Unlogo

Thanks Lester for the tip. Interesting AR project that aims at removing specific items from digital reality, rather than adding them. In this case icons from videos

Unlogo Intro from Jeff Crouse on Vimeo.

Nokia & Burton = push snowboarding

Fantastic open source approach and what a pointer to what Nike+ could have been if Apple didn;t do it ;)



http://blogs.nokia.com/pushburton/

SMS slingshot

Some cool interactive projection stuff, Thanks Digital Buzz blog.

Always amazes me that this sort of stuff just doesn't seem to have much uptake in Australia

iButterfly

Nice AR game / slash coupon app

Video: PSFK Conference NYC: Kevin Slavin’s “This Platform Called Everyday Life”

Another older one, but love this guy's point of view... thanks PSFK

April 28, 2009

At PSFK Conference NYC, Kevin Slavin gave a captivating presentation on “This Platform Called Everyday Life”, in which he discussed the evolving nature of the objects surrounding us. Kevin, Managing Director and co-founder of Area/Code, explained how pervasive technologies are changing the way we relate to our physical environment and everything in it – from playground balls, to houseplants to sneakers.

Kevin opened his talk with a story about a fascinatingly bizarre woman who had such intense feelings for the Berlin Wall that she married it. Through his talk, Kevin demonstrated how the woman’s relationship with the Wall, while extreme, parallels the relationships we’re developing with the material objects we love, use, play with, and wear. Technologies that give an object an ‘identity’ and make it ’smarter’ (RFID, accelerometers, QR codes, GPS) are breathing artificial life into our favorite unliving things. These technological innovations are, in essence, moving us towards a complete convergence with the objects in our lives… Maybe we are becoming more dependent and defined by our possessions because they are becoming more dependent and defined by us. The talk is eye-opening – watch it in full below.

Flashlight Projector Map Concept

Nice idea... why use a screen to augment reality when you can just shine the layers anywhere! Thanks Toxel

February 21st, 2010 | Tech |

Tamtam flashlight map concept tells you where to go by projecting directions right in front of you, thus generating a whole new playful and intuitive way of experiencing navigation.

In case the user gets lost, Tamtam can also project a more traditional map onto any surface. The map is zoomable and scrollable like any digital map.

AR visions

OK... lots of this stuff out there, but i do like these two... if a little trippy (Thanks Digital Buzz Blog)

Augmented (Hyper) Reality Demo

Ahhh so is this where augmented reality will take us in the next decade? Hopefully not, but I can see what Keiichi Matsuda was thinking when creating this amazing video, with the blend between architecture, augmented reality and consumerism combining to create a pretty hectic (or is that enhanced?) kind of life. Hmmm.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

This would be in direct comparison to Nokia’s Augmented Hyper Reality Demo released late last year where the combination of Augmented reality will supposedly simplify and energize life.

My take; this is still a decade off before it will have the supported hardware / apps to be remotely feasible. You just never know what’s around the corner, but it probably won’t be this!?

Projection WOWness

Not much to say really except OMFG!

Thanks Kate! via The Next Web

Augmented Reality Platform Covers Building Exterior

Thanks PSFK for this. I know there is some much hype about the AR space these days, a lot of it unfounded, but the sheer scale of this just makes it incredible. Wonder if i can get a client to turn a whole building into a comms channel?

January 7, 2010

Located in the shopping district surrounding Tokyo’s Tachikawa Station, the exterior of the mall-like N Building has been covered with QR code data so that store information can be captured from street level. The design teams at Qosmo and Teradadesign Architects have also put together an iPhone app that gathers real-time information and conversations within the building through an AR-like interface.

Watch a video of the project below:

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

Augmented reality - WOW there's lots of it about

Hi all and welcome to 2010. I'm getting off to a slow start dealing with jet lag post South African trip... always love that place.

