In my recently released novel The Digital Sea, the Ecoverse corporation is the Google-sized behemoth (or should I say Facebook since it’s 2011) that controls the networks and software that make up the ubiquitous augmented world.  The company motto is Conservation through Digitization.  Meaning that users, by utilizing a digital world overlain the real one, save the environment.  Why buy new clothes when you can have your avatar change on a whim and a thought?  Why repaint your house, requiring buckets of dangerous chemicals, when you can snap your fingers and change the color?

While the company and the level of technology are fiction, the idea that AR can help reduce our carbon footprint is not.  Right now we have various digital media like music, movies, and books that have already shed their physical selves and now dance on the head of a pin, speeding around the Internet requiring only the energy required for the information to exist.

As real books move to eBooks, more than just the singular book that was purchased is saved.  This has to do with the quirky business model that publishing has been using for the last fifty years.  Most books do not have their complete production run sold so thousands or tens of thousands of books will be destroyed if the warehouse doesn’t have space anymore for a poorly selling book (and more book warehouses are being closed down meaning publishing companies will pull the plug faster.)

For most books nowadays, eBooks and print-on-demand services through Amazon or Lightning Source mean that only the books purchased are produced.  The Espresso Book Machine will mean that in the future, you can go down to your local bookstore and pick up any book they have on file without having to wait for Amazon to ship it (thus reducing the carbon footprint further).

Augmented reality, too, offers the magic of reducing carbon footprint to any product given that it is made up of only information and provides no functional physical result.  For example, clothes for keeping warm are functional, but fashion styling is purely informational, designed to display status and individual taste.

The reduction of wasted books was one of the reasons I chose to put out The Digital Sea using those two methods, so that only the books that were going to be read were produced and nothing more.  I considered doing only eBooks to stay in spirit with the concept of the digital sea, but the eBook market is still small and I’m not that dogmatic about it.

Part of the Internet economy is built upon the “click-through” or CTR (Click Through Rate.)  The CTR attempts to measure customer interest in a particular product.  If a person finds the banner ad interesting enough, they will select it and be sent to that site, hopefully to purchase a product (or Conversion Rate.)  Thus the effect of the advertising can be measured and billed.

Even the layout of a site can affect the conversion rate.  Or in the case of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, the color blue can be worth $80 million in additional usage.  Website optimization rearranges the layout to achieve fung shui for dollars.  What is measured can be improved.

These products, like Google’s search engine, are worth more than just the product itself.  And they get first crack at the wealth of information flowing through their servers.  Using the misspelled words on Google search, they created the most robust spell-checker on the planet, in every conceivable language.

Using the information of what you click, they can run experiments to see what works best.  Collaborative filtering makes recommendations to users based on what other users like.  The data exhaust of websites can be as valuable as the product itself.

As augmented reality products use eye-tracking to achieve a realistic virtual overlay like in the recent GM augmented windshield, they are getting more information than just how to align the graphics.  Eye-tracking adds a new dimension to the data exhaust.  As any professional poker player will tell you, the eyes are the window to the soul, and to the tell.  Someone holding pocket kings might look down at their chips the moment they see their cards in anticipation of seeing a bigger pile later.  Players wear glasses for a reason.  The eyes can give away important information.

Studies on select groups of people using eye-tracking have given broad generalizations (read the before-mentioned link for more details):

1.Headlines draw eyes before pictures.

2. People scan the first couple words of a headline.

3. People scan the left side of a list of headlines.

4. Your headline must grab attention in less than 1 second.

5. Smaller type promotes closer reading.

6. Navigation at the top of the page works best.

7. Short paragraphs encourage reading.

8. Introductory paragraphs enjoy high readership.

9. Ad placement in the top and left positions works best.

10. People notice ads placed close to popular content.

11. People read text ads more than graphic ads.

12. Multimedia works better than text for unfamiliar or conceptual information.

Imagine what can be learned when the eye-tracking is always on and always sending data back to the home servers.  Contextual filtering will “pigeon-hole” you into a type of viewer and give you a website more suited to your style of reading.  Web design will customize based on your changing eye sight.  Older viewers that linger over the words will get larger fonts so reading isn’t so strained.  Colorful pictures will attract younger viewers so advertisements will be changed to align with them.

