I've been thinking about people creating things.
The first thing I thought about was that 3D printers might not have a "killer app". They may become popular for the same reason Wikipedia is popular. You don't say "what are the things I can look up that make Wikipedia worthwhile", you say "this is interesting, I'll look it up!" It's a culture of looking things up.
3D printers may be the same way. Not "what can I make that makes this worthwhile", but "this is interesting, I'll make it!" A culture of making things.
After that, I wandered back into my love of augmented reality. With the advent of more and more tech to immerse people into digital realities, we are seeing augmented reality slooooowly unfurl. But there's no "killer app". "What awesome thing can you do in AR that makes it worth wearing clumsy glasses all the time?"
Well, maybe that's the wrong approach. Instead, we might think "this is interesting! I'll create it!"
Imagine a culture where everyone can create digital and real goods as easily as they look something up on Wikipedia.
Let's say you need to keep the sunshine off your kitchen counter's candy stock. Instead of building one out of coat hangers and paper, instead of buying one, you create one yourself.
How do you do that?
Well, you "mold" it with your hands, right there on the counter. Create a plane by squishing your hands together, then grab the edge and pull it forward to create a support, automatically mirrored to the other side. Paint it and dust it with colors. Then hit print.
In your basement, the plastic sun cover gets printed out in the next hour or so. You can go down and grab it yourself, or maybe there's a house robot that will grab it and put it where you initially sculpted it.
I give this not as an example of a killer app. I give this as an example of how you might do something day to day. In the same way that someone giving an example of looking up "soy" on Wikipedia is not giving you the "killer lookup" - they are just giving you an example of a world at your fingertips.
The ability to create and mold digital objects in real space has a huge number of potential applications, all of which are a little hard to see, in the same way it was hard to see that Wikipedia was going to be the incredible resource it is.
Can you imagine getting up each morning and finding your house's ceiling is a different sky each day, depending on where your friends are and what they are doing? Can you imagine a world where your RSS/social network feeds are embodied as entities in real space, ones you can wave away or grab if you want more? A world where if you're curious about water filters, you build a few and play with them? A world you can orchestrate?
A world where creating something is often easier than looking up existing versions?
Showing posts with label augmented reality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label augmented reality. Show all posts
Friday, February 03, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
The Local Convention
I've been thinking more about augmented reality. In a sense it's difficult to do, because we haven't come up with any good way for the digital world to communicate with a human in a way other than them staring at their phone.
However, what if we turn the idea on its head? Instead of giving humans the ability to see the digital world, what if we focus on letting the digital world see the humans?
Augmented reality can be roughly divided into two parts.
The first is "helping people traverse the area". This is what I would call "slow AR". This is putting up a blue line guiding you to your destination, pointing you to a tasty restaurant, helping you find a hotel - all the things phones do today, basically.
The second is an important but underrated concept: "helping people interact with people". This is what I would call "fast AR". Fast AR is largely unexplored because of technical difficulties: it requires people to be in contact with AR basically all the time, and it requires a large number of people to be that way.
Let's talk about an example. Let's imagine a futuristic anime and comic convention. It has no set showings, only a few set events. Instead, it has a list of all the things it has a right to show. It's configured around many small, multi-purpose rooms instead of large theater halls.
When a group of a few people decides they want to watch a particular anime that the convention has the right to show, they tap their phones against the door of a theater and reserve it starting in half an hour.
On the walls all around the convention, that anime pops up as "showing in XXX in 29 minutes", with an arrow pointing the way. If you miss it because you're doing something else, no biggie: get together with some people who want to see it and show it again.
Seem limited? It's a simple example. Let's kick it up a notch: the whole point is to connect people to people. So let's do that more directly.
Let's say that some artists are chatting and get into a conversation about the topic of tangent lines in comic art. One pulls out a sketchbook and starts to draw an example. Well, the other can tap his phone against the door of a conference room and register a "workshop" - these artists, this topic. Even include a tag or avatar that allows people to see the level of artist they are. And now there's an impromptu, loose workshop for artists to discuss a technical point that is surprisingly interesting.
People can wander in and get involved, watch from a distance, whatever. You can even record the meeting for playback later if people want to see it after it happens, or catch up with it if they are coming in late. (Recording is, of course, a touchy subject that would need to be addressed well ahead of actually having the conference.)
