The iPhone: Tricorder Version 1.0?

by James Turner | comments: 4

The iPhone, in addition to revolutionizing how people thought about mobile phone user interfaces, also was one of the first devices to offer a suite of sensors measuring everything from the visual environment to position to acceleration, all in a package that could fit in your shirt pocket.

On December 3rd, O'Reilly will be offering a one-day online edition of the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on the iPhone sensors, and what you can do with them. Alasdair Allan (the University of Exeter and Babilim Light Industries) and Jeffrey Powers (Occipital) will be among the speakers, and I recently spoke with each of them about how the iPhone has evolved as a sensing platform and the new and interesting things being done with the device.

Occipital is probably best known for Red Laser, the iPhone scanning application that lets you point the camera at a UPC code and get shopping information about the product. With recent iPhone OS releases, applications can now overlay data on top of a real time camera display, which has led to the new augmented reality applications. But according to Powers, the ability to process the camera data is still not fully supported, which has left Red Laser in a bit of a limbo state. "What happened with the most recent update is that the APIs for changing the way the camera screen looks were opened up pretty much completely. So you can customize it to make it look any way you want. You can also programmatically engage photo capture, which is something you couldn't do before either. You could only send the UI up and the user would have to use the normal built-in iPhone UI to capture. So you can do this programmatic data capturing, and you can process those images that come in. But as it turns out, at the same time, shortly after 3.1, the method that a lot of people were using to get the raw data while it was streaming in became a blacklisted function for the review team. So we've actually had a lot of trouble as of late getting technology updates through the App Store because the function we're using is now on a blacklist. Whereas it wasn't on a blacklist for the last year."

Powers is hopeful that the next release of the OS will bring official support for the API calls that Red Laser uses, based on the fact that the App Store screeners aren't taking down existing apps that use the banned APIs. Issues with the iPhone camera sensors pose more of a problem for him. "In terms of science, it's definitely a really bad sensor, especially if you look at the older iPhone sensor, because it has what's called a rolling shutter. A rolling shutter means that as you press capture or rather as the camera is capturing video frames or as you capture a frame, the camera then begins to take an image. And it takes a finite number of milliseconds, maybe 50 or so, before it is actually exposed to the entire frame and stored that off into a sensor. Because it's doing something that's more like a serial data transfer instead of this all at once parallel capture of the entire frame, what that causes is weird tearing and odd effects like that. For photography, as long as it's not too dramatic, it's not a huge deal. For vision processing, it's a huge deal because it breaks a lot of assumptions that we typically make about the camera. That has gotten better in the 3GS camera, but it's still not perfect. It is getting better, especially when the camera's turned on the video mode."

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Four short links: 10 November 2009

DIY Diagnostic Chips, Genetics on $5k a Genome, Cellphones as Diagnostic Microscopes, AR-Equipped Mechanics Do It Heads-Up

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips -- microfluidic chips (with tiny liquid-filled channels) can cost $100k and more. Michelle Khine used the Shrinky Dinks childrens' toy to make her own. "I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for micro­fluidics," she says. (via BoingBoing)
2. Complete Genomics publishes in Science on low-cost sequencing of 3 human genomes (press release) -- The consumables cost for these three genomes sequenced on the proof-of-principle genomic DNA nanoarrays ranged from $8,005 for 87x coverage to $1,726 for 45x coverage for the samples described in this report. Drive that cost down! There's a gold rush in biological discovery at the moment as we pick the low-hanging fruit of gross correlations between genome and physiome, but the science to reveal the workings of cause and effect is still in its infancy. We're in the position of the 18th century natural philosophers who were playing with static electricity, oxygen, anaesthetics, and so on but who lacked today's deeper insights into physical and chemical structure that explain the effects they were able to obtain. More data at this stage means more low-hanging fruit can be plucked, but the real power comes when we understand "how" and not just "what". (via BoingBoing)
3. Far From a Lab? Turn a Cellphone into a Microscope (NY Times) -- for some tests, you can use a camphone instead of a microscope. In one prototype, a slide holding a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone’s camera sensor. The sensor detects the slide’s contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center. For instance, the phones can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infection, he said.
4. Augmented reality helps Marine mechanics carry out repair work (MIT TR) -- A user wears a head-worn display, and the AR system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3-D models of the appropriate tools. An Android-powered G1 smart phone attached to the mechanic's wrist provides touchscreen controls for cueing up the next sequence of instructions. [...] The mechanics using the AR system located and started repair tasks 56 percent faster, on average, than when wearing the untracked headset, and 47 percent faster than when using just a stationary computer screen.