And that GM Augmented Windshield?  If their sensors can identify advertising along the side of the road in the form of signs and billboards, then can they collect the data on what works and what doesn’t and sell that to ad agencies.

Like I said, the data exhaust can be more valuable than the data itself.  And eye-tracking will prove to be more valuable because its an unconscious reaction.  Just be careful where you’re looking.

The year 2009 has been an important milestone in the development of augmented reality as an important future technology.  While markers and marketing campaigns captured the early interest of the year, the bigger story was the porting of augmented reality to the various smartphones in the second half. 

But those two generalities aren’t the only thing that happened in 2009 in regards to augmented reality.  I’m going to take a look back at the year, month-by-month, to remember how the year unfolded, so we better understand the direction of the future. 

January

Back at the dawn of 2009, all the augmented reality news you needed to know was in one place – Games Alfresco.  Hope was high and all the pieces seemed to be clicking into place. 

Biggest News of the Month – Metaio releases its Lego AR boxes

   * By a long shot, Metaio’s release of the augmented reality Lego box was the biggest news of the month.  When you can get Angela Merkel and the Govenator to pose with your product, you’re doing well.

Coolest App/Video – iPhone App Helps Solve Rubix Cube

   * This app portents of things to come in the future as products like Google Goggles amp up the possibilities of reality-search.  Using specific algorithms (agents) for specific tasks, there will be an app for everything you want to do in the future.

Best Article / Interview – UgoTrade Interview with Robert Rice

   * Though Robert hasn’t delivered on his promise of a Neogence product by mid-year (though the Apple video API has stymied their progress), the rest of the interview is full of great quotes and nuggets about augmented reality.

   * Notable quotes from Robert that show how much he understands the industry:

But yes, I’d say that the next 18 months are going to be very interesting with a lot of money being thrown around, new ventures, and plenty of content/applications. I expect most of this will be centered on single user AR experienced through a mobile device with a screen (iPhone, android, etc.). I expect that there will be a significant boost after Vuzix releases some of their wearable *transparent* displays, putting Microvision back into the “has potential but is too quiet” position.

Remember, one of the biggest risks that AR has, is being branded as “novelty”, which means “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.” I think we have a ways to go before something is truly useful, but as 2009 progresses we should start seeing some effort here. I’d guess 2010 before something really useful comes out…at least something practical.

Now, having said that, I should say that I expect entertainment and games to take the lead (as usual), although there are a few companies really trying to leverage AR and video/graphics compositing for marketing (brochures) and location based methods (kiosks, large screen projections, etc.)

Other notable things that happened in January – The Augmented Times is born and Rouli Nir begins a great year of chronicling the happenings of AR. 

An auspicious quote from Rouli:

This blog is about Augmented Reality (AR). It is my firm belief that AR will be the next web revolution (the so called Web 3.0, and forget about that semantic web nonsense). In the next few years, stronger devices and better algorithms will enable us to merge the real world with cyberspace. Using your mobile phone (at first) or head up display (later on) every real object will be augmented and achieve a web presence. Tourism, shopping, advertisement, entertainment and education are only a few areas that will never be the same.

This blog mission is to document this revolution as it happens. We welcome you, and welcome our augmented future.

February

This month is relatively quiet due to it being handicapped by fewer days than the other months. 

Biggest News of the Month – Augmented Reality in Flash Now Commercially Available.

   *  Making the nuts-and-bolts tools of AR available for commercial use is always a good thing, especially when its paired with flash. 

Coolest App / Video – “Sixth Sense” MIT Device.

   * Patty Maes unleashed this phenomenon on the web early last year and it still gets links and mentions today.  While projection based AR is probably not medium that we’ll all eventually use, the video showed tangible use-cases that help the non-initiated understand the embryonic technology.

Best Article / Interview – This comic from the Abstruse Goose sums up a lot about the future of ubiquitous computing (via Augmented Blog.)

