Sam Kinsley

AR presents interesting user experience design issues [for through the viewfinder type AR] that involve navigating expected norms of behaviour in public. What the critical comments in this article illustrate is that AR is not a one-size-fits-all technical solution. Perhaps it needs to be folded back into the broader suite of ubicomp and pervasive media ideas about technological mediation and context aware equipment [in the Heideggerian sense, hah!]. Layar also probably needs to be thought of as an experiment that will lead to other things, much in the way we no longer have pagers for example.

Straight forward and easy to understand description of the coffee 'cupping' process with good illustration of comparative scoring.

a humorous take on the technologies of the future predicted in science fiction.

"Fiction now meets reality with prototype contact lenses developed by Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle. Dr. Parviz’s prototype lenses can be used as biosensors to display body chemistry or as a heads up display (HUD). Powered by radio waves and 330 microwatts of power from a loop antenna that picks up power beamed from nearby radio sources, future versions will also be able to harvest power from a cell phone."

Excellent talk exploring various concerns for the practicalities of living with ubicomp, which is - electricity plus connections via wires or radio waves plus people using the technology and constructing behaviours around it/ molding it to existing behaviours. Questions arise: how do we think about the changing nature of what we understand to be a product or a service? how do we navigate social and spatial relations with and through ubicomp technologies? how do we design things that blur the product/service dilineation and accomodate the other questions?

"City ID develop unique design, information and wayfinding solutions to fully integrate people, movement and places. We combine thinking, ideas, planning and outstanding design direction to make cities more welcoming, engaging and easier to navigate."

"Google SMS is a suite of mobile applications that allows you to find information on topics as diverse as sexual & reproductive health, and agriculture to sports scores and weather. It also includes a new marketplace application, Google Trader, that will help buyers and sellers find each other; use it to buy and sell electronics, crops, tools, cars, properties, or anything else that you need or have." From Google Uganda.

"Frengo is a community where people share buzz - a steady stream of opinions, updates, questions, predictions, games. Find Buzz by checking out our public Buzz directory. Or see what other people are doing on the homepage by watching the "What's Buzzing Now" board. Join or leave any Buzz through the web or your phone. Read messages online or on-the-go."

"As Twitter and social media get more and more important for brands, beware of some painful pitfalls"

"We are creating a flexible data collection campaigns for the modern, connected citizen scientist Citizen Science allows individual volunteers or groups to observe, measure, and contribute to scientific environmental studies. How have we made this experience even better? Networked Naturalist is a collection of tools that allows anybody to participate in the growing list of popular citizen scientist projects, all designed to harness the power of people who are not only concerned about their environments but also want to do something about it. On-the-go, flexible data collection schemes, tailored to your busy schedule, allow you to use your cell phone text, email, and picture messages for data collection, as well as sending us email or web forms from your computer. See your data, see how your data fits in with other people’s data, and see how involved scientists interpret those data — all in real-time."

"Installed on a 500-metre section of pavement last weekend, the lampposts double the strength of the light they cast when they detect human body heat. Ten seconds later they revert to normal."

"The New York Times has a piece (Future Vision Banished to the Past") about the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a "rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence." It's a piece that raises some interesting questions for futurists as well as architects and preservationists."

"The International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) will launch its inaugural program featuring the latest developments in the Arts, Media and Humanities (AMH) research and applications.
Artists, designers, media producers and futurists will present new frontiers in the power of Mixed and Augmented Reality to express, convey, impact and improve human experience and interpretation in the areas of education, training, entertainment, communications, design and media production.
The programs will be covering how Mixed and Augmented Reality is revolutionizing diverse application domains and how its innovators are applying the art and craft of melting the boundaries between the real, virtual and imagined."

Excellent reading list for research topics in Ubicomp created by Jason Hong, of CMU.

Sterling pitches his vision of the 'dawn of the AR industry' - 50min video.

