I was recently interview by Klint Finley over at Technoccult. He asked me about foresight methodologies, BCI, augmented reality, systems, and information overload.

Excerpted:

What sort of skills and technologies do you think it’s most important for people today to learn to live in the future?

Accept that we live in a world of great change. You have to be agile and prepared to adapt. The fundamental global systems of civilization are shifting with the impact of instantaneous communication, globalization, and ubiquitous computing. Add to this the threats of climate change and a declining fossil fuel infrastructure and you have a tremendous amount of challenges ahead. I feel it’s critical to embrace the change and try to both anticipate and design the future. The future is not yet writ so you can always influence it, perhaps now more than ever.

Continued here.

“Roughly speaking, we can think of the OECD as the oil users, and the Non-OECD as the coal users.”

This quote from energy investment analyst, Gregor MacDonald, should be deeply considered, particularly given the realities of world energy use and demographics. Simply put, the West is getting older and it’s growth has slowed considerably. Meanwhile, the developing world is seeing rapid population growth, now contributing almost 5 billion people to the global register. The ten largest cities in the world are mostly non-OECD* and as they further industrialize and pull more people out of the slums, they’ll need more power to drive their growth. With economic disparity choking access to petroleum, reinforced by much higher oil prices, the developing world is rising on coal-fired utilities and marching towards it’s own industrial revolution.

Source: Gregor MacDonald, 2010.

It’s my sense that these realities are not being deeply considered by many of the people involved in the debate about climate, energy, and sustainability who seem to be focusing primarily on China and the developed world. Yet population growth, industrial activity, and energy use has slowed to nearly flatline across Europe and the United States over the past 10 years, and their rate of population replacement is now negative. While coal use is a reality that may be declining in the West, it’s on the rise across the rest of the world. The other half of the planet is industrializing rapidly and it’s doing so by burning massive amounts of coal**. China, with a population of approx. 1.3 billion, gets a whopping 68% [adjusted to 2009] of it’s energy from coal. India, with aprrox. 1.1 billion people, derives about 60% of it’s energy from coal. While considerable efforts are being made to build out renewables the sheer size of these populations and the rate of their growth ensures many years of coal use before solar & wind will substantially offset their energy requirements. Likewise, countries heavily invested in coal exports, like Russia & Australia, are incentivised to promote it’s use for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the World Coal Institute would have us believe that there’s enough coal to last 130 years at current rates of production.

Given that coal use is so large and embedded as a global energy resource and financial commodity, it is imperative that the coal industry and it’s technologies are upgraded to reliable clean coal and carbon recapture solutions. These are, in my opinion, some of the most important developments that the climate discussion should be pressing for, amended as pre-requisites to World Bank and IMF funding. Western industrialism is cooling. Capitol is moving to the developing world and the second industrial revolution is beginning. We have the opportunity to try and intentionally design it to avoid the pitfalls of the western path. Whether or not we accept anthropogenic warming we know that burning coal is dirty and bad for living things.

Believe me, I don’t want to say this. And I know the proclivity of the coal industry to promote less-than-marginal solutions disguised as “clean coal”. But it’s critical that we accept the abundance of coal, it’s presently-irreplaceable energy intensity, and it’s ongoing use across the world so we can focus on real solutions to making it cleaner over the next 20 years while we build out the necessary renewable infrastructure.

* Tokyo – 35,676,000; New York-Newark – 19,040,000; Ciudad de Mexico – 19,028,000; Mumbai – 18,978,000; Sao Paulo – 18,845,000; Delhi – 15,926,000; Shanghai – 14,987,000; Kolkata – 14,787,000; Dhaka – 13,458,000; Buenos Aires – 12,795,000 (2007) [Note that non-OECD countries often have census numbers lower than actual population size, due to under-reporting across slums.]
** For more details & numbers on rising coal use in non-OECD, see: EIA International Energy Outlook 2009 for coal.

I’ve been on a music production bender since the new year. The results have come together in a new free EP I’ve released through Bandcamp: Western Rains. It’s wet and devotional, a sort of dubstep electro platter featuring eastern vocals and world percussion. Give it a listen. If you like it, please share!