Four short links: 6 November 2009

Barcode Scanning, Downloadable Community Book, Gov Hack Day, Android Kludges

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store ... (via Ed Corkery on Twitter)
2. The Art of Community For Free Download -- Jono Bacon's O'Reilly book on community management now available for free download (still available for purchase!).
3. Gov Hack -- Australian government ran a hack day with their open data, this is their writeup.
4. Android Mythbusters -- slides for talk by Matt Porter at Embedded Linux Conference Europe. A (long) catalogue of the kludges in Android.

Shopping with AR

by Christine Perey | comments: 8

You are sitting in a café reading the newspaper and there’s a QR code on the page near an article which you found interesting. You’ve never seen this box symbol in a newspaper before but, since you already know the general purpose of these funny black and white checkered boxes, you ask yourself what this is about. You start up your QR code reader application (yes, it’s pre-installed on many camera phones already), aim, see the digital box appear on your screen around the QR code and snap a picture. Off goes the code and, depending on your mobile network connection, somewhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes later more details about this feature story appear in your mobile browser screen.

Time passes (months, maybe years) without your noticing. One day, you’re sitting in a café reading the news on your phone and you notice that the person next to you has some really nice footwear. No QR code on the neighbor’s shoes? No problem. You start up your visual search application (no, it’s not available on all handsets), act like you are trying to find something on the newsreader screen while you turn off the camera’s “snap the photo” sound, then discreetly aim and take the photo of the shoes. No one has noticed, right? You wait, you act like you’re still reading the news. Your mobile browser opens and on your screen is the exact model of shoes on your neighbor’s feet. Another click and you can check the price and availability from stores nearby.

The world is an interactive catalog

The first Sears catalog was published in 1888 for farmers who came to town only rarely and needed to place orders with someone other than their local merchant. By 1894, the Sears catalog had grown to 322 pages, featuring sewing machines, bicycles, and even cars. The next year it exceeded 500 pages and contained more products than people had previously thought existed. About 100 years later, the World Wide Web was getting off the ground, and in the past 15 years we’ve witnessed the explosion of information and had our eyes opened to a vast universe of merchandise, including customized versions of many items made on demand for our pleasure.

Augmented Reality shopping

Much like the farm wife with her Sears catalog, consumers will be able to use simple AR applications to make more informed buying decisions.

Items that are fixed in place (a building, for example) are well suited to research and information display using GPS and compass-based mobile AR as we know it today. Shopping for a new house or apartment to buy or rent? Among the original 4 or 5 layers in the mobile AR application Layar, is a real estate application. Via the Layar partner Funda, Layar launched with a few dozen properties. Now, with 17 real estate partners, tens of thousands of properties are listed worldwide. Perhaps, with just a few more lines of code, could the entire US Multiple Listing Service database be accessible from Layar or a similar application?

AR shopping for objects which move or in indoor environments (where GPS doesn’t work as well, if at all) is a little more challenging. But merchants and brands are always looking for novel ways to enhance a retail experience, and AR technology is on the list of tools that could serve the customer. In 2006, Michigan State University researchers supported by a Microsoft Research grant designed the PromoPad system, a shopping assistant based on a TabletPC which would ride in the shopping cart "cradle." Since image recognition was not sufficiently advanced to serve as a way to identify objects (and this was not the focus of their study), a combination of fiducials (another name for 2D bar codes) and RFID were used to detect the objects around the PromoPad user. The team put together a user interface for simple browsing, thought about how to attractively overlay information on the real world using a video camera connected to the TabletPC and how to design the shopping environment to make sure that only the items most likely to be of interest were presented to the shopper.

Using similar concepts, Insqribe is offering what appears to be a commercial version the PromoPad. They call it a real-time proximity-based marketing system. One version of Insqribe’s system still requires a marker or 2D barcode for recognition. They have also implemented a version with AR features. Another example of 2D barcode-based AR shopping is provided by Moving Brands. The current version of Moving Brands does not use the natural features of an object to recognize the product which has the attention of the shopper.

