Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that the looks of the future and says
I can see clearly now the rain is gone. I'm
Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. And that was a lie.
(00:23):
It's actually raining right now. But hey, what what do
we care, right? I mean, we're just talking about the
future here. Someday it's not going to be raining. Hypothetically. Yeah, uh,
you know, I was actually thinking while looking out in
the rain. I was thinking to myself, I want to
pick up something to eat on the way home, but
I don't want to go too far. And actually, uh,
(00:43):
somehow I've forgotten everything that happens to be near us.
I don't remember a single restaurant that's within walking distance.
If only I had some way of being able to
look at the world around me and get information layered
on top of what I could see, so that I
could actually make a decision to go someplace nearby and
(01:04):
pick things up, that would be an awesome, awesome reality.
So like you look down the street and all these
buildings pop up with a little digital signs of over
them and say eat here, this is good, or the
buildings are there, but the digital signs pop up. Yeah yeah,
lets me know, like, hey, that building happens to have
a bakery in it, and that building over there happens
to have a another bakery in it. We got a
(01:25):
lot of bakeries near our office. But yeah, so we're talking,
of course, about augmented reality. I then realized that this
is actually a thing, and it's been around for a while,
and but the neat thing about augmented reality is really
the promise that it has the potential that it has
to truly make our world a really interesting place beyond
(01:48):
what it already is. But before we get into all
of that, we've got a lot more stuff we've got
to cover first. Yeah, so what is augmented reality. It's
not like a muscle building supplement you take. No, no,
it's not. It's not some sort of you're not gonna
go find that over at the vitamin shoppy shoppy yeah, ohpees, yeah, No,
(02:09):
augmented reality. Okay, So think about it like this. This
is a cool way to imagine the kinds of environments
we can inhabit with our brains. So there is reality, right,
So that's that's that's you and me and the objects
in front of us, as long as we're not secretly
living in the matrix, the world as we perceive it
to be. Keeping in mind, of course, that our experience
(02:33):
of the universe is limited somewhat by the ability of
our senses to pick up on things and intern with them,
and it's all relatively individual in that, um, you know,
two people looking at the same thing are not really
looking at the same thing there, you know. But we're
not going to get too far by that. But I
think we can, as the three of us are sitting
here in front of microphones that I think we can
(02:54):
all agree with this, and that there's the fourth person
who is uh in think in sinister silence, existentially speaking,
I'm in Tahiti right now. So okay, well I hear
it's a magical place. Okay. Well, you know, the funny
thing is, even if we are living in the matrix,
we've still basically we'd have to call this reality because
it's our base level of experience exactly, even if we're
(03:17):
in a computer simulation. To us, this is reality, okay.
And then on the other hand, on the other end
of say this scale you've got, you've got virtual reality.
So that's you put on a helmet and suddenly you're
moving around in a completely simulated environment that's made up
out of computer data and has no bearing on the
(03:38):
actual world. It's just supplied for your brain, you'lid or etcetera. Yeah,
that kind of you've got, you are able to still
obey usually some sort of semblance of the laws of physics,
because that makes it easier for you to adjust to
a virtual reality. So in other words, when you move forward,
you go forward. When you move backward, you go backward.
(03:59):
I mean you can always well that's up to the
hardware in the software. Yeah, but in order to in
order for you to feel in a like you're in
a really immersive environment, generally speaking, it has to obey
certain rules consistently. Otherwise it just ends up being this
kind of mess. Yeah, okay, But say you've got a
spectrum with reality at one end and virtual reality on
(04:20):
the other. What's in the middle. Well, you've got two
different options, right, You've got actually you might say that
you have more than two should spectrum. We should call
this a field, and it's a field that in the
field is known as mixed reality, right, So closer to
virtual reality, for example, you have you might have mixed virtuality,
(04:41):
augmented virtuality. Yeah, so that way you would have like
a virtual environment where you would also incorporate something or
some things that were real objects or people. So here's
an example. Let's say that all of us end up
making World of Warcraft characters and we all log on.
We've also modified World of Warcraft so that instead of
(05:03):
the head of the cartoonish character, it's actually showing a
live feed of a webcam that's facing us. So each
of our characters has our respective heads on that character
and in real time. So when you see my character
walking around, it's a video image of my head on
top of this character's body, and the video images in
(05:23):
real time it's what I'm actually doing. So if I'm
looking off to the side because my dog is making noise,
my character is actually looking off to the side. That
would be this mixed reality here, this actual augmented virtuality,
and that we have brought some of reality into a
virtual environment. The virtual environment is dominant, but there's something
from the physical world in right, Joe, you and I
(05:44):
were talking about this last week with them or or
in a recent podcast at any great one about virtual reality,
right right, some some futuristic virtual reality reality game starting
to incorporate you know, like maybe like an actual ball
that you could incorporate into you virtual or even say
when we talked about Project hollow Deck, you might in
(06:06):
some ways. And what that was was it was sort
of a free play space that would use cameras and
virtual reality headsets and controllers to put your real body
um and track your real movements and put you sort
of in a virtual environment as you see it through
your headset, but you're really moving around and you know,
say ten foot by ten foot kind of space, right,
(06:27):
you could you could say that's virtual reality, but you
might more accurately say that's augmented virtuality because it's a
mostly virtual environment, but it's sort of putting your real
physical movements in there that that's the data. So you
could actually even have physical objects within that that room
that you are in that are represented within the virtual
(06:48):
world as some sort of virtual since some kind of
skin over at sure, um. But at the towards the
other end of the spectrum, you have something that's closer
to real reality, and that's augmented reality. And this is
that idea of overlaying reality with some sort of either
graphics or digital interface something where we're letting the digital
(07:09):
world marry with the physical world some kind of information. Yeah,
so how does this work, um in practice? Well, imagine,
just for one example, you hold up your smartphone and
you aim it around the world, and the things you
aim it at show up on the screen. But they
don't just show up on the screen as a photograph
of you. They show up also annotated with data. And
(07:32):
that data comes from the software on your phone, and uh,
or at least it that that it may even come
from some other source, but it's fed through via signals
and your phone is interpreting that. Yeah, it actually means
that it could be an extremely powerful tool. And we've
already seen lots of different applications of augmented reality. I
thought i'd go a little bit into kind of the
(07:54):
uh the well first before we get into the history
of it. I think it might be fun to actually
talk about the way science fiction has depicted augmented reality.
