LAYAR AUGMENTED REALITY BROWSER FOR IPHONE NOW AVAILABLE IN APPLE APP STORE

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

SPRXmobile announced Wednesday that the long-awaitediPhone version its Layar augmented reality browser is now available in the Apple App Store, free-of-charge (note: for background on the Layar platform--which leverages smartphones' integrated GPS and compass capabilities to display layers of interactive digital information on top of real-time video on those phones' camera screens, thus effectively transforming reality into a giant, clickable interactive video--see the articles published on itvt.com, June 17th, July 9th, August 18th and September 27th, and the interview with SPRXmobile co-founder, Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, published July 16th). The browser launched this spring on the Android platform: at the time, developers were unable to publish iPhone AR applications in the Apple App Store, because the iPhone SDK lacked public API's for manipulating live video, and the method that AR developers had found to work around this limitation--via a restricted tool called "Camera Viewer"--was not approved by Apple. This situation (which resulted in a number of AR developers launching a petition to Apple Developer Relations, asking the company to "provide a public API to access live video in real time, on the iPhone") was remedied by the launch last month of iPhone OS 3.1, which officially supports AR.

In other augmented reality news:

• 
  IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned restaurant information/recommendation service, Urbanspoon, has added AR functionality to its iPhone application. The new functionality, dubbed "Scope," is triggered when users aim their iPhone at the horizon. It presents them with icon overlays that provide basic information on nearby restaurants (type, distance, popularity, price) and that can be clicked/tapped in order to access more detailed information (including reviews). The further away a restaurant is, the smaller its icon, and the less popular it is, the grayer its icon. The app also allows users to adjust it to compensate for any shortcomings in its GPS positioning.
  
• UK artist, Chris O'Shea, has created an augmented reality artwork, called "Hand from Above," on the BBC's Big Screen display in Liverpool. Pedestrians walking by the display see a giant hand poking, tickling, flicking and otherwise interfering with their video image. Video of the artwork, which was created using openFrameworks and openCV, is embedded above.

Link

Nokia Mixed Reality Demo

Citizen Science

In this research we highlight an important new shift in mobile phone usage – from communication tool to "networked mobile personal measurement instrument". We explore how these new “personal measurement instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science.  Through the use of sensors paired with personal mobile phones, everyday people are invited to participate in collecting and sharing measurements of their everyday environment that matter to them.

Our research hypothesis is that this new usage model for mobile phones will:

1. improve the science literacy of everyday citizens through active participation in basic scientific principles
2. provide professional scientists with access to richer, finer-grain data sets for modeling and analysis
3. create new experiences and usage models for the mobile phone as a tool for grassroots participation in government and policy making
4. by choice of sensors and software create a deeper and more informed understanding and concern for our climate and environment - hopefully effecting positive societal change

Mobile phones are rapidly becoming the computer platform of choice in developed and developing nations.  These mobile phones already shape our culture – collapsing space and time by enabling us to reach out to contact others at a distance, to perform just-in-time coordination of events, and to purchase, play, and game “on-the-go”.  While there is a growing research space around sensor based activity inferencing and a wealth of existing location applications in the market, we claim that our mobile phones still fall short in their ability to enable us to measure and understand the real world around us.

To read more about this project

Site Visit by Situated Visualization

abstract

We propose a critical review of existing tools and practices typically used to execute the proverbial site visit, followed by focused invention and development of new tools and practices. We argue that conventional methods to study, document and interact with a site are ill suited to capturing seen and unseen aspects that may remain hidden without enhanced aids to observation and visualization. By extension, these methods fundamentally distort the character and context of the design locus, and constrict the role that visualization can have for the duration of the design process.

Thrust by advancements in geo-spatial analysis, simulation modeling and mobile computing, our team of researchers and practitioners will collectively explore and test new practices for site visit, by developing situated visualizations — dynamic visual representations that are spatially relevant to the place in which they are displayed. The team’s transdisciplinary collaboration — from the fields of architecture, urban design, geography, planning, ethnography, industrial design and computer science — will be hands on, gaining insight into the notion of site and extending the role of visualization beyond initial documentation or final presentation in the design process.