Image recognition as the basis for obtaining information in an AR-enhanced retail application is here today, but only for a few classes of products. Books, CDs and DVDs are the low hanging fruit for this application because the image databases for these searches are already on-line and the “planar” objects (flat) are far easier to recognize than 3D objects. One of the iPhone applications for the books, CDs and DVD search application is provided free by Swiss start-up kooaba. In June 2009, Amazon’s A9.com division acquired another company leading in this domain, SnapTell. Although I haven’t tried it personally, I’m told that the technology is already in Amazon’s service. [Note: please don’t confuse the technology which this post is about with Microsoft’s Bing Visual Search. Same term, Bing is a close “cousin” of image search for retail.]

In the case of books, CDs and DVDs, you might be asking yourself why you would need this application if the real object (e.g., the book about which you want more information) is already in your hand. Some of the answer lies in formats. Maybe you would like to purchase and read the digital version of the book you’re holding. Maybe you would like to listen to the music on your iPod but you are holding the CD. Perhaps you would like to see the movie you are holding in DVD format on a large screen in a theater in your neighborhood.

Good news or bad news?

Like the Sears catalog over a century ago, AR with visual search will cause the minds of people around world to open to entirely new possibilities. Sounds promising? For many people, having the world around them in the form of a searchable, interactive catalog is a distasteful, repugnant reminder that everything is for sale in a hyper-materialistic society. For others, it will become an addiction, perhaps causing people to buy beyond their means.

There is also the bright side of turning the world into an interactive catalog. Motivations for using AR for shopping could include the need or passion to be a frugal shopper. The applications will be able to support price comparisons and, using GPS, perhaps recommend a shop for immediate purchase. Too busy to go into a store to browse? Some will embrace mobile catalog shopping for the same reason they prefer on-line shopping: busy lifestyle. There are also those consumers who have a keen desire to adopt more careful, let’s say "informed," habits with respect to their consumption of physical goods and services. They want to purchase and consume materials which they know to be wholesome, damage the planet as little as possible, and may even achieve some social good. An interactive catalog based on images could alleviate the need to get a bar code or to have the exact model number of a product.

And, adding this new functionality will permit companies to explore new business models. Would consumers be willing to pay a premium for a faster or higher-accuracy visual search engine for retail? Would consumers be willing to pay a premium to have reminders sent to them when they are near a retail outlet where a previously “spotted” object is available in their price range?

Try it on for size and style

AR is also useful when combined with a PC or another device in a virtual dressing room application. For example, Zugara is proposing to develop for its clients customized versions of a Webcam Social Shopper application which allows prospective customers to virtually try on clothes and use motion (actually gesture) detection algorithms for keyboard- and mouse-free navigation (another use for computer vision). Cisco has just released a short commercial vision video which shows how such technology will help shoppers in the future.

This virtual catalog combined with a dressing room concept is attractive but there remain some questions. What happens if the person using the application is a different size than the model on which the garment was originally cast? Are there different markers for people with different height and weight? Then the key question is if this indeed increases retail sales as Zugara suggests.

Feet back on the ground

For many of the location-based shopping services available today, such as recommendations of restaurants and places to hang out, we already have examples of the use of AR (see for example, the Monocle feature of the Yelp iPhone application and, in Japan, Tonchidot's Sekai Camera). We should see AR integration as a feature of more navigation and recommendation services in the future.

Although image recognition technologies for AR applications on mobile handsets are not quite ready to take on the challenge of identifying the pair of shoes your neighbor is wearing, they are entirely up to the task of identifying, from a well-lit photograph, the model of a car or a logo. Expect retail outlets and brands that provide fast-moving consumer goods to be among those eager to exploit mobile AR for shopping.

Shopping with AR is a shoe-in for some, but not all things we might want or need. There remain gaps in this ecosystem which will take a few years to fill. For example, the consumer may wish to consummate a purchase directly from the application which has an AR feature. Mobile commerce is far from a fait acompli. Transaction systems must be integrated to the interactive catalog platforms.

So, despite a high potential for both merchants and consumers to use AR for shopping, we must not get too far ahead of the cart with this one. What do you think? Is shopping with AR something you would do? When do you think it will be ready for prime time?

