s a kind of willful blindness. We know obsolescence is planned but if we talk about it, people take their business elsewhere. “I don’t want a phone that’s gonna beak down after 3 years.” YES YOU DO. You’ll want a new one.

There’s a kind of insane packrat mentality to it. “Who knows, I might still want to be running this computer in 8 years, anyone who makes a CRT monitor that falls apart after 3 is a shyster.”

A sane system would build into objects a realistic lifespan and allow them to die gracefully instead of these undead zombie objects that are no longer useful but won’t go away. This is all that cradle to grave design you’ve been hearing so much about.

So we need a better culture around this, we need planning to match practice to match process. We need better materials. And here’s the kicker: to get to that point, we need to throw away the stuff we’re using now.

All of: Dematerialization
The Unbearable Lightness of Things – Dematerialization 1
The Looming Collapse of FedEx – Dematerialization 2
The Objectless Office – Dematerialization 3 ((YOU ARE HERE))

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3 Stories About Regional Architecture

July 27th, 2009 by Tim Maly

photo credit: tripleman

Over at Inventing Green, Alexis Madrigal looks at the adoption of air-conditioners. He talks about how the rise of electrical cooling seems to have lead to a crash in regional building techniques.

“Of course, the use of air conditioning allowed homeowners to enjoy a new degree of comfort, but a goodly portion of the residential air-conditioning load simply replaced the comfort once provided — at little environmental cost — by good design,” Rome writes.

The whole thing put me in mind of three incidents that highlight the critical importance of a regional context in usable architecture.

Done Well

A few years ago I went on a tour of the then under-construction Earth Rangers Wildlife Center in Ontario. It’s a very green building, LEED gold rating and all that. They were showing us the tech and how liquid running through the building kept it cool and how tall ceilings moved hot air away from employees and on and on about how they were keeping the temperature down. This is Canada, where the main problem, you’d think, is keeping warm. Judging by my utility bills, it certainly is.

One of the students asked the project manager about that and he looked genuinely surprised. Heating was an afterthought, a solved problem – you just needed to keep the place insulated. And then he went back to explaining all the clever cooling solutions.

Done Badly

I remember visiting my parents when they were house-sitting on Salt Spring Island. The proud owners had their home custom built, using a design from California. The result was an unusable disaster.

Everything about the house had clearly been intended to keep a desert home pleasantly shaded. An overabundance of sunlight is not a problem in heavily-treed, often cloudy, British Columbia. They had to keep the indoor lights on pretty much all day long. Even so, the house felt dank, dark and dismal.

Done Badly, Then Fixed

In Halifax, I used to deliver the paper to the Killam Library. The Killam had originally been designed with some warmer climate in mind (all my stories are about how miserable the weather gets in Canada, I’m realizing). Touches such as an always-dry stream bed that ran from outside the building under the edge into the open air atrium and then into the lobby itself, indicated an architect who imagined a place where water did not freeze for a good chunk of the year.

During the winter, that open-air atrium became a terrifying safety hazard. Take a look at this photo. Surrounded on all sides by warmed glass, the whole thing became a chimney. The heating pushed an enormous volume of air out the top and sucked gale force winds through the pictured entry-way.

In the late 90s, Dalhousie fixed the problem, sealing the top of the atrium with glass. The result was a fully usable (safe) courtyard where students now congregate.

So much depends on thoughtful design.

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If Plants Had Culture

June 26th, 2009 by Tim Maly

photo credit: lrargerich

((An incomplete idea))

Begin with the idea of seeds as dense packets of shippable information. Seeds contain (self)assembly instructions. Just add water.

Think about memes vs. genes. Memes allow an evolution that is faster than the rate of gene evolution. There is the rapid transmission, sure. But there is also the internal workings, self-reflection and modification of memes. A meme can undergo a great deal of evolution within a single entity before it gets spit back out into the world.

What would it look like if plants had access to memes? What if plants had rapid learning? They’d still need to be plants, so no moving and talking like people. Otherwise, we’ve just recreated Treebeard.

Think about machines. In some crude sense, RepRaps are plants. They build other RepRaps but they themselves don’t change or learn. The learning is instantiated in the next generation of machine that the RepRap builds. Generations can be radically (instead of gradually) different – an advantage afforded by all of the information processing that happens between generations of RepRaps.

Give plants memes and let them instantiate their learning in the (plant)conscious design of the next generation of seeds. Give them access to the ability to modify their behaviour almost as quickly as humans modify ours. Let them adapt rapidly to our rapid cultural shifts. Why should Monsanto have all the fun?

Scenarios

A weed appears in the Middle East with seed pods that are as satisfying to smash as a florescent tube. When smashed near the right kind of soil, chemical triggers set off a fiery light show. Youthful Tehran is overrun with the stuff.

In Paris, a species of flower predicts next season’s colours and changes its children accordingly. A bizarre symbiosis occurs as fashion designers derive inspiration from plant and plant derives inspiration from the runway. All the big houses guard their greenhouses jealously. Chanel’s radical “Agent Orange” spring line causes a scandal.

On the rootops of Detroit, a species we call shiftspice changes flavours from generation to generation. Chefs prize them, trading and collecting them the way that we trade vintages of wine. “Is that a Brightmoor late 2012?” Collector-prospector-burglars creep along the eaves with highly portable harvesting gear. Their discoveries are sold to restaurants all around the world.

In Tokyo, a kind of balcony fruit that seemed incredibly successful is learning about fads and backlash. While in Abbotswood, truce is declared as gardeners learn that updating your landscaping to the latest fashion can be something of an impossibility if the current plants don’t want to be removed.

Rumours circulate of a grass in L.A. with hallucinogenic properties and pollen spores that are activated by fire. If you hotbox with male and female angiosperm in the same bowl, the trip is said to be twice as intense.

Authorities in São Paulo engage in a futile attempt to crack down on the practice of “body pollenating” at festivals, after revellers discover a flowering vine that, in the right conditions and quantities, produces an indescribable contact-high.

From a plant’s-eye view

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