Anyway, for the first post of the year i thought I'd clump together a load of interseting examples from the AR bandwagon. Definitely not going away and it's really starting to look like it something actually useful

First a look at AR vs VR from Techcrunch

Augmented Reality Vs. Virtual Reality: Which One Is More Real?

by Erick Schonfeld on January 6, 2010

Remember when virtual reality was all the rage? It had a good run, especially during the 1990s, and perhaps culminating with Second Life in the decade which just closed. But virtual reality is old in the tooth. People are a lot more interested these days in “augmented reality,”surpassed “virtual reality” as a search term sometime last summer (see chart). or at least they are on Google where it

Maybe people are searching for it more just because they are not sure what it means, but it definitely is entering the collective consciousness. If virtual reality is a complete immersion in a digital world, augmented reality (AR) is more a digital overlay onto the real world. It enhances the real world with digital data, and therefore it is much more interesting than a completely fabricated environment. There is an element of magic to AR apps because they juxtapose data and graphics where they have no business showing up.

The advent of touchscreen mobile phones with GPS and cameras such as the iPhone and Android phones is giving rise to an array of AR apps from Sekai Camera, Layar, and more. Generally, these apps show the world around you as seen through your phone’s camera, but in addition to functioning as a viewfinder, your screen also functions as a regular computer screen. With help from the GPS and on-board compass, it can place information or graphics on top of buildings or objects seen through the viewfinder.

But that is just the start. Universityresearch labs are springing up to explore augmented realty as a new computing interface. The latest AR app is the Parrot AR.Drone, and combines a flying remote controlled toy with an iPhone app. The app turns the iPhone into a remote control (a concept we’ve seen applied to video games), but there is also a camera on the drone, which let’s you see from its point of view and play virtual shoot ‘em up games with other drones. The shooting happens on the screen, while the toys fly through the air in real life. There is also a solo mode where you can shoot enemy jets on the screen juxtaposed into your living room or wherever you happen to be flying the drone. (Watch the video below to see what I mean).

You can take your virtual reality and get lost on Second Life. I’ll take augmented reality any day. It’s just more real.

Secondly, a list of the seven things you need to know about AR from the Guardian (thanks Simon)

Seven things you need to know about augmented reality

Smartphones are bringing the once-SF concept of augmented reality into the everyday world

Augmented reality: the Nearest Tube iPhone app

Augmented reality is a lively creative mess. Now that smartphones have relieved us from unstylish fantasies of goggles, the technology is finally getting real. In 2010, the world is becoming subtitled, and your future will be augmented.

Augmented reality applications enable users to see additional layers of data when they view normal objects through smartphones or webcams.

Since programming an augmented reality application is easy, every computer student can develop augmented software for a smartphone. Very many of them are. These days, applications mushroom everywhere a bit of augmentable content is to be found.

As in the early days on the internet it is a wild augmented west, and so you need a guide. In part one of our review, we highlight the seven most important things the informed user of today needs to know about augmented reality.

Part two will focus on journalism and augmented reality.

1. Layar

Layar is paving the way. As the witty Japanese introduction illustrates, Layar makes use of the smartphone camera and compass. As you look on your screen information is overlayed on top of the world surrounding you.

A lot of augmented reality applications allow that, but what makes Layar so appealing is that it allows external developers to submit, well, layers, a decision that helped it to become the most flourishing augmented reality application even though it is only available for the Android phones and not ready for the iPhone.

Popular examples are Wikitude, which presents data about nearby points of interest, or Yelp which is providing reviews of nearby restaurants, shopping and nightlife possibilities. Since it can be used for any form of data there is even an application showing where hundreds of billions of US dollars of US recovery funding got spent.

2. Pathfinder

Lost? Among the most popular applications at the moment are travel applications, perfect for augmented reality. Nearest Tube, London Tube and London Bus help you handy to find your way through London, but of course there is an application for nearly every large city by now.

Several astronomical applications transform you into an 21st century explorer, such as the Heads Up Navigator, the sympathetic old school Theodolite and Sun Seeker or Accrossair. And there will be more to come, as a world full of subtitles makes perfect sense for lost travellers.

3. WordSnug, the essential sympathetic nerd tool

If you find yourself holding tight to your laptop on the street seeking somewhere with free Wi-Fi, download WorkSnug. It's a navigation app on the same principle as the nearest-tube-applications, but also provides you with information about Wi-Fi spots' power supply and coffee quality, and makes it easy to get in touch with other lonesome nerds.

At the moment WorkSnug is only available for the iPhone and in London, but it's coming to Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and Paris in February before hitting San Francisco and New York in March.