My older music is at N8UR. I’m always interested in collaboration (or licensing!) opportunities…

The foresight & strategy group, KedgeForward, has featured me in their first KTLS: KedgeForward Thought Leader Series. They’re doing great work – check out their Holoptic Foresight Dynamics series, as well as their excellent presentation on Food Systems in 9 Minutes. I’m honored to be included in their list of Thought Leaders.

The question they pose:

“Do you see a transhuman species emerging? If yes, what present drivers are catalyzing this meme and evolutionary movement? If no, what ideas or emerging trends are discouraging or disrupting such a movement?”

And my answer:

“In strict terms, a species must be capable of passing on it’s adaptations to offspring through sexual transmission. In as much as transhumanism is proceeding through genetic engineering, it may be possible that enhancements to longevity, health, and physical & perceptual structures could be transmitted along the germ line, though there remain significant challenges to such deep modification, least of which are the attendant moral & ethical questions…” (continued at KedgeForward)

I followed COP15 pretty closely and, though I was hopeful, I didn’t really expect any major consensus among the G20. The differentials between the cooling western arc of history and that of the developing world in the East, coupled to the uneven distribution of natural energy resources across the geo’s, ensure that many conflicting interests will dominate the world chess board for some time. Carbon markets will likely build some dampening feedback into the global system by tying energy use & emission directly to the balance sheet but their successful adoption really depends on convincing Goldman Sachs et al that there’s tons of money to be had, not on getting the G20 to agree on a universal treaty.

The simple fact is that the scenarios show climate change accelerating more quickly than global markets. Given the inability of nations to set terms, as well as the fundamental folly of trying to manage such a huge globalized system as a top-down exercise in governance, it has become incumbent upon business and communities to drive the real behavioral change necessary to shift the economy of production and consumption to a more sustainable posture. The necessary bottom-up compliment to a systemic marketplace and/or governance scheme is the intentional re-engineering of human behavior. The tension between the global dialog of governance and the overlooked role of designers in social change is creating a new breed of sustainable systems engineers. The growing class of systems & social designers are building the next operational structures of civilization that will work to mitigate environmental & social destruction by engineering more efficient, sustainable, and holistic solutions to the diverse needs of our world.

As a note of criticism, while we arguably need rapid change, I feel that the environmental movement has erred in orienting it’s brand message around anthropogenic warming. The science may be sound but the position is not defensible against the psychological tactics of the opposition. The models simply aren’t good enough yet to prove beyond a doubt that humans are directly responsible for warming the planet. I believe intuitively that we are but no model or network of models is yet capable of effectively running that simulation. There are too many open holes that the masses will never understand. It’s just too big of a message; too scary. What we do know is that plastics are bad, energy should be conserved, pollution hurts living things, fossil fuels are dirty, and waste and over-consumption are a tax on the future. The environmental movement should focus on these known’s to continue the really applaudable work they’ve done to grow conservation efforts and bring awareness to the deep impact of our industrial economy, extending these efforts to encourage life-cycle analysis, triple-bottom-line accounting, and cradle-to-cradle planning while working directly with designers to intentionally engineer human behavior and ideology towards a more holistic and biomimetic relationship to the planetary ecology in which we live.

The Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR) 2009 is a scenario-based strategic planning activity that looks out to the year 2025 and considers alternative futures (i.e., “scenarios”), missions the Intelligence Community (IC) might be called on to perform, and the operating principles and capabilities required to fulfill those mission… The insights gleaned are intended to help shape the next National Intelligence Strategy and other planning and capability guidance documents.

The document considers four scenarios based on the NIC’s Global Trends 2025 report: World without the West, Politics is not always local, BRIC’s bust-up, and October surprise. These are plotted against two axes: Global Cooperation & Key Players. The scenarios thus represent movement between State-Dominated & Non-State-Dominated Actors, and Aligned & Fragmented Global Cooperation. [Wish I could embed the graphic but it's locked in the PDF.]

