Robert Rice, the CEO of Neogence Enterprises and blogger of augmented reality on Curious Raven, spoke in June at Mobile Monday. His speech targets the intermediate developer of augmented reality. If you’re new to the technology, most of this speech will go over your head.
The video is long, but if you’re serious about augmented reality and the future of mobile, the speech hits major points about the industry. And at 40 minutes, I’d give it a good five minute buffer if you’re going to watch the whole thing.
“Mobile is dead,” said Robert to begin his speech. He goes on to explain it should be brought back to life in a different format. Reincarnated, if you will. The point-to-point communication that we use right now will need transform into an immersive, predictive, meta-enviroment and can’t just be another way to access the internet.
Robert briefly explains the history of communications and tells us that if we do augmented reality correctly, it’ll join the pantheon. If we can remove the excess hardware of keyboards and screens in our mobile devices and convert to sunglasses, then the computer can become a buckle or a watch, conspicuous computing. We need to get away from the 2D mindset of flat screens and create 3D spaces where we can throw a YouTube video to another person through our AR enviroment, or send an SMS as a paper-airplane.
Augmented reality needs more than graphics over video, Robert goes on to explain. Should move past being even interactive and more dynamic and meta. It should answer the who, what, where, when, why and how. Computers have been vague points of demographic data because multiple people can use them, but mobile is an individual thing which allows us to break away from aggregate statistics and start answering questions for individuals.
Robert goes on to talk about venture capital, which he believes doesn’t get AR yet, and smart cities, and give suggestions to developers to keep the tagging of the world in mind, so we don’t have to go back and retag later.
Overall, I have to say I enjoyed the speech, though I was hoping Robert would get into specifics about Neogence Enterprises and their recent Mirascape announcement. And having spoken to him at length at ISMAR09 about the details of augmented reality, I thought he might elaborate on his anecdotes about furries and micro transactions. But maybe those weren’t appropriate for MOMA, anyway.
(edit note: this video was taken back in June and posted on GA.com but its still very relevent. Enjoy.)
