I had a great time participating in the “Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe” show, talking about augmented reality. The careful preparation of the show (professional rehearsals, planning etc) really blurs the boundaries between virtual and physical reality. My fellow guests songwriter PonDman Haalan and Axle Messerchmitt (talking about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) were just awesome – they made me forget completely about any distinction between “real” and “virtual” shows.
As you can notice the interview was more about augmented reality in general, while my more immediate interest in this topic has more to do with the possible applications for news media and for social change.
I’m convinced that the augmented reality versions of location based social networks can not only help you to find out more about local restaurants and pubs, but also enable you to tell stories about your city or neighborhood for instance. Mobile internet and social based services are crucial for this development. There is a lot going on right now in the fledgling industry of location based networks, with a lot of competition between services suchs as Gowalla and Foursquare, but also Twitter and Facebook are taking this evolution very seriously.
I don’t really feel that the newspaper industry is heavily investing in all this, at least not right now. In my previous post I mentioned some hurdles such as the fact that many people in many countries (also in the West) simply don’t have affordable mobile broadband or fancy smartphones. There are technological issues making it very difficult to have real time image recognition. I think we’re still very early phase in all this, and many publishers prefer to wait and see what more adventurous colleagues will learn.
Some publishers do of course experiment with augmented reality. I’ll give some examples of those experiments in a next post.
We had a great discussion at We Are the Network about viral business models and viral campaigns, discussing some of the texts Joel linked to on his blog joelfoner.com.
We discussed Facebook games such as Farmville and MafiaWars but also the Ozimal bunnies in Second Life. I wondered whether those very popular & viral games could “go to the other side” – imagine Farmville coming into Second Life and the Ozimals on Facebook (I know, many of you will cringe now) – but would it not be a way to get new people into Second Life? (just let me know)
During our discussion Melchizedek Blauvelt suggested me to watch this video, featuring Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, who dives into a world of game development.
Schell explains how surprised he was about a number of developments in the games industry and tries to figure out what’s happening there. He points out some psychological tricks which help explain the success of certain games, but there is more.
There is a connection between the virtual/technological with the real, like in Webkinz (virtual and ‘real’ stuffed animals) and Mafia Wars (playing against your real friends). He situates this in a new Zeitgeist – people wanting some reality and authenticity in their lives, “escaping from a bubble of fake bullshit”. This may seem weird in a context of these games, but I let him explain his position all by himself:
- Tomorrow Tuesday March 9 at Noon SLT/PDT We Are the Network will discuss “viral success factors for viral business.” What makes one YouTube video go insanely viral while another one fails miserably? How to go viral on Facebook and Twitter? In fact, we don’t really know I guess. If we could really make it happen with a high degree of certainty, I guess we would drown in viral YouTube stuff coming from all the major brands, and I don’t see that happen. But then again, maybe there are some key elements which at least makes us understand the phenomenon of “going viral”. In the meantime we can only be fascinated watching videos such as Hamster Killerblick
- On Wednesday March 10 Metanomics will explore the 2010 Virtual Symposium – Education for Everyone: Expanding Access Through Technology on March 10, with two key members of the symposium on the show.
Metanomics host Robert Bloomfield will interview Dr. Rebecca Clothey and Dr. Kristen Betts on Wednesday, March 10 at 12pm PST and will discuss the virtual symposium, it’s creation and goals. They will also attempt to address the same questions the symposium will ask, such as how has technology increased or decreased equality in education in your community? What initiatives and technologies have been used successfully to enable access to previously underserved students? What role can government policies and public/private partnerships play in creating a success?
Mashable reporting about yet another 3D success… Whether it will be comparable to Avatar is another matter, but somehow the 3D releases will help familiarize a wider audience with the notion of “immersion”… and maybe even wearing weird glasses will become less of an obstacle…
Though many predicted the boom would end, no one knew exactly when. As it turned out, the March 10 peak would be followed by a jolting downward slide. Small companies would feel the pinch quickly–as the venture capital disappeared and the window for IPOs slammed shut. Larger companies would ride it out longer. But by early 2001, it was clear the highflying boom days were over. By 2003, the tech bust had wiped out an estimated $5 trillion in tech company market value. (…)
The Washington Post runs this story in which ten players in the tech scene look back, a decade later, at the Internet boom and bust.
