Here are the slides I presented during my talk at ARE2010, the first Augmented Reality Event on June 3, 2010 in Santa Clara. Many thanks to all who attended, asked questions and gave feedback. For interested Bay Area folks, I will be organizing some face to face gatherings of the Ubiquitous Media Studio to explore the ideas raised here. The first one will be in July; follow @ubistudio on Twitter for further details.
Archive for the ‘augmented reality’ Category
Beyond Augmented Reality: Ubiquitous Media
Saturday, June 19th, 2010ARE2010: kicking off the augmented reality summer of love
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010ARE2010 – the Augmented Reality Event – is just around the corner on June 2-3. In case you missed the memo, this is going to be an outstanding conference! I’ll be giving a deep dive talk on Experience Design for AR, expanding on what I presented at Web2Expo earlier this month. More importantly, there will be over 80 great speakers from the AR world, including keynotes by los luminarios Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, Jesse Schell and Blaise Aguera. Don’t miss this, seriously. And when you register, use this ARE2010 special discount code: E195 to get the full 2 days for just $195. It’s a freakin’ bargain, folks. Be there.
Experience Design for Mobile AR: my Web2Expo slides
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010my talk on mobile AR experience design at Web2Expo
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010I’m presenting a session at Web2Expo in San Francisco on May 4th, titled “Challenge, Drama & Social Engagement: Designing Mobile Augmented Reality Experiences“. Here’s the blurb:
Mobile augmented reality adds digital overlays and interactivity to the physical world using the sensors and display of your smartphone. Design of mobile AR experiences is complex and takes us well beyond the browser-based web. This session will give you a mix of practical knowledge and new ideas for creating AR experiences, drawing from web design, 3D graphics, games, architecture and stagecraft.
The next generation of mobile augmented reality applications will go well beyond simply overlaying points of interest, floating post-its and 3D models on the video display of your phone. Mobile AR is becoming a sophisticated medium for immersive games, situated storytelling, large-scale visualization, and artistic expression. The combination of physical presence, visual and audio media, sensor datastreams and social environments blended together with web services offers tremendous new creative possibilities. However, the design challenges of creating engaging, exciting and compelling experiences are quite significant.
Research on the design of technology-mediated experiences has shown that compelling experiences often involve a mixture of physical and mental challenge or self-expression, a sense of drama, sensory stimulation, and social interaction. These elements can give us a physical “buzz” by activating the release of adrenaline, endorphins and related neurochemicals.
Mobile AR puts us “where the action is”—in motion through the physical world, surrounded by other people, in a stimulating environment. AR applications additionally provide challenges, stories, information and communication. Factors that AR experience designers need to consider include:
- Goals of the AR experience
- Users’ cognitive model of the system
- Physical environment and context of the experience
- Social context of the experience
- Design of interaction models and experience mechanics
- Story, goals and outcomes
- Immersion and flow
- Design of visual and audio assets
- Non-player characters (“AIs”)
- Tracking and analytics
- Technical capabilities and limitations of the AR system
- Managing the production process (designing an AR experience has much in common with producing a movie on location)
Should be fun, ping me if you’re going to be at the conference!
join me at the eComm firehose next week?
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010Next week I’ll be at the Emerging Communications conference, eComm 2010 in San Francisco, and would love to connect if you are going. The organizers have pulled together an impressive roster of speakers in a rapid-fire single track format that will undoubtedly feel like a three day firehose of ideas. Of course I’m very interested in the AR-heavy Wednesday lineup, but am also looking forward to seeing folks like John Hagel, Ge Wang and Debbie Estrin. Ping me if you’re there, and keep an eye out for digital film geek @endurablegoods who will no doubt be wielding weapons of mass digitization.