Other notable things that happened in February- I started the Future Digital Life blog, which upon reading my early posts, makes me cringe a little.  Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Also, Rouli starts the Weekly Linkfest, the best place to find the round up of AR news each week.

March

In like a lion, out like a lamb.  Augmented reality starts to get rolling in March with lots of goodies and promises.

Biggest News of the Month – Metaio and Vuzix Team Up to Create AR Goggles.

   * While the year has been mostly disappointing regarding HMDs, this was the one tangible piece of progress in the bunch.  The video Ori captured at the GDC portends to greater things.  While no companies have released products for the Vuzix+ARCam, we’ve recently seen an impressive project from Craig Kapp with his Whisper Deck. 

Coolest App / Video – Blair MacIntryre’s GA Tech team – Zombie Attack and Pit Strategy.

   * The videos showed what polished AR games can look like. 

Best Article / Interview – I’m going for a two-fer on this one because its hard to choose between Ori’s talk at WARM09 and Robert’s Decade of Ubiquity post. 

   * If you haven’t watched Ori’s talk, I highly recommend it.  Even though I’d seen the video, I made a point of hearing him live at ISMAR09 because I think its such a well thought-out call for human-based technology.  Robert’s vision is a bit more expansive and covers the whole of augmented reality.  I’ll leave you with another Robert quote:

We will break away from the desk, we will throw away our monitors, and our children will laugh at how large our IPhones are. They will struggle with how we ever managed to get work done with “windows” “webpages” and keyboards. They will be unable to fathom the concept of vinyl disks, typewriters, and landlines. But it all starts, and accelerates, during this next decade. Imagine everything that happened in the last decade, and multiply it. You haven’t seen anything yet. The next decade will make the last one pale in comparison.

Other notable things that happened in March – Topps released augmented baseball cards and ISMAR09 begins calling for papers. 

April

Biggest News of the Month- Rouli and Ori team up on Games Alfresco to create the AR hub for all AR related news.   

   * The move allowed Ori to focus more on his company and gave Rouli the helm on the daily AR newscasting.  Looking back at the great job that GA has done, I’d say it was a good move.

Coolest App / Video – Marco Tempest’s AR card trick video.

   * The video hit the web in April and showed us how AR can change our perception of reality. 

Best Article / Interview – Tim O’Reilly talks Web 2.0

   * Augmented Times identified the best quote from the video:

RFID is an evolutionary dead-end … semantic web or RFID is things “wearing name-tags”, and web 2.0 is learning to recognize things … We’re getting to that kind of augmented reality, where our computers will have senses that are as good as ours or better … they are going to recognize faces, they are going to recognize objects, they gonna have immediate recall. If you ask me “what’s the UI in five years”, it’s a pair of glasses … I’m gonna have some kind of little heads up display because I’m gonna look at something, I’m gonna walk around at a meeting and it will go “that’s Joe, you met him three years ago”.

Other notable things that happened in April – Georgia Tech fear of heights video (another peak into the future of augmented reality as a perception changer), Rouli’s call for marketers to stop using AR to sell cars, Lester at the Augmented Planet gets his blog started, Nokia point and find is out and a couple of articles about brain-computer interfaces: Honda controls robot and the brain-twitter breakthrough. 

May

Biggest News of the Month – Metaio releases Unifeye design demo.

Coolest App / Video – Useful AR from the US Postal Service.

   * Using FLARToolkit, the US postal service shows us that not all AR applications have to be novelity ones. 

Best Article / Interview – Tish interviews Ori Inbar about mobile augmented reality. 

Ori: Just like with every emerging technology in history, people never bought the technology, they bought the content, the apps, the benefits that came on top of the technology. Whether it was VHS winning over Beta Max, or BluRay winning over HD. It’s always because of more/better content. Look at the video game console war: Xbox, and Nintendo did better than Sony just because they had more and better games. Even Windows was a success thanks to its applications. People bought it for the applications not the OS. The content is the first to drive demand.

Other notable things that happened in May – My post about the Path to Augmented Vision, Programmer Joe talks AR at LOGIN, and 11 Industries to be Reinvented with Augmented Reality. 