From this scenario map I want to consider first why non-state-dominated actors might be more important to the global landscape in the next 15yrs. States function as, literally, governors of the system for which they are responsible. They’re tasked with maintaining a degree of socioeconomic equilibrium in the face of change. Yet state governance is relatively immature and considerably laden with the legacy code of The Enlightenment. Most of the prevailing governing structures did not anticipate the world in which we find ourselves today. The rate of change has become so accelerated and the system of civilization so complex that significant broad control of nations has become nearly impossible. Even cities are struggling to manage the change tearing through their streets. This suggests a declining ability of large states to effectively manage their domains, both through inability to manage internal complexity and over-extension across the globalized world. The perennial torpor of state bureaucracy is much slower to adapt leaving more nimble actors room to innovate & thrive.

So with respect to the Key Players axis of the QICR Report, I’m inclined to predict a rise in non-state-dominated actors (eg corporations, NGOs, militias, cartels, super-empowered individuals…) increasingly pulling power away from state institutions. This, of course, will be against a background of hardening state bodies (eg Iran, Russia, China…) trying to clampdown on their power typically through authoritarian means. But the pre-eminence of state control is already fading against rising non-governmental powers. Of particular note is the empowerment of ideological-based insurgencies and organized crime. These elements deliberately undermine state authority often directly challenging control with open source warfare tactics, as in Somalia, Mexico, Iraq, and Af-Pak. Similarly, corporations do this with increasing boldness but generally stop short at armed aggression (though maybe Xe/Blackwater will cross this line…).

The second consideration involves the axis of Global Cooperation. What are the factors at play here? Treaties, trade, military, Bretton-Woods structures like the UN and World Bank, and the structures of government and the Rule of Law all give cohesive input to the system. Working against such cohesion are identity politics, self-interest, tribalism, and the injuries wrought by history. Technology has certainly enabled cooperation and the Social Media Revolution seems to reinforce the basic human nature to share and collaborate. Yet it’s likely that such a popular movement will take time to erode the catatonia of bureaucracy enough to make a significant difference in government. Historically, foreign policy has primarily been a function of managing competition, aggressing towards resources and defending against incursions. So it would be a considerable shift to see a great degree of cooperation across governments, the difficulty of which is presently illustrated by the delicate climate negotiations at Copenhagen.

So with respect to the Global Cooperation axis, my sense is that people and groups and even larger NGOs are indeed cooperating more but governments and corporations are still driven primarily by competition and prone to territorial disputes. The very nature of state borders delineates an “Us vs. Them” posture, as does the Art of War mentality still deeply lodged in the corporate marketplace. This oppositional influence effectively reinforces the ascendancy of non-state actors, particularly identity-based groups and NGOs that can show more competency and humanity in addressing the very real problems of the world. In many ways globalization itself has played a major role in challenging tribal structures and incentivizing cooperation. Buoyed by the waves of commerce, the devices of instantaneous global communication have washed up on the shores of almost every developed & developing nation. Tools of instantaneous collaboration have been surprisingly empowering to insurgencies and militias now much more capable of coordinated strategies and global networking. Ultimately, non-local social networking is likely to undermine racial and nationalistic tendencies while enabling affinity-based collaborations. Yet, in spite of such tremendous connectivity, governments continue to proceed from territorial geopolitics while citizens are living increasingly in a world without borders. This gap will produce increasing tensions in the near-term before yielding to new forms of emergent governance over the next decade.

The primary outlier today is climate change. Shifting patterns of rainfall and arable land may radically redraw the map of cooperation. Rising food prices and massive migratory displacement are obvious precursors to substantial internecine resource conflicts and all-out war. In such a scenario states will radically harden borders and identity politics will cohere around resource rights and the safe-havens of nationalism and religious fervor. If India has to absorb millions of Bangladeshi’s as the Himalayas melt, Indians will face much stiffer competition for local jobs & resources. This pattern could play out all over the world given the mosaic of effects predicted by current climate models. In such a crisis, it’s unclear whether the insurmountable US military will act as global peacekeeper or merely reinforce the interests of its owners.

