Over the past year I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what piece of the augmented reality ecosystem would be the best to start a business around. I’m still not ready to take that jump so, in my case at least, the answer is still “none yet”.  However, in my exploring I keep coming up against a problem:

1. The absolute most profitable place to be in augmented reality is the platform provider at the center of everything.
2. The profit motives of that platform provider could set the development of AR back by about ten years.

A brief history of the web

Whether by design or happy accident the protocols (HTML and HTTP) behind the web are easy to implement and completely open. This meant that by the time Netscape came along, there were already browsers on the Macintosh (CERN’s and Mosaic), Windows (Mosaic), and X (CERN, Mosaic, Viola, etc.) There were also 200 active web servers and port 80 accounted for more than 1% of the traffic on the NSF backbone.

That ecosystem meant that Netscape remain compatible with what already existed in order to succeed.  Sure, they were selling licenses to their own software, which let them cash in on the shocking growth of the web, but the Netscape browser had to work just as well against pages served by HTTPD, IIS, Apache, and any other random web server anyone decided to write. The same thing was true from the other side.  Netscape Now! buttons aside, website operators soon had to deal with at least two and possibly more different browser, as well as various versions of each browser.

This made life interesting for web designers, but it was good for the web as an platform. The nature of the web meant that nobody had to convince somebody else to say “Yes” to get involved.  There is no way that any one company (or any ten companies for that matter) could have even authorized, let alone managed, all of the initiatives that went on with the web between 1994 and 2000. There was just too much stuff happening.

The open nature of the web allowed the cost of innovation to be spread around to thousands of organizations around the world.  It also let anyone with enough cash to buy some hosting try out their big idea. Most of those ideas failed, of course, but when taken as a whole they succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

I think that augmented reality has the potential to follow a growth curve with the same shape as the one the web followed. The web had very few institutional barriers standing in the way of its growth, and the AR ecosystem would do well to learn from that.

Open Augmented Reality

If the emerging augmented reality ecosystem wants to grow as quickly as the web it cannot include anyone who must say “Yes” to allow existing users to get a new capability. That implies a few things:

1. Anyone can publish content into the system. There are no controls for quality or appropriateness of content on this ability to publish.
2. Clients from multiple vendors are able to view that content. Anyone who choses to can write a new client that works with existing content.
3. Servers from multiple vendors are able to respond to requests for data. Choosing server technology is primarily a decision for content providers to make and their choice is invisible to end users.
4. The network itself is neutral to the data being transmitted across it. This means the mobile internet providers must not white-list content from publishers that it has partnerships with.
5. There is no single central directory that all content (or every content provider) must be listed in to be available.

Note, that this does not require that the software in question be open source. Open source software (in the form of Linux, HTTPD, Apache, Perl, PHP, and others) was instrumental in spreading the web far and wide. However, the personal computer revolution happened with little in the way of open source software and was just as rapid as the spread of the internet.

Open Standards

As VRML and many other standards over the years have taught us, developing a new standard from whole cloth is fraught with peril. It is even more difficult (as in the case of VRML) when there is not an existing standard that the new standard is intended to supplant. The AR community must avoid repeating the history of VRML. Fortunately there are existing standards that lend themselves well to the problems augmented reality developers are trying to solve.

The first of these is good old HTTP. As a transport protocol, HTTP fits the list above very well. The protocol is well understood, decentralized, and available in server or client library form for every platform. Minor new standards for querying location-specific data are already emerging.

The second current standard that the augmented reality developers can adopt and bend to their will is KML. KML is the file format that Google Earth uses to represent geocoded information. It has support for points, lines, and shapes. KML is an open standard and is supported by many GIS packages in addition to Google Maps and Google Earth.  Google has open-sourced its own KML parsing library so there is a place to start there too.

Any augmented reality client that supports attaching web browsers (including URLs) to locations can also take advantage of most other existing web standards for whatever happens to be in those browsers.

Is this how things are actually going?