June

Biggest News of the Month – Layar is online. 

   * The biggest news of the month by far.  Layar was the first big product release that got a buzz bump. 

Coolest App / Video – Zugara Social Shopper.

   * The video showcased the use of motion capture to help eliminate the burdensome need for keyboards and mouses when you’re using augmented reality.  Zugara later put the technique into practice for their Cannonballz and Fashionista products.

Best Article / Interview – UgoTrade Interview with Blair MacIntyre

   * No surprise here.  Tish Shute continues to get great interviews with everyone important in the AR field. 

The problem with the mobile phone as a AR device is that problem of awareness. If I have a head mount on and I walk down the street and there is bunch of probably-not-useful-but-potentially-useful information floating by me, that’s a good thing, because I may see something that is useful or makes me think of something else.  But if I have to hold up my phone to see if something might be interesting nearby, I will never hold up my phone because at the time there is a high probability that there won’t be anything particularly important there.  You might imagine you can get around this by using alerts or something like that, but then you overload whatever alert channel you use.

Other notable things that happened in June- Ori asks us all about our favorite AR games of all time, Noah breaks onto the scene with his Touchless Glove Interface, and Goggle presents their paper on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (which later becomes Goggles). 

July

Biggest News of the Month – The AR Consortium Announced. 

   * While its still unknown if the consortium has accomplished anything through cooperation, the intention of cooperation is a start.  Here’s to hoping we’ll see more fruit from this vine in 2010.

Coolest App / Video – AcrossAir Tube Finder.

   * At the time it was released we weren’t sure if it was a real product, but eventually we learned the truth and for a time, AcrossAir became the top selling AR app on the iPhone appstore. 

Best Article / Interview – UgoTrade Interview with Ori Inbar “Reality Reinvented”

Ori:You are so right. It’s multiple elements in the industry that have to come together. You have the technology companies like Imagination and Metaio, then you have content companies like what we’re trying to do; the hardware vendors and the large content providers. Those brands that we’re trying to go after and educate them about the potential of AR. All these pieces need to come together for this market to ignite.

Other notable things that happened in July – James Alliban’s business card goes viral and AR Avatar toys are released at Comic Con.

August

Biggest News of the Month – Yelp Introduces AR Monocle via Easter Egg

Coolest App / Video – Bruce Sterling’s Layar Keynote – At the Dawn of the AR Industry

   * Bruce released an AR-infused novel Catyadids in 2009, so it was only natural that Layar asked him to speak about the fledgling industry.  The speech is memorable with too many great lines to pick from for quoting here. 

Best Article / Interview – Thomas Wrobel’s Proposal for an Open AR Network

   * Easily Tish’s best interview because it turned into more than a reflection of past events or hopes for the future.  Tish and Thomas have since rallied AR professionals and amateurs to join the AR Wave collaborative effort.  They seek to use Wave as the platform for an open AR network and have recently been testing code. 

Other notable things that happened in August – AR Strippers!

September

Biggest News of the Month – Vuzix 920Wrap Will Not be See-Through

   * The biggest disappointment of the year was the news from Vuzix.  Good see-through AR glasses are supposed to release us from the tyranny of the “magic lens”.  Hoping 2010 brings better news, but I’m really waiting until 2011. 

Coolest App / Video – Augmenting Aerial Maps with Dynamic Information

Best Article / Interview – Gene Becker’s Design Strategies for Magic Lens.

Other notable things that happened in September – No more Gamaray - Death of a Browser, Int13 and Total Immersion getting into bed, and the augmented reality reading list.

October

Biggest News of the Month – News from ISMAR09, News from ISMAR09 #2 and UgoTrade ISMAR09 Coverage.

   * I was lucky enough to attend and speak at ISMAR09.   The energy of the participants was exceptional and I came away from it more jazzed about AR than I was going in.  Hopefully the ISMAR committee will be releasing the videos from the event soon. 

Coolest App / Video -  2D sketches become 3D reality. 

