Thursday AM Augmented Reality

Moderator: Roo Reynolds (BBC)
Panel:
David Orban (Chief at WineTag Inc.)
Eric Rice (Producer)
Marc Goodman (Alcatel-Lucent focused on innovation, runs University's Innovation Program)
Blair MacIntyre (Georgia Tech professor, working on games on hand-helds)

Started with wikipedia on Augmented Reality. Panel defined it too...understanding the world better through different means. Instances where you are tightly merging media with the real world. More collectively, Blair called it "mixed reality." Not important to make strong distinctions insofar as it lets us talk. An overlay for all of the invisible data were are constantly surrounded by.

"Augmented Reality Character on Smartphone" YouTube video.

"Magic Lens" -- YouTube.

Bringing real stuff into the virtual world and virtual stuff into the real world.

Showed several of the Georgia Tech YouTube videos. GTU's goal was mixed media machinima. This was funded by Alcatel-Lucent. A-L showed this at CTIA. Showed a video of this using cell phone. By mixing realities, this is one area where businesses are going to want to go for the purposes of telepresence conferencing.

The input devices are now changing through touch screen, accelerometers, and cameras. Gaming VWs tend not to look at each other, but they have the most to learn from each other. You don't necessarily need a sophisticated headset.

It is useful to consider separately the data collection aspect versus the data visualization aspect. Having the data first is the most important thing. The semantic nature of AR...without the ability to tag knowledge prohibits any AR visualization. Much more data is needed where you don't need to rely on people to waste their lives collecting. We need sensor networks to really enable autonomous collection --> AR display. This is the biggest challenge for making the AR world useful.

The reason black markers are needed to triangulation is so you don't have to model the entire environment. This is one of the biggest advantages of AR. But without these coordinate queues, you can't really get a realistic path, for example, with AR yet.

The tech that we tend to use to interface with this stuff has a certain amount of "social isolationism." It makes it harder to interface with the real world since you have covered yourself with all of this hardware. Which tech lends itself best to this right now? iPhones, cellphones. We are already isolating ourselves thru interaction with these things (example: the driver trying to hide looking at the cell phone)...we are just in denial about it.

The HMD will never be popular or mainstream. When it is a nice pair of glasses with everything embedded, no chords hanging off, and a good software app is when it will take off.

Book: "Everything that is good for you." It is not necessarily true that we are isolating because of these devices. Like social networks, they are bringing us together in new ways. The intensity of sharing is so high that it feels like you are there. As a society, we learn what makes sense and what doesn't and we don't need laws for it. It will eventually be normal to hold your phone up in front of your face to get additional information about a thing.

From a business standpoint, it is advantageous because it gives the users the information they want when they want it. They are pulling the information rather than having it pushed at them.

INTEROPERABILITY
...between AR and other bits of the web. Is there a roadmap? Are there standards or is it adhoc?
No, it is still messy. There are already things (company: Media Powers) like QR codes in the works. Maybe there will be in ARML that combines geotagging, semantic web, etc. How do we make the sensor nets available to phones? Commercial services like Frommers? Eric was very negative about commercial entities moving towards this. Academics need to be careful about rolling out standards too soon without a lot of input from users.

As we build communities or societies that have to be accurately represented across AR, we must take cultural value into account. What happens when an avatar finds a place where slavery is legal? What about automated XML contracts?

Book: "Halting State"...by Charlie Strauss. About AR and the police use of...this generation's "Snow Crash."

How do we tag real life data? Or is it just a spillover on what we are already doing with photos online? If you are typing things (ex: Twitterific) and it is geotagged, is that really useful? What is the best way to display that? Plastered on the walls? And how do we tell the VW where the walls are? If we are going to get to real apps, we need to not only geotag, but also have a meaningful representation of the real world with an understanding on where on the world these data get displayed. Is the best tagging geotagging or will it be situational (ex: "I am in LA" versus "I am at dinner with ... ").

Book: "Rainbow's End" by Verner Venge.

Expressed concern over the social issues of using the data taken by the average citizen to inform governments (example: the UK wants to use the photos of its citizens taken with cellphones for monitoring for terrorism).

This session made the whole conference for me.