nanoluke

Last Saturday 11 Jun 2011, about 40 digital practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds - software developers, interaction desigers, 3D modelers, content managers and geeks in general - got together at the ThinkSpace in the Powerhouse Museum for the first AR Dev Camp Sydney.

The event - sponsored by the Powerhouse Museum, Layar and MOB - was structured as an unconference "barcamp" style, with an open agenda with content provided by the participants. To tease the audience, an ARDevCamp Layar layer had been previously setup by MOB indicating the workshop location and general info. This is me using augmented reality to get to the camp:

Following an initial discussion about the nature and general state of Augmented Reality on the digital landscape, a few topics started to naturally emerge:

• AR Displays
• AR CMS
• Standards and UX
• Web technologies convergence
• Open data sets

AR Displays

The current state of AR still relies essentially on dedicated browsers - such as Layar, Junaio, Wikitude orArgon - which are basically mobile applications designed to fetch, parse and deal with geolocated data in order to overlay it onto the mobile camera viewframe. As an experience, it is at a single time nice a bit cumbersome - the whole interaction becoming constrained to looking through a mobile screen in order to get the world "augmented". Such kind of keyhole interaction with the world around us is not natural nor ergonomic, resulting in a user experience which, despite its coolness, can hardly be sustained for great lengths of time (although tablets such as the iPad may definitely change the game).

Yet, as the recent (Un)seen Sculptures mobile augmented reality art show demonstrated, such experiences, albeit personal, have a great potential to evolve into a social play, particularly when interactive POI's (Points of Interest) are used, enabling people to effectively establish active conversations in the augmented world.

To that extent, wearable AR technologies would serve as a great boost, leveraging from (and in fact extending) our natural ways of move, act and communicate in space. The Vuzix glasses are one already existing example of wearable AR devices. 

AR CMS

Just like the normal web, content for AR can be (and so far usually has been) the domain of developers with the necessary skills to set an AR web service up  (including POI databases and general handling of requests and JSON responses from/to mobile devices). However - and, again, just like the web - boilerplate coding can generally be reused in most circumstances, with focus shifting from framework programming to content generation via dedicated tools.

Two of the main players on the AR Content Management Systems scene are BuildAR (developed by MOB) and Hoppala. In the workshop, we played with BuildAR and quickly managed to put together a very simple layer with a few locations, customising their geodata and basic look and feel. Although we haven't gone that far on our exercises, full Layar publishing integration has also just been released last May as part of the BuildAR platform.

Standards and UX

It is quite clear that Augmented Reality is still in its infancy, bearing great resemblance with the first days of the web. First movers choose a path based on their own research and motivations and, if appealing enough, those become references for newcomers to follow. 

In order to organise the landscape and document patterns emerging from various AR practices, an AR Standards community has come together, with regular meetups around the world supporting discussions and, on the process, building a growing knowledge base. 

Likewise, interaction design and UX matters are still a new frontier when it comes to Augmented Reality, with a few groups - like AR-UX - starting to form with the goal of carrying out more thorough and formal research.

Web technologies convergence

As perceived in many other areas of the digital industry, consensus seem to exist amongst the community - particular from developers - that as much as possible this new brave world of Augmented Reality should be built on the foundations of well-established web technologies. Reinventing the wheel and relying on proprietary technologies would be expensive not only for curbing reusability but also for failing to leverage from already widespread technical knowledge.

Most players have, therefore, built their tools around a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and KML (for geolocated data representation). A powerful JavaScript libraries for 3D graphical content generation is three.js, which supports HTML5 and WebGL.

An amazing demonstration of the potential of JavaScript for rendering AR content can be found at the Remixing Reality Mozilla demo website.

Open data sets

A round of discussions and presentations kicked off regarding the ownership of the digital space as well as mechanism to make public information openly available for social utilisation.

Following its Declaration of Open Government, the Australian Federal Government has been digitally facilitating the access to public datasheets through the Data.gov.au portal (different data licences apply regulating the purposes each data sheet can be used for). Similarly, institutions like the Powerhouse Museum itself have made available great part of their collection through public API's, freely accessible upon registration. The Powerhouse Museum Data Access API is regulated by CC BY-NC Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution license.

Initiatives like Google Crisis Response have also be mentioned as potential candidates for taking AR approaches to a more practical and compellingly  social responsible level. Currently, Google already steps up and collate a myriad of data from different sources and make it readily available to the open community through services such as Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Latitude, mostly built on top of open standards such as KML. Hooking AR features onto such initiatives and adopting similar approaches to the democratisation of data are perhaps avenues which future Augmented Reality services can potentially explore once the technology gets more mature.

Thanks to the Powerhouse Museum, Layar and MOB for organising such an informative and fun event on such a fascinating topic. Looking forward to the next one!