Living in an Augmented Reality

I found this blog post interesting, when viewing high tech gadgetry from the viewpoint of mass appeal. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but those of us embedded in the world of high tech sometimes forget that most people don’t have the newest gadgets or will take a long time to get them, so it’s good to be reminded of this.  

I think it’s clear that the best strategy will be to come up with approaches to advertising and marketing that span the spectrum, from low to high tech, especially in the mobile sphere.  Which begs the question, what’s the “low tech” you want to support on a mobile device?  SMS?  MMS?  J2ME?  Do we “care” about folks who have the lowest-end of the lowest-end phones right now?

After all, if you look at the other side of the argument about what to assume in terms of mobile device capabilities, it’s clear that churn is pretty rapid in mobile devices, so shooting too low may be a bad strategy.  After all, how many of the masses does a “mass” marketing campaign have to hit?   Perhaps shooting for a subset of phones (1%? 5%?  10%?) right now is reasonable, since the owners of those may be the folks you want to hit anyway (tech savvy, disposable income, young?).  By the time we see if a technology works or not, those numbers will have likely risen (5?  10%?  25%?).  And what is the goal of a high-tech mobile advertising campaign right now?  Perhaps the PR from a well executed campaign may be a bigger benefit than the “click through” of a piece of technology.

Of course, it would be easy to say that I’m a technical optimist and not a marketing person.  Both of which are true.  And I’m working in the highest end of the high end of mobile technology (mobile AR).  However, given the cost of creating technology and porting to todays plethora of phones, one has to be careful and reflective on deciding what to try and what to invest in;  the low end approaches don’t seem (to me) to offer a lot of potential when compared to the web or print or TV.  

Unless you are leveraging location (GPS or otherwise), the camera (for AR, or QR codes, or other forms of tracking and recognition), local ad-hoc networks, and other unique mobile technologies built into the device, it’s unclear to me what mobile marketing has to offer.

It looks like there are more reports on the DSi and it’s camera.  There is the potential for AR games here, but the big worry is that the device is too slow.  There are some details/rumors on the hardware floating around, but it’s not looking as promising as I’d like:  doing computer vision for any sort of tracking is expensive, and you still need to actually run the game!

That said, being able to do ANY AR on a commodity device will be awesome, as it will create an outlet for AR and drive people’s imagination.  And focusing on a kids device is key:  iPhone games are great when targeted at the > 20 year old set, but so many interesting AR games and “magic books” and so forth are targeted to much younger kids.  The iPhone isn’t going to be bouncing around in middle-school backpacks any time soon!

Picked up a pointer to an AR Book being shown at a German book fair.  While this blogger, and the blogger he points at, note that this is a “real” book (meaning, I assume, it will be for sale) rather than a demo, the video leaves the viewer wondering “so what?” …

We’ve built some AR books, and my friends and colleagues in Graz and HITLabNZ have too.  The critical issue whenever we try them with real people is “so what?” … meaning, why would I want to “read” this.

Look at the video being pointed by these articles and ask yourself that question.  At least in the video, these books appear to be nothing more than a placeholder for a (non-?)interactive bit of 3D and audio content;  does this look fun (minus the gee-wiz factor)?  Now look at how it’s being “read” … the “reader” is holding it up FACING AWAY FROM HER toward a camera on a computer screen and having to “read” it on the screen;  does this look fun?

I realize that there needs to be a “first” one, and that figuring out what the sweet spot and magic sauce will be that makes these work is non-obvious (otherwise, we’d all be reading them now, right?).  But, I wonder if the folks trying to create these have asked anyone besides their engineers “What is the real market for these?”  ”Who’s going to want to read something like this?”  ”What makes a 3D AR book good?” 

There are books:  they have certain appeals, they have certain affordances. There are computer games:  ditto, certain appeals and affordances.  ”Magic books” of this sort appear, to me, to combine the WORST of both, not the best.

I don’t think it has to be so.  It’s clear that there is an intuitive appeal to having books become 3D.  But, like print books before them, it’s the actually content (not the technology) that matters.