User interfaces for AR

by Christine Perey | comments: 0

People intuitively understand that Augmented Reality (AR) opens the door to compelling new ways to interact with technology and our environment. Yet the AR implemented on mobile phones today (e.g., touch on a point of interest on the live video which is on the phone’s screen and get more information) is only the tip of the iceberg. It's dangerous to predict too far into the future, and there is a risk that talk about haptic (touch) interfaces and heads-up displays for AR will seem like just hype. But new ways of interacting with digital data on the real world are not hype to those who work on them.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics at Tuebingen and the Swiss Federal Polytechnical Institute in Zurich (ETHZ) are members of a worldwide community conducting studies with users to evaluate how touch and sight work together in multimodal interfaces for AR applications. These researchers are making great strides in the direction of “next generation” user interfaces, inventing devices that take advantage of increasingly powerful and sensitive sensors (one and then two cameras, Assisted GPS, 3D magnetometer, or 3D accelerometer).

Touch

In most consumer mobile AR applications released to date, AR interaction is mediated via haptics--the user touches a highlighted area of the screen to request to more information associated with an object or point on the planet.

But we perceive our environment using a combination of all senses, and researchers are developing haptic interfaces that go beyond the “touch for more info” model. Dr. Matthias Harders of the ETHZ Computer Vision Lab works on applications of AR for training surgeons. At the upcoming ISMAR 09 meeting, Drs. Benjamin Knörlein (ETHZ), Massimiliano Di Luca (Max Planck), and Harders will present the results of their ongoing research on the use of haptics and AR interfaces. Their studies show that delays for haptic feedback result in decreases in the user’s perception of “stiffness” in the interface. In contrast, visual delays (where there is a delay between the touch and the response) caused an increase in perceived stiffness. Understanding how vision and touch interact to affect the user's perception can help AR developers finetune the interface so that it accurately maps that perception.

Such studies may, one day, be helpful for designing AR training for neurosurgeons so, please, pay attention!

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Look through the AR window

by Christine Perey | comments: 9

“Augmented Reality is your window to the world,” suggest some companies who have released applications for the iPhone 3G S and Android handsets over the past few months. As we have witnessed since the launch of Layar in June, the world needed another “window.” Or, perhaps we needed another browser? Have you heard about the World Surfer by GeoVector?

Rather than focusing entirely on the window itself, it’s time to look at the value the information in the window is bringing to the user.

Let's study the user’s interaction with digital information about their world on a deeper level. What are people likely to need AR applications to do for them? The hottest applications for AR in the next year will closely resemble familiar human interactions with the physical world.

High Level Taxonomy

In order to really understand the requirements of AR applications, we need clearly defined application categories.

One stab at an AR application taxonomy distinguishes between those applications which require a very highly controlled, perhaps a highly “instrumented” user environment, and those which do not. Intersense is one of the leading providers of technologies for AR applications that require knowing the precise position of user and objects in a reference framework. Examples of highly-instrumented environments are a technology-assisted operating theater in a hospital, a virtual assembly line in a manufacturing plant, an oil drilling platform, a museum with AR exhibits or the space in which visitors can experience an AR-enhanced ride within a theme (amusement) park.

Then there are uncontrolled environments: anywhere that lacks unique identifiers placed in advance for the benefit of the AR user's application, and where the environmental conditions may rapidly change.

As I was preparing the description of the upcoming Mobile Magic Wand workshop, I discovered that there also needed to be a distinction made between what I call “mobile AR” and that which the chairs of the Let’s Go Out workshop, a workshop conducted in parallel with the Mobile Magic Wand meeting, call simply “outdoor AR.”

Here’s what we came up with: Mobile AR applications or services can use an off-the-shelf hardware platform, such as a mobile phone, UMPC or personal digital assistant with pre-integrated sensors (GPS or camera, for example), or a custom-designed system of any specification as long as the user can carry it without assistance and the device is not connected to its database by a physical cable of fixed length. The access to digital information can be mediated by a wireless or cellular network connection or the digital information necessary for the AR application can all be kept local to the user’s device (pre-loaded).

Mobile AR can be both indoor and outdoor. The scope of “Outdoor AR” includes that portion of mobile AR for which the use case is outside of any building or shelter. There may be some Outdoor AR applications which are not highly portable. Mobile AR includes only that portion of Outdoor AR which is accessible with a device a user can carry without assistance, which is not connected to a server by means of a physical cable and is entirely outside a highly-instrumented environment.

Here's a photo of me wearing the LifeClipper2 system.

Christine Perey using lifeClipper2 in Basel [photo credit: Jan Torpus]

It's mobile, at least I could carry it unassisted, and I'm outdoors.

Mobile AR applications

Let’s explore the next level in the Mobile AR application taxonomy. There are professional applications for Mobile AR: this covers all the uses for a mobile AR system by people doing their job.