4. Let me entertain you

The addition of an 3D object is another important augmented reality feature. Several games already make use of this: Mosquitos, Wanted Dead or Alive, and Firefighter 360 place targets in the world surrounding you while the multiplayer game Gunman simply uses the T-shirt colour of your friends.

If you are not a bloodthirsty teenager but a knackered parent you should get The Hidden Park, a game that combines technology and outdoor experience; this neatly designed iPhone game keeps your child busy in London's Kensington Gardens or South Bank, New York's Central Park or Munich's Englische Garten.

So after the interactive media artists Blast Theory have already tested what's possible in urban gaming, and augmented reality will boost this further. Yet to be invented is the augmented reality movie, but you can watch an early version of what might be to come in the video above.

5. Everyday use

One thing that's striking about augmented reality is that it is so everyday. In 2009, applications were developed for a lot of different day-to-day situations. They help you find your car, test the size of the parcel you packed before you go to the post office, arrange and test new furniture, or present information about the food you're buying like the one Giuseppe Costanza developed at London's Central Saint Martin's for the communication design course.

6. Why not the other way around? Augmented virtuality

Interact with your computer using the physical world: SixthSense uses natural hand gestures to interact with the computer. It projects the screen on your hand or any other surface using a tiny small wearable gestural interface. Developed by the Fluid Interfaces Group of the MIT Media Lab, this application is yet to be mass-marketed but pretty impressive.

7. If you want to stay on top of things, have a look at the following blogs

2010 will be the year where augmented reality will reach the mass market, because finally smartphones are widely available, the applications are easy to use and pretty useful. To stay on top of developments, follow the London based Augmented Planet blog run by Lester Madden, The Augmented Times, or Games Alfresco, which is a bit more dedicated to the reinvention of interactive entertainment.

If you really wanna dig deep, get down with augmented reality guru Bruce Sterling, who recently gave a keynote about the dawn of the augmented reality industry.

Watch out for part two of our special on augmented reality and journalism.

And finally, from Springwise, a cool Layar app making AR useful in a tough environment... the madness of a music festival... assuming that anyone is sober enough to operate their phone that is.

Just a month or so after augmented reality browser Layar won EUR 75,000 in Vodafone's Mobile Clicks contest, the technology was already being put to work in a custom-designed application for Louisiana's Voodoo Experience music festival.

Layar is a free mobile browser for Android devices and the iPhone that overlays computer-generated information on top of real-time, on-screen images from the handset's built-in camera. The Voodoo app was designed by New Orleans ad firm Zehnder Communications using Layar 2.0 to let festival-goers with enabled phones get information on performances, attractions and services simply by pointing their phone cameras toward key parts of the festival grounds. When viewing concert stages, for instance, one custom AR layer provided information on lineups, schedules and current artists performing, including artist profiles and Web links. Pointing a phone camera at a vendor would show menus and pricing, while other points of interest highlighted by the app included vendor locations, artist displays, restrooms, ATMs, entrances and exits, medical sites and other services. Zehnder was one the first 50 firms worldwide named as developers of the Layar platform. A demo of the Voodoo app is available on Vimeo.

In addition to a whole new world of entertainment and useful information for mobile consumers, augmented reality also opens up a wealth of new OFF=ON opportunities for advertisers. Time to explore the possibilities for *your* tech-savvy brand...?

Website: www.z-comm.com
Contact: jzehnder@z-comm.com

Google goggles

Found this a while ago and forgot to post it. Yet another useful AR app on andriod. Thanks Mashable

Put on Your Google Goggles and Visually Search the World

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Google’s breaking news left and right today. Of course the big news is that real-time search is live, but the release of Google Goggles can’t be overlooked. The brand-new addition to Google Labs is an experimental application for Android devices that supports visual search.

How does it work? Just open the app, snap a photo and voilà: Google () will process the image and return search results. The photo search functionality eliminates the need to type or say anything on your mobile device, and it adds context to your real-world surroundings.

While the technology is pretty remarkable, Google admits that it is still in its infancy. So while some image searches work brilliantly — think photos of books, business cards, artwork, places, logos and landmarks — don’t be too disappointed if your image searches for food, animals, plants and cars are less than stellar.

Still, the application should prove useful, and we hope to see versions of it made available for other smartphone users as well. For now, though, iPhone () users can turn to a number of different augmented reality applications for camera-enabled search functionality.

