SeAR July 2010: Augmented Reality the Next Next Big Thing from Joe Ludwig on Vimeo.

This is my talk from last Wednesday’s Seattle Augmented Reality Meetup. I will upload the discussion that followed as a separate video later today. Comments and feedback are welcome… just comment below or over on Vimeo.

The working title for the app is Mobile Photo Hunt. If you give Photo Hunt a try and have feedback, I set up a User Voice forum to collect that feedback. This is an open alpha, so don’t be surprised if major changes occur over the coming weeks. I am making it available here well before it goes up on the app market so I can get some early feedback. Please tell me what you think.

The basic idea is this: People take pictures of cool or interesting things in the world and upload those as puzzles. Those pictures (and their GPS coordinates) are made available to everyone else and everyone else is encouraged to find whatever the thing is and take a picture of their own to prove that they found it.  Other users can then compare the two pictures and vote up or down about whether or not they match. Some sort of game mechanics wrap the whole activity to encourage good puzzles, searching for puzzles, and confirming matches. Except for the game mechanics this all basically works now.

The game uses Facebook Connect to authenticate users. I expect to eventually add Twitter, Google,  and OpenID logins as alternate ways to authenticate. I have no interest in maintaining a list of usernames and passwords, so creating a custom Photo Hunt account will never be an option.  These login methods are only used to figure out who you are and and come up with something to call you. The app doesn’t publish anything to your feed, send any messages to your friends, or do anything else annoying in whatever social network you used to log in.  I may eventually add the ability to automatically post new puzzles to Facebook/Twitter, but that will be something you can opt-in to when you upload the puzzle.

There are a few known issues up on User Voice already, and a few more minor ones I’ll list here:

• After logging in you will see three paragraphs telling you how to play but no buttons. They appear after your phone acquires a GPS signal. Need a busy indicator of some sort to indicate what’s going on.
• The FB Connect login has a yellow warning bar that says “Cookies Required.” Cookies actually WORK and your login is stored, so I don’t know what that’s about. Haven’t dug into it yet.
• When you bring up an on-screen keyboard the FB Connect dialog freaks out. I’m hoping this will be fixed when I switch to the official Facebook SDK.
• After you switch to another app it may still be using GPS. Killing Photo Hunt with a task killer will probably fix that. Eventually it will stop using GPS on its own.

So that’s my app.  Please give it a shot and tell me what you think.

Here’s a QR code for the app in case you happen to be viewing this on your desktop:

This sort of platform has existed before, but previous attempts never really worked out. This time I think they have a real shot at it, and I think two factors will make the difference this time around. Both platforms have large libraries of apps, and both platforms greatly reduce the cost of owning a computer.

Previous attempts to build small, lightweight operating systems always included a big push to sign up developers. Then they failed to attract significant developer attention because they had no installed base. Then no one could figure out why they should buy one because they had no applications and the installed base never materialized. Both Apple and Google have used the mobile web to bootstrap both their user-bases. Many people are willing to buy the phones because they can read web-pages from anywhere. Nobody balks at developing for these platforms because there are millions of them out there. Then another wave of people are happy to buy the phones because of all the cool apps. As a result each platform have tens of thousands of applications when their mid-sized devices launch.

The cost of ownership factor is also a pretty big deal.  For years I have had computer-savvy friends describe to me how they will no longer support relatives on Windows and have purchased iMacs for their parents. It is much easier for a normal person to break a Windows machine than to break a Macintosh, so the unfortunately tech-savvy guy in the family ends up spending  more time supporting a casual computer user on Windows. Android and iPhone OS push this much further by removing most of the remaining pitfalls. This doesn’t matter much for powerusers, but for the average computer user it is a big deal.

Some previous attempts at midsized computers (e.g. Magic Cap and Newton) had a similarly low cost of ownership. Some previous attempts at midsized computers (e.g. Ultra-Mobile PCs, Windows-based Tablet Computers, and Netbooks) had a huge software library to draw on but a cost of ownership that was actually higher than their desk-bound brothers. These new mobile-derived operating systems are the first time we’ve seen both factors in the same devices. I think this could be as disruptive as the original Personal Computer revolution.

