At largetosti we’re always eager for the future to hurry up and arrive already, so we’ve been keeping an eye on Augmented Reality for a while. Last Saturday the #ARDevCamp rolled through Amsterdam, so I went along to observe the current state of the industry and see if there were any opportunities to do cool stuff floating around. Here’s a review of the days events and our current conclusion on where AR looks to be at.
I showed up only 5 minutes after ten which is pretty good considering that’s earlier than we usually open up the studio on week-days, found a seat and concerned myself with some caffiene consumption while waiting for my brain to engage. The other seats filled up and Willem Velthoven gave a short intro seeing as we were in his house, followed by Dan Brickley who gave a lengthier intro during which I managed to wake up somewhat. No marker business today, apparently this is the year of location based AR.
The first speaker of the day was Steven Pemberton, whose credentials include all kinds of important work with the W3C and having awesome villain hair. He related an anecdotal warning of the danger of information overload and talked briefly about his encounters with the ambitious cyborg Steve Mann before getting to his main point, extolling the virtues of the RDFa format and the importance of emerging standard ontologies as we go about populating our digital cities. If you like your data semantically rich this is all great fun. The slides are online here.
After a round of introductions the next speaker was up, Firefighter and Developer Bart van Leeuwen showed the work he is doing on navigational aids for Firetruck Drivers. If you had a hangover the worst 5 minutes of your day started as he showed a video demonstrating the response time of a firefighting unit, from the initial alarm to arrival at the scene complete with sirens blaring all the way. The problem his colleagues face is an interesting one, traditional turn-based navigation systems are pretty much useless to these guys as they are too slow and unaware of the fact that they are installed in a firetruck which can ignore one way streets, use tram tracks, cut through pedestrian areas and generally ignore all basic traffic law as long as the sirens are running. His system solves this problem by just showing the trucks location and destination together on one map, and leaving it up to the driver to determine the best route, relying on their own knowledge of the local area which is generally much better than routing data supplied by a standard navigation system like the Cosby kit.
James Brian Graves was next with his talk, ‘Where’s my Geometry?’ showing his work on processing video feeds in order to create geometries that allow virtual objects to be placed convincingly in 3D space instead of just layering them over the top of the raw video feed as is currently the case in most apps. This is important stuff if Augmented Reality is ever going to mature into immersive interactive worlds that mesh convincingly with whats around us. James isn’t the only guy in the world working on this (I damn well hope), so I’m sure we’ll get there eventually. It will be cool.
Lunch break! After a bagel and a quick trip to the Book Exchange I spent some time watching the crowd around the iPad guy, who won’t mind my referring to him as such since he had already resigned himself to the fact that his function at this event was as a prop to support the starring role of his new toy. You may have seen the videos floating around of the two year old and the cat playing with the iPad for the first time, I can now confirm that the reaction is pretty much the same in adults. Jaws drop slightly and pupils dilate as an invisible Steve Jobs throws fistfulls of his magic dust in the users face. I must also have inhaled a fair amount of second hand Apple dust as I now find myself wanting one as well. If only someone would make a device that can actually compete…
Half past one rolled around and Johannes la Poutre from Squio launched into his talk, the state of AR using Layar as a reference. If you’re not up to speed on this it may be worth checking out his slides on slideshare. Layar are the major dudes at the moment, and while they’re not turning a profit yet it looks like they have several revenue streams in the pipe and are steadily building an army of developers to support their platform.
Hans Overbeek stepped up to discuss Government Standards for Open Data, opening by issuing the warning that he was about to give the most boring talk of the day. He delivered. This guy has a hard job of course, as much as he may like to be doing cool stuff all the time he has to deal with the politics that come with working at a high level in government. My impression is that the Dutch government is basically adopting a wait-and-see stance, checking out the developments in e-govt systems abroad and then adapting what they perceive to be effective. If you want to play a part in speeding things along your best bet is to probably to contribute to initiatives like hack de overheid (hack the government), and force change by helping to create better systems than those currently in use. The slides from this talk are also on Slideshare.
The last presentation of the day was given by Francesco Masia of Calameda who talked about Calaboard, an interactive virtual layer that can be superimposed between videoconference attendees allowing for collaborative note-taking and doodling through gesture recognition. This sounded cool enough but dude, you had no visuals! No demo video, no pictures, nothing! This is a primarily visual medium, you can’t show up to a room of random people and expect anyone to care about slides showing code snippets. Even if your product doesn’t actually even work yet at least get someone to mock something up in Photoshop and call it an ‘artists impression’, seriously. By the way reader, if you need a fantastic artists impression of your own current vaporware project call us to ask about our smoke and mirrors discount specials!
Time for another break. I went out for a smoke and eavesdropped for a while on the conversation around Marc René Gardeya, QA Manager at Layar. You know someone is up to interesting stuff when they can’t really talk about any of it. Gotta love those NDAs. Also had a brief chat with Sander Veenhof, who is organizing the first Augmented Reality Flashmob, which will take place next Saturday (April 24th) on Dam Square here in Amsterdam. Roll down if you’re in the area it shouldn’t be hard to find, just look for the people waving their phones in the air in front of them like the neanderthals of the future.
Breakout sessions were next, and the crowd split off into the following groups; Government/OpenData people, Museum people, a ‘non-geek friendly’ Culture/Technology discussion, a Layar Hacking/Q&A group and the guys from Mediamatic demonstrating their RFID projects. I stuck with the Layar guys, while I’m a fan of wild speculation and brainstorming their group looked like it had the highest amount of guys actually building stuff. Hans Blaauw from Openhanced demonstrated his Layar Mobile starterkit, designed to allow users to create content in a user-friendly (ie; no code) way. The project is open-source, and as a result of the discussion he intends to add support for 2D and 3D objects soon so watch out for that.
At this point I was hungry again and decided it was time to get some sun, so I can’t comment on the days conclusion. I do feel vindicated in my belief that this AR game is not just the next Virtual Reality hype, it’s real, useful and getting better by the day. The groundwork being done now by companies like Layar (and most people attending the event) will provide a foundation for some very cool stuff in the near future. Once the hardware starts to become common and with any luck evolves into glasses and/or lenses, we’ll be wailing.
Watch out for the Largetosti Reality, coming soon* to retinas near you.
*Largetosti Reality may not actually come soon, but we’re excited anyway.