The version I always think of, UM, I think of
Minority Report. That's a big one where you've got and
they do everything right, don't they. That's like the best
movie for realistic sci fi. Yeah. I personally love how
(08:16):
how they are incredibly consistent with applying the rules of
logic of their universe despite lots of plot holes. It
co if only it could have been a better movie.
If only, if only they actually could have been consistent
with their rules. Oh yeah, I'm not saying the pre
crime is necessarily feasible, but all of the sort of
consumer technology in the movie is pretty smart and and
(08:41):
a lot of the stuffy they created was you know,
they were looking at things that were coming out of
M I T at the time and saying, well, let's
extend this and imagine what this would look like in
twenty more years. So let's go from the prototype version
of this technology and say what would it be like
as a mature technology. And that's kind of where they
got their start. Okay, so what is there augmented reality? Look,
(09:01):
it's it's sort of the same kind of stuff we're
talking about here where you get that overlay. In this case,
it's also tied to your identity. So when you are
walking around the world, it can the world itself can
react to you, kind of like our Internet of things discussion,
but in a way where it's giving you information about
your environment that's tailored not just to the environment but
(09:22):
to your personal preferences and needs. Now there are other examples.
I just started watching a show that's been on the
air for a while, Continuum, and in that you have
a character who is from the future who gets sent
back to present day what is our present day, and
she has these essentially cameras for eyes, and she's able
to have augmented reality features where she can look at
(09:45):
someone and in her time, she can look at someone
and use facial recognition software to map that person to
a specific identity and determine whether or not that person
is wanted for a crime, because she plays a police officer.
So that's another example of sci fi. UM. One would
be in the term dominator movies. That's just what I
was thinking of. Well, don't let me steal your thunder
Oh no, no, no, that's why we can share the
Terminator thunder um. The moment I thought of was when
(10:09):
those moments when you see the Terminator's vision he walks
into the bar and he's sizing up the different bikers
and he finally sees the one biker where he identifies
the different body parts for a matching size so he
can steal his clothes. Right, Um, and that augmented reality
could really help you quickly identify whose clothes you need
(10:29):
to steal to match your size appropriate. Right. It's sadly enough,
I have not seen any apps that have that specific application,
but I'm sure. But I wanted to talk a bit
a little, you know now that we've kind of got
like the here's the science fiction thing, and that's really
even the science fiction approach is just scratching the surface
of what augmented reality could possibly do. Right, But where
did this come from? Well, you know, you have to
(10:51):
look at a couple of different things before you get
to where we are with augmented reality. Some some developments
that were important that kind of set the found nation. So,
for example, one of the important developments was just the
development of three D films and three D technology. This
ability to have some sort of display that could give
you the illusion of depth, that not only that the
(11:13):
image that is projected on a flat surface have depth,
but it could also come toward you. Because most of
the implementations of I'm in a reality we have are
either flat text that's displayed on a screen like a
smartphone or a tablet, or they are something that's displayed
on a screen that has some sort of three D
capability like the Nintendo three DS, and I'll talk about
(11:35):
that in a little bit. Or it's maybe for some
sort of augmented reality glasses, and that owes a lot
to those early three D movies. On top of that,
you've got something that happened back in nineteen fifty seven
when Morton Hellick said, you know, there's gotta be a
way to make a more immersive experience to watching a
film besides just you know, sitting there passively. What if
(11:56):
I created something called the sensor rama. Yeah, yeah, we
were talking about that and that with all the air
and the vibration, the So I think we've visited the
sense of rama many times, and we should because it's
really the root of all modern technology that weirdly enough,
automated cars straight from the censor rama. Nineteen sixty six
(12:20):
was when Professor Ivan Sutherland, I'm sure you spoke of him.
He was the one who created a head mold displays, right,
So then you get up to uh, from that early work,
that's what kind of laid the technical groundwork for augmented reality,
but real augmented reality is as we understand it today
kind of dates back to the early nineteen nineties. That's
when a guy named Tom Coddle had come up with
(12:41):
a design for Boeing. He was actually reading about that. Yeah,
it was for for the engineers to help them put
together wiring. Well, it was really meant for manufacturers and
machinists to be able to build the stuff that Bowing needed,
but to be able to see where cables were going
to go. So the cables had not been laid in
(13:02):
yet there this is just the manufacturing phase where they're
actually making the metal components for a Boeing aircraft, for example.