What do you think? Will these new mid-sized computers cause massive upheaval, or will they fall down the same dark hole as their predecessors and never be heard from again?

I am bad with faces. I mean really bad with faces. My brain just doesn’t seem to be very good at mapping what someone looks like with their name.  This often makes things difficult for me at networking events and conferences.

The Solution

A passive mobile application that scans the environment around the user for faces. When it detects a face that it recognizes the application speaks the person’s name to the user via their bluetooth earpiece. Ideally this solution would also involve a discrete camera that could operate without being obvious to the people it is operating on. The point is to serve as a passive aid to memory while not changing the behavior of the people you are interacting with.

The Competition

There are a couple concept applications out there along this line including Recognizr and Comverse Social AR. Both of these applications have the same problem, which is that you have to hold up your phone to take a photo of the person you want to identify, then wait for the result to come back.  That is intrusive enough that a simple “I’m sorry, remind me what your name is…” would be a better option.

The Pieces

1. Facial recognition. There are many providers of facial detection and recognition APIs, so it should be possible to license this piece. Unfortunately most of the providers don’t seem to be very good at licensing their SDK to people. I get the idea that these are all very small companies that spun out of someone’s PhD research.
   1. PittPatt never replied to my email.
   2. Luxand put me on their marketing email list, but never sent me an evaluation key.
   3. Betaface actually gave me a chance to evaluate their SDK. It works quite well. I wasn’t a fan of their licensing terms, but you might have different needs than I did.
   4. Ayonix got back to me right away but never provided the promised evaluation link.
   5. I don’t remember if I contacted Seeing Machines or not.
2. Bluetooth camera – I bought an OptiEye. It works pretty well. If you ask them nicely they will send you the protocol documentation. The specs claim a four hour battery life, which is plenty for most networking events.
3. Text to speech – I haven’t done any research here.  Many applications do it, though, so I would imagine SDKs are available.  If nothing else the user could record the names and the software could just play back the recordings.
4. Mobile computer – Both Android and iPhone allow communication over RFCOMM, which is what the OptiEye uses. Existing devices are also too weak in the CPU department to do much visual processing on the phone, but they could stream video or individual frames up to a server for further processing.

What do you think?  Dream product?  Interesting project? Terrible idea?

Two weeks later Google announced that they are incorporating user photos into Google Street View. This requires essentially the same data as Photosynth. Google has the added advantage that they can combine it with the Street View images and LIDAR data they are already collecting. Though they haven’t demonstrated real-time capability with this data they certainly have all the pieces they need to make this happen.

Access to the data required to perform pose recognition with cameras is a novelty at the moment, but if mobile augmented reality takes off in a big way it will become a key component of that system.  In my opinion this component is too important to be left in the hands of one company. A much more desirable situation would be to have an OpenStreetMap-type project to accumulate and curate a freely available dataset to provide structure from motion and pose recognition for use in mobile augmented reality and whatever other uses someone can dream up.

OpenStreetMap is a project that sprung up to provide access to data that was free from the costs and restrictions that come with commercial data. It uses a Creative Commons license to make the data free for use by anyone for most any purpose. Although OpenStreetMap came about in response to the restrictions on commercial data sources, the same approach could be taken for 3D structure and image data even though commercial sources for that data do not yet exist. If OpenStreetMap had existed when car navigation systems became feasible in the late nineties it is likely that many commercial products could have been developed on open data at far lower cost and in much more variety.

All such a project needs is a small number of dedicated people to get it started. Download a copy of Bundler (an open source structure from motion library based on the same research that spawned Photosynth) and seek out publicly available photograph libraries. Then talk a cloud computing provider into sponsoring the project by hosting the data and build things up from there. The project won’t have many users for a few years, but as the accuracy and coverage of the dataset grows the set of applications based on this open data will grow too. Somebody just has to get the ball rolling.