I don’t think we’ll have a specific tech bust of this magnitude again (we just had another bust, related to the financial sector, not the tech sector).
The cost of failure is much lower these days, and the big movers such as Facebook and Twitter are as yet not public companies.
All this does not mean that we cannot have hypes anymore – only those hypes won’t have that dramatic impact the Internet bust had ten years ago.
Second Life had its hype moment. Reading all the stuff about augmented reality, that could very well turn out to be another hype moment. But wait, what exactly is a hype? It involves people losing their money, but not necessarily the end of technological evolution – the internet had no problem surviving both the bust a decade ago and the recent financial bust.
What’s your take on booms and busts in virtual worlds, augmented reality and social media?
Yesterday I talked about chat as a way to facilitate community interaction for news media. The chat tool we discussed, CoverItLive, is rather sophisticated, but in the end it is just 2D chat, with the possibility to add other media such as video, rss-feeds, pictures, links etc. Today I’d like to explore some more futuristic possibilities for news media but also for all those wanting to change things in society.
I also invite you for “Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe” a TV Talk show filmed in Second Life, today Sunday March 7th at 6 pm SLT (3 am Monday, March 8th, CET). I’m one of the guests and will talk about augmented reality (more about today’s show here).
What do we mean by “augmented reality”? Wikipedia says:
Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery.
Let’s just say that augmented reality “augments” our physical surroundings by putting layers of digital data on top of that reality, enabling us to store, to perceive and to search those data.
The term itself was coined in 1990 by Tom Caudell, a researcher at aircraft manufacturer Boeing, so Wired says:
He applied the term to a head-mounted digital display that guided workers through assembling electrical wires in aircrafts. The early definition of augmented reality, then, was an intersection between virtual and physical reality, where digital visuals are blended in to the real world to enhance our perceptions.
The term however does not mean the same thing for everybody. Wikipedia explains that according to one definition (Ronald Azuma) it combines real and virtual, is interactive in real time and is registered in 3D. Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino defined Milgram’s Reality-Virtuality Continuum in 1994. They describe a continuum that spans from the real environment to a pure virtual environment. In between there are Augmented Reality (closer to the real environment) and Augmented Virtuality (is closer to the virtual environment).
Some AR applications
In fact we’re already rather used to AR in the media, more specifically in sports coverage. Just look at the virtual lines indicating the position of the puck in ice hockey or superimposing data about a record holder on actual images of a swimming event.
Another application is in advertisement where one can hold some code in front of a webcam and subsequently see images in 3D and eventually interact with these images.
In first-person shooters we’re used in getting instructions and information pretty much as in military AR applications. We don’t see the enemy nor those providing the information, but right there, somewhere on our screen, the information appears.
The military are using AR for a long time now, one could trace the early phases of this in the Airforce during the Second World War projecting information on the windshield, going straight to current times (pilots being able to look around as if their own plane was not there hence not blocking their sight).
An important aspect is how we see the AR data: using a display on a laptop or a smartphone, a Head-up display (HUD) or a Helmet mounted display (HMD) or spatial displays which don’t have to be carried by any particular person.
Why is AR hot now?
AR is very fashionable these days and some even fear it’s just another hype. However, there are some fundamental reasons for this popularity: the convergence of gaming and virtual environments, online social networks and mobile broadband.
Whether or not Second Life will ever go mainstream, notions such as “avatar” are becoming increasingly familiar (with some help from the movie industry). Clicking on objects and avatars in virtual settings often gives us information, and so one starts wondering how we can organize things so that we can look at some conference participant and just get information about this person by using for instance a smartphone snapshot.
Online social networks can be especially fun when we’re able to organize people in our physical neighborhood. Enter Foursquare, Gowalla or Brightkite for doing just that – keeping track of where your friends are and of their comments on pubs, restaurants and other points of interest. Often those location based social networks incorporate game elements to make things more fun.