But by putting on these headsets, they could take a
look at the uh, the stuff that was in process
of being manufactured, and see where the cables were going
to go, to make sure that they were allowing enough
clearance and creating the right type of framework to support
the cables so that the finished product would actually work
(13:25):
the way it was supposed to. And it meant that
they didn't have to constantly consult a manual or call
up one of the engineers who had designed the thing
and say, all right, you know, I'm trying to build
this thing due to your specifications, but I can't see
where it's gonna go because it's not there yet. So
this was kind of a way of getting around that,
and he has been said to essentially have coined the
(13:46):
term augmented reality. Uh In lb Rosenberg worked on a
user directed system for the United States Air Force called
Virtual Fixtures that was also an early example of augmented reality,
and a trio named Blair McIntyre. Stephen Finer, and Dorrie
Seligman wrote a paper about a head meld display and
(14:08):
a program that you could use when you were working
with a particular type of printer. They called it Karma,
which was knowledge based augmented reality for maintenance assistance. The
idea being that, all right, you know, these printers are
starting to get a little complicated, and sometimes your average
office worker doesn't know how to load the paper incorrectly
or a clear paper jam, And by using this sort
(14:30):
of head meld display and looking at the printer itself,
they could be guided to using this without having to
consult a manual, which does not necessarily lend itself to
a an easy translation of actual actionable things you can do,
you know. Yeah, most of the manuals that I've seen
are really cryptic. Yeah, well, they have an augmented reality
(14:52):
guide on how to smash your printer to pieces. No,
there was no office space app at that point, but
I think you know, probably would at one point say
have you tried turning it off and on again? But really,
if they could overlay a video of the computer just
just exploding spontaneously, that would I would buy. Sorry, I
think we see how the technophobes in the room feel
(15:13):
about this now that augmented reality really got a big boost,
Like in these early nineties, it was pretty much the
domain of research facilities some universities. No one outside of
those worlds really had access to any of this. I
really cared about it because this was the same time
when the initial virtual reality revolution was taking place and
then kind of collapsed in on itself. Talked about that.
(15:37):
So this this uh also affected augmented reality because it's
a related field. Well. In the late nineties nineties, uh
Hirokazu Kato produced an a R toolkit called a R Toolkit,
which that included a tracking system and included source code
that people could use and and camera calibration code that
(15:59):
would allow people to use headsets and various operating systems
to create an augmented reality system that had real time
tracking and incorporated in it, which really is what made
it truly useful and not to be too obvious, but
just if y when we say a are that stands
for reality. So that's kind of the lowdown on the
(16:21):
basic UM way that or you know, how augmented reality
developed Since those late ninety nineties, a lot of different
applications came out, but again, the really early ones were
pretty much restricted to engineering schools, that kind of thing.
It wasn't until the revolution of the smartphone really started
seeing them come out. Yeah, I was about to say
(16:42):
that that since um, since you know, head mounted displays
are still very expensive and very temperamental. Um, we don't
really have a good cheap product like that out yet.
We're waiting on the Oculus Rift. But then then Oculus Rift,
you can't see through it. It's a monitor had a
camera U live live video feed, in which case you
(17:03):
could argue whether that was augmented reality or more virtual
reality because you're seeing an actual camera feed as opposed
to UH, an optical view, like like a lens that's clear. Um. Sure, sure,
I guess something like Google Glass or um. I mean,
there's there's a couple other consumer products out there, and
most of these are very limited, like you were saying that,
they don't really have a lot of augmented reality uh functionality.
(17:27):
Yet the thing about them is that obviously their main
future application I think is augmented It would be hard
to argue against that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, but
you know, until we come up with that kind of thing.
We've got smart watches and smartphones and uh, and you know,
video applications like the like that game I have Judgment
that came out for the PS three back in two
(17:48):
thousand seven, UM, which was a sort of augmented reality
Magic the Gathering. It was made by Wizards of the Coast.
And so you had a gaming mat and you had
collectible cards and uh, and you play it on this
mat and you pointed the PlayStation I at it and
up on the video screen. You know, your little characters
would come out with the cards and move around and
do acky stuff. What this reminds me of and it
(18:10):
is kind of another example of augmented reality that comes
from science fiction is the Star Wars Hollow chess game
that's very much kind of augmented reality because the chess
pieces themselves moved around on a physical board, and there
was an actual board there, but the pieces were virtual representations.
Now in that case, we're also talking about holograms. And
if you really want to hear us talking about holograms,
(18:30):
just go back like forty episodes or something. So there's
still all kinds of questions about what we will eventually
be able to do in terms of holographic projection. But
one thing we do know we can certainly do is
mess with screens. You know, take a photo of the
world or a lens view of the world and add
overlay data on a screen that's flat in front of
(18:51):
your eyes. Yes, absolutely, And and also artists and and
museums have been really interested in this for for several
years now. Back in two five as an art installation
in Mexico City where um kids could put on these
kind of simple smocks or little pieces of headgear and
stand in front of a video assisted mirror and and
it would overlay images of elaborate costumes depending on which
(19:14):
little clothing markers they had put on. Stuff like that
and you know, and and also of course museums have
stuff like self guided audio tours that you can pick
up a little MP three player and take it around
with you. But a lot of them are experimenting with
different ways to to give people apps on their smartphones
or or eventually on something like Google Glass that they
(19:34):
can walk around and and find out more information about
all the cool stuff there see. That would be great.