Nevertheless, humans seem to be innately wired to cooperate and help others. As a species, we’re arguably on a path that reinforces this nature. Our technologies keep making it easier & easier to connect across the world and collaborate towards great heights. Tribalism continues but there is a trend towards tribes of affinity rather than tribes of geography. Whether we can collaborate enough and in time to avoid a return to global tribalism is an open topic. As animals, our access to food & water will determine everything, as will the struggle to maintain energy flow towards all of our technological endeavors.

This past Saturday I worked with Mike Liebhold, Gene Becker, Anselm Hook, and Damon Hernandez to present the West Coast Augmented Reality Development Camp at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, Ca. By all accounts it was a stunning success with a huge turn-out of companies, engineers, designers, makers, artists, geo-hackers, scientists, techies and thinkers. The planning was mostly done virtually via email and phone meetings with only a couple visits to the venue. On Saturday, the virtual planing phase collapsed into reality and bloomed on site into AR Dev Camp.

As an un-conference, the event itself was a study in grassroots, crowd-sourced, participatory organization with everyone proposing sessions which were then voted on and placed into the schedule. To me, it was a wonderfully organic and emergent process that almost magically gave life and spirit to the skeleton we had constructed. So before I launch into my thoughts I want to give a hearty “Thank You!” to everyone that joined us and helped make AR DevCamp such a great experience. I also want to give a big shout-out to Tish Shute, Ori Inbar, and Sophia for coordinating the AR DevCamp in New York City, as well as Dave Mee & Julian Tate who ran the Manchester, UK event. And, of course, we couldn’t have done it without the help of our sponsors, Layar, Metaio, Qualcomm, Google, IFTF, Lightning Laboratories, Web3D Consortium, IDEAbuilder, MakerLab, and Waze (and URBEINGRECORDED with Cage Free Consulting contributed the flood of afternoon cookies).

So first, just what is Augmented Reality? There’s a tremendous amount of buzz around the term, weighing it down with connotations and expectations. Often, those investing in it’s future invoke the haunting specter of Virtual Reality, doomed by it’s inability to live up to the hype: ahead of it’s time, lost mostly to the realm of military budgets and skunkworks. Yet, the AR buzz has driven a marketing rush throwing gobs of money at haphazard and questionable advertising implementations that quickly reach millions and cement in their minds a narrow association with flashy magazine covers and car ads. Not to diminish these efforts, but there’s a lot more – and a lot less – going on here.

In it’s most distilled form, augmented reality is an interface layer between the cloud and the material world. The term describes a set of methods to superimpose and blend rendered digital interface elements with a camera stream, most commonly in the form of annotations such as text, links, and other 2 & 3-dimensional objects that appear to float over the camera view of the live world. Very importantly, AR includes at it’s core the concept of location mediated through GPS coordinates, orientation, physical markers, point-clouds, and, increasingly, image recognition. This combination of location and superimposition of annotations over a live camera feed is the foundation of AR. As we’re seeing with smart phones, the device knows where you are, what direction you’re facing, what your looking at, who & what is near you, and what data annotations & links are available in the view. In this definition, the cloud is the platform, the AR browser is the interface, and annotation layers are content that blend with the world.

So the augmented reality experience is mediated through a camera view that identifies a location-based anchor or marker and reveals any annotations present in the annotation layer (think of a layer as a channel). Currently, each of these components is uniquely bound to the AR browser in which they were authored so you must use, for example, the Layar browser to experience Layar-authored annotation layers. While many AR browsers are grabbing common public data streams from sources like Flickr & Wikipedia, their display and function will vary from browser to browser as each renders this data uniquely. And just because you can see a Flicker annotation in one browser doesn’t mean you will see it in another. For now, content is mostly bound to the browser and authoring is mostly done by third-parties building canned info layers. There doesn’t seem to be much consideration for the durability and longevity of these core components, and there is a real risk that content experiences may become fractured and ephemeral.