Watch the video below for a demonstration of Google Goggles.

Four Mobile Applications That Peer Into an Augmented Spiritual World

Spooky AR thanks to Mobile Behaviour

Four Mobile Applications That Peer Into an Augmented Spiritual World

Japanese video game Fatal Frame spun a narrative around the capturing of spirits using a camera obscura, viewing a spiritual world through man-made lens. Sure it's a little eerie, but the hype-machine that is augmented reality builds off a similar concept, allowing us to peer into the digital realm. Developers have played with this idea, creating mobile applications that imitate Japanese folklore.

Ghostwire for the Nintendo DSi uses the embedded microphone and camera to allow users to scan the room for ghosts and then bribe them away.

GhostCam for the iPhone gives the ability to haunt any captured image, making for a fun scare. Ghost Radar detects nearby spirits and provides a flux readout alongside any words spoken. Finally, Mobilizy released an augmented reality app that gives users a disturbing view of the lost Twin Towers. All of these add to the mystery of the unknown. Happy (belated) Halloween.

Your Augmented Future: The 3 Hottest Videos From International AR Symposium

Cheers Read Write Web for these peaks at where AR is heading

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / October 26, 2009 12:09 PM / 4 Comments

3D virtual pets to hold in your hand and interact with, software that turns drawn objects into movable 3D objects subject to the laws of physics and a Microsoft hiring-coup. Those are the stories behind the hottest videos from the eye and brain-candy world of Augmented Reality, as seen at last week's International Symposium on Augmented and Extended Reality in Orlando, Florida.

Who says the web is all about pages that you view in a browser? Check out these three visions of a fast-approaching future where data is drawn from and overlaid on top of the real world around us.

Kid Stuff: Eye Pet

The Eye Pet is a virtual critter that you can interact with through a webcam on your computer. Check out this demo where the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe pets the animal and spins through a 3D menu of toys to play use in playing with it. It's pretty awesome. The Eye Pet is expected to be released for the PS3 game system as early as next month.

That looks like a lot of fun for kids (who knows about the psychological impact) but imagine other interactive 3D objects with menus of options like this. Occupational training possibilities? Sports practice? There seems to be a lot of possibilities.

Thanks to Canadian PhD student Gail Carmichael for shooting that video.

The New AR Paradigm: AR Sketch

We wrote about this international project last week and the team behind it went on to win the Best Student Paper award at the ISMAR conference.

AR Sketch takes drawn images, processes live video capture of the drawings and turns them into 3D image overlays. Then it subjects them to a physics simulation. The team behind it just happened to hack into the private API for live video processing on the iPhone and make it available to developers around the world, too.

Popular AR apps like Yelp or Layar on mobile phones don't actually know what they are looking at, they just know where you are and which direction you're facing. Thus they can tell you what they believe you're looking at. Marker-based AR apps know only to look for one thing - a printed marker with a pattern on it that triggers display of an overlay. Sketch AR needs neither guesses nor markers - it processes and augments what you're actually looking at.

It's nuts. As Ori Inbar wrote about the Sketch AR team in an overview of ISMAR, "Their work is revolutionizing the AR world by avoiding the need to print markers - or any images whatsoever."

Here Comes Microsoft AR!

Oxford's Georg Klein, whom Inbar calls "the smartest Computer Vision guy on the block," just joined Microsoft this month, conference-goers learned. Is Microsoft going to make a major Augmented Reality play? They'd be fools not to explore the possibility. They don't want to be left out in the cold if AR does become the next version of the web. Here's what their new man's been working on.

These exciting examples of Augmented Reality have little to do with mobile location awareness, a nice reminder that there's a whole lot more to the field. Mobile AR browsers are the best known commercial services so far, but academic research on other forms of AR has been going on for years.

Ready to browse and interact with data on top of the physical world, through webcams, mobile phones and increasingly svelte AR glasses? A future when such experiences are mainstream may be fast approaching.

Video painting

Thanks Piero for sharing this mad stuff from SWEATSHOPPE

SWEATSHOPPE, 4spots, the landing extras

by SWEATSHOPPE

SWEATSHOPPE, 4spots, the landing extras from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo.

