While this application is not about to lead me to a feast of wild strawberries in downtown Sydney just yet, is is a fantastic example of how technology can be used to bring us closer to our natural world rather than take us further away.
Mashing up crowd sourcing and citizen science principles, Boskoi feels like exactly the sort of approach that could help get a screen focused generation back in touch with the world around them. Imagine using AR tech for this and other crowd sourced/citizen science created ways to explore the urban environment, rather than to win a car (no offense MINI Getaway... i love that idea as well)
Here's more details on the application courtesy of The Pop-Up City
Augmented Foraging With Boskoi
By Joop de Boer | Published: Thursday November 4, 2010
Everywhere in the world you can find plenty of remarkable fruits, vegetables, mushrooms and herbs in the wild. Not only in the forests of Africa, but also in metropolitan areas around the world an enormous variety of edible species can be found. Boskoi is a new open source project that aims to unlock the collective knowledge about these edible species and their location. Boskoi is a tool to explore and map the ‘edible landscape’ wherever you are while using your mobile phone.
The app enables users to submit own findings and post these to the map. Additions to Boskoi will be reviewed by an editorial board, considering toxicity, pollution and endangered or rare species. Findings can be reported on the website or through the beta app for Android phones. The team has set up some rules though to respect nature, ownership and health: (1) be friendly (ask permission if ownership is unclear), (2) be generous (how much do you really need? Leave most for others), (3) be alert (beware of toxicity and do not tread on other plants when picking), and (4) be careful (only add locations that are robust and can survive limited foraging).
Boskoi is a project by the Amsterdam-based foragers of Urban Edibles, initiated by research and design collective FoAM and supported by Urbanibalism and Pollinize. The app is based on Ushahidi, an open source platform for mobile phones that people in crisis situations use to report what happens. The app was built for the post-election crisis in Kenya in 2008. Ushahidi was also used to map the catastrophe in Haiti and the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. For Boskoi “report an incident” is changed to “report a find”. The app aims to highlight what is growing and living in our daily environment as it stresses the quality of the eco system close to the city. The makers of the app found out that the diversity of plants in The Netherlands is higher in the urban than in rural areas. The idea of Boskoi is to develop new networks between people and their living environment through ‘augmented foraging’.
In several countries online mapping networks regarding freely available fruits and vegetables are already running, for instance the Urbana-Champaign Fruit Map. To combine the data collected by all of these ‘sidewalk harvesting’ projects, the initiators of Boskoi are planning to create a ‘Forage Markup Language’ in order to make the knowledge available to everyone. Another future innovation could be a culinary plug-in with special recipes.
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
We want to show some of these things in an "experience video", that shows a normal day in a couple of years when all these technologies are affordable enough to be used everywhere. This video is the result of our experiment with open innovation, read more about our experiment here. Big thanks to all the people from TAT and around the world who helped out and sometimes shared their ideas and sometimes gave us homework on our own ideas.
Well never done this before, but just loved this post from the Amnesia Blog that i had to copy the whole thing here. Awesome mobile interface stuff and yet another reason why i'm backing Android to be the dominant, universal OS of the future. Thanks @eunmac and @razorfish
I have seen concepts from this company before (more about this below) and they always seem to be taking different approaches to the rest of the world.
The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) has yet again showcased a UI they call Velvet – pull out a widget or Google Maps query, and a sheet of your desired result waves with the virtual wind, before stretching out flat for you to more comfortably interact with.
This is what TAT has to say about the Tablet UIs out there and why they are different:
On one hand we have companies that scale phone UIs to tablets. On the other hand we have companies offering the full blown desktop experience scaled down to tablet size. We believe that both of these approaches will result in crippled user experiences. For example, the tablet form factor is perfect for media consumption and this could be manifested in the UI. TAT recognizes tablets as a radically different type of device – personal and mobile yet powerful and creative. We are now on a quest to design fantastic UIs that are optimized for this device space.