Indeed, content wants to be an inclusive, social experience. One of the core propositions underlying our motivation for AR DevCamp is the idea that the platforms being built around augmented reality should be architected as openly as possible to encourage the greatest degree of interoperability and extensibility. In the nascent but massively-hyped AR domain, there’s a growing rush to plant flags and grab territory, as happens in all emergent opportunity spaces. The concern is that we might recapitulate the Browser Wars – not intentionally but by lack of concerted efforts to coordinate implementations. While I maintain that coordination & open standardization is of necessity, I question my own assumption that without it we’ll end up with a bunch of walled gardens. This may be under-estimating the impact of the web.

Through the lessons and resultant standardization of the Browser Wars, it’s become a best practice (and indeed, a necessity) to design specifically to the most common standards. Arguably, the move from Web 1.0 (essentially a collection of static billboards) to the social interactions that characterize Web 2.0 established and deeply reinforced the fundamental requirement that we’re all able to share information & experiences in the cloud. This social commons necessarily requires an architectural commonality. Thus, we all agree that HTML, JavaScript, PHP, JASON, MySQL, and now RDF, OWL, and SPARQL are the core components of our data service models. Since we understand that AR is primarily a location-aware interface layer for the cloud, it’s very likely that independent implementations will all speak the same language. However, the point of AR DevCamp and similar gatherings is to challenge this assumption and to reinforce commonality by bringing everyone together to press flesh & exchange notes. The social dynamic in the natural world will determine the level of cooperation in the virtual.

Yet, this cooperation and normalization is by no means a given. Just about every chunk of legacy code that the Information Age is built upon retains vestiges of the git-er-done, rush to market start-up midset. Short-sighted but well-meaing implementations based upon limited resources, embryonic design, and first-pass architectures bog down the most advance and expensive software suites. As these code bases swell to address the needs of a growing user base, the gap between core architecture and usability widens. Experience designers struggle against architectures that were not able to make such design considerations. Historically, code architecture has proceeded ahead of user experience design, though this is shifting to some degree in the era of Agile and hosted services. Nevertheless, the emerging platforms of AR have the opportunity – and, I’d argue, the requirement – to include user research, design, & usability as core components of implementation. The open, standardized web has fostered a continuous and known experience across it’s vast reaches. Artsy Flash sites aside, you always know how to navigate and interact with the content. The fundamentals of AR need to be identified and agreed upon before the mosaic of emerging code bases become too mature to adjust to the needs of a growing user base.

Given the highly social aspect of the web, place-based annotations and objects will suffer greatly if there’s not early coordination around a shared standard for anchors. This is where the Browser Wars may inadvertently re-emerge. The anchor is basically the address/location of an annotation layer. When you look through an augmented view It’s the bit of data that says “I’m here, check out my annotations”. Currently there is no shared standard for this object, nor for annotations & layers. You need the Layar browser in order to see annotation layers made in it’s platform. If you only have a Junaio browser, you won’t see it. If you annotate a forest, tagging each tree with a marker linked to it’s own data registry, and then the browser app you used to author goes out of business, all those pointers are gone. The historical analog would be coding your website for IE but anyone with Mosaic can’t see it. This is where early design and usability considerations are critical to ensure a reasonable commonality and longevity of content. Anchors, annotations, & layers are new territory that ought to be regarded as strongly as URL’s and markup. Continuing to regard these as independent platform IP will balkanize the user experience of continuity across content layers. There must be standards in authoring and viewing. Content and services are where the business models should innovate.

So if we’re moving towards an augmented world of anchors and annotations and layers, what considerations should be given to the data structure underlying these objects? An anchor will have an addressable location but should it contain information about who authored it and when? Should an annotation contain similar data, time-stamped and signed with an RDF structure underlying the annotation content? How will layers describe their contents, set permissions, and ensure security? And what of the physical location of the data? An anchor should be a distributed and redundant object, not bound to the durability and security of any single server. A secure and resilient backbone of real-world anchor points is critical as the scaffolding of this new domain.