I’m a user of Foursquare and to my delight I found an AR application on Layar for Foursquare. Pointing my iPhone and looking at the camera view I can find out places where friends checked in, tips about those place, and how far and in what direction to go in order to find the points of interest. Tweeps around will show me the location of tweeting people in my neighborhood.
What it could mean for news and change
First this recent video about the new edition of Layar, one of the most popular mobile AR browsers:
ReadWriteWeb recently had an interesting post about Layar, mentioning civic projects and politics as subjects for augmented reality. Imagine some huge building projects in the city, where you could superimpose on the physical view the plans and images of the finished project (the new market hall in Rotterdam, the Netherlands).
Or let’s take NetKnowledge.ca where a layar gives information on all of the projects that receive funding from the Canadian government as part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan.
These seem to be projects which indicate a possible way to go for news media and activist groups: integrating stories, data and discussions as layars on top of the physical reality.
Challenges and opportunities
So are newspapers heavily investing in these new possibilities? Not so. There are lots of issues to take into account here. I’m not sure how the business model exactly looks like. Will anyone get paid for this, and by whom? The eventual revenue will to to which parties – the developer of the layer, the company providing the platform, the smartphone producer, those who initially collected the data… ?
Let’s not forget that in many countries high-end smartphones and mobile broadband is expensive. The technology itself is not yet where it should be: the location is often far from precise, the data are not really real-time, the image-recognition is an illusion…
There is the unpredictable element of consumer behavior. I must admit I feel a bit weird holding up my iPhone and turning around and around glaring at the screen. Wearing special glasses seems particular off-putting for many people, but then again it was considered a non-issue for watching the Avatar movie.
Finally there is the question “do we really need it or think it’s that very fun to do?” After all, I can find a pub either my pointing around my smartphone, or I can just keep the thing in a more discrete position and glance at Google maps, not to mention just asking around. I mention this last argument because I hear it rather frequently, but I don’t think it’s entirely justified. It is fun and practical to get in one movement information and tips about points of interest, and about where and how far I have to walk to get there, for instance.
AR will not only succeed because it’s technologically fancy, but also because people will find or produce great information and data, and organize all that in a compelling design.
I ‘m preparing for a barcamp in my hometown Antwerp (Belgium). My topic will be something which is very much related to my daily life in the newsroom: why and how to organize chat sessions for our newspaper community.
We use our chat platform, CoverItLive, for daily and weekly live shows, for live blogging, for brainstorming sessions with the community etc. It’s a very versatile tool, which allows for the integration of Twitter, streaming video, pics, videos, texts and links etc.
It learns us a lot about our coverage and what our community thinks about that coverage. Sometimes people come up with very useful and concrete suggestions. Above all, this 2D chat tool is rather immersive. People stay longer than for a simple site visit, we have contacts in a Ning community etc.
The fact that it’s synchronous adds some magic to it, and it enables people to discuss major news events as they unfold. Here is my presentation, you’ll see at the end what I really would like to achieve: to be able one day to organize a session in a real 3D virtual environment, for as many people as we reach now with our 2D chat box (about thousand a day, and for special events thousands of people).
The games seems to use a combination of missions, comics narratives… it’s all about solving the big world problems!
One of the missions is to investigate what it means to be a social innovator, and a number of possibilities are mentioned in this exhibit. One I particularly like:
Innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)
I think it’s important to use the technology and platforms people are used to, or at least start from there. Only a tiny minority of humanity is on Twitter, Second Life, or even Facebook Mobile.
There is this tension between wanting to promote new technologies and yet not ending up in a geeky echo chamber. If you want to use twitter, fine, but recontextualize it – use sms, or embed curated tweets on a simple site – this not only applies for poor African countries, but in Western communities as well.
This applies also for Second Life. If we want to be a vector of social change, it would be very useful to have a light version of it, which could be embedded in simple web contexts.
I confess: I’m rather clumsy building stuff in Second Life. I’m a blogger and love discussion groups and talk shows, but I’m not a builder – I simply feel I lack time and probably talent to build something interesting, so I just buy stuff. Or I’ve friends building things for me.