Here is the Velvet UI in action
As I said before these guys have some pretty awesome, yet radical ideas – check this augmented reality ID out – TAT augmented ID
I have an Android phone and I have been looking for a decent home screen and I really hope this little beauty will hit the market at some time soon – TAT Home
These guys are definitely someone to look out for in the future – if you want to learn more about them, check out their blog
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...?
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
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.
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.
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.
OK, catching up with stuff, so apologies if this is a little old. Still, nice move by Yelp towards making AR something useful for the real world. Thanks Contagious. Yelp AR
01/09/2009
Oh, but the barriers, they just keep crashing down. Augmented reality has had something of a bad press recently, when a spate of largely pointless branded applications served only to reveal that 1) most people do their research in the same places, hence the coincidence of timing and 2) the novelty of technology for technology’s sake is shortlived. The potential for AR apps on mobile, where the practical benefits become obvious, were hampered by Apple’s insistence that we would have to wait for the iPhone OS 3.1 update, and low user numbers for the few handsets compatible with Google’s Android platform.
(All this is said with a nod to the innovators over at Dutch financial institution ING, whose AR app for the Android platform was released in January and allows users to locate their nearest cashpoint. http://tiny.cc/ING784)
However, user review hub Yelp’s new application for the iPhone has managed to combine the powerful tenets of purpose, functionality and technology in order to create an augmented reality app indicative of the future we were promised when the technology was first unveiled. Not only does it offer news and reviews on restaurants etc. in the area, when you shake your iPhone three times to wake the inbuilt accelerometer you can activate a feature they call Monocle. Monocle then allows you to use your iPhone camera viewfinder to layer augmented reality information over the objects in the window, in real time. There’s a demo here that explains it fully, courtesy of Mashable: http://tiny.cc/mashAR
Obviously this is a cunning use of the technology, and ideally matched to Yelp’s raison d’être. What we find fascinating is the way in which this application was created, discovered, and seeded, almost with a buzz mechanism built in to the product.
he Monocle window, once you get it working, says: ‘The Monocle is activated. Yelp thought reality was boring, so we augmented it’. Blogosphere hero Robert Scoble was the first to uncover the ‘easter egg’ functionality, and then spread the word to iPhone enthusiasts eager to share the ‘secret’, particularly as it seemed to have been constructed in direct breach of Apple’s own mandate concerning AR. This is the stuff of which PR ripples are made - a secret functionality, a useful application of a prevalent technology, and a targeted launch designed for online chatter. We hope that this smart thinking from Yelp is indicative of AR’s evolution into a valid medium for information delivery and branding.
Ooops... found and saved this post as a draft, now can't remeber where i got it. Sorry, but thanks for this on a new virtual world for mobiles... one step close to a unified, 3D, virtual reality
Bobba scheduled for September launch
August 31, 2009
After successfully developing it’s three year wireless research project, Mini Friday (a successful mobile virtual world), Sulake - the parent company of Habbo - has confirmed that Bobba is scheduled to launch in September. Bobba is Sulake’s newest addition to it’s virtual worlds. Unlike Habbo, which runs on a computer, Bobba is a virtual world accessible from mobile devices. The mobile virtual world has some visual similarities to Habbo, but Bobba is targeting an older demographic of 16 years and older.
Mika Salmi, Sulake’s Chairman of the Board, told Reuters that the new world will be the first virtual world that can be accessed directly from the iPhone or iPod Touch, either via a wireless connection or an operator’s network. In another comment to Reuters, Sulake’s Chief Executive Timo Soininen said “Bobba is still very much in the early development phase … Our aim is to build a virtual world, which is virtually platform free — it can be accessed practically anywhere, with all kinds of devices.”
Bobba opened public testing earlier this year and can currently be accessed from mobile phones running the Nokia Symbian operating system. The virtual world currently has over 28,000 registered accounts.
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.