Earthmine is a company I’ve been watching for a number of months since they presented at the IFTF. They joined us at AR DevCamp to present their platform. While many AR developers are using GPS & compass or markers to draw annotations over the real world, Earthmine is busy building a massive dataset that maps Lat/Long/Alt coordinates to hi-rez images of cities. They have a small fleet of vehicles equipped with stereoscopic camera arrays that drive around cities, capturing images of every inch they see. But they’re also grabbing precise geolocation coordinates that, when combined with the image sets, yields a dense point cloud of addressable pixels. When you look at one of these point clouds on a screen it looks like a finely-rendered pointillistic painting of a downtown. They massage this data set, mash the images and location, and stream it through their API as a navigable street view. You can then place objects in the view with very high accuracy – like a proposed bus stop you’d like to prototype, or a virtual billboard. Earthmine even indicated that making annotations in their 2d map layer could add a link to the augmented real-world view. So you can see a convergence and emerging correlation between location & annotation in the real world, in an augmented overlay, on a flat digital map, and on a Google Earth or Virtual World interface. This is an unprecedented coherency of virtual and real space.

The Earthmine demo is cool and the Flash API offers interesting ways to customize the street view with 2d & 3d annotations but the really killer thing is their dataset. As alluded to, they’re building an address space for the real world. So if you’re in San Francisco and you have an AR browser that uses the Earthmine API (rumors that Metaio are working on something here…) you can add an annotation to every STOP sign in The Mission so that a flashing text of “WAR” appears underneath. With the current GPS location strategy this would be impossible due to it’s relatively poor resolution (~3-5 meters at best). You could use markers but you’d need to stick one on every STOP sign. With Earthmine you can know almost exactly where in the real world you’re anchoring the annotation… and they can know whenever you click on one. Sound familiar?

Augmented reality suggests the most significant shift in computation since the internet. As we craft our computers into smaller and smaller mobile devices, exponentially more powerful and connected, we’re now on the verge of beginning the visual and locational integration of the digital world with the analog world. We’ve digitized much of human culture, pasted it onto screens and given ourselves mirror identities to navigate, communicate, and share in this virtual space. Now we’re breaking open the box and drawing the cloud across the phenomenal world, teaching our machines to see what we see and inviting the world to be listed in the digital Yellow Pages.

So, yeah, now your AR experience of the world is covered in billboards, sloganeering, propaganda, and dancing dinosaurs all competing for your click-through AdSense rating. A big consideration, and a topic that came up again & again at AR DevCamp, is the overwhelming amount of data and the need to filter it to some meaningful subset, particularly with respect to spam and advertising. A glance across the current crop of iPhone AR apps reveals many design interface challenges, with piles of annotations all occluding themselves and your view of the world. Now imagine a world covered in layers each with any number of annotations. UI becomes very important. Andrea Mangini & Julie Meridian led a session on design & usability considerations in AR that could easily be a conference of it’s own. How do you manage occlusion & sorting? Level of detail? What does simple & effective authoring of annotations on a mobile device look like? How do you design a small but visible environmental cue that an annotation exists? If the URL convention is an underlined text, what is the AR convention for gently indicating that the fire hydrant you’re looking at has available layers & annotations? Discoverability of the digital links within the augmented world will be at a tension with overwhelming the view of the world itself.

When we consider the seemingly-inevitable development of eyewear with digital heads-up display, occlusion can quickly move from helpful to annoying to dangerous. No matter how compelling the augmented world is you still need to see when that truck is coming down the street. Again, proper design for human usability is perhaps even more critical in the augmented interface than in a typical screen interface. Marketing and business plans aside, we have to assume that the emergence of truly compelling and valuable technologies are ultimately in line with the deep evolutionary needs of the human animal. We’re certainly augmenting for fun and art and engagement and communication but my sense is that, underneath all these we’re building this new augmented reality because the power & adaptive advantage mediated through the digital domain is so great that we need it to integrate seamlessly with our mobile, multi-tasking lives. It’s been noted by others – Kevin Kelly comes to mind – that we’re teaching machines to do many of things we do, but better. And in the process we’re making them smaller and more natural and bringing them closer and closer to our bodies. Ponderings of transhumanity and cyborgian futures aside, our lives are being increasingly augmented and mediated by many such smart machines.