These impromptu affairs would initially probably clash a bit with the old way - the idea of having a specific event at a specific time. Planning is a key component of today's conventions. And some things do require planning, such as the keynote speaker, or the big contest.
However, as most experienced con-goers can tell you, the real meat of a con is the meets of the con. The people you talk to, the things you talk about on the fly. Obviously, not all of those are suitable to become a recorded public meeting, but a surprising number are.
In addition, some conventions have roaming points of interest, such as cosplayers, and those could be tracked using a switch-onnable RF card. Switch it on, and now you're added to the wall maps as a point of interest, and if there are photographers whose video/photos are being CCed to the con as they are being made, you can find yourself on the walls...
I can definitely see a time where the convention staff are actually taking part in the con - stirring up interest in a particular topic or thing in order to get the events flowing smoothly. However, they wouldn't be trying to set it up using some kind of official meeting-maker system: they would simply be drumming up interest and then letting the interested parties use the scaffolds provided to self-organize.
If you think this is pure fantasy, well, there are a surprising number of unconferences already being run, including at least one in Boston - my turf. This is not a fantasy, it's just one baby step further than what we're already seeing.
The reason I used cons as examples is because a conference/convention is a lot of people interested in more or less the same thing all in the same place. It's very dense compared to, say, walking down a city street.
Start with the easiest targets - the ones that offer the most calories per bite. And that's probably conventions. Or unconferences/unconventions.
What do you think?
However, what if we turn the idea on its head? Instead of giving humans the ability to see the digital world, what if we focus on letting the digital world see the humans?
Augmented reality can be roughly divided into two parts.
The first is "helping people traverse the area". This is what I would call "slow AR". This is putting up a blue line guiding you to your destination, pointing you to a tasty restaurant, helping you find a hotel - all the things phones do today, basically.
The second is an important but underrated concept: "helping people interact with people". This is what I would call "fast AR". Fast AR is largely unexplored because of technical difficulties: it requires people to be in contact with AR basically all the time, and it requires a large number of people to be that way.
Let's talk about an example. Let's imagine a futuristic anime and comic convention. It has no set showings, only a few set events. Instead, it has a list of all the things it has a right to show. It's configured around many small, multi-purpose rooms instead of large theater halls.
When a group of a few people decides they want to watch a particular anime that the convention has the right to show, they tap their phones against the door of a theater and reserve it starting in half an hour.
On the walls all around the convention, that anime pops up as "showing in XXX in 29 minutes", with an arrow pointing the way. If you miss it because you're doing something else, no biggie: get together with some people who want to see it and show it again.
Seem limited? It's a simple example. Let's kick it up a notch: the whole point is to connect people to people. So let's do that more directly.
Let's say that some artists are chatting and get into a conversation about the topic of tangent lines in comic art. One pulls out a sketchbook and starts to draw an example. Well, the other can tap his phone against the door of a conference room and register a "workshop" - these artists, this topic. Even include a tag or avatar that allows people to see the level of artist they are. And now there's an impromptu, loose workshop for artists to discuss a technical point that is surprisingly interesting.
People can wander in and get involved, watch from a distance, whatever. You can even record the meeting for playback later if people want to see it after it happens, or catch up with it if they are coming in late. (Recording is, of course, a touchy subject that would need to be addressed well ahead of actually having the conference.)
These impromptu affairs would initially probably clash a bit with the old way - the idea of having a specific event at a specific time. Planning is a key component of today's conventions. And some things do require planning, such as the keynote speaker, or the big contest.
However, as most experienced con-goers can tell you, the real meat of a con is the meets of the con. The people you talk to, the things you talk about on the fly. Obviously, not all of those are suitable to become a recorded public meeting, but a surprising number are.
In addition, some conventions have roaming points of interest, such as cosplayers, and those could be tracked using a switch-onnable RF card. Switch it on, and now you're added to the wall maps as a point of interest, and if there are photographers whose video/photos are being CCed to the con as they are being made, you can find yourself on the walls...
I can definitely see a time where the convention staff are actually taking part in the con - stirring up interest in a particular topic or thing in order to get the events flowing smoothly. However, they wouldn't be trying to set it up using some kind of official meeting-maker system: they would simply be drumming up interest and then letting the interested parties use the scaffolds provided to self-organize.