I would love to be able to look at a
piece of art and not have to hunt down the
accompanying little um plaque that's next to it. If I could,
if I could stand back and admire the art, and
then also have the information come up and then go
away whenever I wanted it to to, you know, not
(19:56):
impede my view, that would be amazing. Well, we we
will talk more about the potential future applications of augmented
reality towards the end. But one thing that's even cooler
in that view is that data could be dynamic in
that sense, Like say you're looking at a painting in
a museum. Um it couldn't. It could just pop up
with information about the painting overlaid onto your screen, but
(20:18):
it could also do more. It could point out specific
parts of the painting and highlight them and say like, well,
here's where the artist used this type of shading or
this type of technique, or this is this is a
great example. People have questions about what this figure in
the back represents, and that's something that a plaque on
the site certainly couldn't do. I would love to have it.
(20:40):
Well we'll go, I'll say what I would love I've
been a reality to do. At the end, let's talk
a little about something about the earlier apps as well.
Like one that I always think about is Yelp. And
the reason I think of Yelp is they have that little, uh,
that little program where you can actually hold your smartphone
up and it looks takes information from the GPS, the
comp us, the camera, and then allows you to do
(21:03):
exactly what I was saying at the top of the show,
where you want to try and find a specific type
of business. For me, it's always restaurants. It's the only
thing I ever use it for. But i might be
someplace that I'm not familiar with and I'll pull that
up and then I'll do like a full three degree
turn to see what restaurants happened to be nearby, and
I can even take a look at their ratings based
(21:23):
upon yelps database. But if you like really quickly need uh,
you know, interior car cleaning and where's the nearest dump. Yeah,
they're still just just for example, No, but but the
reason why I even bring it up is that's one
of the earliest smartphone apps to come out that had
this sort of augmented reality UH feature built into it.
(21:46):
And this again is still just barely scratching the surface,
but it was one of those things that that got
people really excited at the early days of the smartphone revolution.
I mean keep in mind, at least in the United States,
it wasn't until we had the iPhone come out in
two thousands seven that consumers really began to connect with smartphones.
They just weren't as interested. Otherwise, the smartphone world in
(22:07):
the United States was pretty much limited to executives people
who had their various BlackBerry phones. And it wasn't until
the iPhone came out that your average consumers really got excited.
Camera in their phone that could handle right right, yeah,
and the process h Yes, So a lot of the
UH in my view at least, and and maybe you
all can correct me. It seems like a lot of
(22:28):
what's big out there in terms of augmented reality these
days is geolocation based. It's it's based on you know, well,
we've got your GPS location here, and we're sort of
checking you in at this like business establishment or landmark
or whatever it is, and we have some data associated
with that. There's a lot of that because but that's
because of the smartphone. I mean, it works well with
(22:51):
a smart phonecause the smartphones with you, and it can
identify where your location is. I mean, it assumes that
you are where wherever your smartphone happens to be. Another
one that I guess is probably kind of similar to
the ELP model, but a little more general, I think,
is like Wikitude. Yeah, that the mobile browser that is
meant to be a sort of a geolocation browser. Most
of the information in there is user generated. Uh, it's
(23:14):
um an interesting idea. It's the you know, you can
hold it up and get information about the world around you.
It's kind of like what you would think of with
the ultimate augmented reality, like a living encyclopedia. But it's
it's limited model. Yeah, you know, it's it's it's the
the potential is amazing, but the actual execution right now
(23:36):
is limited, just mainly because of the user base. It's
a limited user base. Not that the user base is bad,
there just aren't enough of them. Sure, Sure, and there
there have been around two thousand nine and two thousand
ten a couple again museums. I get really excited about these.
UM started linking up their photo archives with like GPS
smartphone augmented reality apps so that you can be walking
(23:57):
down the street and uh, and it will pull up,
Oh this is what this building looked like a century
ago or two centuries ago, or oh this this guy
lived here, this is this painting that he did. Um.
That's kind of kind of stuff. UM. And and these days,
I think that in combination with all of this really
awesome GPS technology that they're working with, they're also kind
(24:18):
of going backwards and starting to starting to work at
things on on a more micro level of you know,
getting your your camera and your software to recognize a
a sign or a person or something like that that
cannot be geologued. So in other words, it's it's not
tied down to a location, it's more tied to specific
(24:38):
objects or people. So for example, if I were to
have an augmented reality application on my phone and I'm
shopping for houses, I might be able to hold it
up and and get a information on the house. Or
if I'm shopping for some sort of uh specific gift
for my wife and I've got a whole list of things,
(25:00):
like it might be able to hold it up in
a store and start seeing locations for things. Or I
might even be shopping for I don't know a car,
and I hold it up and pointed at a car,
and it tells me all about the car, It gives
me all the features, it gives me maybe even what
the the the the suggested prices for it. These are
all different, just simple applications of augmented reality. I think
(25:22):
one of my favorite existing augmented reality apps I've seen
is called Google Sky. Yeah, that's a cool one where
you essentially you just hold your mobile device up to
the night sky and it will show you or I
guess it doesn't have to be at night. You just
hold it up to the sky and it will show
you the overlay of constellations, anomical information of what you're
(25:45):
looking at, which in Atlanta could be like this is
where the stars would be Yeah, due to all that
light pollution that's out there. Of course, anyone living in
a city knows what we're talking about here, but yeah,
exactly like it could be one of those things where
if you go out to a nice dark area and
you want to look at the stars, this could actually
(26:06):
help you envision those constellations you've always heard about but
perhaps did not quite you know, make them out when
you look. It's like three dots and and and This
kind of stuff sounds sounds easy, but when you really
get into the nitty gritty of of combining all of
this different data in real time um and and spitting
(26:28):
out something understandable, it gets it gets really tricky. You know,
if you ask a camera to recognize a car and
not the fact that you're reflected in the car, that's sure,
that's trick. Yeah, And being able to differentiate between things,
you know, cars that might have fairly subtle differences in
the various models, so it would be able to even
pick out what year that particular car model was. I mean,
(26:50):
sometimes you know one model to another, the changes might
be pretty minor, and things that you know, for the
average person looking at it wouldn't pick up on me.