So far, I have seen very little discussion of how different augmented reality systems will work together.  In large part that is  the point of this post. But then there are also very few AR systems that exist outside of laboratories, so we could just be in the bad old proprietary hypertext system days of the late 80s.

So far the AR systems that seem to be designed for lots of different kinds of data (Layar and Seer) have not announce any way for third parties to publish data for their clients. My twitter exchanges with Raimo at SPRXMobile make me think that Layar is at least thinking about it.  Hopefully they will turn out to be as open as I’ve outlined above.

How important do you think open AR standards are? Can an AR solution succeed without them?

Have you ever seen Bull Durham? If not, watch this clip:

 
Over the past eleven years I have worked with many great people on many great projects.  While there has been plenty for those teams to be proud of, I have never worked on a hit.  I have never worked on a game with a marketing budget to speak of. I have never worked on a game with a 90+ Metacritic rating. I have never worked somewhere that could really afford to push a game back just to make sure it was right before it came out. In other words, I have never been to The Majors.

Well that is all about to change:  tomorrow is my first day at Valve Software as a programmer on Team Fortress 2.

I am excited to be going to Valve for many reasons.  I love their games. I am hugely impressed by their consistently high level of quality. I am excited to work with a whole new pile of very smart people. I am excited to learn how their freaky “we don’t have managers, or pure designers, or even job descriptions, really” development process works. I love their dedication to playtesting and really taking playtest feedback to heart.  This is a big opportunity to learn from people who have built some of the best games out there.

My career is about to take a big step forward. I am excited, nervous, and more than a little intimidated. I feel like I’m finally going to the show.

Two of the posts from this blog are now up at Industry Broadcast in audio form.  I’m thrilled to be among the people contributing content to the site.   The original posts are How to Improve Developer Efficiency and Why Stage-Gates are Wrong for Games.

Give them a listen!

This is my presentation from LOGIN 2009 titled “What Augmented Reality Means for Game Developers.” It is more or less aimed at game developers, but is really just where I see AR going in general. The presentation itself is 50 minutes long followed by 20 minutes of Q&A.

It is also my first attempt to post a SlideCast, so if something in there is messed up, let me know.

You can download the slides from SlideShare, and the audio can be found here. My own audio came through fine, but next time I think I need to figure out a way to mic the audience.

Today is the last day for the cheapest registration rate for the LOGIN conference. The price goes up at midnight, so register now.

I had a wonderful dinner the other night with a bunch of game developers who are interested in Augmented Reality. In attendance were Stefan Misslinger and Noora Guldemond from MetaIO, Mitch Ferguson from Carbine, John Walker, Cory Bloyd, and Ron Haidenger and Paul Travers from Vuzix. It was great to spend the evening talking to other people who are as interested in AR as I am.

Noora from MetaIO talked a bit about how their LEGO kiosks have been received by end users. At first they don’t get it because they’re looking at the box in their hand. Once they notice the screen they are amazed and start running around the store trying out other boxes. There is a kiosk installed at a LEGO store in San Mateo. I’m not sure if the store in Seattle has one or not, so I may try to go and take a look over the weekend.

John Walker spent quite a bit of time talking about about the AR applications he has worked on for the Department of Defense. Even though I was sitting directly across from him, I unfortunately couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Hopefully I can catch up with John later in the week and get the scoop. (Since I’m posting this on Sunday, I can say that didn’t happen.)