If you think this is pure fantasy, well, there are a surprising number of unconferences already being run, including at least one in Boston - my turf. This is not a fantasy, it's just one baby step further than what we're already seeing.
The reason I used cons as examples is because a conference/convention is a lot of people interested in more or less the same thing all in the same place. It's very dense compared to, say, walking down a city street.
Start with the easiest targets - the ones that offer the most calories per bite. And that's probably conventions. Or unconferences/unconventions.
What do you think?
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Flashlights
I've been stuck on thinking about the flashlight projector. Original post included if you missed it.
I've been thinking about the sort of games and apps you might be able to create. This post will be pretty design-heavy.
The flashlight projects an image onto a surface. Fundamentally, that means you can put virtual things on the surface. These virtual things can be just something on the surface, such as a sticker or a logo. Alternately, they can represent things that aren't on the surface, but are only being displayed there.
Three examples of that are:
1) Displaying the piping and wiring in a wall by painting their image on the wall.
2) Casting a shadow on the wall from a virtual object between the flashlight and the wall. Shadow does not have to be actual dark patches - for example, the virtual object might be a stained glass bauble.
3) Showing what is beyond the wall on the surface of the wall. For example, a security guard could shine his flashlight on a wall and play the camera feeds for the room on the other side.
There is also the option to display simple virtual things on the surface, but use them in an information-dense manner. For example, painting a map on the surface, getting a footprint trail of people who passed through, or average rainfall displayed as inches of "water" splashing along the ground.
These are things which have nothing to do with a reality that currently exists, but are still deeply tied to the location, as opposed to simple virtual tagging.
So... what sort of games could you make out of it?
Tagging
Let's start with the obvious one: let people paint on surfaces, then let other people see what they have painted.
This offers some unique limits and opportunities. First off, the flashlight is a physical object, and most people aren't going to want to seem weird by hunting around Manhattan with a flashlight during the day. It follows that the majority of tagging will happen in places with some foot traffic, but not too much (the weirdo with the flashlight) or too little (nobody else will see it). An alternative is places with very few people plus some kind of guidance/seeking system, which would be useful if there were few users.
If you're painting on surfaces rather than in space, you can take advantage of the nature of surfaces. Some surfaces are the same day in and day out. However, other surfaces are temporary or recurring. For example, if you paint the side of a parked car, you can only see that image when a car is parked in that same spot. If you paint someone's shirt, you can only see the image when someone is standing in that same place. Perhaps you can see blurry shadows if your light shines through where the surface should be, and then there's the fun of looking for places there were surfaces that people painted on, and temporarily recreating those surfaces.
Painting doesn't have to just be painting. Like, with a finger. There are a variety of things it could be.
I like the idea of "stamping". You have virtual possession of a thing. You then stamp it onto a surface, losing possession of it. Someone who sees it can peel it off and stick it in their inventory.
In some cases, this is probably ad-driven. Through the central "inventory management system", you can manage the unique tags for every stamp, regardless of what it actually is once it is on your computer. So if an online game wants to put up stamps for custom armor and a month of free play time, they can pay the central database a per-item fee to register it, and then go around stamping them out. You could also do coupons for the local stores, or even just flat-out billboard ads.
It's actually less obnoxious than normal ads because you, the player, can rip them down and throw them away (by "taking" them). The central database still gets the ad money.
But it'd be a pretty dull game if it was just about ads. So we have to think about how and what people would want to share.
Let's put it in three categories:
1) I want people to see this cool thing - the display case reason.
2) I want to put out rare and interesting things that make the world a bit more magical - the unicorn reason.
3) I want to share and work together on this thing - the garden reason.
The first category would consist of content you created, or links you've found. Basically, you could slap images and youtube videos and stuff onto various surfaces. The world could get very crowded if they never faded, so I think most of these would fade slightly if someone viewed them and did not "thumbs up" them. So after, say, 20 unique views without a thumbs-up, they vanish entirely. "Peeling" these off would not remove them from the world, but simply keep a local copy (if allowed). Depending on the rules, you may report illegal/inappropriate content, which would be removed/gated in much the same manner as any other kind of hosting service.