Best Article / Interview – ISMAR09 HMD Review

   * I think I summed up the current state of HMDs for AR pretty well.  I’m hoping 2010 brings a suprise for AR HMDs.

Other notable things that happened in October – AR Wave discussion on UgoTrade, Wikitude for the iPhone first look and Giant Hand Torments City

November

Biggest News of the Month – Junaio hits the app store. 

Coolest App / Video – Interactive Entertainment Using AR

   * The videos about the Disney experiences were similar to what Mark Mine showed us at ISMAR.  They really show us how technology can transcend our perceptions of reality.

Best Article / Interview –  Augmented Planet’s Head-to-head browser test (and part 2)

   * Lester broke down the various browsers in this excellent hands-on challenge.  Read both parts to find out the winner.

Other notable things that happened in November – Business Week’s Article about: Getting Beyond the Hype and Robert Rice’s reply. 

December

Biggest News of the Month – Goggle Googles is released.

   * The giant has awoken.  Goggles has many implications for Googles ideas on the AR market.  This won’t be the last time we’ll hear from them about this technology.

Coolest App / Video – Layer 3.0. 

   * While Layar has since pulled the app from the app store and had to issue and apology, the version 3.0 still holds lots of promise. 

Best Article / Interview – Augmented Reality in 2010: Predictions (10 part series)

   * A wide swath of the AR blogosphere had the opportunity to participate in the predictions series from Games Alfresco run by Rouli Nir.  More interesting, snarky, and possibly-true predictions that you can shake an augmented stick at.

Other notable things that happened in December – AR Wave FAQ on UgoTrade, Enkin acquired by Google, ARDevCamp, Wikitude Teams Up with Lonely Planet, 10 Worse Uses of AR in 2009, and Nexus One News and Implications of AR. 

What It All Means

Whew.  After reviewing hundreds of articles and videos, I’m sure I’ve missed a number of important happenings from the year 2009.  If I have, please make sure to comment and I’ll add it if I have overlooked it. 

What does it all mean?  That is entirely up to you.  The year has brought many advances to augmented reality and the ceiling is sky-high for 2010.  There will be surprises, excuses, apologies, releases, re-releases and more.  Money will be pumped in, not all where it should go, and progress will be made.  We’ll laugh at the videos, smile at our favorite products and complain when it does work as expected.  Either way, it will be a year more interesting than the last and I’ll be here to watch it all unfold.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a pile of old Commodore 64s, you’ve heard about the Google Goggle announcement.  The service allows you to use pictures to search the web.  The service is amazing in its own right.  Check out the videos if you haven’t seen them already.

Google Goggles opens up huge possibilities for augmented reality.  One of the challenges of AR is for the computer to understand the world around it in a realistic manner.  GPS and compasses only tell one tiny part of the story.  If the only thing you know about the world is the exact location you’re in and which direction you’re facing, then you really can’t accomplish much. 

Object recognition (which for Goggles includes facial recognition, but they’re not allowing individuals to be accessed until privacy issues are figured out) allows our phones to mimics how the brain works in the seeing the world around it (or the Reality Recognition if you’re familiar with my AR Scale.)  This doesn’t mean that Google has mind-mapped our mental processes to make the service work.  What it means is that Goggles allow for computers to start doing what our brain is doing–seeing the world around it. 

Google Goggles Will Make These Eight Things (and More) Possible:

1 – Cataloging your refrigerator and pantry so you can cross-reference at the store and get menu ideas.  Maybe in five years your fridge will have a camera inside of it to do it real-time.   

2 – Noah Zerkin on twitter pointed out pretty quickly that “If they can recognize scene elements, and they also provide GPS/inertial/mag-based overlay, how long before using surroundings to fix POV?”  This will make immersive augmented reality games and services possible. 

3 – Run your TiVo through it so it can edit out the commercials.

4 – Wilderness survival tool that lets you know if its safe to eat the purple berries (when the plant picture search is added and assuming you have cell phone coverage!)

5 – Scan your strange garage sale items to find out what they go for on Ebay (Who actually owns purple zebra lamps?)