I spent the night peppering Paul Travers from Vuzix with questions about the Wrap 920AV glasses and other things they are working on. This is a bunch of the stuff I was intending to ask when I get a chance to go by their booth, but I got that out of the way early. Here are the answers to those questions:

• They don’t know exactly what the price will be, but they are expecting it to be less than $500.
• Paul is very confident that the Wrap glasses will ship this year
• The displays are 800×600 in these glasses. That’s a step up from the 640×480 resolution that their other glasses use.
• The two displays are independantly controllable through a variety of methods, but if your software can handle it, you can provide 60Hz to each eye.
• The IMU for the wrap will include accelerometers, gyros, and magnetic sensors, and will provide yaw, pitch, and roll to the software at a very high rate.
• When they are in visual pass-through mode the Wraps will blend a translucent scene over the world. In this mode the brighter a pixel is the more visible it will be to the user. That makes black the transparent color and white the “visible as it gets” color.
• Paul was coy about exactly what the specs on the camera will be. I think they aren’t 100% settled yet. He was very aware of the issues with frame rate on USB cameras, though, so hopefully they will figure out a way to provide a reasonable frame rate (or at least crisp frames.)

It turns out that as part of their research into how to get the IMU working they have been with the same SparkFun 6DOF IMU that I have. They have also had trouble with the magnetic sensors. The voltage range provided by the sensors is far too small and there is no amplification between the sensors and the microcontroller. The result of all this is that the noise in the system tends to swamp the actual readings. That sound like exactly the problem I have run into.

I left dinner very excited about the next year of Augmented Reality. In six months or so I will be able to buy a pair of glasses (with IMU) for less than $500 that will show visuals over the world. Right now the other options in this space cost $1700 for the IMU and $30,000 for the glasses. When the price on a piece of technology drops to 1/60th of what it used to be it unlocks a huge potential for exciting new applications. I can’t wait!

It stuck me recently that GameStop might be falling victim to The Innovator’s Dilemma. This book, published in 1997, a model of why a company that is at the top of its industry can fail to maintain their dominant position in the face of disruptive innovation. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. This summary does a good job of explaining the premise of the book, so if you haven’t read it, go read the summary and come back. The rest of this post attempts to apply the model outlined in the book to the situation GameStop (and other niche game retailers) face with respect to digital download.

The argument that digital distribution is a disruptive technology is an easy one to make. It disintermediates retailers, distributors, and manufacturers, by letting publishers and developers by through a single layer of middlemen (in the form of Steam, Impulse, or Direct2Drive) or even directly to their customers. Digital distribution also removes the sharp shelf-space restrictions that keep a game’s shelf-life artifically low and allow game sales to enjoy a long tail. Numbers are hard to find, but digital distribution has also been accelerating in the past few years. 

Part of the Innovator’s Dilemma model predicts that established players will be able to enjoy significant revenue growth by retreating from low-margin and low-volume markets as those fall to the invading technology. GameStop’s last two quarters are the best they have ever been. However, one part of GameStop’s business has been in serious decline over the past several years, and that is PC games. That is partly due to an overall decline in PC games in general, but it is also to the fact that PC games can’t be repurchased and sold as used like heavily DRMed console games can. This resale of games accounted for 23% of the company’s revenue last year, and that number is increasing. According to the Wall Street Journal, used game sales account for 42% of GameStop’s gross profits.

I suspect that the other major reason for GameStop’s withdrawal from PC games is that digital downloads have made their strongest inroads on the PC. Steam is selling tons of AAA games, and casual and indie games are sold primarily online at this point. The company is not mounting much of a defense in the market where its competition is strongest. They will likely lose the console market the same way, since I would be shocked if the next generation of consoles (Xbox 720, Playstation 4, and Nintendo Puu) didn’t include large hard drives and the ability to download full sized titles as easily as on a PC.

GameStop is making the choices they are because that is what is demanded of them by their customers and investors.  As a multi-billion dollar public company the tiny digital sales available five years ago would have just been a distraction from meeting their growth goals. That allowed Valve and others to get experience and partnerships that give them a huge head start in the the digital distribution space. Just in the past 18 months Steam has picked up titles from EA, THQ, and Sony Online Entertainment. These major publishers join Activision and Take-Two that joined the service a few years ago. In fact, GameStop was reportedly so upset at how much THQ was favoring Steam that they temporarily refused to offer pre-orders of Dawn of War II. (Or at least that was the rumor.) All the while, the biggest complaint that most of GameStop’s customers have is that it doesn’t give them enough for a used game. By and large their customers are quite happy with the company.