Maybe a gear head would take one look and say, no,
I can tell you told obviously that other thing. But
for those of us who lack that Sherlock holmes s
ability to stare at a car and know everything about it,
it would be very useful. Another cool thing I don't
(27:13):
know if you all know about geogoggle. This one's one
that I was not familiar with. Yeah, well, I mean
it's cool all the different things you can do with
your environment just based on geographical information. So, say you
want to estimate the distance between you and a distant object,
(27:34):
Augmented reality could do that, which would be amazing for
people like me who are notoriously bad at estimating that
kind of thing. I mean, if I look at something
that's fifty feet away to me, it might as well
be either five feet in front of me or a
hundred miles away, because I just couldn't guess the number.
I'm not, No, I can't. I have practice, see, And
that's the thing is that if I had that where
(27:54):
I'm like, I could start to train my mind to
recognize this. I tend to be very bad with spatial
relationship type things, not special relationships. I'm awesome at those.
But spatial relationships I have. It's always been one of
those things that for me is a little tricky. So
not to the point where you know, there's a pencil
across the room and I keep reaching for it as
(28:16):
if it's right in front of me, but you know,
I'm not able to estimate very effectively. Would be useful
once we master artificial intelligence, though, they could also help
you estimate the distance in your special relationship. Well, I
like shoulder to shoulder with all my special relationships. Uh one,
obviously we're talking about emotional distance. Don't be so obtuse.
(28:37):
I'm not the alright dating Sam, This sounds like a
very bad future. Well we're going to get into augmented
dating in a second. What let's I want? But I
wanted to talk a little bit about the Nintendo three
D Sefly. So Nintendo three DS, you know, I got
to take one of those apart as soon as they
came out, and then I put pictures of it all
(28:57):
over the Internet of how it was just a bunch
of pieces and every all the gamers got upset. It
was a lovely day. But no, it was fun because
I got to play with it first. Obviously, I played
a couple of games. Yeah, so anyways, you know, handheld
mobile gaming device. It has a three D display that
you can look at without the use of glasses, and
(29:19):
you could also use these cards that came with the
game to the game set to do some augmented reality
type activities. There weren't actual games. It was more like, yeah,
you would play some you would play some games on
the device and then unlock stuff with your little character.
But basically you would have a card that would have
(29:41):
a very simple symbol and color on it, put it
on the table, hold your your Nintendo three D s
so that the three D camera is pointed at that card,
and you're looking at the card through the screen. So
it's it's obviously the card, and it's on whatever surface
you put it on, but it's it's the video stream
team that you're looking at. And then a little three
(30:02):
D virtual character would pop up on the card and
wander around or do whatever, depending upon whatever character it was,
which was really neat you got to you know, it
looked as if you had Mario walking around on your table,
playing around, you know, in an actual real environment. Now granted,
if you looked anywhere other than that screen, you would
see there's no Mario there. It's not projecting Mario, there's
(30:25):
no hologram. It's just on the screen. But it was
a really cool effect and it's something that I have
seen in other applications. Here in Atlanta, we are very
close to the campus of Georgia Tech, and there was
a point where the entire tech stuff, how stuff works,
and and related families all went down to Georgia Tech
(30:45):
to go and sit in on a Augmented Reality UH workshop.
It was a a classroom where the various students have
been working on augmented reality UM applications and I got
to go through all of us and see what the
different teams were working on and get to play with
it myself, and it was really neat. They were doing
(31:06):
a lot of same stuff that you were talking about earlier, Lauren,
where they would have like a a map that would
be laid out and then you would hold a smartphone
that was loaded with a specific app and you would
aim it at the map, and then you would see
the representation of your characters on that map, and then
you could control the characters through the through the phone,
and you're you could see them interact with the other
(31:28):
characters that were represented by the other players. So obviously
the first thing that all the cool kids were thinking
was this is going to make my Saturday afternoon Dungeons
and Dragon sessions so much more awesome because we'll all
just be sitting around and seeing that, you know, Throng
Guard the Barbarian is truly kicking some cobalt butt. Um,
(31:51):
the non cool kids totally didn't get it and went
out smoking. So yeah, their Platins, their rangers anyway, the
uh yeah, so it was but it was an interesting
experience to actually see these is that Paladin is Paladin's Paladin.
(32:11):
You didn't know. I thought you were making a joke, Lamp. Sorry, well, hey,
you know, we've all learned something today and it's not yet.
