{"id":484,"date":"2009-06-24T00:49:24","date_gmt":"2009-06-24T07:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.genebecker.com\/?p=484"},"modified":"2009-09-18T21:16:51","modified_gmt":"2009-09-19T04:16:51","slug":"a-few-remarks-about-augmented-reality-and-layar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/2009\/06\/a-few-remarks-about-augmented-reality-and-layar\/","title":{"rendered":"a few remarks about augmented reality and layar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I genuinely enjoyed the demo videos from last week&#8217;s launch of the <a href=\"http:\/\/layar.eu\" target=\"_blank\">Layar AR browser platform<\/a>. The team has made a nice looking app with some interesting features, and I&#8217;m excited about the prospects of an iPhone 3GS version and of course some local Silicon Valley layarage.<\/p>\n<p>At a technical level, I was reminded of my Cooltown colleagues&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hpl.hp.com\/news\/2001\/jul-sept\/websign.html\" target=\"_blank\">Websign project<\/a>, which had the very similar core functionality of a mobile device with integrated GPS and magnetometer, plus a set of web services and a markup language for binding web resources (URLs) to locations with control parameters (see also: <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20030326165904\/cooltown.hp.com\/dev\/wpapers\/websigns-IEEE.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Websigns: Hyperlinking Physical Locations to the Web<\/a> in IEEE Computer, August 2001). It was a sweet prototype system, but it never made it out of the lab because there was no practical device with a digital compass until the G1 arrived. Now that we have location and direction support in production platforms, I&#8217;m pretty sure this concept will take off. Watch out for the patents in this area though, I think there was closely related prior art that even predated our work.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway I looked carefully at all the demos from Layar and the various online coverage, and wondered about a few things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Layar&#8217;s graphical overlay of points of interest appears to be derived entirely from the user&#8217;s location and the direction the phone is pointed. There is no attempt to do real-time registration of the AR graphics with objects in the camera image, which is the kind of AR that currently requires markers or a super-duper 3D point cloud like Earthmine. That&#8217;s fine for many applications, and it is definitely an advantage for hyperlinks bound to locations that are out of the user&#8217;s line of sight (behind a nearby building, for example). Given this, I don&#8217;t understand why Layar uses the camera at all. The interaction model seems wrong; rather than using Layar as a viewfinder held vertically in my line of sight, I want to use it like a compass &#8212; horizontally like a map, and the phone pointed axially toward my direction of interest. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2009\/06\/17\/video-sprxmobiles-layar-is-worlds-first-augmented-reality-bro\/\" target=\"_blank\">This is most obvious in the Engadget video<\/a>, where they are sitting in a room and the links from across town are overlaid on images of the bookshelves ;-) Also, it seems a bit unwieldy and socially awkward to be walking down the street holding the phone in front of you. Just my $0.02 there.<\/li>\n<li>How will Layar handle the navigation problem of large numbers of active items? The concept of separate &#8220;layars&#8221; obviously helps, but in a densely augmented location you might have hundreds or even thousands of different layers. Yes this is a hard UI\/UX problem, but I guess it&#8217;s a problem we would love to have, too much geowebby goodness to sort through. I suppose it will require some nicely intuitive search\/filtering capability in the browser, maybe with hints from your personal history and intent profile.<\/li>\n<li>Will Layar enable participatory geoweb media creation? I&#8217;d be surprised if they don&#8217;t plan to do this, and I hope it comes quickly. There will be plenty of official corporate and institutional voices in the geoweb, but a vibrant and creative ecosystem will only emerge from public participation in the commons. This will demand another layer of media literacy, and this will take time and experimentation to develop. I say the sooner we get started, the better.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In any case, good luck to the Layar team!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I genuinely enjoyed the demo videos from last week&#8217;s launch of the Layar AR browser platform. The team has made a nice looking app with some interesting features, and I&#8217;m excited about the prospects of an iPhone 3GS version and of course some local Silicon Valley layarage. At a technical level, I was reminded of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,20],"tags":[200,71,45,73,61,72],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-augmented-reality","category-mobility-media-ubicomp","tag-augmented-reality","tag-cooltown","tag-layar","tag-physical-hyperlinks","tag-ubicomp","tag-websign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lightninglaboratories.com\/tcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}