Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere
Fifty years after its invention by the British Royal Navy for use by fighter pilots, the technology of layering information on top of our naked view of the world may cross over the line between science fiction and mass consumer experience as soon as next month. It's widely believed that the operating system for the iPhone 3Gs will be updated this Fall, possibly in September, to allow developers to use the phone's location awareness and internal compass to orient displays of information and imagery placed on top of the view through the camera.
"The internet smeared all over everything." An "enchanted window" that turns contextual information hidden all around us inside out. A platform that will be bigger than the Web. Those are the kinds of phrases being used to describe the future of what's called Augmented Reality (AR), by specialists developing the technology to enable it. Big questions remain unanswered, though, about the viability of what could be a radical next step in humanity's use of computers.
Let's set aside for now questions about the desirability of Augmented Reality. Some people will be wary of its consequences for social interaction - even for spiritual practices already based on engaging with other layers of the world around us. Those questions deserve exploration, but the potential of AR is exciting enough that obstacles are worth discussing aside from objections. Augmented Reality is in some ways just another version of the web; a web applied, through novel interfaces, in reference to the physical world, instead of floating documents tied only to each other as the web is today.
Early Examples
Early examples that Google Android phone owners can use now and that all iPhone 3Gs owners will probably be able to use very soon include:
- Layar, a browser for layers of information about things like restaurant reviews and Wikipedia entries and Brightkite social network entries for places you point your phone at. Here's the list so far.
- Wikitude, an AR wiki that displays collaboratively edited information about locations when you point your phone's camera at a place.
- Acrossair's Nearest Subway App
Not all work in Augmented Reality is going on in mobile phones. There are webcam marker-based implementations like ARSights and projector-powered experiments as well, but AR coming to the iPhone will be a key turning point in popularizing the technology.
It's very exciting to think about, but it might not work. Here are five of the challenges faced by the small but fast-growing industry of Augmented Reality.
Spam and Security
Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling gave a keynote talk at Layar's global launch event this month. His hour-long discussion of potentials and pitfalls included in-depth warnings that security and spam will be major issues. Imagine being drowned in swarming icons for porn or pharmaceuticals! Imagine having your view of reality not just augmented but hacked and controlled by ill-intentioned people.
Sterling says it's not a matter of if, but of when. If AR companies don't prepare for this, they will be caught unaware and users will be turned off in a big way.
Social and Real-Time vs. Solitary and Cached
If AR experiences can be designed for people to experience them together, and if people in different places can touch each other's experiences in real time, then AR is going to be a whole lot stickier. That presents serious technical challenges.
So will being able to show users rich information about things they point their phones at. Visions of rich AR are tempered by imagining the buffer time whenever a widely-used AR app is launched.
UX
The User Experience (UX) of AR presents no end of challenges as well. Social conventions are one factor. Why are you pointing your phone at me while we're talking? "Because I want to see if a link to your Twitter profile will hover above your head." Maybe not.
Joe Lamantia wrote a long post about UX design considerations for the future of AR and argues that the two primary questions at hand are: what information will we turn inside out from hidden context to presented interface layer? And can we find any better interfaces for viewing that information than we have today in the models that are available so far?
Interoperability
Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s. It may not be obvious and it may not even be true that users have a right to view any layer of Augmented Reality through any Augmented Reality browser.
Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever. (A lack of data portability when it comes to Augmented Reality could cause substantial psychological distress!)
Layar, the most high-profile AR consumer company on the market, says it's in full support of interoperability. It has published its documentation publicly and co-founder Maarten Lens-FitzGerald told us the following by phone today:
"I think it's going to be very important. We're open to talking to anybody and seeing what we can make happen. Anyone who creates a service on our platform can publish elsewhere. Our reach will be in installations and content and making sure other parties are on there. We don't do negative things. The lock-ins and exclusivity won't work. Openness and interoperability are where it's going; we're going to discover how exactly with other people. I used to work with VRM and Doc Searls. That's where it's going: control to the user."
Those are encouraging words, but Lens-FitzGerald says that no legal work has been done by his company to encourage an open development standard free of legal fears for developers.
Openness
The most exciting AR programs will be platforms that encourage other people to develop layers of content they then display. That's the Layar model. Hundreds of companies are developing layers for that system on the Android mobile phone. Layar has said that content developers will be able to sell layers to users in the future - a Lonely Planet layer is something travelers might buy, for example.
What kind of standards will AR platforms have in deciding which layers their users can see? Is that the right question? Will we have Augmented Reality Neutrality? Or will we have an AR version of the fickle, anachronistic, tiny despots of the iPhone App Store? I have a right to Augment my Reality with whatever information I want! "Not while you're using our AR browser/network/handset/etc.!" It's not hard to imagine the coming of a Firefox for AR.
Layar says it will be that open platform. It may not remain the leader of this very young market, though.
