Living in an Augmented Reality

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!

In his keynote at AGDC, Bruce Sterling pushed the idea that in the future, all games will be AR games.  His premise of coming back from the future as a student sent by his older self, to talk about the industry in 2043 (35 years from now) is a bit trite, but how can I argue with the observation that

And the games of 2043? “They’re not the kind of games that were developed for flat glass screens — cumbersome,” he said. “We don’t pretend that a flat glass screen is a window into a virtual world… the idea sounds silly to us.”

Then what do the games of 2043 look like? “I think you would call [them] ‘augmented reality’ but we don’t,” Sterling continued. “We think that reality is real — you can have a lot of fun with [an overlaid] game interface.” To Sterling, the games of the future scale from personal “body games” to global games and space games and everything in between — including “neighborhood games”. More importantly, “[In 2043] we’ve got 70 years of computer games — that’s what we’ve got that you don’t have — and we got it from you. All kinds of dead intellectual properties and platforms, all being continually re-released.” 

It sounds like it was a bit of a light, motivational talk, but it seems everyone is getting the AR bug these days.

Well, I guess I’ll answer that question with “no.”   But, on the night before ISMAR starts here in Cambridge, England, I was sitting around with some fellow AR folk, having a pint and some fish and chips in The Eagle, and I let the unwashed iPhone-less masses indulge in Spore on my iPhone.

And it struck me as somehow appropriate that we were playing Spore in the Eagle Pub.   For those who don’t know,  the Eagle is the place where Francis Crick interrupted patrons’ lunchtime on 28 February 1953 to announce that he and James Watson had “discovered the secret of life” after they had come up with their proposal for the structure of DNA. 

Perhaps this is only amusing to those of us with jet lag.  Off to bed, then, and off to ISMAR tomorrow!

As usual, Ian has some very insightful, cut through the hype, things to say about the gaming and social media.  While he isn’t talking about AR, his comments about the nature of personal media and game-creator tools will be even more poignant as handheld AR games and social spaces “get out there.”  Once people can start “attaching their content” to the world, for anyone to see and experience, their will be a stronger push to move from static/linear content (e.g., photos, notes, videos) to dynamic media (e.g., animations that react to the viewers actions or to nearby activity in the world).

Inevitably, these will be called “games” and the kind of hype Ian refers to will pervade the media.  I tend to agree with Ian that focusing on the personal and shared nature of these “experiences,” the notion of “AR snapshots” if you will, will be key to understanding what people will want to do.  It won’t matter if they are “good games” or “clever art”, but that people can make their mark “for themselves”, for their friends and family.

Ian’s comments make me look forward to the day “the world is filling with trite and silly 3D litter” rather than bemoan having yet another channel of noise to wade through.  Like youtube and flikr, the key will be making it easy for users to author, to control what they see, and to serendipitously stumble on “random fun.”