The metaio tech looks pretty good, if they can get it off the laptop and onto a device that might actually be more conducive to the “book” experience.  And if someone can get some good content in there.

This article on cnn.com paints a nice path toward the eventual deployment of handheld AR games.  Right now, they are not doing AR, just geolocated content, but by focusing on devices and concepts that require magnetic compasses in the phones, they will hopefully help push manufacturers toward creating devices with full 3d orientation sensors.  Again, as the article points out, we need both position (good GPS, better than currently available), a good compass AND tilt/roll sensing (full 3D orientation) to know “where you are looking.”  

Eventually, 3D position and orientation like this will just be the starting point, and the devices will use other information in the world (models of buildings, such as this system demonstrates, or the imaged-based approaches being worked on by Nokia Palo Alto researchers).  When such systems (which will require a massive amount of information about the real world, much more significant that systems like Google Earth and Google Streetview) are deployed, we can finally start doing REAL AR in the physical world.  

Some day, some day …

Over on Wired there is an article about a new Nintendo DS possibly having a camera and other support for creating AR games. Ori also comments on this.

I am also really excited by this; anything that pushes handheld AR will be a good thing for those of us currently engaged in it (and it’ll give my students more job opportunities!).  There is the practical issue of creating “good handheld AR games” that are practical for mass marketing and consumption. The DS/PSP/Gizmondo aren’t powerful enough to do “real computer vision” (like the PS3 could do), and so some sort of physical props (e.g., cards with markers on them) will be needed. As soon as your start requiring props, that makes the games less portable … a conundrum to be sure.

Hopefully, some of the students in the “handheld AR game design” class I’m doing at GT right now (in collaboration with a class at SCAD Atlanta) will come up with some compelling examples and help drive interest!

While popping into Ori’s blog, I say this post: Unveiling Tonchidot: A Cool Parallel World - on the iPhone

Other coverage seems to indicate that it’s not real, and given the lack of detail (and the state of the art in mobile AR) it’s hard to imagine it can do what the video seems to want to imply that it does.  Of course, if it’s just grabbing information based on the location, and then using interesting layout algorithms, it could really work.  For example, given that the iPhone location could be pretty accurate, you could do some simple heuristic-based search to associate a “geo-tagged” piece of data (e.g., put this note at this intersection) with a part of the image stream (e.g., put it over this bit of the view of the world, like a sign).  It would likely be very fragile, but given that the labels seems to reposition a lot in the video, perhaps that’s what it’s doing.

Of course, like many of these demos (think about that one on Android, called Enkin), it’s amazing how they seem to be “inventing” the same idea over and over. 

And not addressing any of the “real” problems that will come up.  Consider what happens when thousands of people leave hundreds of notes in that mall the video appears in.  How does arfilter filter that?  How do people author content?  Deal with privacy, security and permissions?  Of course, as we all know, we must take baby-steps, but I think these questions are fascinating to consider.  Especially when the commentators refer to this as evoking something like Vinge’s “Rainbow’s End,” where these concerns are central.

Ok, this isn’t really focused on AR, but I’ll get to that.  Check out the article on “the cocoon” and ask yourself “why, why, please why?”

Don’t get me wrong.  I love technology;  I even love pointless technology if it’s cool and might be useful someday.  But, I really hate people trying to revive the VR hype era by pushing a “might be useful for something, especially games” kind of technology as something that could be generally useful.  Classic VR had (and still has) many problems, not least that for most of what we do as people, we really don’t want to be isolated from the world.  So (and this is just my humble opinion) climbing inside a small pod is not going to be the answer to the question “how can I make my amazon experience better?”

I liked Scott Fisher’s comments at the end, although I probably would opt to say that AR will be here sooner, courtesy of the next generation of mobile phones.  ”Real” “immersive” AR (of the sort I’ve long done, with see-through head-worn displays) will take longer, but it won’t be far behind.  Check back in a month or two, and you’ll see what I mean!