So I think that if I can integrate web content in Second Life, it cannot be that difficult – and indeed, I managed to create this media kiosk, putting up some pages of my own blogs, Metanomics and We Are the Network.
But much more is possible. Video, flash, all these webby things can be integrated now. Even by dummies (more techno babble and tutorials here). Today we’ll hear more about this at the Metanomics show at Noon SLT/PDT (9 pm CET), at a Q&A session with Linden Lab’s Esbee Linden, Viewer Product Manager and Amanda Linden, Executive Director, Product Marketing. For those who cannot attend (like me) there will be an archived video.
It’s not only a lack of time or of talent which somehow stopped me from exploring building in Second Life. It’s also that I had the impression that the techniques used were rather SL-specific. I always said to myself “why study Linden Scripting Language while I could use that time to learn JavaScript or ActionScript, stuff which is used so very much more than LSL?”
One of the nice aspects of all the changes now is that web technology becomes much more relevant in-world. As is explained on the Second Life Blogs:
With Shared Media, SL building now extends well beyond SL into the vast and varied skill set of Web development. Suddenly, skills like PHP, SQL, ActionScript, Apache and FMS can be used to create compelling inworld content. Flash and Flash Media Server (FMS) become particularly useful tools for creating animated, interactive Shared Media that can be kept in sync.
So suddenly even I feel inclined to experiment with combination of web technology and the possibilities of the the 3D virtual space.
This is rather new for me – I can imagine collaborating in-world using for instance Google Docs or MindMeister (mindmapping), but I’m sure much more is possible for collaboration and learning. If you have compelling ideas about this, don’t hesitate to let me know!
I’ve never been to There.com, and it seems I never will go there, because this virtual environment is closing down. Daniel Terdiman on CNet describes the world as follows:
The service, which launched in the fall of 2003, was a fully 3D social environment with a sophisticated economy, wonderful vehicles like hoverboard and hoverboats and, eventually, a wide variety of community-created content.
The sophisticated economy of There.com did not survive the recession, so CEO Michael Wilson explains, announcing today that his world will close on March 9th.
Wilson underlines that this world was a world “for everyone”:
Unlike other products, There was designed from the beginning to be a welcoming and comfortable place for everyone – not just gamers, not just people over 18, not just people with high end computers, and not just people on broadband.
It seems the members of There were “hardest hit” by the recession, and as Wilson says:
But, at the end of the day, we can’t cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There’s nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can’t support itself doesn’t work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were “directionally correct” and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.
Some first thoughts:
The immersive, at least partially user-generated open-ended virtual worlds, suffer. Metaplace disappeared as did Lively. In this context I won’t even mention the troubles of Forterra or of Project Wonderland, which are different types of virtual world projects.
Second Life seems to survive and is introducing essential stuff such as the integration of web content in the virtual world. This will rejoice the residents of Second Life and enhances the possibilities for business collaboration and education, but it’s not enough to attract the mainsteam web users. More will be needed, but I think Linden Lab is moving in the right direction: making things easier to use, moving closer to the web and especially the online social networks.
Second Life (Linden Lab) seems to be profitable (but has anyone outside Linden Lab and the shareholders the exact figures?), it not only has technologically sophisticated users, but also a solid business model.
User generated content is fascinating, and deserves respect. Virtual worlds, so it seems, are not here for eternity. Shouldn’t we be able to archive virtual worlds creations, for history’s sake? Is this in itself already not a reason to adopt common standards, enabling the migration of virtual content to other platforms?
Am I right to be relatively optimistic for Second Life, even though I don’t think it will go mainstream very soon? Or do you think that the whole concept of open-ended user-generated virtual worlds is in a crisis, and that Second Life won’t survive in the long run?
I confess: I’m rather clumsy building stuff in Second Life. I’m a blogger and love discussion groups and talk shows, but I’m not a builder – I simply feel I lack time and probably talent to build something interesting, so I just buy stuff. Or I’ve friends building things for me.