AUG|RE

Mr Oliver Blank is conducting a fascinating art piece in A Coruña, Spain. People wandering about the city may find a hand-painted sign, with a phone number. Dialling the number connects to a piece of music composed for that very place. The music is (apart from an example track on SoundCloud) only available in-situ. This lines up with a lot of my feelings on what good locative digital art should be: crafted carefully for its environment, only available in context, additive.

It's interesting to see the discussion around the Google heads-up display. The most obvious thing to point out is that so far the UI they present isn't augmented reality. There's nothing there that really "blends" or "mixes" into the environment - everything obscures. Whether for pragmatic or stylistic reasons some of the easier possible examples of aligning the data with the view have been omitted: routes aren't shown projected on the ground, and POIs aren't rendered seamlessly on the objects.

I'm always keeping an eye out for pieces that either might already be AR, or would translate very well into AR. Two artists caught my eye recently.

The first is illustrator and artist Anna Emelia, whose work is very cosy and intimate which might translate well into the "doll house" perception of desktop hand-held AR for instance. She recently submitted this image on her blog, which I like very much. 

The first public release of our mirror worlds work comes out just in time for ISMAR 11! Right now it's Nokia N9 only, and we only have a handful of cities covered, but if you have an N9 get it! I'd be especially interested in hearing what people who follow this blog think. 

I'm very excited to be involved co-organizing a workshop at ISMAR this year on enabling large scale MAR. If you're interested in participating, the research topics include (but are not restricted to):

3D geo-referenced data (images, point clouds, and models)

Algorithms for object recognition from large databases of geo-referenced data

Algorithms for object tracking in outdoor environment

Multi-cue fusion to achieve improved performance of object detection and tracking

Novel representation schemes to facilitate large-scale content distribution

3D reasoning to support intelligent augmentation

Novel and improved mobile capabilities for data capture (device sensors), processing, and display

Applications, experiences, and user interface techniques.

Can you imagine what you could do with see through and/or projected AR added to the mix? It would be the whisical, funtime opposite of Daniel Suarez' icy Daemon.

There's a couple of things to note here: this is an "mp3 experiment" - but the mp3 really only serves to initiate, synchronize, and contextualize via the voice and music. AR could work like this - detractors confuse wanting to augment things with more or less wanting to replace all other kinds of stimulation, and that's not necessarily in the best interest of the user.

Then there's the element of "being in on it" while perplexing the general public that's part of the fun of flashmobs, that actually plays to the user-exclusivity of portable AR presentation.

As an example of how fast things are moving in AR consider augmented books. In 2008 I was blown away by "Haunted Book" by Camille Sherrer of ECAL and the ever amazing EPFL CV lab. I can't seem to find a video of that work, but "Magic Book" by the same artist looks similar:

This ran on a laptop, and the graphics are strictly flat sprites. The natural feature tracking was ground-breaking in 2008 - even recent commercial works such as the rather nice DibiDogs book prefer markers. 

The augmentations on the laptop / book in hands dichotomy makes for awkward interaction, and should recognized for what it is: a limitation imposed by incapable mobile devices, rather than a design decision (though the kids are clearly unfased).

Three years on from "Haunted Book", Helen Papagiannis has a new augmented pop-up book, with interactive fully 3D models, natural feature tracking running on iOS mobile devices.

The tracking isn't a research project either, but off-the-shelf from Metaio. It feels like the technology is just maturing to the point where artists and creators can get on with what they do without the technology being a massive consideration, or getting in the way too much. 

As with most technologies, the mechanisms for reading and consuming are maturing faster than those for writing and creating. The next challenge is to make creating AR works as easy as consuming this piece. Maybe we'll be there when we have an AR sketch book (if that even makes any sense).

I was at Sónar festival in Barcelona this weekend, and one of the things that stood out for me what how important visuals have become for live electronic music artists. It makes sense electronic acts would lead the way here, both because of familiarity with technology, and a certain boring guy-with-laptop sameness of performance that doesn't create energy like a live rock-band can. The visuals are a performance aid.

This is the sound/visual control island at the night venue's main stage - notable because it's as deep as it is wide, with four rows of computers and technicians, and only one of the four rows seems to deal with sound, while the other three layers of technology all control lights, screens, lasers and other visuals. Visuals require three times as many resources as sound engineering at a music festival.  One act was delayed ten minutes purely because his windows laptop wouldn't play nice with the projectors - lack of visuals was a sufficient impediment to performance to hold up the show.

There were a couple of different styles of visuals seeming (to me) to be trying to be volumetric:

a) The coloured lasers seemed to be trying to "carve out" visual spaces and shapes - certainly (they aren't making any discernable pattern at the endpoint of the beam, seen from about 11 seconds into the video), and they aren't doing the usual laser-show trick of projecting things like grids on smoke.

b) Straight-ahead projection onto a 3D shape. The mesh-screen in conjunction with the back-screen make it feel like the band are performing in the middle of a textured cube.

c) This is harder to describe, but the singer was using a strobe as if to reach out and "touch" the audience.