In an effort to establish new platforms for public art and performance, the
multimedia duo SWEATSHOPPE has developed a new interactive technology that enables
them to explore the relationship between video, mark making and architecture. Dubbed
"video painting", this technology allows them to essentially "paint" video onto any
surface. Shooting in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, the duo spent weeks
documenting their work in urban settings to create "The Landing" the first in a
series of episodes that showcases their work as artist, technologist and performers.
This video shows 4 full uncut extra clips form the landing.

sweatshoppe.org
myspace.com/sweatshoppe
brunolevy.com

Your Cyborg Eye Will Talk to You

Great stuff from ReadWriteWeb... bionic eyes. I want them

Written by Dana Oshiro / August 31, 2009 9:30 PM

Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum, Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter.

Says Parviz, "We're starting with a simple product, a contact lens with a single light source, and we aim to work up to more sophisticated lenses that can superimpose computer-generated high-resolution color graphics on a user's real field of vision."

For now, Parviz mentions that single pixel visual cues for gamers and the hearing impaired are already quite possible with the lens prototypes. The group has also experimented with non-invasive biomonitoring including checking glucose levels for diabetics.

Some of the obvious challenges of building an augmented reality contact lens include:
1. The Need for Custom Parts: Regular circuitry and LEDs are incompatible with regular contact lenses. Every piece of this project must be fabricated from scratch.

2. Physical Constraints: The group must attempt to fit transistors, radio chips, antennas, diffusion resistors, LEDs and photodetectors onto a miniscule polymer disc. Additionally, the team is required to control lens position and light intensity relative to the pupil. And finally, because the lens is so close to the corneal surface, the group must project images away from the cornea using either micro-lenses or lasers.
3. User Safety: In addition to protecting the eye against chemicals, heat and toxins, the lens components must be semi-transparent in order for the wearer to view their surroundings.

"We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions. As far as we're concerned, the possibilities extend as far as the eye can see." And you thought the iPhone SDK was a tough nut to crack.

For Parviz's complete seven page article, check out the IEEE Spectrum's Biomedical page.

How Demand for Digital Experiences Is Transforming Our Physical Spaces

Great post from Garrick Schmitt on Adage, via Mobile Behaviour

And Creating 'Screens' Where There Weren't Any
Posted by Garrick Schmitt on 09.01.09 @ 08:44 AM

At times it seems that the entire world has become a screen. The proliferation of devices of all shapes and sizes -- from the jumbotrons in Times Square to the micro-menus of Apple's Nano -- surround us. And, of course, the sheer multitude of these screens (GPS, iPod, mobile phone, LCD TV, Nintendo DS, etc.) has begun to change our interaction with the physical world.

But what's most interesting about this development is not the abundance of screens, per se, but about how our culture's seemingly ravenous desire for digital experiences is changing our expectations for physical spaces -- both in public and private.

In the past few years, a host of artists, programmers and marketers have melded art and science to create new, digitally driven experiences that are redefining the way we think about our urban and personal landscapes.

Some of the better-known advertising work here includes Mini's groundbreaking "Motorby"HBO's "Voyeur" campaign, which transformed a New York City street into a theater. campaign, where an interactive digital billboard responds to Mini drivers passing by, and

But the trend is more than just "digital out of home," which is a phrase that gets used a bit too broadly to describe this cultural shift. Instead, it's a complete rethinking of our public spaces as digital experiences.

Project Blinkenlights: Perhaps the most influential and pioneering work done so far has been by this German group, which transforms office buildings into digital interactive installations. Its most recent project, Stereoscope, took over Toronto City Hall and created an interactive, visual concert.

Blinkenlights Stereoscope Toronto documentation video from Tim Pritlove on Vimeo.

The experience went beyond just a light display; it was participatory as well. Attendees were invited to play video games on the sides of the building by using their mobile phones. And artists could create their own animations for the installation using Project Blinkenlights' open animation formats and tools.

555 Kubik: Similar to the work of Project Blinkenlights, the 555 Kubik project is a digital installation that turns a naked building facade into a compelling piece of art through 3-D projections.

555 Kubik extended version from UrbanScreen on Vimeo.

The project was created by UrbanScreen, a European agency that specializes in large-scale projection on urban surfaces.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra: The YouTube Symphony Orchestra was an attempt to crowdsource a virtual orchestra via auditions through YouTube. For the public performance, which featured 96 professional and amateur musicians from 30-plus countries, Obscura Digital specifically mapped Carnegie Hall's architecture to project 20,000 square feet of full-resolution video and dramatically enhance the event.