DARPA wasn’t at AR Dev Camp. Or at least if they were, they didn’t say so. There was a guy from NASA showing a really cool air traffic control system that watched aircraft in the sky, tagged them with data annotations, and tracked their movements. We were shown the challenges to effectively register the virtual layer – the annotation – with the real object – a helicopter – when it’s moving rapidly. In other words, the virtual layer, mediated through a camera & a software layer, tended to lag behind the 80+ mph heli. But in lieu of DARPA’s actual attendance, it’s worth considering their Urban Leader Tactical Response, Awareness & Visualization (ULTRA-Vis) program to develop a multimodal mobile computational system for coordinating tactical movements of patrol units. This program sees the near-future soldier as outfitted with a specialized AR comm system with a CPU worn on a belt, a HUD lens over one eye, a voice recognition mic, and a system to capture gestures. Military patrols rely heavily on intel coming from command and on coordinating movements through back-channel talk and line-of-sight gestures. AR HUDs offer simple wayfinding and identification of team mates. Voice commands can execute distributed programs and open or close comm channels. Gestures will be captured to communicate to units both in an out of line-of-sight and to initiate or capture datastreams. Cameras and GPS will track patrol movements and offer remote viewing through other soldier’s cameras. But most importantly, this degree of interface will be simple, fluid, and effortless. It won’t get in your way. For better or for worse, maximizing pack hunting behaviors with technology will set the stage for the future of human-computer interaction.

After lunch provided by Qualcomm, Anselm Hook led an afternoon session at AR DevCamp titled simply “Hiking”. We convened in a dark and hot room, somewhat ironically called the “Sun Room” for it’s eastern exposure, to discuss nature and what, if any, role AR should play in our interface with the Great Outdoors. We quickly decided to move the meeting out into the parking lot where we shared our interests in both built and natural outdoor environments. A common theme that emerged in words and sentiment was the tension between experience & distraction. We all felt that the natural world is so rich and special in large part due to it’s increasing contrast to an urbanized and mechanized life. It’s remote and wild and utterly disconnected, inherently at peace in it’s unscripted and chaotic way. How is this value and uniqueness challenged by ubicomp and GPS and cellular networks? GPS & cellphone coverage can save lives but do we really need to Twitter from a mountain top? I make no judgement calls here and am plenty guilty myself but it’s worth acknowledging that augmented reality may challenge the direct experience of nature in unexpected ways and bring the capacity to overwrite even the remote corners of the world with human digital graffiti.

But remember that grove of trees I mentioned before, tagged with data annotations? Imagine the researchers viewing those trees through AR lenses able to see a glance-able color index for each one showing CO2, O2, heavy metals, turgidity, growth, and age. Sensors, mesh nets, and AR can give voice to ecosystems, cities, communities, vehicles, and objects. Imagine that grove is one of thousands in the Brazilian rainforest reporting on it’s status regularly, contributing data to policy debates and regulatory bodies. What types of augmented experiences can reinforce our connection to nature and our role as caretakers?

On the other hand, what happens when you and the people around you are each having very different experiences of “reality”? What happens to the commons when there are 500 different augmented versions? What happens to community and society when the common reference point for everything – the very environment in which we exist – is malleable and fluid and gated by permissions and access layers or overwrought with annotations competing for our attention? What social gaps could arise? What psychological ailments? Or perhaps more realistically, what happens when a small class of wealthy westerners begin to redraw the world around them? Don’t want to see other people? No problem! Just turn on the obfuscation layer. Ugly tenements ruining your morning commute? Turn on some happy music and set your iGlasses to the favela paintshop filter! Augmentation and enhancement with technology will inevitably proceed along economic lines. What is the proper balance between enjoying our technological luxuries and responsibly curating the world for those less fortunate? Technology often makes the symptoms look different but doesn’t usually eradicate the cause. In the rush to colonize the augmented reality, in the shadow of a wavering global economic system and deep revision of value and product, now is the best time and the most important time to put solutions ahead of products; to collaborate and cooperate on designing open, robust, and extensible systems; and, in the words of Tim O’Reilly, to “work on stuff that matters”.