In one of the LifeClipper2 scenarios, for example, urban planners wear the system to experience (during the design phase of a project) the changes they propose to make in the real environment. These changes could include introducing new vegetation, removal of existing buildings and, perhaps, addition of new facilities. The mixture of simulated objects with the real world is very fluid and, in some instances, even includes changing the acoustic properties in the space.

In the class of Mobile AR for consumers, there are navigation applications or services. Primarily pedestrian navigation, these way-finding applications help us get to the nearest bus stop, public rest rooms, ATM machine, a doctor’s office, coffee shop, McDonald’s and other fixed point which we might need to find in geo-space. We could find these points the old-fashioned way, by asking someone or using a map, but is easier for some to navigate by means of a screen and using the phone’s GPS and compass than on a digital or paper map view.

The next category of Mobile AR consumer applications is associated with having fun: games which involve the user’s natural environment as stimuli or just weave together the natural world and synthetic game objects and players. Think of the Kweekies game, or the AcrossAir virus killer 360 application. In this rich and expanding category, the user’s interaction with the surroundings by way of a consumer mobile telephone or PDA is playful, or at the very least involves earning points in some way. Frequently the metaphor is pointing and shooting or tapping. I’m not implying that these applications aren’t purposeful because having fun is a widely-felt human need, but it is distinctly different from other application categories.

Social AR is the third category which is ripe with possibilities. It is at the intersection of social networks and AR interfaces. Social AR applications will seek to fulfill the human need to find people and to share with friends and fellow inhabitants something personal about ourselves. Social AR will permit us to annotate the places we co-occupy or which we have occupied at different times. Some Social AR applications will arise from location-based social network services such as Yelp's Monocle feature in its iPhone application.

Mobilizy has made a big contribution in this category with the release of Wikitude.me. Expect there to be many other examples of social AR coming out in the near future. Social AR will undoubtedly also have aspects in common with game applications when two or more people are using their AR interfaces to play with one another.

There are more AR application categories. Can you suggest a few? What are your favorite Mobile AR application segments?

See It, Follow It

by Christine Perey | comments: 2

Before our eyes and minds can “follow” something in our environment, we first must detect it. Similarly, before an AR application can “augment” something, the target object or place needs to be detected. Strictly speaking our eyes can’t detect a geo-location, but a GPS-enabled device can detect where it is relative to other points on the globe.

Since most of the world’s people, objects and places are not emitting radio signals which our mobile Internet devices can reliably detect, as was once envisioned in the early visions of RFID, other technologies are being used and new ones being developed for detection in AR applications. Further, even if there were tags on us (or other moving objects) and readers everywhere, RFID alone is insufficient to provide the six degrees of freedom necessary to correctly position a device relative to the object or point of interest. This isn’t to say that RFID has no place at all in AR, just that it is not a widely applicable tool for developers of today’s consumer AR applications.

Tracking for AR applications involves identification of one or more targets in the user’s field of vision or surroundings, then keeping track of the position of the user’s device relative to the recognized and/or selected object in three-dimensional space, and, for there to be an augmentation in the field of view, properly "registering" an overlay image or text to the real world object. The first two of these steps are closely aligned with the sequence which some types of robots need to perform when moving autonomously in an environment. They are also leveraging core ubiquitous computing technologies which are necessary in “intelligent environments,” as in spaces which exhibit Ambient Intelligence.

Tracking real world objects which are stationary (with fixed geo-location coordinates) has been achieved most widely and at relatively low cost using a mobile phone’s GPS and compass. There are many examples such as Wikitude, Layar and BionicEye. But there are situations in which GPS and compass are not the best, for example when the user is inside a building or near something which causes disturbances in the magnetic field and, in the best of circumstances, GPS and compass technology don’t provide the speed and accuracy which many AR applications require.

Let’s just take, for example, applications in which the user’s target object is not fixed in space. This challenge has been solved for years by affixing a marker, such as a QR (Quick Response) or Data matrix code on the object. For the past three or four years, markers have provided a suitable approximation for what most people designing AR applications really want: recognition of people, objects or places on the basis of their unique features, or, in the research community vernacular, “natural feature recognition.”