1. Star Trek Online will be the only significant MMO launch in 2010. It will do well enough to make Atari and Cryptic plenty of money, but will not do nearly as well as World of Warcraft, so many people will consider it a failure. (Those people are dumb.)
2. At least three of the major unreleased MMO projects will be cancelled. I have a guess about which two are most likely, but I’ll keep that to myself.  Qualifying projects include:
   • Guild Wars 2
   • Whatever Carbine is working on
   • That console MMO Turbine hasn’t said much about
   • Whatever Trion is working on
   • The Sci-Fi channel tie-in MMO that Trion has said they’re working on
   • Whatever Zenimax is working on that may or may not be Fallout
   • Whatever 38 Studios is working on
   • The Agency
   • Whatever Gazillion’s Gargantuan studio is working on
   • Star Wars: The Old Republic
   • The second MMO that CCP is working on down in Atlanta where all those White Wolf people are.  Hmm. What could it be?
   • Whatever Red 5 is working on
   • DC Online
   • That other MMO I know NCSoft is working on that is completely under the radar
   • Whatever Slipgate Ironworks is working on
   • The second MMO Blizzard has in the works
   • APB
   • Jumpgate: Evolution
3. Project Natal and the Playstation Motion Controller will both come out.  Natal will do fairly well. Both controllers will allow some new kinds of games, but we won’t see any compelling examples of those games until 2011.
4. Unemployment will peak and then start to fall.
5. The compass+GPS augmented reality products will begin to shift to general location-awareness and away from their Augmented Reality roots. They will de-emphasize magic lens and start to emphasize aggregation of nearby content.
6. No consumer-level see-through displays will come out in 2010. Significant progress toward them will be made, but nothing will be released.
7. Neither Google nor Apple will release any kind of AR-focused hardware
8. The use of “wave it in front of your webcam” type AR in advertising will peak with an AR-enhanced ad in the Superbowl.  The backlash will begin. By the end of the year the advertising world will have moved on.
9. Apple will release its tablet and a new iPhone (faster and more storage) but won’t release anything that is specifically an AR product.
10. Apple will address the pain caused by its app-store approval process, at least in part. I have no idea what their specific solution will be, but they aren’t going to let their developer community grow to hate them.
11. Android will continue to pick up steam. By the end of the year Android will boast 50,000 applications.
12. People will spend the entire year trying to find something really useful to do with Google Wave. They won’t succeed in 2010.
13. Google will make Wave interoperate with email. This will make it useful as an email client if nothing else.

Ok, that’s the last of this kind of post for at least a year.  If only I could get back to posting regular stuff again.

Please note that just because something is on this list does not mean that it’s something I want to happen, only that it’s something I think will happen. Anything that’s missing from this list is probably just something I didn’t think of.

I would love to hear your thoughts on any or all of these.  Please comment below.

General Technology Trends:

1. Moore’s Law will continue to operate for the entire decade. That means a given form-factor of computing device will be approximately 100x the power of the same form-factor today.
2. Mobile computing will dominate. Everyone who owns a laptop or desktop today will have a mobile device that is about 10x the power of their current computer.  We may still call these “phones”, but placing voice calls will only be one tiny part of what they do. This device will replace most users’ desktop and laptop computers.
3. Digital Distribution will be king. Only a tiny fraction of the media that’s currently consumed digitally (TV, movies, music, and software) will be purchased on a hunk of plastic. Both the subscription model (aka Rhapsody or cable television) or the purchase model (aka iTunes or DVDs) will have at least 20% market share, but one of those two models will be gradually taking over. Advertising supported media will be just as big of a deal as it now, but the user will have much more control over how they consume that media (think Hulu rather than broadcast television.) Books are on the same trajectory, but in 2020 the majority of books will still be sold on dead trees.
4. Speach recognition will gain a lot of ground as the primary way we enter text into a computer. Offices are one place where this trend won’t have advanced very far mostly because of the noise involved.