Our research activities will focus on a 17-acre industrial district of New York City known as Manhattanville, in which rezoning efforts are raising disputes over land use, economic development, socio-cultural diversity and environmental stewardship. This area has also been declared the “site” for Columbia University’s campus expansion, for which preliminary design propositions have been publicized using various visualization strategies.

Experiments by members of our team have been conducted on this site using augmented reality (AR) techniques and Census datasets in order to generate situated visualizations about Manhattanville’s population. This past spring, these new practices were further explored in a workshop co-taught by architectural and computer science faculty.

Phase One of our proposed research will review and evaluate typical practices used for site visits and site analysis. Phase Two will illustrate the potential of new methods and technologies for collecting, curating and creating information as tools for site visualization. Phase Three will include developing and testing these methods against Manhattanville’s complex landscape. Phase Four will prepare a comprehensive account of innovative visualization tools for site visit and site analysis as important facilitators of the design process.

Team: Petia Morozov, Sean White, and Sarah Williams, all of whom have practices in our respective fields, and all of whom have an affiliation with Columbia University.

Project Wiki

Million Story Building

Location-specific ambient storytelling

If a building could talk, what would it say? How would it “feel” about the comings and goings of the people who use it every day? Would it be affected by their moods and desires? What kind of relationship would it have with its occupants if it could communicate with them somehow, and how would they respond? Perhaps most importantly, would such a feeling-and-talking building even be desirable?

In attempting to answer these whimsical questions, the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab (MEML) at the University of Southern California conceived of Million Story Building, an experimental design project exploring how location-specific mobile technology can add playful, imaginative and practical new layers to the relationship between a structure and its inhabitants.

Using the newly-constructed School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) Building as a test bed, the MEML team has designed a location-sensitive iPhone application (see video) that enables students and faculty to engage with their workplace in a variety of exciting new ways, from scanning Quick Response (QR) code glyphs mounted next to posters in the hallways in order to access and tag video clips from a central database, to leaving virtual messages for others to read in an Augmented Reality view of the building’s central courtyard.

Functions such as these, working together with networks of sensors, interactive plasma screens and web-based social media profiles, made it possible for iPhone-carrying building occupants to learn about SCA history, discover events and activities, share stories and updates of their own, enrich the school’s media archive, and participate in an Alternate Reality Game.

Furthermore, and crucially, users could come to expect increasingly customized communications, behaviors and interaction opportunities as a profile concerning their preferences, habits and interests was generated based on their usage of the system. The end result was a prototype for a personalized and self-renewing “ambient story” experience co-constructed by the collaboration between the occupants of a building and the building itself.

Background

At its heart, Million Story Building is an effort to mobilize a range of storytelling and interaction tactics such that the occupants of the SCA building can experience a deeper and richer connection with their workspace and co-workers. Such an effort is not unique in the history of design; indeed, the practice of embedding story and play in physical space is almost as old as civilization itself – one recalls the Catholic Via dolorosa (Stations of the Cross), the Shingon Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku or the transit to the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

More recently, what Jill Walker-Renberg calls “distributed narratives” have manifested themselves in public and institutional space through sticker art, coordinated graffiti campaigns, flash mobs and other interventions. Million Story Building emerges at the nexus of these practices and the new potentialities unleashed by the recent blossoming of mobile and ubiquitous computational technologies.

More Information

The Million Story Building series archive is an effort to gather together, enframe and contextualize key planning documents from the first phase of the project’s development. By browsing proposals, demo descriptions, annotated meeting notes and other development documents, readers can get a sense of the key concerns from which the project arose and the various components of the prototype application, both implemented and imagined.

Project Link

City Tag-location-based multiplayer game for spontaneous social interaction

iPaq screens showing 3 different game states

CitiTag is a wireless location-based multiplayer game, designed to enhance spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences in city environments by integrating virtual presence with physical. In the first version of CitiTag you roam the city with a GPS- and WiFi-enabled iPaq PocketPC in search for players of the opposite team that you can ‘tag’. You can also get tagged yourself if one of them gets close to you. Then you need to find a friend to free you. Urban space becomes a playground and everyone is a suspect.