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Four short links: 17 September 2009

Involuntarily Opened Geodata, Sense Organ, Doc Vis, 3D Open Source Bodies

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Wikileaks Now Holds UK Postcode Database -- the UK does not have open geodata in the way that we know it. A state-owned enterprise, Ordnance Survey, is responsible for maintaining all sorts of baseline data and they charge (through the nose) for that data. This is the release of 1,841,177 post codes, geographic boundaries, and more. Postcodes in the UK are far more useful than US ZIP codes--they identify a handful of houses, rather than a few thousand houses.
2. My New Sense Organ -- a strap with buzzers and a compass, so you always have physical reminder of orientation. For people like me who can get lost putting on pants in the morning, this would be a godsend. (via Slashdot)
3. Saving is Obsolete -- EtherPad adds a Wave-like replay feature to help you see the history of a document.
4. Open Source 3D People -- incredible software to design realistic 3D faces and bodies. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

Resetting Expectations: Some Augmented Reality Links

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 9

1. Mobile Devices and AR: Besides employing the location of users (Wikitude), there are generally two ways to overlay data onto the real world: through markers ( (2D) bar codes) or through automatic object/image recognition algorithms ("markerless"). The Economist gives a good overview of the different mobile applications that are starting to emerge and lists a few areas where AR makes sense such as shopping (letting house-hunters which properties are for sale) and events (giving sports fans access to stats and player bios).

2. 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere: @gnat linked to a recent RWW post, that lists high-level challenges the AR industry needs to address, including spam and security, interoperability, user experience, and openess.

3. For technical challenges facing AR developers, I recently had a chance to visit with computer scientist and Everyscape CTO/founder, @mok_oh, who's also been blogging about AR. In the first of two posts, he points out that accurate object and image recognition remain formidable^† technical hurdles ("accurate registration of the virtual objects with the real-world image"). Without object and image recognition, Mok points out that some of the more well-known AR apps may not actually be augmented reality apps in the classic sense (" ... there’s not much difference between this and Google Maps on your mobile phone").

In a follow-up post, Mok warns that too much hype may be worst thing that can happen to AR. Serious technical problems need to be resolved:

I still think we need to continue to expand/expound on vision algorithms (e.g. image tracking, image detection/recognition, etc.) and couple that with other sensors (e.g. Wifi, RFID, Bluetooth, accelerators, gyros, GPS, compasses, etc.) to more precisely tell people what they’re seeing in an interactive and augmented sense. The level of precision provided by current apps are good from a mapping perspective (i.e. the 2D “aerial” view), but not good enough from a first-person’s ground perspective. ... Perhaps, we need to reset people’s expectations somehow, or rebrand the words to something else. Because I really do think that there’s plenty of use for AR-inspired technologies as being defined by Layars and Wikitudes of the world.

Everything I read indicates that the more likely scenario in the near future is that AR applications will use a combination of sensors (like a GPS) and markers. In contrast, accurate markerless AR is a distant dream, that will remain locked away in the world of science fiction for years to come.

(†) Mok was at Foo camp last month and I had a chance to talk to him about AR and related topics. Given that he has long worked in the relevant fields within computer science, I take his word on the state-of-the-art in computer vision.

Four short links: 27 August 2009

Copycrime, Die Music Industry Die, Open Government Data, Augmented Reality

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Second Degree Murder and Six Other Crimes Cheaper Than Pirating Music -- I'm outraged that the Obama administration is supporting the RIAA on the case against Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four who has to pay them $1.92 million for downloading songs. That's more expensive than murder and six other crimes... (via Br3nda)
2. Bill Drummond Talk (MP3) -- cofounder of the KLF gives 130 years of music industry history and explains why music's future might depend on not recording it. (via Br3nda)
3. NZ Government Recommends CC-BY -- NZ all-of-Government licensing framework recommends CC. So far as copyright works are concerned, NZGOAL proposes that agencies apply the most liberal of the New Zealand Creative Commons law licences to those of their copyright works that are appropriate for release, unless there is a restriction which would prevent this. The most liberal Creative Commons licence is the Attribution (BY) licence. So far as non-copyright information is concerned, NZGOAL recommends the use of clear “no-known rights” statements, to provide certainty for people wishing to re-use that information..
4. Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere (ReadWriteWeb) -- great post with five areas that need to be addressed before we can move from "wow" to commonplace. Interoperability: Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s. It may not be obvious and it may not even be true that users have a right to view any layer of Augmented Reality through any Augmented Reality browser. Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever. (A lack of data portability when it comes to Augmented Reality could cause substantial psychological distress!)