Added value, social experiences, real-time information delivery, user experience, interoperability and openness - those are the problems of the web! So too goes the development of Augmented Reality, the web of everywhere.
It's a lot of Wow and skepticism right now, but in the future it could be a thriving ecosystem of rich information about the world around us. Or it could be a closed, proprietary (literal) lens through which we view the world - unable to change the way we view that world or see it as others do because our accumulated knowledge is trapped inside one platform and inaccessible from others. Or there could be a plague of spam that overwhelms our view-finder into our physical surroundings.
The future is being built now and smart people are tackling these problems.
This post is heavily indebted to GamesAlfresco, a great blog we just discovered that's closely tracking AR. That's where we found the title image, many of the links here and several of the videos. Big thanks to site authors Ori Inbar and Rouli Nir.
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Excellent piece.. Exciting times.. Many decisions to be made..
We cant wait, The next of the Internet, all of the possibilities that it creates for the future advancement of man kind. Not to mention the opportunity =)
iPhone App with Augmented Reality http://www.trigeia.com/article.php?id=95175
@trigeia
The biggest challenge facing AR, before all these others, is simply GPS accuracy. You don't need much accuracy to create a navigation app, but to create an information app the phone really needs 1 meter GPS accuracy, otherwise it's much harder to pinpoint what you're looking at. And in NYC, for example, the iPhone finds it quite difficult to get that accuracy everywhere. GPS doesn't work well in the vicinity of tall buildings. Cell tower triangulation would work better, but that information is restricted.
Really exciting post! Can't wait to try some of these things out first-hand
Good article, with well thought out insights. Well deserved plug for Games Alfresco. It is THE site to follow for augmented reality. I also cover AR, especially Mobile AR on my site, GigantiCo (link from name).
I'm going to go Twitter this article now.
All I can say is, "more please". Great post.
Really good a post! Also can't wait to try some of these things out first-hand...
Thank you for producing this piece. I used to consider one of the key challenges to be finding true utility in Augmented Reality, but the societal implications are worth attention.
As the web becomes more democratized, will augmented reality creep up from behind and gradually create an unfair marketplace? Will valuable information, that is now free, only be available to the privileged? Scary stuff...
It's so exciting to see this article, the technology will give us so many conveniences so that we will have a better life.Just let's wait the advanced tech.
Can you guys stop hyping this until there is actually something real (as it were) and useful in the world using this technology?
Your approach to AR is very reminiscent of the hype surrounding VR back around 1990. Lots of broad-smiling CEOs of one-man firms shopping "photorealistic" 3D environments composed of 10 polygons with skewed crappy photos smeared onto wall surfaces. 20 years later there are still no good VR applications anywhere.
It's great to be on the bleeding edge and all that, but the barrage of AR articles without any actual AR applications that anyone might want to use is getting a bit old.
The only solution for sustainable interoperability is an open standard. HTML 5 with the proposed addition of X3D (and X3D Earth) sounds logic. And therefore the browsers have to adapt the standard not the other way round. TwittARound (http://i.document.m05.de/?p=685) for example already is based on HTML 5 and Webkit.
X3DOM is an proposal for the integration into HTML 5. There are other proposals from DFKI and Google.
X3DOM
http://www.web3d.org/x3d/wiki/index.php/X3D_and_HTML5#X3DOM_proposal
http://blip.tv/file/2514605
I have my reservations like post 10 mentions but on the other side for a commercial perspective there are some fun and creative possibilities. I like Lego's first try with AR:
http://www.notcot.com/archives/2009/01/legos_digital_b.php
Anon #10 - Layar and several other AR apps are live in the Android Marketplace now. Layar is a featured download, in fact.
Just because apps are live doesn't mean they are any good or that anyone has made any money off them. Layar seems to be a bit of a joke to me; I can't imagine wanting to use it. I would be happy to use the kind of pervasive AR described in Vernor Vinge's recent novel, but that won't be available for a generation at least, if not longer.
@Anon, I agree with you to a certain extent; however, as I anticipate you can understand, this technology will not just become immediately useful. Augmented Reality is no different from any other technology. It requires more awareness after early adoption starts to occur. I don't think we're far off from seeing this technology have true utility. First we had "print this piece of paper and see something on your screen", now we have, "hold your phone up, and find your way. That seems convincing enough to me."
Great article! And re creating an open augmented reality network as universal and standard as the internet, I have just published on Ugotrade a proposal by Thomas Wrobel for an open augmented reality network based on existing infrastructure and protocols.
Thomas's proposal utilizes two existing paradigms IRC and Layers. But the ideas he outlines, and possibly even the proposed protocol string could be adapted for Google Wave or other future systems.
Also what he is presenting is going to be transparent to the methodology of registration/tracking so augmented experiences created with sophisticated image recognition, tracking, and registration will be able to be viewed as these technologies evolve.