Where: The Open University Campus in Milton Keynes and Bristol Centre (St. Augustine’s Parade

Why:The CitiTag game is being developed to explore social experiences and emergent behaviours in public spaces through playful interaction, based on the awareness of other players’ presence. The project is motivated by the hypothesis that very simple game rules based on presence states (e.g. I am Green and ‘tagged’) can result in an enjoyable social experience, stimulated by real world interaction among players. The aim of our studies is to identify the design implications for future technology mediated social experiences and how such experiments can inform the experience design process.

The project involves the collaboration between HP Labs and the Open University’sKnowledge Media Institute (KMi). KMi’s Centre for New Media is developing the client software and multi-user server. The user trials will provide data for Yanna Vogiazou’s (OU) and Bas Raijmaker’s (RCA) PhD work.

Exploring mobile gesture design at Nokia

Geospatial info-mobility service by real-time data-integration and generalisation

Objectives

The objective of the project is to develop methods for delivering geospatial data to a mobile user by means of real-time data-integration and generalisation. The project aims to a seamless data service infrastructure providing access, through a common interface, to topographic geo-databases maintained by the national mapping agencies. The sub-objectives comprise of developing methods for real-time generalisation, integration of national primary geo-databases by means of thematic harmonisation, and real-time transformation of the data to a common EUREF-based co-ordinate system for seamless geometric representation. Emerging standards, like XML, are used for transferring vector-formatted spatial data in the Web. A study on small-display cartography, and an analysis on the requirements of the mobile use of geospatial data are carried out. The approach is tested using a prototype system in a multinational context.

Project website

Alls My Monies

Supervision is the personal financial assistant you wish you had. The electronic budget diary scans receipts, charts money coming in/out, talks to your bank, and gives you monthly expense details so you can balance your finances more effectively - or for most people, at all. The display doubles as a touchscreen and comes with a stylus so you can manage your monies the old fashioned way too.

Designer: Eun-Gyeong Gwon

Nokia Morph Concept

I really like this concept, and video demonstration

Trace: Mapping The Emerging Urban Landscape

by Alison Sant
917 Bryant Street
San Francisco CA, 94103
U.S.A.
Tel: +415 865 9500
Fax: +415 865 9502
info [@] tracemap [dot] net / ali [@] alisant [dot] net

http://www.alisant.net
http://www.tracemap.net

KEYWORDS
wireless networks, locative media, mapping, mobile devices, public art, Hertzian space, WiFi

ABSTRACT
Digital networks and wireless technologies are radically reforming the contemporary notions of urban place. As network technologies move away from their hardwired roots, they are activating an urban dynamic that is no longer based on referencing static landmarks, but on a notion of the city in which spatial references become events. These developments imply a changing pattern of urban reference in which invisible boundaries of connectivity alternately thicken or marginalize the urban territories they overlay. *TRACE* is a collaborative project, by artist Alison Sant and programmer Ryan Shaw, that examines the layering of physical space with the on and off zones of the wireless network. The project seeks to blend the corporeal experience of the city with the invisible qualities of the network, creating a narrative mapping of the hybrid space between them. This mapping is one that challenges purely static notions of public space to promote a temporal logic of the city that reflects the fluctuating character of the wireless network.

Link

NTT DoCoMo Mobile Future

Wikitude for Google's Android phones

WIKITUDE - AR TRAVEL GUIDE

"TELLS YOU WHAT YOU SEE!"

Wikitude is a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content. It is a handy application for planning a trip or to find out about landmarks in your surroundings; 350,000 world-wide points of interest may be searched by GPS or by address and displayed in a list view, map view or cam view.