Game Industry Trends:

1. Total revenues from video games of all kinds (including mobile and social games) will exceed revenue from movies and television (independantly, not added together.) Games will finally learn to exploit merchandising and secondary markets as vigorously as movies do.
2. In 2020 no one will be selling a dedicated gaming console. All computing devices in production in ten years will be about consuming other kinds of media just as much as they are about playing games.
3. Desktop PC gaming will be all but dead, with the majority of triple-A games coming out for multi-media consoles or mobile devices.
4. Gaming that involves exercise will be the primary way that the majority of people get their exercise.
5. Location-aware games will be common.

Augmented reality:

1. A growing minority of people in the developed world will wear heads up displays almost all the time. These displays will be capable of information overlays, but will mostly be about contextual information that is not overlaid on the world. These products will be on the verge of hitting the mainstream, but won’t quite be mainstream yet.
2. Development of these displays will be by small companies (perhaps companies that are around now) but those companies will be acquired by massive consumer electronics multinationals before wearable displays hit the mainstream.
3. Recognition of people and text in images (and video) will be nearly perfect, at least in reasonable lighting conditions.
4. Gestural interfaces will be commonplace. Many hard-core computer users will be sad at how clumsy they are compared to keyboard and mouse.

The fate of specific companies:

1. Google will be huge and influential. Their influence will likely peak in the 2010s, but it will difficult to see that from the ground. Google will have had some sort of anti-monopoly action taken against them.
2. Microsoft will fail to transition to the new mobile-centric world and will be in decline. They will still be a very powerful multi-billion-dollar company, but will not own the end-user to nearly the extent they do now.
3. A company that exists today will be the dominant social network.  that could be Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, but it probably won’t be MySpace.
4. Apple will be huge and influential. They won’t ever be as dominant as Microsoft was in the 90s, but they will be very successful. Steve Jobs will still be running the company.

US Politics:

1. Gay marriage will be legal in most states.
2. Marijuana use will be legal in California and a few other states.
3. We won’t have elected a woman president. (My wife came up with this one, but I agree with her.)
4. The problems of illegal immigration will not be solved.
5. The problems of providing health-care to everyone that needs it will not be solved.
6. Privacy in an age of always-on location-aware devices will be a huge topic of debate.
7. Silicon Valley will remain the world’s premier startup region.
8. The US will still have troops in both Iraq and Afganistan. These will be like the troops we still have in Germany and South Korea, and will not be in combat often, if ever.

International Politics:

1. Carbon emissions will be at approximately their peak in 2020.
2. Oil production will also be peaking around 2020.
3. Most other countries will be ahead of the US in terms of switching to renewable energy.
4. Most of the rest of the world will have consumer-friendly privacy regulations in place. Those countries will scratch their heads at the debate raging in the US.

Things that will not happen:

1. We will not have flying cars, jet-packs, or most of the other things promised by Sci-Fi in the 50s.
2. There will not be peace in the middle east.
3. Africa will still be the poorest continent.
4. Brain-computer interfaces will still not work very well. No one will be uploading themselves into a computer.
5. We won’t have a human equivalent AI.
6. We won’t know how to reliably unfreeze people.
7. World War Three won’t have happened.