At the end of the day, pizza’s arrived (Thanks MakerLab!), beers were opened (Thanks Layar & Lighting Labs), and the buzzing brains of AR DevCamp mingled and shared their thoughts. Hearts alit, I’ll be forgiven some sentimentality to suggest that the Hacker Dojo had a soft, warm glow emanating from all the fine folks in attendance. Maybe it was like this around the Acid Tests in the 60’s (with more paisley). Or the heady days of PARC Xerox in the 80’s (with more ties). That growing inertia and sense of destiny at being at the right place at the right time just at the start of something exceptional…

Special thanks to Andrea Mangini for deep and ranging discussions about all this stuff, among many other things.

Open interoperability across platforms, universal standards for markups & messaging, geospatial data representation, 2D & 3D rendering, identity & transaction management, strong security & encryption, structured data and portability, content & markup ownership, and solutions driven by design & user experience. All these considerations & more require tremendous coordination to converge on a set of platform specifications that enable a strong and extensible ecology of developers, users, and content creators. In the rush to plant flags and colonize the new AR domain, it’s critical that we balance competition and collaboration to avoid the walled-garden balkanization and impossible hypemachine expectations that sent virtual reality to an early grave.

So go to the signup page, add a topic on the Session Topics page, and come join us this weekend for heady, juicy, AR goodness! If you’re not in the SF Bay Area or NYC, check out the other AR Dev Camps listed or get some co-conspirators and plan your own.

And now a word from our excellent & generous sponsors:

I’m working with Mike Liebhold, Gene Becker, Anselm Hook, and Damon Hernandez to produce an AR Dev Camp in Mountain View, Ca. on December 5th, 2009. It’s intended to be a technical unconference considering the elements necessary to create a robust and open augmented reality platform. Here are the details:

AR DevCamp 2009
The first Augmented Reality Development Camp (AR DevCamp) will be held in the SF Bay Area December 5, 2009. After nearly 20 years in the research labs, Augmented Reality is taking shape as one of the next major waves of Internet innovation, overlaying and infusing the physical world with digital media, information and experiences. We believe AR must be fundamentally open, interoperable, extensible, and accessible to all, so that it can create the kinds of opportunities for expressiveness, communication, business and social good that we enjoy on the web and Internet today. As one step toward this goal of Open AR, we are organizing AR DevCamp 1.0, a full day of technical sessions and hacking opportunities in an open format, unconference style.

AR DevCamp: a gathering of the mobile AR, 3D graphics and geospatial web tribes; an unconference
* Timing: December 5th, 2009
* Location: Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA
* Sponsorship: please, to cover basic costs of food/drink etc.
* Attendance: AR DevCamp interest list

Among other topics, we’ll discuss are implications of how the various layers of an open augmented reality stack will fit together to support the following straw man requirements:
* support for both fundamental kinds of AR requiring semantic frameworks be harmonized: 1. Image Triggered and 2. Location Based.
* support for many image trigger types, and many coordinate systems.
* a description of what happens on the focal plane of the view, including user interface conventions, and rendering rules.
* a description of the properties of a specific object or place, including data type, decoding and rendering requirements and resources
* support for local media types produced by many applications domains including 2D Web, 3D web, web maps, GIS, CAD, BIM, 3D game and virtual worlds
* support for local rendering rules and coordinate systems for specific places and objects e.g. html, CAD objects and spaces, video, rendered graphics game objects, etc.
* harmonization and interoperable semantic framework with adjacent semantic domains within overlapping computing and media domains, e.g. web, CAD, mapping, games, virtual worlds, etc.
* support for secure transactions and data exchange
* support for sensors and sensor networks
* social network interoperability, managing groups, permissions, and privacy
* messaging, communication, and collaboration

Sign up here

“Imagine an environment where most physical objects know where they are, what they are, and can, (in principle) network with any other object. With this infrastructure, reality becomes its own database. Multiple consensual virtual environments are possible, each oriented to the needs of its constituency. If we also have open standards, then bottom-up social networks and even bottom up advertising become possible. Now imagine that in addition to sensors, many of these itsy-bitsy processors are equipped with effectors. Then the physical world becomes much more like a software construct. The possibilities are both scary and wondrous.” (Vernor Vinge – intro to ISMAR 2009)