6 – Warehouses or stores can auto-count items as they are removed from the shelves with a bank of cameras so they can have real-time inventory and also know which items were “almost” sold.

7 – Genealogists can use old family pictures as a search criteria to find other long lost family branches. 

8 – Trend spotters could use live camera feeds to understand usage patterns of products.  

These do require access to Goggles database or at least a way to port through Goggles (like using Twitter for real-time search) and some might also require usable HMDs to make it worth using, but the possibilities are exponential.  While none of these things are going to happen overnight, Google Goggles sure has made things a lot more interesting (especially if they allow facial recognition.)

The augmented world will exist as a shadow to the real one. 

Rouli from the Augmented Times posted on Friday about the ACME project (Augmented Collaboration in a Mixed Environment.)  Leave it to a group of researchers to suck the life from a wonderful tool by giving it such a drab name as ACME.  And I disagree with Rouli’s assessment that it’s a form of telepresence, its much cooler than that.  My point is not that their descriptions are lacking (and I have nothing better to offer).  It’s more that the technology deserves sexier nom de plume. 

The video demonstrates the idea that presence need not be tied to our geospatial location.  Nor does our awareness.  An augmented world will allow us to move the focal point of our being to a different location. 

Though the word demonstrate has limitations.  The Mixed Reality Teleconferencing (see english website for more details) ACME project shows us how we can mix reality and the virtual in a boring conference room using Second Life.  Their skill at manipulating these two environments is commendable but unfortunately, Second Life is a not platform that I believe will be a part of the equation in a real open AR world. 

The reason I think Second Life doesn’t work is because it is a seperate world, similar, but unlike ours.  It has virtual ground, trees, buildings, and people, but not in the same location as our own.  Google Earth gives us a 3D representation of our world in the exact proportions we need it.  A GPS position on Google Earth is the same on the real Earth.  Second Life doesn’t have that symmetry with our world. 

Another connection between the augmented and real world can be made using the technology demonstrated by the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology as they use cameras to integrate real world activity onto Google Earth.  They will also be attending ISMAR09 in a few weeks (maybe these two groups should collaborate?)

The combination of these technologies and a lightweight HMD can give us a way to project ourselves to another location and be aware of changes in that environment.  This will create a world in which time and distance have less meaning.  And while its not going to replace the feeling of walking the streets of Shanghai or exploring the sand dunes around the Great Pyramids, it will certainly make the world feel smaller. 

This augmented world will connect people and places in ways never considered.  Space will be layered with the human spectrum, games will exist across imaginary dimensions and the reach of awareness will be pushed out to a global scale. 

Some may scoff at such thoughts and believe that an augmented world will only create a populous lost in an unreal world suffering within its own delusions.  I offer the doubters this video as proof that “reality” is just a trick of our monkey brains.

With the iPhone OS 3.1 launch set to debut next month, I wanted to explore the features that are going to help make some AR apps succeed over others.  We’re going to be seeing a spike of releases since many have been working towards this moment waiting for the iPhone to become AR enabled, so its a good time to get those apps in tip-top shape. 

And while I’m personally smartphone agnostic, these are features that should be present on any app, no matter what the platform.  But the OS3.1 release will connect the hype of AR with the hype of the iPhone, so that’s why we need to talk about app features now.  Call it Hype2.0 if you’d like.

And now for the features:

1 – Solutions Not Gimmicks

The best products and services are solutions to a problem.  Going to your webcam to open up a 3D version of the product has lost its luster as a tired gimmick.  Find a reason that augmented reality can be useful for your customers.  And if you’re a car maker looking to use AR, listen to Rouli. 

Don’t be like Always, the feminine hygiene company, please…

2 – Social Connections

The reason these social connectors like Twitter and Facebook work is because they allow us to be nosy neighbors seeing what next person is doing.  The term “Keeping up with the Jonses” applies here.  Give your app a way to connect other people in creative and interesting ways.  Even if its seeing the high score along with a picture of you dodging a cannonball.