The second category is driven by the urge to make hidden things in the world, hidden things that people can find. For example, you might stumble across a red "thread" on a wall, which if you follow it, leads to a real-world grotto and a geotag-style treasure box. Or maybe you simulate how the night sky would look if it were completely dark in this city, and then paint the eves of buildings with it. Or you paint a mural, a little bit every day, so that visitors feel the need to check back frequently.
This kind of sharing is generally not quite as "loud" as the first kind, and is often slightly secret or hard to find. They're half treasure hunt. That's fine, sounds fun. Imagine finding a mural in midair (by the shadows the mural casts), and then spending fifteen minutes using your hand and the flashlight to pan across it and see it.
The third category - the social and cooperative creation of content in this virtual world - is definitely the most interesting to me. Imagine if there was a garden in some downtown nook - a virtual garden. People could come by and plant things, harvest things, and so on. Or there's a cooperative scene, where people can drop their "Mii"s and watch them play around. Or any number of other things.
The problem with this category is trolls. I imagine every site would need an "owner" who could veto, roll back, and ban. That might get logistically irritating. But, on the other hand, it offers another way to monetize: "if you want something that runs and changes over time and isn't, say, a static youtube video, you need to pay $5 per 100m of sim..."
Hmm.
I've been thinking about the sort of games and apps you might be able to create. This post will be pretty design-heavy.
The flashlight projects an image onto a surface. Fundamentally, that means you can put virtual things on the surface. These virtual things can be just something on the surface, such as a sticker or a logo. Alternately, they can represent things that aren't on the surface, but are only being displayed there.
Three examples of that are:
1) Displaying the piping and wiring in a wall by painting their image on the wall.
2) Casting a shadow on the wall from a virtual object between the flashlight and the wall. Shadow does not have to be actual dark patches - for example, the virtual object might be a stained glass bauble.
3) Showing what is beyond the wall on the surface of the wall. For example, a security guard could shine his flashlight on a wall and play the camera feeds for the room on the other side.
There is also the option to display simple virtual things on the surface, but use them in an information-dense manner. For example, painting a map on the surface, getting a footprint trail of people who passed through, or average rainfall displayed as inches of "water" splashing along the ground.
These are things which have nothing to do with a reality that currently exists, but are still deeply tied to the location, as opposed to simple virtual tagging.
So... what sort of games could you make out of it?
Tagging
Let's start with the obvious one: let people paint on surfaces, then let other people see what they have painted.
This offers some unique limits and opportunities. First off, the flashlight is a physical object, and most people aren't going to want to seem weird by hunting around Manhattan with a flashlight during the day. It follows that the majority of tagging will happen in places with some foot traffic, but not too much (the weirdo with the flashlight) or too little (nobody else will see it). An alternative is places with very few people plus some kind of guidance/seeking system, which would be useful if there were few users.
If you're painting on surfaces rather than in space, you can take advantage of the nature of surfaces. Some surfaces are the same day in and day out. However, other surfaces are temporary or recurring. For example, if you paint the side of a parked car, you can only see that image when a car is parked in that same spot. If you paint someone's shirt, you can only see the image when someone is standing in that same place. Perhaps you can see blurry shadows if your light shines through where the surface should be, and then there's the fun of looking for places there were surfaces that people painted on, and temporarily recreating those surfaces.
Painting doesn't have to just be painting. Like, with a finger. There are a variety of things it could be.
I like the idea of "stamping". You have virtual possession of a thing. You then stamp it onto a surface, losing possession of it. Someone who sees it can peel it off and stick it in their inventory.
In some cases, this is probably ad-driven. Through the central "inventory management system", you can manage the unique tags for every stamp, regardless of what it actually is once it is on your computer. So if an online game wants to put up stamps for custom armor and a month of free play time, they can pay the central database a per-item fee to register it, and then go around stamping them out. You could also do coupons for the local stores, or even just flat-out billboard ads.
It's actually less obnoxious than normal ads because you, the player, can rip them down and throw them away (by "taking" them). The central database still gets the ad money.
But it'd be a pretty dull game if it was just about ads. So we have to think about how and what people would want to share.
Let's put it in three categories:
1) I want people to see this cool thing - the display case reason.
