Living in an Augmented Reality

Looking back over the summer, it’s almost comical to re-read the sometimes-frenzied excitement at the possibility that the iPhone will support AR with OS 3.1. The possibility was exciting, even to those of us not trying to keep a small company afloat;  the idea that there would finally be a platform that would let us get our ideas, games and products to millions of eager customers was an unfamiliar feeling for those of us who have been doing AR for a (very long) while. And for the dozen or so small AR companies, surviving on contract work for movies web sites and eye-candy web advertising, it must have been intoxicating.
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First, in the spirit of full disclosure, I will point out that one of the students in my lab built this demo.  So, I’m obviously biased.  

That said, I am pretty impressed with what she managed to pull off in a very short time.  Ignoring the work involved in hacking the iPhone to get video out of the camera, and porting a little 3D loader/rendering to the phone, she managed to work in quite a few of the ideas we’ve been batting around about how to take advantage of the iPhone for handheld AR;  a bunch of things are still not in there, but will be eventually.  

The idea motivating this project is the old “Virtual Pet”, with the goal of having an individual’s pet be available on different platforms (handheld 3D, handheld AR, desktop 3D, etc), and of having multiple people’s pets be able to play with each other.  More interestingly, we hope to have the environment’s in which you play with your pet affect their growth and behavior.  We’ll see how far we get!

Here’s a video of the current prototype.

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.