Our ‘Memestreme RCW’ project, funded by AFLF, is an iPhone 3GS based ‘Augmented Reality’ AR application. The following brief history of AR may assist in your understanding of following articles in this our 2009 project blog.
Augmented Reality, AR as the name suggests is reality that’s augmented, Mechanically, I guess the first killer app was the telescope; check this out Galileo, this little app doesn't change your reality but it certainly enhances it, hope you can find a use for it, and don’t mention heliocentricity in your regular chats with the Pope. These days AR is more or less exclusively computer based and I’ll pull in a definition from Wikipedia at the end of this rant.
In 1990 Boeing Aerospace were experimenting with video-enabled goggles for their airframe electricians. As electricians worked on sections of fuselage cabling, the correct wiring configuration was displayed on their heads-up display, this AR display thus aiding [augmenting] their personal technical know-how and paper based wiring diagrams. The project was a success, wiring confusion/mistakes was all but eliminated, but due to the overall clumsiness of the hardware and software, relatively poor computer processor speeds and the sheer cost of the equipment the research results were archived and the equipment cannibalized for other projects.
Fast forward to 1992 when ‘The Lawnmower Man’ hits the movie screen with an AR techno-drama that turns a simple man into a genius, and in true Hollywood style, the augmented brain power of this computer-assisted-simpleton scenario catapults our unwitting dude into a demonic nerd with attitude bent on World Domination, I can’t spoil the ending cos he dies. Notwithstanding, the high-end graphics, AR sensory suit and body harness used on set gave a leading edge view of how much more scientifically mainstream AR systems had improved and become.
A personal pivotal moment in AR interest arrived for me in June 2002 in a Jumbo jet. I was on my way to deliver a presentation at the Calgary 2002 WIPCE conference ‘Towards a pedagogy of the distressed’ discussing the praxis and technologies I’d found useful delivering ITC competencies to Indigenous adults in remote regions of Central Australia. Anyhow, I’d bought the April 2002 edition of ‘Scientific American’ [Click here to download] to read in-flight. I just remember excitedly reading the article on AR [Augmented Reality: A New Way of of Seeing] 4 or 5 times; and had some form of epiphany, Brave New World and Big Brother be damned, this was hot [and I've spent much time since then following developments].
The necessary technological infrastructure was in place, evolving sure but existent, the web was evolving potently and there was so much information out there that wanted to be free! It was just a fantastic article on the shape of AR to come, I feel its still a ground breaking article and well worth a read, given where we up to technically in 02 i.e. :
No Web 2.0 apps [ flickr, blogs, twitter etc] in 2002;
✓ google announced a major partnership with AOL to offer google search to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com,
✓ weak high-end mobile phones [“these days nearly everyone uses a mobile phone. The little devices have become far more than just a telephone. They can take photos, and even receive moving images.”]
✓ packet switched radio apps such as home based Wi-Fi routers were expensive yet available and maturing apace,
✓ GPS hand-helds were emerging into the marketplace after successful residencies within science, industry and of course the military [Garmin: “From the time our first GPS handhelds supported the Coalition forces in the Gulf War…”] .
Things were so exciting it was just like an All Bran New Day.
The 02 SciAm article quite accurately envisaged the environment in metropolitan cities today, a really neat piece of informed scientific speculation, in case you missed it above; [Click here to download]
Back to the present though, and the 3 key determinants factors, I feel, for both Virtual and Augmented Realities are: Location-Aware, Sensor-supported & Internet-connected LSI capability. The ‘sensor-supported’ determinant is a little difficult to get your head around as, of the 3, this is the one that is not mandatory. One may pull down a heap of interesting and relevant augmentations via Geo-locatives and Internet-connected capacity alone, but if we take a closer look at what is becoming available its just a matter of time until we see 'bolt-on' sensory accoutrements for the well heeled mobile aficionado.
Consider ‘Appland’,a name coined by New Scientist, [22 Aug 09 pps 32 to 36 ] In the online repositories of mobile phone companies there is a bewildering plethora of Apps currently available to you, coded by large industrial houses and bedroom code-cutters alike [user generated], and you can have any of them for a couple of bucks each via Google Android or iPhone.
And what is it that you want today? You’ve played with the streetmaps, as you were really lost that time, audio-sampled songs from the radio for auto location in iTunes just to see if it worked, wasted hours playing jelly car and even shown off your virtual Zippo lighter [very lickable eye candy but not very useful].
The thing is, as a nurse you may want a way to use you iPhone as a thermometer, as a fossiker of semi-precious stones you would love a handy way to optically gauge the refractive index of this quartz [or is it a gem?] in your hand, or as a marine biologist, a handy way to sense and record the salinity of the pond you are on would be ideal right now. ‘Sensory bolt-ons’ are set to change the way we do a lot of things. For the record I'm just running an FM transmitter and stereo microphone bolt ons.
To more fully mesh with our wildly divergent personal needs, and because thousands if not millions of folk are writing Apps as we speak, AR and VR applications are emerging, evolving really, with mechanisms that sense the environment around us in weird and wonderful ways. Running such sensors presents you with enhanced informed choices based on the inputs of its sensory mechanisms, and the nature of its user. This is where fuzzy logic and indeed AI systems are starting to kick in, and its going to be a helluva ride. I've already seen the iPhone referred to as 'the Jesus phone' and this user generated wave is going to goldly blow where no app has been before. at $3 a pop.
Augmented Reality is an available fact of life now then for any citizen residing in a 'mature' telecommunications location, and with the cash to buy a relatively inexpensive readily available 3G phone.
Its just a bit of a bummer then that I live in the Alice.
As you can't possibly see from the image, there is a tiny 12 Km radius of 3G coverage around our fair Town. While we are at it I may as well throw in a whinge to Telstra as my broadband speed drops down to dial-up speed as soon as the Alice kids get home from school, that was nice, but I digress. We have written the iPhone application primarily for remote areas where the signal strength of the 3G network is zilch. In this first iPhone iteration we have an augmented reality application running on the latest iPhone 3GS. What makes our project internationally unique however is that it operates without that 3G 'cloak of confidence' supplied to the majority of our fair Nations denizens living in places with a rich telecommunications infrastructure; we provide rich customised spatially relevant media to you and your iPhone when you are at work or play in the 3G barren outback.
And there are a few screenshots of the memestreme RCW iPhone a few posts down from this.
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