But yeah, it was really neat seeing these these projects
that various students were working on with various approaches to
augmented reality. I've also seen it used in marketing. I
go to a lot of big events like CE S
(32:33):
and E three, and these are places where people will
often trot out this stuff and and kind of show
off the potential for it. It's not again, it's not
something that you often see in practice because it usually
requires that your audience have a specific type of app
installed on their mobile device. Right, It's not like it's
a native feature that's supported by all smartphones. So for
(32:56):
you to be a marketing person and to try and
uh can ins your you know, your pretend your your
customers customers to download an app so that when they
hold it up to an advertisement, they get this little
augmented reality experience. That's a big stretch, but it did
show off some of the really kind of fun ways
that you could create an augmented reality experience. It's just
(33:19):
one that I questioned the practicality on because I wasn't
sure how many people, again, you would convince hey, download
this app so that way our commercials will be more effective. Yeah,
a lot of the future of this is really based
on how much crowd sourcing we we managed to get
into it, because like like one app that I read
about UM that I think is still in development. UM
(33:39):
was something by by company called crowd Optic that that
that lets you if you if you hold up your phone,
your phone can this this app can tell you what
direction a bunch of people are holding their phones in
in the nearer vicinity, and and then it can go
in if they also have this app and let you
look at what pictures and video those people are taking
(34:01):
with their phones. So it's stuff that people have opted
in this, so it's not like not like not like
I just pip my phone out so I could take
a picture of this special moment that's happening, that's that's
good for my life, and then realize that, oh, everyone
around me also saw that special I see. Like it's
when like Godzilla attacks and there are people a couple
(34:21):
of blocks over getting video and you don't want to
get that close. You can you can sponge off of
what they're doing. Yeah, what meanwhile you're saying or at
a concert or um, you know, in in another less
Godzilla situation, maybe maybe maybe you're the Russian village where
the comet is flying overhead. Yeah, I guess I should
(34:41):
say media, right, But well, I wanted to follow up
on your three DS thing, um Nintendo three DS with
a cool kind of future vision, uh, and I suppose
we should talk about what are some of the future
applications of augmented reality that right there? Yet? Um So
I saw a video the other day that was it
(35:01):
was linked on Kotaku and it was called a future
retro Mario three D world. Yeah, I saw that. That
was great. Yeah, And so it wasn't a real augmented
reality app. It was just a video like almost almost
like a concept. But what it was it was sort
of like it showed what an augmented reality app might
do in the future, which was it had a little
(35:23):
Mario sprite scurrying over and your grill. So and in theory,
like with something like that, if you could make it work,
you could design your own real world Mario level by
stagging cardboard boxes or whatever, getting cans of food out,
and then play the game and try and get Mario
to actually navigate through this this obstacle course you've created. Yeah,
(35:46):
and there's really when I think about it, when you
think about what's already been done with the connect and
stuff like that, there's really no reason I can see
why that shouldn't be doable to have say a Mario
sprite or whatever kind of protagonist sprite in and maybe
even enemy sprites and power ups and stuff like that
appearing overlaid on a landscape that's real three D objects. Now,
(36:09):
the main things you need to conquer I think is
you need a very good accurate perception of depth with
the cameras, which that's why the connect thing would work
so well. You'd have to have multiple you combine them,
or or infrared sensing or something like that. But um,
it also needed to need to be able to tell
shadows from solids basically, right, So in other words, you
(36:31):
wouldn't have a problem where suddenly you can't get across
part of this because you've got this this wall that
stretches all the ceiling and it's because the floor lamp
has got a shadow cast right there. Um. But yeah,
I mean that'd be really fun, right, you could like
run Mario over your dog or whatever. I guess the
(36:53):
seems fun. I don't know. I've been you have to
try it to find out how fun it is. I've
been breeding pet turtles just for this purpose. Yeah, I
just well, I don't know what's going to happen yet.
We haven't built it. I was going to mention there
is another semi augmented reality game that exists right now
that I think could really benefit from a full augmented
(37:17):
reality treatment, and that's Ingress, which is a Google based
game now as it stands right now. The way it
works is that you load the game up on your
smartphone and it gives you like a map view, just
like it would be a Google Maps view kind of thing.
But there are points on the map that correspond to
the game world, uh and in the real world they
correspond with things that are of cultural or artistic significance. So,
(37:39):
for example, there is a mural that's painted on underneath
a bridge near where I live, and that's one of
the spots. But any like if it's a museum or
an old theater or whatever, those pop up on the game,
but they're different from like in the game, they're just
points of importance where it's kind of like capture the flag.
(38:01):
You have to go to this section and uh, secure
it for your team. Now, right now, it's played on
your smartphone where you look at the little map and
you go and you push some little buttons and hopefully
you end up capturing that point for your team. And
that's about it. But in the future I could see
this where if you had some sort of augmented reality
glasses like Google Glass, you might be able to see
(38:23):
an overlay of these these virtual points that are coinciding
with the actual real culturally significant areas. That are in
your in your town, or wherever you happen to be.
I think that would be really cool because then you
could experience both worlds at the same time. Right now,
it feels like two separate experiences. And if you're really
(38:43):
just interested in the game, you're mostly just running around
looking at your position on the map, right, Yeah, you're
not really looking at the world around you. But if
you were able, if you were able to translate this
to some sort of Google Glass type of experience, you
could then have the real world experience on top of that.
And that's where I think augmented reality really is interesting.
(39:04):
It's when you have this moment where you can appreciate
what how amazing our real world is by getting more
information about it than you would have. Yeah, I wanted
to talk about at least a couple of augmented reality
futures that I've written about in previous four Thinking episodes.
So one of them was just augmented reality for social media,
(39:27):
which is interesting because you you went with it from
a different perspective than the way I think of it.
When I hear that phrase, explain what you mean? But okay,
well what I meant is right now, you can say,
look at your Facebook news feed, and that's full of
items that have been um annotated with data by your friends,
so they've attached a like to it. And now say
(39:49):
this article from some website or whatever has their like,
and you can see that, or it has their comment
on it, or they can share it with their friends. Imagine,
instead of articles from various websites or images or whatever,
you're doing this with objects in the real world. So
you have your social network and you walk through the
real world, and you can see all the data points
(40:12):
that your friends or even strangers have left on these objects.