 3 – App Search

Google dominates the search wars because they’re the best at it.  Many functions of AR require pulling information from the data sphere and if it gets hijacked by spammers then the app will quickly lose its purpose.  No one wants to pull up a restaurant layer to find a nice place to eat in a new town and get a porn layer instead while your three smiling children peer over your shoulder. 

4 – Alacrity Wins

I could say apps need to be quick, but they need to be more than that.  The Webster’s definition of alacrity is “promptness in response” or “cheerful readiness.”  Apps should anticipate what the user wants and get it quickly.  If it takes 10 seconds for the camera to identify where its at so you can decide which way to walk, no one is going to use it.  If the processor is too slow, move your heavy lifting to servers off the smartphone.  Life moves quickly, your app should move at the same pace.  

5 – Unique Style

If you want your business to grow, your style should be tasteful and easily recognizable.  When people see your products they should instantly know who created it.  Already the Layar symbol has stuck into my head as a good product identifier. 

6 – Not Another Vista!

If I let my kids cook dinner for themselves they make cereal.  My wife will take six hours to make an exquisite dinner that uses every dish in the house, including a few of our neighbors.  The kids eat cereal because its easy to do.  My kids are your users.  They’re not going to make Chateaubriand no matter how good it tastes.  So make your apps simple to use. 

7 - Save the Trees, Please

Please don’t make me print out another marker to see your version of augmented reality.  We might be able to say that AR is a green product, but for all the papervision markers we’ve had to print out.   

8 – Now With Less Spam

 For the AR apps that allow user added content, we need to make sure we’re not besieged with spammers like the regular Internet.  While this might be an impossible request, at least consider the spammers in your product design. 

9 – Tell Me A Story

Augmented reality was built by programmers, but it needs artists to grow.  Don’t forget to tell me a story and engage my emotions.  AR is a wonderful new medium with potential to tell stories in ways never told before.  The story can exist all around us or even in our living room. 

10 – FUN!!!

Now matter what the purpose of your app, even if its a serious one like saving the rain forest.  Don’t forget to make it fun (and maybe include a little magic).

UgoTrade brings us another excellent interview with Ori Inbar and explains it will be the first of many with leaders in the augmented reality movement.  Stop by and read the whole thing in its full-length goodness.  Here’s a few highlights:

Ori: Exactly. In parallel to my blog becoming popular, it seems there’s a lot of activity picking up in the AR space. People are reaching out to us and are asking asking for help. So we started actually making that a part of our business. We help connect them with the right technologies if they need it or connect them with the right brands or companies and strategize with them on how to go to market and help publish their applications or games. So that’s becoming an exciting part of what we do.

An important part of augmented reality becoming a useful and integrated product with society is cooperation on standards and specifications.  Its good to see industry leaders busy nurturing this new technology rather than battling over the details.   A rising tide lifts all boats and augmented reality has seen a lot of growth so far this year as seen by the Google Trends graph below:

I think as Apple releases the iPhone OS 3.1 in September, which will allow a host of AR apps currently in development to hit the market, and with a few other products like the PS3 EyePet releasing around Christmas; we’ll see augmented reality start to crack the mainstream consciousness.

Augmented reality is only a medium (actually just a mashing together of other media), but content is king. 

To make use of computer data and images superimposed on real life we need content, but creating that content can be time consuming and expensive.  Instead, we have to find ways of leveraging the crowd to fill the cloud.  As I’ve explained before, cataloging image databases will be one way we can build digital versions of the world. 

Today, researchers at Google are presenting a paper on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Miami, Florida.  Using 40 million GPS tagged photos from Picasa and Panoramio and online tour webpages, they’ve been able to improve computer vision of major landmarks.  The technology sounds similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth, but they may have different implications based on the form of the data. 

The key point is that these technologies (either Google’s or Microsoft’s) will allow for the leveraging of information (in the form of pictures) being created daily and stored on the web.  Not only is this data available, but due to its time signature, it can also help us reconstruct past events of significant importance.   This will give us powerful tools for creating huge chunks of content for the cloud. 

The below picture shows the visual representation of how their cluster recognition model works.

Google has shown us another way to use large, noisy datasets to automate the digitalization of the world. 

Via Spatial Sustain.