2) I want to put out rare and interesting things that make the world a bit more magical - the unicorn reason.
3) I want to share and work together on this thing - the garden reason.
The first category would consist of content you created, or links you've found. Basically, you could slap images and youtube videos and stuff onto various surfaces. The world could get very crowded if they never faded, so I think most of these would fade slightly if someone viewed them and did not "thumbs up" them. So after, say, 20 unique views without a thumbs-up, they vanish entirely. "Peeling" these off would not remove them from the world, but simply keep a local copy (if allowed). Depending on the rules, you may report illegal/inappropriate content, which would be removed/gated in much the same manner as any other kind of hosting service.
The second category is driven by the urge to make hidden things in the world, hidden things that people can find. For example, you might stumble across a red "thread" on a wall, which if you follow it, leads to a real-world grotto and a geotag-style treasure box. Or maybe you simulate how the night sky would look if it were completely dark in this city, and then paint the eves of buildings with it. Or you paint a mural, a little bit every day, so that visitors feel the need to check back frequently.
This kind of sharing is generally not quite as "loud" as the first kind, and is often slightly secret or hard to find. They're half treasure hunt. That's fine, sounds fun. Imagine finding a mural in midair (by the shadows the mural casts), and then spending fifteen minutes using your hand and the flashlight to pan across it and see it.
The third category - the social and cooperative creation of content in this virtual world - is definitely the most interesting to me. Imagine if there was a garden in some downtown nook - a virtual garden. People could come by and plant things, harvest things, and so on. Or there's a cooperative scene, where people can drop their "Mii"s and watch them play around. Or any number of other things.
The problem with this category is trolls. I imagine every site would need an "owner" who could veto, roll back, and ban. That might get logistically irritating. But, on the other hand, it offers another way to monetize: "if you want something that runs and changes over time and isn't, say, a static youtube video, you need to pay $5 per 100m of sim..."
Hmm.
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Augmented Reality and Imposed Reality
There have been a few vaguely interesting articles on augmented reality, and they tend to be like this. "How will corporations abuse us in this new, augmented reality?"
I think this is a topic that needs to be addressed more fundamentally. Rather than talking about the types of ads that can be served, we need to talk about whether or not ads can be served at all.
Right now, if you try to use an augmented reality system, you have to use one of the primordial research projects that are floating around the web, like Google Goggles or Layar. Most people seem to be under the impression that that's just the way it's always going to be.
But that's not the case.
As we move into the future of AR, we're going to have a few basic formats for data to display, and we're going to have loads of competing browsers. Like Chrome and Firefox, these browsers do not exist to serve ads, nor do they exist to take us to specific sites of the corporation's choice and force us to view specific things.
Sometimes, these browsers do. For example, Chrome recently tried to sell me Angry Birds.
So now I don't use Chrome any more.
The point is that, like web browsers, AR browsers will emerge as open solutions for interpreting any available source of data. We won't be using Google(r) ChromeOS(r)(tm) Goggles (r)(tm) with forced reliance on Google(r) GiantFuckingDatabase(tm)(c). We'll be using whatever browser we want to access whichever data sources we want.
Serve us ads? Lock us in?
Not for long!
I think this is a topic that needs to be addressed more fundamentally. Rather than talking about the types of ads that can be served, we need to talk about whether or not ads can be served at all.
Right now, if you try to use an augmented reality system, you have to use one of the primordial research projects that are floating around the web, like Google Goggles or Layar. Most people seem to be under the impression that that's just the way it's always going to be.
But that's not the case.
As we move into the future of AR, we're going to have a few basic formats for data to display, and we're going to have loads of competing browsers. Like Chrome and Firefox, these browsers do not exist to serve ads, nor do they exist to take us to specific sites of the corporation's choice and force us to view specific things.
Sometimes, these browsers do. For example, Chrome recently tried to sell me Angry Birds.
So now I don't use Chrome any more.
The point is that, like web browsers, AR browsers will emerge as open solutions for interpreting any available source of data. We won't be using Google(r) ChromeOS(r)(tm) Goggles (r)(tm) with forced reliance on Google(r) GiantFuckingDatabase(tm)(c). We'll be using whatever browser we want to access whichever data sources we want.
Serve us ads? Lock us in?
Not for long!
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