So a business or storefront, or you know, or a
geographic location, or a landmark, a public landmark at a
site of interest, or even I thought about, like sitting
down in a restaurant and looking at a menu would
not be cool if you could see what your friends
had liked on that menu. Sure, yeah, yeah, go like
(40:33):
try the scallops kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So
that's a really interesting idea, the idea that you have
an annotated world around you that you can kind of
see what your friends liked and didn't like, especially when
you start comparing your own tastes against your friends and
maybe you're going to completely against what they said or
he hated this so I'm gonna love it, or just
you know, how how cool is that for for going
(40:55):
places like if you're going to New York City where
a lot of movies have been filmed, and for example,
you you're kind of trying to find you know, like
like where's that firehouse where they filmed Ghostbusters or etcetera.
Where where where in Central Park was that one scene
in the Fisher King shot. I was there when they
showed it, so I could actually take you there, but
that's okay? Or say, um, what if you are visiting
(41:16):
a city where you have a friend who lives um
but you know, maybe your friend is busy and they're
not around to show you around. You could still see
all of the places in town where they've left to
comment and like sure, Now, when I thought of the
social the social media use of augmented reality, my mind
went the other way around where I thought of the
(41:39):
potential And this is something we've seen in science fiction
as well, where you're able to wear some sort of
augmented reality headwear, or I guess you could use your smartphone.
It would be a little less um discreet and and
look at the people around you and see things like
maybe you could see their Twitter feed and you could
read up on what assuming that they have a public
(41:59):
Twitter feed, you could read some of the tweets they've
been post, how many friends they have, or even just
see what kind of what kind of person they are online,
like what sort of persona do they project when they're online?
Or maybe even if you have certain kinds of apps,
see if people have left comments about that specific person.
So if you are looking at a person and the
(42:21):
messages just keep popping up like heartbreaker player, jerk face,
you like, you know what I'm gonna get this guy's
I'm just I'm just not gonna tell. Yeah yeah, so UM, anyway,
that would explain why people avoid me. But we don't
have that. I've been in reality yet, so I really
I don't understand it. Yeah. The other one I thought
(42:41):
of I sort of I mentioned in our episode about
the future of travel, um, and it seems sort of
related to something you talked about, Lauren, which was like
going through a city and having like, here's what this
building used to look like. I assumed that that, though,
is more of kind of a data link like, here's
a photograph. Um. The idea I had was, well, what
if say you visit an archaeological site, like the ruins
(43:03):
of a temple complex or something like that in Egypt
or anywhere in Rome, Yeah, in anywhere that that used
to look different? Well, wouldn't it be cool if you
could walk through the real physical environment but you've got
your smart glasses on and they're overlaying a virtual completion
of those ruins that shows you what they would have
(43:25):
looked like and what I have felt like to have
walked through this place when it was when it was
a full right. Right, So you say, you've got the
ruins of a temple that are just some columns, while
reaching up from those columns would suddenly be the rest
of the columns, the entire building to scale from your
point of view, the plant life that they've done paintings
of that they know that they know existed, yeah, or
(43:45):
even the population. Right, there's no reason you couldn't have
like virtual sprites of human beings dressed as they would
have been doing what they would have been doing as
as far as we know, moving around within the environment.
You know, maybe either actors that they filmed previously or
right or digital represents. Yeah, would all. I mean, there
are a lot of different possibilities there. I think about
the potential for doing something like visiting the site of
(44:07):
an old battlefield and being able to actually see how
that played out, because I mean hit on one that
I don't want to when you think about it, Yeah,
it's it would be really I mean, to be a
really impactful experience in many different ways. What the reason
why I think about that is that when you read
history and you're reading the stories about the various conflicts
(44:30):
that have happened throughout history, you really don't get a
sense of what was what was it really like? Certainly
not You don't get the scaled the human factor is
almost always completely ignored. It's usually very dry facts. Even
if it's written well, it often is just giving you
kind of this huge bird's eye view, and it would
(44:51):
be interesting to see that, you know. It's it's easy
to tell a story in in you know, hindsight of
how this general was brilliant because they made this manu ouver,
But in reality, any of these kind of situations tend
to be far more messy, complicated, chaotic than any book
would necessarily let you know, and being able to see
it and experience it may give you a deeper appreciation
(45:13):
of actual historical moments, and it wouldn't necessarily have to
just be battles. So when I think about because uh,
you know, there are a lot of different sites in
the United States, particularly in the area that we're in
the eastern side of the United States, where there are
a lot of Civil War markers, and I always think
about that. I think, you know, you hear the stories
and you see maybe the re enactments or whatever, but
(45:35):
it's still doesn't give you a full appreciation for the
terrible things that happen. And while I don't want to
dwell on those things, I think they are important to understand. Well, yeah,
I mean just to get a sense of what it
was like to be on the ground. We we usually
think of historical events sort of like with a bird's
eye view, yeah, um, but but to get the feeling
(45:56):
of like, what would it look like if you're standing
on the ground here and had this horde, yeah, coming
towards you. What would it be like if you were
not only standing there and you had all these people
around you on various sides, but you were able to
actually see who those people were now they're now that's heavy,
But it would be amazing. I mean you said there
(46:17):
and thing like, well, they'd be like living that Burns
documentary on the Civil War, you know, and it's it's
also I mean, this is all really terrific um historical
and educational kind of stuff. But you know, we can
also with augmented reality. For example, there there was a
bunch of buzz last year about the development of airplane
pilot visors that would let let a pilot sitting in
(46:39):
the cockpit look down and see the airstrip below him
or her, or or or look around and be able
to see, um, you know, how far away that stormfront
is in the distance, and what speed it's moving at.