If you’re in town, you may want to extend your 3-day fun pass by going to Reality Checked – What’s Next for Mobile Augmented Reality on Monday night, and the wonderful Dorkbot-SF on Wednesday night. I’m just sayin’.
augmented humanity + enspirited reality: AR panel at NAB2010
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010Earlier this week I spoke on the Augmented Reality: Entertainment Meets Ubiquitous Computing panel at the National Association of Broadcasters conference. In my intro talk I stated that AR should be thought of as the intersection of two separate trends: the augmentation of human capabilities through technology, and the digitization of the physical world of people, places and things. I named these trends ‘augmented humanity’ and ‘enspirited reality’. My slides for the panel (cc-by-nc):
My fellow panelists (photo) came from diverse perspectives and included Joe Garlington from Disney Imagineering, Bruno Uzzan from Total Immersion, Chetan Damani of Acrossair, and Rebecca Allen, director of Nokia’s Hollywood research lab; the estimable Seth Shapiro moderated the discussion. Garlington showed video clips from several of Disney’s mixed reality theme park projects, Bruno wowed the crowd with his familiar K’NEX demo, Chetan showed off one of the acrossair apps live on iPhone, and Rebecca Allen screened an extended clip from NRC’s Westwood Experience mobile storytelling project. Overall I think the discussion was well-received, even if the topic was a bit fast-forward for the largely broadcast-focused attendees.
will the HP Slate be a killer AR device?
Monday, April 5th, 2010
The HP Slate in live video mode
Augmented reality enthusiasts and developers got the shaft (again) from Apple when the iPad launched without an integrated camera, thus becoming a dead platform for AR purposes. Well it looks like the little computer company on the other side of Hwy 280 might pull a little auggie magic out of their hat, just in time for the AR summer of love in Silicon Valley. HP has been teasing their forthcoming Slate for a few months, and they just posted another video clip that clearly shows live video from a forward-facing camera. We already know the slate will run Windows 7, and we have heard public rumblings about Android from various quarters, so it’s likely to be reasonably developer-friendly.
With the horsepower to run object recognition and tracking plus high quality 3D graphics, the Slate will definitely blur the line between webcam AR and mobile AR experiences. You know all those marker-based AR toys that feel so gimmicky when you have to use them in front of a PC with a webcam? I guarantee they are going to seem 1000% cooler when you pull out your Magic Internet Magnifying Glass and look through it into an alternate universe. And if the Slate ends up shipping with a GPS and digital compass, just watch all the mobile AR guys scrambling to learn Win7 and Silverlight. Oh yeah SLAR toolkit dude, better get a bigger server ;-)
augmentation overload
Friday, February 5th, 2010Watching Keiichi Matsuda’s superb short video imagining a hyper-branded augmented reality environment, for some reason I was reminded of this classic bit of dystopia from PK Dick’s 1969 classic novel Ubik.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
experience design for locative media & AR
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009The next generation of mobile Augmented Reality applications will go well beyond simply overlaying points of interest, floating post-its and 3D models on the video display of your phone. Mobile AR is becoming a sophisticated medium for immersive games, situated storytelling, large-scale visualization, and artistic expression. The combination of physical presence, visual and audio media, sensor datastreams and social environments blended together with web services offers tremendous new creative possibilities. However, the design challenges of creating engaging, exciting and compelling experiences are quite significant. AR experience designers will draw fruitful inspiration and practical lessons from game design, 3D graphics, architecture and stagecraft, as well as the structure, linking, protocols and openness of the web.
Some of the best research to date on experience design for locative media experiences, was done at HP Labs as part of the Mobile Bristol collaboration. You might find these papers useful and applicable to AR design, as I have.
Technology Experiences: What Makes Them Compelling? Alison Kidd, 2000
Experience Design for Pervasive Computing, Richard Hull & Jo Reid
Experience Design Guidelines for Creating Situated Mediascapes, Reid et al, 2005
we’re wired to augment our world and our selves
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Humans are driven to augment our reality, and to augment our own capabilities. It’s the way we’re wired; it’s what we do. From the earliest cave paintings to modern day urban graffiti, we overlay our world with expressions of our inner selves. Architecture, street signs, billboards, fashions — these are all visual and functional augmentations of the physical world. We extend our sensory and cognitive capabilities as well, creating tools that allow us to perceive phenomena beyond the ken of our normal senses — at extremes of scale, distance, time, frequency, complexity, sociality. “Augmented Reality” is simply the next technological framework for expressing the natural human propensity to augment our world and our selves.