1. Correct. Champions and Free Realms both launched. Those were both smaller than the big launches of 2008 (Age of Conan and Warhammer), and I expect they will end up being smaller than next year’s Star Trek Online launch.
2. Wrong. The console version of Champions Online never came out. I hear it’s because of difficulties working out revenue sharing and certification details with Microsoft, not because of any technical challenge. We’ll see if it actually comes out in 2010.
3. Wrong. Has there been a single large MMO announced in 2009?  Carbine, Trion, Red 5, 38 Studios, and Zenimax certainly haven’t announced anything.
4. Wrong. Nope. Nobody bought Turbine. Atari did buy Cryptic, which is almost the same thing.  Maybe I should be more vague in the future.
5. Correct?  Upper Deck University launched, but hasn’t had much traction. Are there other kid’s MMOs that launched in 2009?  Wizard 101 from King’s Isle launched at the end of 2008 and had an excellent year in 2009. What does that mean for my prediction? No idea.
6. Correct, sort of. Both Microsoft and Sony decided to launch gestural control devices instead of whole new consoles. They are trying to get some more mileage out of their investment in the current generation. Project Natal has had a lot of buzz, but no dev kits have shipped as far as I know. The PS3 motion controller has been a little more under the radar.  Both of these devices are expected to ship in 2010.
7. Hard to say. Maybe we’ve hit bottom, maybe we haven’t.  Ask me in two years.
8. Wrong. Oh so astoundingly wrong.  Between Layar and Junaio’s launches, tons of marketing campaigns, and lots of concept and research videos, AR has had a year full of hype. Those see-through displays I was so excited about in January didn’t happen, but on the smartphone/magic lens front there has been quit a bit happening.
9. Hard to say. Did Microsoft start an MMO in 2009?  They didn’t announce anything.  Wonder if they’ll announce it before they cancel it.
10. Wrong. At least I haven’t heard of one.  Lots of indy games made lots of noise in 2009, but none of those were XNA games.
11. Correct?  iLike’s firesale to Myspace is one.  Metaplace.com going away is arguably another, though Metaplace lives on as a company, at least for a while. Geocities counts too, I guess.  The trouble is the “have heard of” qualifier. Most web startups are completely unknown outside of Silicon Valley
12. Wrong. There has been no SOE reorganization fallout visible from the outside. The Agency lost the head of its studio, but the game seems to live on.  DC universe is going fairly well from what I hear.
13. Correct.  Mythic merged a bunch of servers.  Then they laid off a bunch of people. Then EA kicked out Mark Jacobs. Then EA laid off more people.  It has been a tough year over there. I hope everyone lands on their feet.

So for the year, that’s five correct predictions, six incorrect predictions, and two unmeasurable predictions.  Not such a good year to see the future.

The biggest thing I missed is the way mobile is heating up.  The App Store is a couple years old at this point, but it really exploded in 2009.

What about you?  Did 2009 turn out like you expected?