Livestrong Chalkbot: As part of Lance Armstrong's return to the Tour de France and his Livestrong organization's mission to cure cancer, Nike commissioned the Livestrong Chalkbot. Created by DeepLocal and StandardRobot, the Chalkbot enabled thousands of people to have their messages (submitted digitally) chalked along the route of this year's Tour.

'Top Chef Las Vegas': For this season of "Top Chef Las Vegas," Fallon and Monster teamed up for one of the more clever uses of mobile and digital-billboard advertising. The team created an interactive casino in Rockefeller Plaza that highlighted the Las Vegas element of the show and allowed passers-by to play interactive slot machines with their mobile phones for the chance to win $5,000 -- now that's an incentive for engagement.

While the melding of digital and physical has been done well before, it's often been in fits and starts. But it's only been as of late, as the technology has become cheaper and connectivity more pervasive, that we've started to see a more profound shift in digital altering of our public spaces. The emergence of radio-frequency identification and augmented reality and shift toward branded destinations -- see the O2 in the U.K. -- will only accelerate the trend.

Leave it to Guinness to give us an early taste. Working with London's Red Urban, Guinness placed RFID tags on its team's rugby balls and players, providing real-time data for fans and coaches alike. Running pace, kicking power and passing speed are all monitored -- allowing a digital window into a physical event that is just scratching the surface of what's possible.

If the Guinness RFID work is any indicator, perhaps the future won't be about screens at all -- it may simply become a matter of data and sensors.

Cross channel AR game from Lego

Looking forward to seeing this in action

Anyone can sit there and watch American Gladiators on TV, but fans of Lego's Bionicle toys can now battle it out online in a new interactive video game experience.

Canadian kids-entertainment powerhouse Corus has partnered with Lego on a new campaign called "Bionicle Glatorian Legends" to promote the Bionicles, a line of robot-like toys produced by Lego. The centerpiece of the campaign is new augmented reality video game technology on YTV.com. Essentially, it brings the user into the game via a webcam with flash animation and the online and "real" worlds are blended together. Users signal their participation by logging on with their webcam and signalling the game visually with a marker that they can download on YTV.com.

The campaign starts on Aug. 31 and the two augmented reality games will be available for six weeks. It is targeted at kids aged 6 to 12, a viewership that coincides with the target demographic of YTV's Crunch programming on Saturday mornings. The campaign's broadcast tie-in comes on Aug. 29 at 9 a.m. when YTV host Andy will show kids how to play the game during the morning programming.

"It's a brand new way to engage kids online," Tim Cormick, VP client Kids are invited to battle it out on YTV.com with an innovative new online video game technology.marketing at Corus Television, tells MiC. "As far as we know, it's never been done on any other network's website."

The campaign was born when Corus approached Lego with the new technology, and Lego, through their agency Starcom, replied with a brief outlining their Bionicle strategy. It was a good fit, says Cormick.

There is a detailed, ongoing storyline behind the Bionicles toys, and the release of this campaign ties in with the introduction of a new chapter in the Bionicles' story. It also ties in with a new Bionicle DVD release on Sept. 15 that will promote the new storyline.

"The idea from a business perspective is by engaging the fans, they want to come back for more," says Cormick. "The way you want to continue the story is with the products themselves."

The campaign will be promoted through YTV with ad spots, on-air billboards, and on YTV.com via leaderboards and box ads.

www.ytv.com

7 Technologies Shaping the Future of Social Media

Yummy future (and current) tech stuff from mashable

June 1st, 2009 | by Mike Laurie15 Comments

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.

In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.

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1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian

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Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.

The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.

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2. RFID Tags & Transponders

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While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.

For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.

But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.

And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).

Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.

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3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices

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The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.

Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.

But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.

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4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality

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Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.

That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.

That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.

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5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph

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Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.

OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook () are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.

Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.

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6. Mind Reading

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My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.

But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there areproofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.

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7. Natural Language Processing

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Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.

Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.

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The Future

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Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.

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More social media resources from Mashable:

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- Tweet Street: 7 Extraordinary Twitter Uses in the Home

- The Evolution of the Social Media API

- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates