Apparently set to be the next big thing (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8421684.stm) in 2010:
QuoteAugmented reality (AR) has had a quiet launch on mobile handsets but it set to explode next year, experts say.
AR is a technology that allows data from the web to be overlaid on a view of the physical world.
Although a relatively small sector at the moment, analyst firm Juniper Research predicts that AR will generate incomes of $732m (£653m) by 2014.
AR allows mobile operators to combine the increasing functionality of smartphones, such as GPS, video and accelerometers, with the increasingly available number of location-based apps.
Already mobile phones use location technology to help people find their way around, such as an iPhone app developed by UK firm Acrossair to help people find their nearest tube station.
New look
US location-based social network Brightkite allows users to find friends in their vicinity simply by turning on the camera on their mobile phone and pointing it around them.
If any of their friends are in the same location, they can see their posts and photos.
Futurologist Ian Pearson predicts an explosion of such services next year.
"I'm surprised we haven't got there yet. But it makes a lot of sense if a friend is a street away then you can meet up for coffee," he said.
And it won't end there as the physical and virtual worlds increasingly blur, he says.
"Instead of seeing people as they are you might well be able to see their Facebook profiles appearing as bubbles above them," said Mr Pearson.
This is likely to raise some very important privacy issues but Mr Pearson thinks users will be in control of what others see.
"It will be up to individuals to set the privacy levels," he said.
Next year will see a range of "experimental" services rolled out as mobile firms grapple with how to make money from AR, thinks Martin Garner of analyst firm CCS Insight.
"It is an exciting area for mobile. It is a way for them to define a new area of the internet because phones can do it in a way that the desktop can't," he said.
This is fun stuff. Steve Mann at the University of Toronto has done some incredible work in this area... I got to beta a set of his sunglasses for a while, it was really cool.
that would be pretty awesome actually.
Am I a bad person for secretly wishing AR would stay an underground tech thing only used by crazy hackers? :)
and yeah what BAI said--they will probably use it as a way to augment our reality with even more advertising.
As long as they don't put adverts into your dreams
AR has been the Next Big Thing since about 1998. Only recently has it actually become reasonably practical. I've been working on an AR app for the gphone -- once I get a gphone I'll see if I can get the damned thing working.
Side note: how the heck are people planning on making money off of AR? Outside of ads, are people selling the apps? Making people buy subscriptions? Or is the figure up in the OP like twitter's figures?
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 30, 2009, 02:24:53 PM
Quote from: Kai on December 30, 2009, 02:58:52 AM
Quotefuturologist
:lulz:
SCIENCE!
I think what they mean by that word is "person who makes random bullshit predictions about technology and somehow gets paid in the process".
No, they also make predictions about politics, too.
Quote from: Cain on December 30, 2009, 04:05:34 PM
No, they also make predictions about politics, too.
What is your opinion of "futurology", Cain?
Quote from: Kai on December 30, 2009, 04:03:37 PM
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 30, 2009, 02:24:53 PM
Quote from: Kai on December 30, 2009, 02:58:52 AM
Quotefuturologist
:lulz:
SCIENCE!
I think what they mean by that word is "person who makes random bullshit predictions about technology and somehow gets paid in the process".
Having met some futurists... I think that sums it up.
I have no respect for 'futurists' that are incapable of interacting with "Now". If the Internet and forums and HTML are "too complex" and "too confusing" then you are not a futurist. You are an old person that desperately wishes they lived in a scifi story... without realizing that compared to your youth... THIS IS A FUCKING SCI-FI LIFE!
I get so fucking pissed off at these assholes that are gonna tell me about the Singularity or the Next Big Thing when they are incapable of fully grokking the Current Big Thing... or even the Thing that was Big Last Year.
Futurists, Transhumanists, etc.... some of them are really cool and are on top of their shit... quite a few of them however, appear to be mouths attached to post-40 bodies and pre-90's brains.
Most don't know what they talk about and have facile expertise in what they are futurologising about.
Some can be OK, but they generally don't call themselves futurologists (for example, historian Martin van Creveld, predicted more of the current decade in his 1999 book than most futurologists I've read, and economic analysts for Shell accurately predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War). If they know the subject and have a historical, in-depth grasp of the material, then yeah, chances are they know what they are talking about. Professional futurologists though might as well call themselves future bullshitters.
NOSTRADAMUS WAS A FUTUROLOGIST, TOO.
In other words, I could predict as well as a futurologist. Good to know.
Quote from: Cain on December 30, 2009, 04:12:28 PM
Most don't know what they talk about and have facile expertise in what they are futurologising about.
Some can be OK, but they generally don't call themselves futurologists (for example, historian Martin van Creveld, predicted more of the current decade in his 1999 book than most futurologists I've read, and economic analysts for Shell accurately predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War). If they know the subject and have a historical, in-depth grasp of the material, then yeah, chances are they know what they are talking about. Professional futurologists though might as well call themselves future bullshitters.
This is the correct
motorcycle futuristic hovercycle.
Understanding history gets you a lot closer to the future than falling asleep after watching the Sci-Fi channel and eating too much pizza does. Most futurists seem to do the latter.
The best way to get respected for being a 'futurist' is by calling yourself a science fiction author, and selling your predictions as fiction. That way, people jump on what you predicted correctly and ignore what you predicted wrong, instead of the other way around.
There are actually courses in futurology, you know. Just in case anyone thought the "professional futurologist" thing was a strawman. Actual expertise in a particular subject, be it virtual reality simulation or conflict resolution in South Asia, will make you far better at seeing the trends evident in that field than someone with less expertise, but with a lot of fancy pseudo-sociological models and jargon.
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on December 30, 2009, 04:29:19 PM
The best way to get respected for being a 'futurist' is by calling yourself a science fiction author, and selling your predictions as fiction. That way, people jump on what you predicted correctly and ignore what you predicted wrong, instead of the other way around.
Example: William Gibson, Jules Verne
Also, Gibson never posited himself as an expert, did he? Everything I've seen suggests he is very forthcoming about his lack of technological aptitude, especially earlier on in his career.
Quote from: Cain on December 30, 2009, 04:40:51 PM
Also, Gibson never posited himself as an expert, did he? Everything I've seen suggests he is very forthcoming about his lack of technological aptitude, especially earlier on in his career.
Absolutely... in fact his more recent books aren't all that futuristic because Gibson stated that he has NO IDEA, what the hell is gonna happen next... he is of the opinion that the Future is Now and things are changing far too fast to predict anything with accuracy.
:lulz:
Quote from: Cain on December 30, 2009, 04:33:03 PM
There are actually courses in futurology, you know. Just in case anyone thought the "professional futurologist" thing was a strawman. Actual expertise in a particular subject, be it virtual reality simulation or conflict resolution in South Asia, will make you far better at seeing the trends evident in that field than someone with less expertise, but with a lot of fancy pseudo-sociological models and jargon.
Good to know I can predict trends in the biological sciences better than some doofus calling himself a futurologist.
Quote from: Doctor Rat Bastard on December 30, 2009, 04:58:01 PM
Quote from: Cain on December 30, 2009, 04:40:51 PM
Also, Gibson never posited himself as an expert, did he? Everything I've seen suggests he is very forthcoming about his lack of technological aptitude, especially earlier on in his career.
Absolutely... in fact his more recent books aren't all that futuristic because Gibson stated that he has NO IDEA, what the hell is gonna happen next... he is of the opinion that the Future is Now and things are changing far too fast to predict anything with accuracy.
:lulz:
Smart man.
Quote from: Kai on December 30, 2009, 05:02:16 PM
Quote from: Cain on December 30, 2009, 04:33:03 PM
There are actually courses in futurology, you know. Just in case anyone thought the "professional futurologist" thing was a strawman. Actual expertise in a particular subject, be it virtual reality simulation or conflict resolution in South Asia, will make you far better at seeing the trends evident in that field than someone with less expertise, but with a lot of fancy pseudo-sociological models and jargon.
Good to know I can predict trends in the biological sciences better than some doofus calling himself a futurologist.
Quote from: Doctor Rat Bastard on December 30, 2009, 04:58:01 PM
Quote from: Cain on December 30, 2009, 04:40:51 PM
Also, Gibson never posited himself as an expert, did he? Everything I've seen suggests he is very forthcoming about his lack of technological aptitude, especially earlier on in his career.
Absolutely... in fact his more recent books aren't all that futuristic because Gibson stated that he has NO IDEA, what the hell is gonna happen next... he is of the opinion that the Future is Now and things are changing far too fast to predict anything with accuracy.
:lulz:
Smart man.
Yep Here's a bit from the interview where they asked about the shift in focus:
QuoteWell, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I'm going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I'm going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. 'Cause I'm going to have to go beyond that. And I think definitely over the course of these last two books--I don't think I'm done yet--I've been getting a yardstick together. But I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. I don't know if I'll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s, as strange as it may seem to say this, we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.
Full Interview at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000112701
If you consider Gibson as a futurist, his track record is actually pretty awful. When he wrote Neuromancer, video games were already big and virtual reality was an existing concept. The idea that people would interact using computers the way they already do with telephones and books is no great feat of logic. The icon-centrism in the cyberspace trilogy completely failed to pan out, and Case was about to be killed for less ram than is probably in your average graphing calculator. Had he marketed himself as a futurist, he would be a complete failure. He was trained in postmodern literary criticism, and so his use of brands and his grasp of how people might mis-use technology were always far better than his predictions of technology.
Likewise, PKD has occasionally been accused of having good predictions of the future. His track record, if anything, is worse. Gibson at least managed to inspire a generation of graphic designers with a paragraph in Idoru, making his imagined near-future closer to reality. PKD's writing has always struck me as somewhat Gernsback-ish. It is amusing that the least speculative and futuristic of the bunch (A Scanner Darkly) is the most realistic, wherein outside of a few details (scramble suit, holographic video recorders, portable home fMRI machines that your average unemployed stoner can afford) it would fit neatly in the 1994 setting in which it was plopped.
ENKI: get off your ass and finish your goddamn AR smartphone app!
I want to help design AR games and I need someone to do ALL the technical stuff while I sit back in my chair and make vague predictions about how they will impact
my bowels society.
I had no idea Futurology was something you can study academically, I always thought it was a label sci-fi authors came up so they could minimize that word 'fiction' in their job title..
also, BAM - back in the Predictions About the Future thread, I
vaguely forecasted all of this
Quote from: Cramulus on August 20, 2007, 04:39:00 PM
New genres of games will eventually emerge which make use of portable systems equipped with GPS and VoIP. Games in which you have to go physically explore the world in order to play.
IMMA FUTUROLOGIST!
Quote from: Cramulus on December 30, 2009, 07:28:02 PM
ENKI: get off your ass and finish your goddamn AR smartphone app!
The codebase has been sitting around unmodified for something like three years. I will be getting an actual gphone soon, so I will try to get the damned thing debugged then.
Quote from: Cramulus on December 30, 2009, 07:28:02 PM
ENKI: get off your ass and finish your goddamn AR smartphone app!
I want to help design AR games and I need someone to do ALL the technical stuff while I sit back in my chair and make vague predictions about how they will impact my bowels society.
I had no idea Futurology was something you can study academically, I always thought it was a label sci-fi authors came up so they could minimize that word 'fiction' in their job title..
also, BAM - back in the Predictions About the Future thread, I vaguely forecasted all of this
Quote from: Cramulus on August 20, 2007, 04:39:00 PM
New genres of games will eventually emerge which make use of portable systems equipped with GPS and VoIP. Games in which you have to go physically explore the world in order to play.
IMMA FUTUROLOGIST!
I did some basic development work on a tech heavy RPG... but the cost was just not feasible two years ago.
At any rate, we were considering the use of RFID tags in objects, so your smartphone or whatever would be able to know/identify stuff. And we'd come up with a basic system to work with a minimalist GUI... If this takes off, it may be time to break that shit out again.
Though in honesty, its not cause I'm a futurist... it was imagined on a Mushroom trip.. and sketched out in the weeks after the trip. :lulz:
I am pretty sure that doing image recognition on a gphone is still damn near infeasible in real time. At least, I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck doing it. This, of course, means that if Cram wants to use my app to LARP, he will either have to deal with unskinned weapons or cover his foam weapons with telephones.
BTW Rat - how did you get in on a steve mann beta??
I've been telling people about his work for YEARS, I love that stuff
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on December 30, 2009, 08:17:41 PM
I am pretty sure that doing image recognition on a gphone is still damn near infeasible in real time. At least, I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck doing it. This, of course, means that if Cram wants to use my app to LARP, he will either have to deal with unskinned weapons or cover his foam weapons with telephones.
rfid's would allow you to have a 'prop' in the real world and a 'object' in your app... Of course this assumes that all players have some minimum level of gear.
Quote from: Cramulus on December 30, 2009, 08:19:13 PM
BTW Rat - how did you get in on a steve mann beta??
I've been telling people about his work for YEARS, I love that stuff
UNNAMED PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT decided that one year all of their Powerz That Be should have cool wearable computers for the Fashion Show... apparently so that they could watch the Internet video broadcast, rather than the girls on the runway in front of them. The concept failed utterly (sort of like the time they rented the Concord and wanted to "paint it pink and put heart stickers on it" for the flight to Europe....). However, it did get me a budget and a short trial period with Steve's early sunglasses model.
Quote from: Doctor Rat Bastard on December 30, 2009, 08:22:55 PM
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on December 30, 2009, 08:17:41 PM
I am pretty sure that doing image recognition on a gphone is still damn near infeasible in real time. At least, I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck doing it. This, of course, means that if Cram wants to use my app to LARP, he will either have to deal with unskinned weapons or cover his foam weapons with telephones.
rfid's would allow you to have a 'prop' in the real world and a 'object' in your app... Of course this assumes that all players have some minimum level of gear.
Namely, RFID detectors. I don't think that will work too well with smartphones, unfortunately. Any ideas for how that could be done with another technology? I would be interested in adding the ability to skin moving objects as well.
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on December 30, 2009, 08:39:03 PM
Quote from: Doctor Rat Bastard on December 30, 2009, 08:22:55 PM
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on December 30, 2009, 08:17:41 PM
I am pretty sure that doing image recognition on a gphone is still damn near infeasible in real time. At least, I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck doing it. This, of course, means that if Cram wants to use my app to LARP, he will either have to deal with unskinned weapons or cover his foam weapons with telephones.
rfid's would allow you to have a 'prop' in the real world and a 'object' in your app... Of course this assumes that all players have some minimum level of gear.
Namely, RFID detectors. I don't think that will work too well with smartphones, unfortunately. Any ideas for how that could be done with another technology? I would be interested in adding the ability to skin moving objects as well.
No... that's why my initial thought was that such a system would need to be a "package". So basically "Virtual RPG Company" has all the hardware etc and travels from Con to Con charging people to play. That would cover for testing/debugging/tightening up the system and maybe have enough time for costs and technology to make it feasible to have a 'packet' that people can buy with everything included. (Have you seen the RFID readers that fit in the memory slot of any smartphone?)
My design was using wireless ethernet and 'netbook' type devices. So you could set it up at a Con and run it standalone.
It occurs to me that some of these smartphones will have built-in code for reading 3d barcodes. Perhaps those routines can be called in place of the normal hand-coded routines for AR object glyphs.
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on December 30, 2009, 08:57:06 PM
It occurs to me that some of these smartphones will have built-in code for reading 3d barcodes. Perhaps those routines can be called in place of the normal hand-coded routines for AR object glyphs.
Well, depending on the AR app... that might be workable. Again, though... your dependent on the user having the right hardware.
I was part of the 'Terrorwerks' team at Origins this year, they hit 6 or 7 big Cons every year and charge something redicilous for a 45 minute game ($20 or something like it). It's an itneresting model if a high tech LARP concept was developed... without staying with entirely generic technology which is going to seriously limit what you can do, having the technology and 'renting' it out as part of the game experience seems the most sane way to handle it.
Though by the time it gets developed enough to use, there might be another cool new gadget out there to fix this issue.
Terrorworks is basically laser tag, right?
See there's all sorts of games which can be played with very simple tech.
Assassin comes to mind.
so do obstacle courses, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, or any game where you have to move your meat-body into a zone to trigger something.
You could press a button to drop a bullseye on the ground which would be visible to other players. Then when someone who is playing walks onto the bullseye, you could press a button to drop a digital 20 Ton anvil on them.
more thoughts here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/blog/cramulus/web-games-in-meatspace/
Quote from: Cramulus on December 30, 2009, 09:11:50 PM
Terrorworks is basically laser tag, right?
See there's all sorts of games which can be played with very simple tech.
Assassin comes to mind.
so do obstacle courses, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, or any game where you have to move your meat-body into a zone to trigger something.
You could press a button to drop a bullseye on the ground which would be visible to other players. Then when someone who is playing walks onto the bullseye, you could press a button to drop a digital 20 Ton anvil on them.
more thoughts here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/blog/cramulus/web-games-in-meatspace/
The idea alone makes me :lulz:
It also seems to me that it would work well as a territory-grabbing game. Control city blocks for more mittens and win; establish the local bar as your base of operations and surround it with 20-ton Anvils on digital tripwires to deter would-be invaders.
Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg&fmt=6
Quote from: Cramulus on December 30, 2009, 09:11:50 PM
Terrorworks is basically laser tag, right?
No, its airsoft. Basically you have 'actors' with nerf guns that are dressed as Evil Aliens, Monsters... whatever and 'players' that get airsoft guns and a minimalist character sheet (loosely based on the Cthulhu Live system).
The players enter a 15,000 sq ft set and the story runs from there... including puzzle solving, dealing with 'first aid' once the attacks start etc.
Quote
See there's all sorts of games which can be played with very simple tech.
Assassin comes to mind.
so do obstacle courses, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, or any game where you have to move your meat-body into a zone to trigger something.
You could press a button to drop a bullseye on the ground which would be visible to other players. Then when someone who is playing walks onto the bullseye, you could press a button to drop a digital 20 Ton anvil on them.
more thoughts here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/blog/cramulus/web-games-in-meatspace/
I like this idea a LOT!!
Quote from: Kai on December 30, 2009, 09:30:55 PM
Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg&fmt=6
:aaa:
Quote from: Cainad on December 30, 2009, 09:46:24 PM
Quote from: Kai on December 30, 2009, 09:30:55 PM
Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg&fmt=6
:aaa:
Yeah. And theres nothing really new about it. You've got a projector, a camera and a computer, and some color coded tips for your fingers.
I wonder how you could integrate typing into this though.
The color-coded tip thing is probably doable with minimal image processing, though it will become problematic if anything in the environment is the same color. A lot of the things in the video, though, are all image processing -- which is terribly problematic in most cases. We can barely get readable text out of professionally scanned books, so many things in here (such as loading book info from the internet, loading a video from a newspaper, etc) would be nearly impossible to get working properly at a large scale without many glitches (and even then, things probably will only even be functional enough to use when they were designed with that purpose in mind). This is, of course, assuming that we can clear up the image and get clear gestures, which we may have trouble with -- as you could see in the video, when he was demoing the gesture recognition he was actively managing it in order to avoid screwing up (for instance, trying to stay VERY still while resizing the photos so that the camera could track his hands reliably).
It's a neat idea and all, but it seems pretty far away from any potential real-life application. If some poor sod picks it up and tries to use it across the board, it will probably suffer from either the problem with speaker-independent speech recognition systems (which you will find any time you try to work with a telephone tree that doesn't depend on tones) or the problem with handwriting recognition in early palm pilots and newtons (an overly complex system for writing which doesn't particularly resemble actual handwriting, is inflexible and finicky, terribly timing dependent, and essentially counters its own rationale of usefulness by asking the user to fundamentally retrain himself in that set of 'natural movements' the device was supposed to gain usability from).
hmmm gutting a ball mouse and put the rolling thingies somewhere on the joints of your fingers you say? that sounds like it might actually work. and I have a bunch of ungutted ball mice. I think. maybe I threw them away after the fire.
also
UNGUTTED BALL MICE
:lulz:
anyway, and then yeah, you got a funky little two-finger glove thingy that is capable of [admittedly very accurately and low latency-y] sort of tracking the posture of your fingers.
then what.
WHAT I ASK YOU
WHAT?!!
somebody actually did that in the video kai posted
the mice were very sad :sad:
Quote from: BAI on December 31, 2009, 07:00:30 AM
Dunno what the fyck kind of software to put in between the webcam input and the eye piece output though.
I'd have a play with this, but, software? hmpfh. google earth street view with add in info mods is all I can think off, and thats kinda lame, and would only work in a wifi area.
I'd take a tip from the AR smartphone apps and get one of those cell-phone modem cards. In terms of software, video processing and image recognition is a lot nicer on a netbook, but the easiest thing would probably just be to turn your desktop background into a webcam preview and make all your windows translucent.
A couple of things I have noticed from using AR so far:
(Heh, that rhymes)
1- For multiplayer games you wouldn't really need RFID chips. If you wanted to substitute that, you could use bluetooth or the wifi antenna. Most android phones have built in sensors that detect the position, orientation and movement of the phone, these sensors could be used to register swings and the location of the phone relative to other phones in the game. If you were close enough, you could have the phone roll dice or whatever to see what sort of damage you did. The accuracy of the GPS can be supplemented by the strength of the bluetooth signal.
2- The AR games I have played so far, while they're kind of fun because of the novelty, they really haven't matured. That said, I think AR has the potential for some really awesome games.
3- Most of the AR apps so far are cool, but kind of impractical. The two exceptions I've seen so far are Google Goggles and some of the features of Layar. Usually, I find myself using a regular mapping application when I want to find something.
I have an Android phone, so far my favorite AR game is this ghost hunting game where you have to run around and hunt ghosts before the time runs out. I haven't played many games yet though.
Quote from: Cramulus on December 30, 2009, 09:11:50 PM
Terrorworks is basically laser tag, right?
See there's all sorts of games which can be played with very simple tech.
Assassin comes to mind.
so do obstacle courses, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, or any game where you have to move your meat-body into a zone to trigger something.
You could press a button to drop a bullseye on the ground which would be visible to other players. Then when someone who is playing walks onto the bullseye, you could press a button to drop a digital 20 Ton anvil on them.
more thoughts here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/blog/cramulus/web-games-in-meatspace/
So nethernet played on the real world instead of the web?
Hell, you could do that right now, any smartphone that has GPS and minimal web should be able to do it. Why wait for the fancy glasses?
does anyone have any thoughts on AR and what it means to be psychotic? i.e. if a person has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality already . . . how does AR play into it?
also - i was thinking it would be kind of neat if there was some sort of credibility app. sort of like an ebay seller rating. so you could tell if complete strangers were cool or not based on there "cred" rating.
AR Idea: What if, using a smartphone or something, you could leave virtual graffiti on physical surfaces, or floating in the air? What about leaving secret notes places that only a certain phone can see? What about ARGs that incorporate smartphones?
My brand of futurology is shit I want to exist that I am pretty sure is possible and profitable.
Quote from: Felix on January 03, 2010, 06:37:12 AM
AR Idea: What if, using a smartphone or something, you could leave virtual graffiti on physical surfaces, or floating in the air? What about leaving secret notes places that only a certain phone can see? What about ARGs that incorporate smartphones?
Brilliant! I fucking love that idea! Someone make this happen, with haste!
Quote from: Felix on January 03, 2010, 06:37:12 AM
AR Idea: What if, using a smartphone or something, you could leave virtual graffiti on physical surfaces, or floating in the air? What about leaving secret notes places that only a certain phone can see? What about ARGs that incorporate smartphones?
Layar can kind of do this with Tweeps Around (local twitter) and a couple of art apps. Not sure how customizable the art apps are though. Also, there's a program called Block Chalk for WebOS and OS X mobile (iPhone) that lets users post local messages.
Can I affix horrible photos to billboards and advertisements? That's kind of a deal-breaker.
Wow, apparently there are a lot more than I thought.
It looks like there are a few Layar apps that will let you upload photos, so yes you can.
Also, I'm still not sure if the 3D models in the art apps are loaded by the programmer or by users, but if you could upload your own that would also fall under your requirements for awesome.
This is intensely erotic to me.
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on December 30, 2009, 08:17:41 PM
I am pretty sure that doing image recognition on a gphone is still damn near infeasible in real time. At least, I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck doing it. This, of course, means that if Cram wants to use my app to LARP, he will either have to deal with unskinned weapons or cover his foam weapons with telephones.