OK... without implementation, an idea is nothing. But still, is it annoying to see someone else create something you've presented (almost word for word), and had rejected in the past. Nice work IKEA and thanks MobileAD news
IKEA Uses Mobile Augmented Reality To Engage Shoppers’ Imagination
Earlier in 2009 IKEA launched a new line of furniture, IKEA PS, whose objective was to stretch the idea of design, to think about empowering people, and to minimize the impact on the world.
With such unusual designs, IKEA felt they had to do something special to help customers imagine how this furniture would fit into their houses, so they turned to a mobile augmented reality solution.
The Portable Interior Planner application gives customers the ability to see exactly how the new designs will look in their home, without the need to actually move any furniture!
Mobile Augmented Reality has become a hot topic recently. An “Augmented Reality” system deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data, and generates a composite view for the user that is the combination of the real scene viewed by the user and a virtual scene generated by the computer
The beauty of the IKEA application is the simplicity and strong appeal of the basic proposition: wouldn’t it be nice if you could bring all these new furniture designs home to see how they might look in your own house. While this would be very difficult to do in the physical world, it is a perfect application for mobile augmented reality.
To help overcome a customer’s lack of imagination, IKEA worked with Ogilvy and Mindmatic to design and build a mobile application that is a portable interior planning tool.
Here’s how it works:
In the application are images of many of the pieces of furniture from the new IKEA PS line. The customer selects the product they are interested in, and then selects “Take a Picture”.
The customer aims the camera of the phone at the area of the room where the furniture might be placed. The image of the room appears on the phone screen, along with the IKEA furniture. The furniture can be scaled larger or smaller to make it fit better in the scene.
Once the image is the way the customer wants it, they use the camera to take a picture of the scene.
If the customer likes the photo, they can either save it on the phone, or send it via MMS directly from within the application
How it looks
Here are some images of the IKEA application in use.
Distribution
The IKEA PS made the mobile application available to consumers in three ways:
1) In-store posters urged customers to send a free text message to IKEA to receive a link to download the application.
2) Customers going to the IKEA website were able to enter their mobile number and receive a download of the application.
3) Bluetooth pillars were installed in IKEA certain stores. These would periodically sent out signals to nearby phones inviting the subscriber to download the application.
Conclusion
We believe that the IKEA interior planning tool application is a great example of applying the unique attributes of mobile to a specific customer situation. In this case, providing customers with an easy-to-use means to understand exactly what a piece of furniture would look like in their home.
A couple of key points to take away from this campaign:
• Sometimes simple, single use apps are the best. As Magnus Jern, MD of Golden Gekko told us when discussing how to develop great marketing apps, “Prioritize just the key functionality, avoid the temptation to make the app do too many things, or you will never finish.” (from MobiAD article Mobile Applications: The Next Big Thing In Mobile Marketing?)
• The relatively low development costs for mobile apps means that this type of app can be build economically for a specific campaign (although this sort of capability could certainly be an ongoing part of IKEA marketing).
• Emerging technologies, such as mobile augmented reality or visual interactivity will be an important force in enabling new opportunities for brands to communicate with their clients, especially with branded utilities. The key will be to marry new technologies with real customer needs in a simple to use way. The proper application of mobile technology with a good user interface to offer a specific solution is what’s really important.
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.
1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian
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.
2. RFID Tags & Transponders
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.
3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices
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.
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.
5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph
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.
6. Mind Reading
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.
7. Natural Language Processing
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.
The Future
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.
Google’s breaking news left and right today. Of course the big news is that 
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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 
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. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vl-wtGR-M8X91Qpg9Ei-5mhwFpvRXRnlMhf_DcH4erausHIZ7Pl3tw_0iLvaMhS6THe-PnS7CrFfqtQ5KfG3StRbvbkIcPHf9i4NDEMhxZIPqH1DUp9-lBrz_ax46LrYFXRJwoeN53e0WGzXJOY_qS=s0-d)
Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at 