At the very least, I think, Thomas shows us that an open augmented reality network will be with us very soon.
Exciting times!
I must thank MK for the app list. It confirms to me there are no useful AR apps right now, and also that the feasible apps are very limited, because they all seem kind of similar to one another.
It's just so much easier for me to use an ordinary browser map application and see all the locations of interest for any conceivable query than to mess around with a phone's camera.
AR seems kind of like voice recognition to me, in a way.
Recall that some years ago there was a massive hype storm about how much better voice input would be than typing. But despite the general availability of a fairly decent program (Dragon), most people still use keyboards because keyboards just have more utility and usability combined. That's how I feel about these crappy AR apps until there are some serious breakthroughs in both hardware and software.
I mean, you really need a lightweight high-res infinite-battery HMD with meter-accuracy location for it to make much sense to me -- snapping photos through a cellphone and looking at crappy low-res decorations on the result seems very weak to me, especially given the error scale of GPS. But no such HMD exists. Alternatively (as in Vinge's novel) you need something like a long-range RFID on every object or location of interest, and that isn't going to happen any time soon either.
Like voice recognition, there may be some special purpose AR apps in the short term that are useful and effective for narrow uses. I'm sure Dragon is great for many disabled people, and for the few people who are really skilled at dictation, so perhaps the same kind of niches can be found for low-tech AR.
But I don't think it will be broadly useful in the near-term, so it seems to me to be an unworthy thing to spend so much time and effort hyping right now.
As I wrote on Twitter a few days ago, augmented reality is currently the "Second Life of Local Search". And that could be good or bad, depending how you see it...
Sebastien@18, come on, AR isn't *that* bad.
Like many pieces of technology before augmented reality, there's usually a period where people are doing 'cool' stuff with it for the sake of it. Then some clever people take what was cool technology and turn it into cool product.
Best example? Multi-touch surfaces. They were around years before we had the iPhone, arguably the most successful consumer electronics release of the last few years. Apple took what was cool technology and turned it into cool product, not to mention cold hard cash.
Who's to say we are not a year away from someone taking AR technology and doing what the iPhone did to multi-touch screens?
do you agree? long comment on RWW says there are no good Augmented Reality apps & it will go un-cool like voice recog http://bit.ly/HVdTn [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3557818427]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 26, 2009 8:32 AM
In the same way that the web browser on a computer screen is a window into cyberspace, an augmented reality viewer is a window that looks out on the blended physical/digital landscape, the geoweb, the city as platform.
We're just at the beginning of a fifty year adventure where we will infuse the physical world with connected digital experience. AR browsers like Layar and Wikitude are like Gopher was in 1991 -- early, geeky, not a lot of content, not a great experience...but watch what happens next.
AR has been live on game consoles for a while, as an i/o interface, as far back as the PS2. Combine AR camera visualization + alternate forms of interaction (spatial motion, touch, camera motion and heh, brainwaves) and there's a newer level of interaction with information ready to go.
There is two problems I see with AR as a visual layer atop reality. For one, I don't think the tiny displays are in fact severely limiting the chances of what we can do yet --this technology probably is really meant to be consumed by a HUD or glasses that contain one or the other form of display technology.
The other is that we're such a visual species that even slight deviations will be noticable and disruptive to the experience. Case in point: Deviation in the GPS fix by a few metres can have your data overlay being ... off enough to puzzle you, not help you. Heck, if you want to superimpose 3d images on a view of a street, even slight derivations (say, you're standing on the pavement but the software sees you in the middle of the road) might give the visuals a severe twist.
But this space is certainly one to watch; probably, the technology will be up to speed faster than we all anticipate right now.
I agree with the referred comment. What I expect from AR in the mid-term is some use in controlled environments: plants, warehouses, labor fields, playgrounds, etc.
Posted by: José Mª Peláez
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August 28, 2009 4:47 AM
As I wrote on Twitter a few days ago, augmented reality is currently the "Second Life of Local Search". And that could be good or bad, depending how you see it...
I like it. Very much. And I can see how it has grown organically from where you where yesterday (and from before that too) which is cool.
Recall that some years ago there was a massive hype storm about how much better voice input would be than typing. But despite the general availability of a fairly decent program (Dragon), most people still use keyboards because keyboards just have more utility and usability combined. That's how I feel about boya these crappy AR apps until there are some serious breakthroughs in both hardware and software.
I mean, you really mantolama need a lightweight high-res infinite-battery HMD with meter-accuracy location for it to make much sense to me -- snapping mantolama photos through a cellphone and looking at crappy low-res decorations on the result seems very weak to me, söve especially given the boyacı error scale of GPS. But no such HMD exists. Alternatively (as in Vinge's novel) you need something like a long-range RFID on every object or location of interest, boya söve and that isn't going to happen any boya time soon either.