Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 739

Augmented Reality: Nokia Indoor Positioning

*Not very augmented, and it's vaporware to boot. However, this is a great example of "buildingware," a smaller locative technology build for scales and situations where GPS doesn't apply.

*Compare and contrast this wifi Nokia scheme to the Microsoft TAG navigation scheme in the earlier video.

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyon...

*One can already foresee a weird cacaphony of these systems; you'll enter a strange building in a strange city, and you'll...

Augmented Reality: Google SkyMap

*Check out how street-level, yet how slick and elegant, this Google promo is.

*I use SkyMap, and I like it because it's got the biggest scalar qualities of any augmented reality app. Among a hundred local urbanware apps, this thing is cosmicware.

Augmented Reality: Urban 3-D Modelling from Video

*They drove down the street with some vidcams, and generated a three-D model of the city.

*Part of Chapel Hill, in fact. Man, a little North Carolina barbecue wouldn't kill me right now.

http://cs.unc.edu/Research/urbanscape/

Spime Watch: Microsoft Tag

*Why is there yet another entry in the too-crowded 2d barcode biz? Well, I dunno really, except that this one is in color. And it's from Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/sep09/09-16tag.mspx

"The power of Microsoft Tag

"A Microsoft Tag is a new type of bar code, optimized for reading on mobile phones, with symbols that can form trillions of combinations. And that's what gives Tag its power. When a consumer downloads the Microsoft Tag application and then snaps a...

Augmented Reality: "Scintillation" by Xavier Chassaing

*Now that's projection mapping, eh? Into some "augmented surreality" territory here.

*Makes you wonder if there could be whole techno styles of augmentation, like "gabba augmentation," "trance augmentation" or "augmented glitchcore."

SCINTILLATION from Xavier Chassaing on Vimeo.

Augmented Reality: Prague Street Art Festival 09

*Nothing of tremendous technical interest here, but I like that (a) they chose this humble, derelict spraybombed building to adorn and (b) that animation looks so Czech. It's interesting to think of augmented reality as a specifically local, or even ultra-specifically geolocal, street-art.

Augmented Reality: "The Ultimate Display" by Ivan Sutherland, 1965

(((This famous essay from 1965 was a seed-bomb of emergent technologies. For Augmented Reality, this is the equivalent of Vannevar Bush's famous essay about computer networks, "As We May Think" (1945). )))

The Ultimate Display

Ivan E. Sutherland

Information Processing Techniques 
Office, ARPA, OSD

We live in a physical world whose properties we have come to know well through long familiarity. We sense an involvement with this physical world which gives us the ability to predict its properties ...

Heat-Seeking Missiles Versus Auto-Flushing Toilets

*The great pioneer Ivan Sutherland is discussing his groundbreaking work in the military, in ARPA, and in the ARPANET, the Cold War ancestor of the Internet. His interviewer would like to know where the money, power and intellectual impetus came from to build such a thing as the ARPANET.

http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/pdf.phtml?i...

ASPRAY: …. The reason I ask is that in our research so far, among government agencies NIH looks like the only competitor to ARPA in terms of having the ability or a...

Vernacular Video

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1389491

*Phil Torrone and Limor Fried are mavens of distributed manufacturing. They have a flourishing electronic parts business — design, manufacturing and shipping — that they run out of a home office near Wall Street. Everybody knows that, because Limor and Phil are kinda famous for it. They are classic Web 2.0 "global microbrand" types.

*Now I ask you: is there any sane reason why you should have to watch them stuff an electronic item into a shipping...

Augmented Reality: GPS parody

*56,000 views in four days? Not bad, pal!