The Greener Grass Concept- the current state

We were inspired by the energy visualization concepts and the lack of well design device timers to create this high tech system to help individuals take control of their energy usage. Current State is a real-time energy use monitoring system and timer for powered devices combined into one. The Current State system is made up of two parts, a mobile application for you cell phone, which allows you to control and monitor electricity use from anywhere, and a series of Plug-Ends that give you control over the products around your house.



How it Works

1. Order the system online, specifying the number of Plug-Ends needed.
2. Install Current State software on your mobile device.
3. Attach Plug-Ends to powered devices around your house.
4. Sync Plug-Ends to software, giving each powered device a descriptive name and confirming its location within your house.
5. Use Current State to remotely monitor your energy usage, control your devices, and set up automatic timers.



The Plug-Ends
The Plug-Ends allow users to turn powered devices on or off remotely. Devices can be turned on and off and the flick of Current State's virtual switches, or set up on timers to turn themselves on and off at specified times.

The Plug-Ends are designed to be simple and energy conscious. They contain no LEDs or screens. All of their controls can be accessed through your mobile device.


Current State Software
The Current State software is designed to help users monitor their energy usage and take steps to control their energy consumption. Here is a closer look at some of the application's features...

Usage and Goals
The Usage screens focus on energy consumption throughout your house. The main screen shows real-time energy rates and your overall usage in killowatt hours and dollars for your current billing period. An overall graphic of your home depicts rooms that are at high, acceptable, or low energy consumption.


Close ups of each room help identify which devices and outlets are causing the most drain. Current State is designed to help educate users and therefore uses a percentage system based on a user's energy goals to judge over consumption. Users can specify energy goals for each room or device. Energy usage is shown as a percentage of that goal, where 100% is the set goal and anything above or below 100% shows excess consumption or efficiency.


Energy efficiency goals can be monitored and changed over time. For extra motivation and a competitive twist, your energy usage and goals are ranked in comparison to other users in your neighborhood and around the country. Participating energy companies can choose to add additional incentives for well set and achieved efficiency goals.



Controls
The Control section of Current State gives users remote control over any powered device in their house with a Plug-End attached to it. Devices can be turned on or off from anywhere within or outside of the home. All devices have an additional Auto setting, which acts as a timer. There are many devices within a house that do not need to be powered up, or even on standby, at all hours of the day. For these types of devices, the Auto timer setting can be used. Users set on and off times for both morning and night time hours to help reduce excess energy usage and increase their home's overall efficiency.

Android - Apps without borders

The Future of Mobile Social Networking-Whrrl combines activity recommendations with real-time location data.

When Steve Jobs strides onstage at Apple's annual developers conference on June 9, many will be expecting fireworks. Some industry analysts think Jobs will announce an iPhone upgrade, one that takes advantage of faster networks and includes new hardware, perhaps a GPS receiver. Jobs is also expected to demonstrate some third-party iPhone applications, available in June, which could include games that use the phone's accelerometer as a control, new mapping software, and quick ways to update profiles on social networks such as Facebook or MySpace.

One rising company that's hoping for a mention during the Steve Jobs Show is Pelago, a startup that recently garnered $15 million from funders, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Pelago will soon offer a version of its software, called Whrrl, for the iPhone. The software enables something Pelago's chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone's map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user's friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.

"If you think about your day-to-day life and how you discover things around you and places to go, to a great extent the source of that information is your friends," Vengroff says. With Whrrl, a user can "look through the eyes of friends and see the places they find compelling." The software begins with the user's position on the iPhone's map and indicates a smattering of nearby establishments. If the user's friends have visited and rated these places, the software indicates that as well. The map also shows the positions of nearby friends who have enabled a feature that lets them be seen by others.

Whrrl may turn out to be the leading edge of a wave of new location-based applications. "I think we're going to see a lot of new players showing up in this space," says Kurt Partridge, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center who works on a similar project called Magitti. "Part of the reason," he says, "is the universal availability of GPS or access to location, which hasn't been available to application writers before." The iPhone and Nokia's N95 phone are two examples of phones that provide location data to computer programmers. Google's forthcoming Android mobile operating system may also help push location-based applications onto the market.

To read more