Broadband penetration in the US has increased from 4.4% to 50% in the past 9 years. At this point the extensive selection available for download is primed to combine with the relatively new viability of large downloads and drive GameStop completely out of the PC game business. I believe the same thing is likely to happen for console games within the first two years of the next generation of consoles. Within ten years the dedicated video game store will have gone the way of the travel agent, cable driven earthmover, and walled garden internet service provider. 

Or at least that’s now it seems to me as a retail outsider and recent convert of The Innovator’s Dilemma. What do you think?

This morning I read a post by Dusty Monk where he described the forces that were working to push the Halo MMO toward “WoW in Space”:

For me personally, this was probably one of the most conflicting parts of working on Titan.  Don’t get me wrong — I’d wanted to work on an MMO for as long as long as I’ve been in games, and this was the dream game of a lifetime.  But while there were a few of us that had played MMO’s before WoW, by far and large, as the team grew, most of the people on the team had never played a single MMO before WoW.  This led to a dilemma that the entire team struggled with throughout the lifetime of the project.  And it’s a dilemma I think every team out there that’s designing an MMO today has to struggle with,  and the actual point of this post, which I’m only just now actually getting around to:

 How much do you copy the genre leader?

Dusty’s actual question is a good one, but that isn’t what really caught my eye.  You see, while we were building Pirates of the Burning Sea we had a similar dynamic to our team.  World of Warcraft came out two years after we started, so nobody had played it. Instead we had one designer who figured that the MMO genre started with EverQuest where most of the rest of us pegged that event at some earlier game. This guy refused to acknowledge Ultima Online as a “real” MMO despite its hundreds of thousands of subscribers and massive success. He thought even less of the games that came before it: The Realm, Meridian 59, and the thousands of MUDs.

For my part, I saw Ultima Online as a logical next step from the MUDs I played in college in the early 90s. I was pretty far gone into a couple of TinyMUCKs back then.  (I just checked and I do, in fact, still have my wiz bit on PegasusMuck.) When called on to date the start of the MMO I usually give two answers: UO was the first commercial success. MUDs (starting with MUD1, I guess) were the origin of the design genre. To me the distinction is important because of all the ways that MUDs break when your playerbase is counted in the tens of thousands instead of hundreds. UO was really the first game to deal with that kind of scale in the design, so it was the first “real” MMO.

It shouldn’t surprise me that there are people working on MMOs today that consider World of Warcraft the first real example of this kind of game.  It has thirty or fourty times the number of subscribers that EverQuest had at its peak. That increase changed the dynamics of the game just as much as the previous 30-40x jump made EverQuest and Ultima Online different from the games that preceeded them.  My only fear is that this will drive more companies into direct competition with WoW (and the $40 million plus games that are intended to compete with it) instead of toward building a nice tidy business aimed at a niche of 100,000 to 300,000 players who are craving something different.

What is your answer when you are trying to come up with the first real MMO?

After getting roll and pitch working through the Kalman filter, this week I wanted to move on to yaw. Too bad the magnetic sensors in the SparkFun IMU don’t actually work:

While I was recording those values the IMU rotated a full 360 degrees and was even turned upside down.  MagZ should have inverted when it turned upside down, at least.  I guess there is enough stuff going on inside the IMU that it mostly detects itself.

I tried using just the gyros to track yaw by dead reckoning, but they drift enough that the fish are turned 90 degrees after about ten seconds. I’ll have to wait to track yaw until I can get a magnetic compas that works or have vision-based tracking working well enough to use it to compensate for the drift.

I finally reached the limit of my ability to cope with how many editing bugs Wordpress 2.2 had when I found I couldn’t embed the YouTube video in that IMU post. So I’ve updated to 2.7.1, which lets me edit in Chrome, lets me embed stuff, and fixes the visible escape character in the tag line.

Let me know if you see any problems.