I don't know how many of our listeners have been
in a cockpit, but the visibility there, the actual visibility
through the windows, is really limited. I mean, you've got
a lot of flementation around you and you rely on
(47:01):
it heavily. But being able to not have to depend
on glancing down and looking at that instrumentation having it
be plastered on your vision would be terrific. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And beyond the usefulness and the educational aspects, there's still
plenty of ways to use augmented reality that are purely
for entertainment purposes. I mean, think of all the different
style games there are that you could play with folks
(47:25):
if we were all using the same sort of app
like something along the lines of ingress. Let's say that
we wanted to play a game where one person is
playing kind of I don't know if you guys have
ever played any of those games where you've got everyone's
playing it that they are all assassins and you have
a specific target you're supposed to be after. Well, with
augmented reality, you could end up making a game like
(47:46):
that way more fun with crazy effects, and it would
be really neat. Yeah, rather than distributing little bottles of
for example, food coloring to to have people drop in
other people's drengths poison, right, Yeah, you could do a
lot of different little thing things that could be you know,
potentially hilarious and entertaining. But there are a lot of
different options for that sort of stuff when it comes
(48:08):
to gaming. And I mean, I think that the game
applications for augmented reality are going to go a long
way to enabling other more educational and informative applications. The
same sort of thing with virtual reality, where they ended
up appropriating a lot of the technology that was designed
for video games, because if those markets existed and they
(48:30):
drove prices down, then this other industry could end up
using that same technology for a totally different purpose. Yeah,
these kind of simple I mean, forgive me, game designers
of augmented reality stuff, what you're doing is not simple.
But these sort of relatively proof of concept sort of
games can absolutely lead to I mean, you know, the
again kind of kitchy but useful, ikea application of being
(48:50):
able to, you know, hold up your smartphone to your
apartment and and drop in a couch and see what
that would look like there. That would be uh yeah,
I mean that's a very good example. These are things
that you know, we're going to be taking for granted
in another decade. Right This is the kind of stuff
that's already finding its way into our personal electronic devices
(49:13):
right now, and within a decade we're gonna be like,
I don't remember what it was like to have to
go into a store and just hope that what the
thing I was looking at was going to fit in
my decore. Now we're gonna be able to do that
all the time without ever leaving our home, and uh,
you know, it's kind of interesting to me, and I
love all the different ideas, Like you know, I love learning,
(49:33):
So anything that has augmented reality where it gives me
the opportunity to get more information about the world around me,
I think it's phenomenal. I would love to be able
to go to a location I've never been in and
have the option to turn this on and off so
that I could one experience it in first person exactly
the way I would without any augmented reality at all,
but also benefit whenever I wanted to from the extra
(49:56):
information if I wanted to know, you know, how how
long has that been here? What was the cultural significance
of the statue that I'm looking at? Maybe it's maybe
there's a plaque there, but it's written in a language
I don't understand. It would be really helpful to have
that kind of stuff. And I think, uh, you know,
anytime we talk about this, I just think of all
those different possible applications, and I love the idea of
(50:19):
having like a truly uber augmented reality application where you
can even choose what sort of information is coming to you.
Maybe it's maybe you're only interested in navigating through the
modern city and you just want to know where the
best coffee shop is in your area. Or maybe you
want to go on a cultural vision and you want
to see the places that have cultural significance, or maybe
you're stalking a celebrity and you just gotta know where
(50:41):
they are going. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it
sounds like the kind of rabbit holes that you can
fall through on Wikipedia or on other parts of the
Internet and and come up like two hours later, kind
of going like, oh, I'm my back is stiff. I
guess I haven't blinked. In this case, it'll be like
I don't know where I am anymore because I'm four
miles from where I started. But how now, how cool
is that you've got GPS to lead you back where
(51:04):
you need to go. Well, I think the coolest thing
about it is that it could help you know the
things you didn't even know. We're available to be known
about the world around you. Your your physical environment is
full of secrets that you don't even know. You need
to discover you and and sharing that level of specialization
that usually only an expert in that field could give
you being able to walk around with the collected experts
(51:26):
of the world in your ears. And you know, it's
it's absolutely mind blowing ly phenomenal, and I I'm so
happy that we are able to see the beginning of
that that fund that era. Really, I mean, it's it's
and i'd say going into full swing now, but we'll
definitely see maturation over the next few years. We're going
(51:47):
to people are going to come up with applications for
this that haven't even at all occurred to any of us,
and we're gonna say, oh, of course, that makes perfect sense.
Now I didn't think of it before. And then we're
just going to be completely blown away by the results.
It's gonna be amazing. I cannot wait. I love this stuff.
Then again, I'm also one of the owners of Google Glass,
(52:07):
so I guess that's not to be surprised. Um, although
we should say Google Glass obviously it's not really augmented
reality glasses yet. The closest is the maps function that's
on there, and there are a couple of apps that
people have been working on but aren't official Google Glass apps.
But the there's certainly I would argue a tool that
will be taking full advantage of augmented reality in the
(52:29):
near future. Yeah, and we're seeing plenty of other competing
technologies come to market soon. So awesome stuff. Well, let's
wrap up this discussion. Guys. If you have enjoyed this,
make sure you go and visit FW thinking dot com.
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(52:50):
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(53:16):
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