You could have a database of signed dated GPS-tagged notes, viewable on a map on a phone. But few would use it if they can’t add notes for free, and if they can add notes for free it’ll fill up with stuff like “MARY LIVES HERE AND SHE SUCKS!!~!1”. Worse, no one will pay to put ads into it, and you have to pay for the server somehow. Maybe some subculture would love it so much they’d pay $5/month for it? Who?

NYC cops might use a map of crimes color-coded by type or recency. Their car computers may already do that.

Hikers might use one if they can get reception. Or maybe if they can just get GPS out there, sync it to a computer before the trip to read other people’s notes, and after the trip to upload yours.

Anyone else?

Or maybe there’s something to glasses. William Gibson’s “Spook Country” has a cool bit about public art installations viewable only through glasses, which could be huge and could be animated. You could go there, put on the glasses while you wandered around and checked out the art, then take them off before you leave. They’d have to be cheap though, and I don’t know if epaper or other technologies will make that happen anytime soon.

That is to say, we’ve been maneuvered into this odd space where we’re somehow forced to justify the non-adoption of some new technology, at the risk of being labeled a Luddite (or worse), forced to make some affirmative case for leaving the things the way they are.

As repent_harlequin (ha!) points out above, part of this has to do with a neat dovetailing between the technical affordances of augmented reality and the needs of certain institutions residing in late capitalism. Part of this has to do with the inherent shear in speed between that of technical development and that of (personal and social) reflection. And indubitably, as far as I’m concerned, part of the odd nature of these discussions is down to the fact that unpeeling these questions is very often personally uncomfortable: any honest accounting for the relative gains and losses sure to be imposed by ubiquitous augmentation forces us to reflect on our own privileges as those privileges are distributed in the technosocial milieu that we live in.

And people just don’t like to do that. They get defensive, they hide behind rhetoric or jargon, they appeal to authority or the aura of inevitability, they call you names – you see it right here in these comments. This is what happens when technological literacy is allowed to reside solely in the class of people who benefit from the widespread adoption of technology, and why I believe we should work to extend such literacy as far outward into the far larger pool of “(l)users” as is practicable.

Mostly because critique is a useful strategy for rethinking orthodoxy, I would say. I get snarky on the blog because I usually blog in the morning, when the mind is anxious to participate in the world and the coffee has taken good, strong hold of my senses.

I agree that refashioning the world has been going on…forever. Even describing the world as divided up between things that are natural, built, man-made, etc., is a way of augmenting the worlds around us. This, I agree with.

There’s history here, too. Trail marking and so forth — these are good examples, with all kinds of motivations and uses that may not be quite the same as the latter-day augmentation of reality that I think people imagine when they say “AR” or when they say “Augmented Reality.” That sort of AR usually is the kind that has swerved through things like mobile- pervasive- ubiquitous- computing and the hope that networks will leak out across the earth with the speed and stability and cost that is only ever imaginary. It has the scenarios of flat displays or glasses that one orients onto the world, with pop-up graphics and text, etc. In other words, not hot-iron etched trail markings or sign posts, etc. So, these distinctions matter, I think, in the specific case of “AR” — distinctions that trace back through from the new kinds of visual and in-world literacies that evolve from networked worlds.

Yes, this, I agree would be quite a bit more intriguing if I could run my own algorithm, which is, actually, what I do even without some affordance like the technology that is described around AR. For example, a combination of paper maps (both real and perhaps a bit broken, like the crappy tour maps you get that only outline specific sites of common interest rather than weird back alley things), some kind of navigation device like the Drift Deck or some suggestions for directions to interesting places or other strategy for exploration.

So, there are lots of ways to augment reality, which is my point. I’m just curious why the old fashioned kind of display + computer sort has taken hold again. By “again” I would remind my kind and generous readers (all, like..17 of you, bless your souls..) that I spent my first graduate school experience working in a Virtual Reality lab, so my history is to have gone through this moment when the world was going to change because of some technology that never really made sense to normal human beings, except for a prop for some bad science fiction films and, well..porn. The lesson learned there was that the coupling between normal human social practices and the instruments/technologies that provide continuity of those social practices is something that engineers simply have no clue about. A justification for doing something has to be more than ” ’cause its cool ” for it to be legible to normal human beings. I’m less than convinced this time around, and happy to learn while being proven wrong. I have no hard-and-fast stake in this stuff..I’m a subject of history, whither will we go toward paper, OLED, pharmacology or wherever for our near future ways of augmenting our realities.

Maybe its the term itself, which you don’t like, because the idea has been around for ages.

Just look at the signs used to mark hiking trails (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_blazing). They have been used for more then one century in old Europe.

Not all scenarios for augmented reality must be based around user identities or must be related to Second Live or World of Warcraft.

I enjoy getting lost and anticipate doing so in the future. I’m also fed up with waiting for the computer industry to offer what I want-so I’m going to throw together some of this growing-ever-cheaper tech and build myself a wearable computer system with some interesting sensors attached to a microcontroller/multiplexer. Between things like this, the Maker movement and the buzz around AR on smartphones we should have some good data soon that can point us towards the best interfaces for ubiquitous computing.

By next year you’ll be able to buy one of the most successful homebrew variants in kitset form or fully assembled, whether the big companies offer it yet or not. However, it’ll be some time before most people want to wear their cellphone and get nagged by a helpful bit of software.

Kids would love it, but for everybody else…why? The virtue of a smartphone is you only look at it when you choose to. A smartphone display isn’t plastered all over your field of vision 24/7. And you can do anything with a smartphone you could do with one of these VR setups, just a little less intrusively. That makes the smartphone better. You can’t both drive and navigate the internet on a smartphone and a sane person doesn’t try, but, boy, you could sure see people crashing their cars when the visual overlay from their VR setup confuses the hell out of them. Or for that matter, walking straight into a London city bus because their VR display distracted them.

It seriously does not make sense to enter text using VR data gloves and a headset. That’s what a netbook is for. The web is still mostly text. 99 times out of 100, on any website, the images are ad pollution. VR just isn’t that useful for dealing with text.

I agree that “Tour guide” content seems like an impoverished design center for Augmented Reality. Currently available views of AR from services like Wiktude or Point and Find are really limited by sparse data offerings. In the meantime, We’re just beginning to see services like google and others begin aggregation of millions of standard geocoded objects in open formats like geoRSS and KML, but the true value of AR will only become visible as data becomes precisely geocoded in three dimensions ~ latitude, longitude, and elevation, and devices are able to similarly recognize it’s location in 3D position including pitch and yaw by comparing a visible point cloud with a stored database of points like earthmine.com 3D city models or microsoft photosynth images. the good news is that both KML and Microsoft VE have semantics to describe the precise location of 3D data and media objects, when they become available.

The net intermediate result might end up in the kind of cluttered UI in the WoW image, but over time, we should be able overcome visible clutter by contextually processing and filtering based on personal preferences, biases, and situational requirements.

Good topic!!

Cheers-

Mike

There will probably also be some weird kind of intersection between social networking and augmented reality, maybe a 3D Twitter where people walk around with “what I’m doing” status updates hovering above their heads, or mood labels.