"Bing Local Search has some interesting features you won't find in Google, so the prospect of seeing Bing listings appear on top of your iPhone's camera viewer when you point at a restaurant or business is intriguing. That's what forthcoming iPhone app RobotVision offers - and it displays a view of Tweets and Flickr photos published nearby wherever you are.

RobotVision is a new Augmented Reality (AR) app for the iPhone 3Gs. It's not available yet, but it will be as soon as AR apps are formally welcomed into the App Store by Apple, probably sometime next month. AR browsers "turn the world inside out" by exposing latent online information about your surroundings; there will soon be enough of them that they will compete based on user experience. RobotVision looks like it could be a good one."

The book Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces has been released recently. The description goes as follows:
"The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this edited volume is one of the first scholarly works to engage the emerging area of multi-user location-based mobile games and hybrid reality games."

An article addressing the role of SciFi as a mediator between imagination and technology development: "In 1993, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” science fiction author William Gibson famously said, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In the work of Gibson and his fellow writers, we often find the tension between two key pillars of future thinking: our future stuff and our future selves.
As a form of communication, science fiction (especially written) presents its own usability challenge. Like many things, it’s easier to use if you already know how it works (I think this is why I struggle with jazz). There are many recurring tropes that get little exposition… The more we read and watch, the more interface standards we absorb, and the easier it is to quickly move past this interface of tropes to the actual story."

Old PDF outlining Philips Future Vision:- "Predicting the potential of a technology is difficult because its success depends not only on its intrinsic value as an innovation but also on a wide variety of 'real-world' variables. These include commercial viability, social need, governmental policies, international standards, and often other technologies which may boost its widespread acceptance. In reviewing technologies which now exist or look extremely promising, we decided to concentrate on those which have the most realistic chance of success and which are most relevant to Philips' field of operations: electronic engineering, software, materials, lighting technology, telecommunications and medical systems. We concluded that the most far-reaching changes in the next decade are not likely to be the result of dramatic new innovation. Rather, they will almost certainly result from the focusing, refining and merging of existing technologies and their extension to more areas of our lives."

BBC News item from 2002 on internet fridges:- "Imagine this," says Adrian King, president of ICL's Retail System Division. "You're in the kitchen and notice that you are running low on eggs. "You swipe the carton past the barcode scanner, which makes a note on its personal 'shopping list'. You do this for all the items that you need. When you're ready, you send the list to a nominated supermarket who can then make up and deliver the order to your home."

"Ubicomp. Oh yeah. I know it's got a million names. All kinds of jargon. Pervasive computing. Wearable computers. Intelligent environment. Wireless internet. Peripheral computing. Self-configuring, adaptively coordinated Embedded Nets. Things That Think. Locator Tags. JINI. Wearware. Personal Area Networking. And so forth. This kind of disruption in my beloved English language is like the rumblings of a tectonic fault. The signs are very good that something large, expensive and important will tear loose there.
I personally prefer the word "ubicomp" because it sounds so cheap. Ubicomp: that sounds like you go down to the hardware store and buy a few gallons. You don't have to genuflect to it, but it's still a grand challenge. Because ubicomp is truly a profound idea. It has grandeur, and better yet, it's not metaphysical. You don't have to handwave with any big verbal catch-all terms like "artificial intelligence". Or "evolution." Or "nano-" anything. Or "virtual" anything."

Economist on Augmented Reality: "AR starts with reality itself and then augments it… It all sounds rather distant and futuristic. The idea of AR has, in fact, been around for a few years without making much progress… Several AR applications are already available. Wikitude, an AR travel-guide application developed for Google’s Android G1 handset, has already been downloaded by 125,000 people. Layar is a general-purpose AR browser that also runs on Android-powered phones. Nearest Tube, an AR application for Apple’s iPhone 3GS handset, can direct you in London to the nearest Underground station. Nokia’s “mobile augmented reality applications” (MARA) software is being tested by staff at the world’s largest handset-maker, with a public launch imminent."