1. Metaio is pronounced mehtayo, not (as I’ve been saying) mehtah-ayo.
2. The high-end HMDs that academics buy for tens of thousands of dollars are terrible.
3. Nokia has a very cool see-through display with eye tracking up and running in their research lab. This display may never see the light of day.
4. There are still tons of people doing research with markers.
5. Robert Rice and I are both 38.
6. When using a tag-based gesture to activate a menu, users are more accurate and able to select their option more quickly if the options are presented relative to the user’s view than if they are presented relative to the marker’s original location or an object in the world.
7. Vuzix is working on cool stuff and Paul Travers is a good guy with a passion for AR.
8. Telepresence is creepy when it is accomplished by projecting a remote video feed onto a static mannekin head. (This was the Anamatronics Shader Lamps Avatar paper and demo.)
9. Robert Rice really got into AR in early 2008, just like me.
10. The academic AR community is ready to welcome industry to their conference with open arms. Apparently there were many more companies present this year than last year.
11. Metaio’s mobile platform (Junaio) is not a clone of Layar/Wikitude in any way. They are building a much more social system based on user-provided content.  Junaio is also going to work on phone with no compass (i.e. the iPhone 3G.)
12. X from Y is a smart dude. (Sub in any X and Y you like among the many people I met this week. I met so many smart people.)
13. There are some professors who love the sound of their own voices. OMG, (that one guy) from (that one university) can’t seem to ask a question in less than five minutes.
14. I believe that augmented reality is the next big technology revolution and will have an impact at least as big as the web’s impact. This will provide opportunities for tons of companies and as a result there’s no reason to start competing bitterly at this early stage.  It turns out Robert Rice agrees with me.
15. Tish Shute is obsessed with XMPP (and a smart non-dude.)
16. There are more AR startups out there that are flying under the radar. For instance, there are these two guys from Rochester…
17. Silicon Valley remains completely oblivious to AR. If Robert and I are right it will be interesting to see what this means for their dominance of the startup community.
18. The vast majority of the AR research being done in adademia is being done outside the US. I knew this going in, but it was shocking to be confronted with it in person.
19. Georg Klein (of PTAM fame) works at Microsoft now.  Hmm.
20. The food in Orlando is terrible.  Maybe they could move this conference to Austin…
21. Microvision’s display technology works really well.  At least on the monocular test unit that I got a chance to look through after their talk.
22. There is (or was) at least one PC gamer out there that has never heard of Steam. I was shocked.
23. Qualcomm is backing AR in a big way and intends to be the hardware provider of choice for mobile AR.
24. Venture Capital isn’t flowing into augmented reality quite yet. Most AR startups are self-funded or funded by friends and family.
25. I am much better at networking than I was when I first started going to game conferences.
26. It is far too early for meaningful standards in AR. It would be awfully nice if the Wikitude content provider API used the same format that people are already providing to Layar, however.
27. The projector part of Sixth Sense is still a non-starter. The UI parts are still very cool, however.
28. Robert Rice and I have a creepy number of common traits.
29. Disney Imagineering makes extensive use of AR.
30. Peter from Metaio suggests that if you want to get anything done in the AR space you shouldn’t spend any time worrying about whether or not what you’re doing is AR or not. I agree with him. There’s not a clear line between AR and not AR and there probably never will be.
31. See-through glasses at a reasonable price point (and field of view) are probably more than a year out. This is frustrating to a great many people, including me.
32. Layar isn’t going to ruin AR. I went into the week with a fear that the GPS+compass category (which Layar is currently leading) would forever taint the term Augmented Reality by providing a fairly useless AR view (when compared to a map or list view.)  Instead I think that people will simply not use the AR view and that Layar pushes location based services forward in a huge way by providing access to multiple content providers from a single app. One day no one will remember that they started out as primarily an AR app.
33. I prefer talks about what people did over talks about what people think will happen.
34. For many researchers, augmented reality is a solution looking for a problem. There are a lot of gee-whiz demos and many people seem to accept cool factor as a compelling reason to use AR instead of more traditional solutions.
35. I saw a presentation on an AR-based interface that included a user study that concluded the mouse-and-keyboard interface they devised for comparison was both more accurate and faster for users. Clearly we should not rush out and replace all UI in places where a mouse and keyboard are working now.
36. Roundtable sessions with fifty or more people in the room don’t work.
37. There was a company using optical flow to fake accelerometer-type UI elements back before phones had accelerometers. On a related note, promo videos from old dead-end technologies are funny.
38. By and large academics feel that augmented reality is poised to take off in a big way.
39. Academics don’t drink nearly as much as game developers.
40. Nobody has solved the problem of optical tracking in arbitrary outdoor environments as a means of correcting GPS and magnetometer error. The sensor fusion presentation from Gratz was promising, however.
41. ISMAR doesn’t treat their speakers very well. Apparently there was some question at to whether or not speakers would even get a free badge.  That’s just silly. Speakers also shouldn’t have to buy their tickets to the award banquet all attendees get for free.
42. Some people think that “the Layar and Wikitude type apps” don’t count as real AR because they only use the camera for video pass through. Most people (including some of the people in the first group) agree that it doesn’t really matter whether these apps are AR or not.
43. Video pass-through introduces massive latency, which can cause significant issues with perception of haptic feedback.
44. Natasha Tsakos is happy to use the same shtick to open her talks at both TED and ISMAR.
45. AR researchers are poor at name badge design. Badges should include company/university name. The name of the attendee is the most important thing on the badge and should be larger than everything else. The ISMAR badges had three lines of text, all the same size:
    • ISMAR 2009
    • Your Name
    • Science and Technology or Arts and Humanities.
46. Nobody in the ISMAR community takes the various advertising uses of AR too seriously.
47. You shouldn’t register for a conference on the day registration opens. Apparently the regonline account was still in test mode for the first day or so and all the people who registered that day didn’t really register (or have a charge appear on their credit cards.)
48. There is a strong bias toward computer vision and away from other sensors among many researchers.
49. Orlando was not made for walking.
50. ISMAR 2009 was totally worth attending.

I am so happy I went.  ISMAR reinvigorated my interested in AR and allowed me to meet many great people. I wonder if I’ll be able to swing a trip to Seoul for ISMAR 2010.