Then don't do image recognition on the gphone - do it on the Cloud server of some kind. I'm pretty sure Google is working on some kind of image recognition technology for its image search; presumably they'll figure it out at some point and make it available through the Google Cloud.
I think the key, though, in the early stages of this is to work with what you have, which is GPS. Running a territory-based game should be pretty easy - just meatspace Monopoly around a city block, with the AR showing names, prices, hotels, and borders on each property would be pretty sweet. The Diplomacy board game would be pretty cool as well.
For LARP-like games, if you could pipe what the players are seeing back to a GM, and allow the GM to communicate back with speech and visuals, that also has a lot of potential. I imagine the GM sitting in front of a dozen monitors, each displaying what's in front of each of his players as they're spread out over a city. The GM then could handle the image recognition - "See the hubcap I just highlighted? That's the mirrored shield of Jason." I guess all that really allows the GM to do is run a delocalized game from a central area.... I dunno, never LARPed much.
I don't see LARP meeting AR on the smartphone in an extremely visual way. If I'm pretending my opponent's pool noodle is actually a sword, it doesn't get more believable if I have to stare at a phone to make the illusion work.
In terms of LARP, the smartphone is probably better for doing things like keeping track of your character card, detecting what territory you're in, giving you a map of other player locations, instructing you to do certain things.
Your smartphone might be like Navi, the little fairy that follows around Link in the 3D zelda games. It tells you "that guy in front of you is higher level than you," or "Getting warmer ... you are within 100 feet of a magic node." Or if you're NPCing it might say "Here are your stats, go touch the check point and respawn." Once the heroes finish the spell at the magic node, the LARP engine texts the NPCs to say "stop respawning".
In a more social game, the smartphone could be used to regulate things like voting. I imagine a game where the players are the equivalent of the senate in a fictional world. The game software generates a news feed of current events, and you and the other players have to discuss it and then vote in a way which resolves (or exacerbates!) those issues. The smartphone clears up the proximity issue - that the people playing these roles might be spread out all over the world. If the plotline dovetails with real world events, we've created an interesting alternate reality that doesn't require a physical presence to maintain.
I really do like the idea of the smartphone as a means of annotating the world. Similar to the annotated web, you could leave notes and diary entries and images littered all over the planet for others to discover. The world we are exploring is not quite physical, not quite digital, but somewhere in between.
Quote from: GA on January 04, 2010, 01:56:04 AM
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on December 30, 2009, 08:17:41 PM
I am pretty sure that doing image recognition on a gphone is still damn near infeasible in real time. At least, I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck doing it. This, of course, means that if Cram wants to use my app to LARP, he will either have to deal with unskinned weapons or cover his foam weapons with telephones.
Then don't do image recognition on the gphone - do it on the Cloud server of some kind. I'm pretty sure Google is working on some kind of image recognition technology for its image search; presumably they'll figure it out at some point and make it available through the Google Cloud.
I think the key, though, in the early stages of this is to work with what you have, which is GPS. Running a territory-based game should be pretty easy - just meatspace Monopoly around a city block, with the AR showing names, prices, hotels, and borders on each property would be pretty sweet. The Diplomacy board game would be pretty cool as well.
For LARP-like games, if you could pipe what the players are seeing back to a GM, and allow the GM to communicate back with speech and visuals, that also has a lot of potential. I imagine the GM sitting in front of a dozen monitors, each displaying what's in front of each of his players as they're spread out over a city. The GM then could handle the image recognition - "See the hubcap I just highlighted? That's the mirrored shield of Jason." I guess all that really allows the GM to do is run a delocalized game from a central area.... I dunno, never LARPed much.
I wish google was that cool. For serious. I also wish I had the bandwidth and cycles to waste on a server dedicated to doing nothing all day but receiving images from cell phones and responding with some unique or semi-unique identifier.
Quote from: somebodysomething about psychosis and augmented reality something
I get the impression that normal ARGs (especially early ones like Majestic) are far more dangerous for psychotics. They don't rely on you looking through something's screen in order to be stuck into an alternate reality -- they rely upon the Masquerade, and generally tap into existing methods of defending totally unfounded beliefs about the phenomenal world in order to maintain suspension of disbelief.
Cram, wouldn't a smartphone+GPS basically allow a LARP to take place without the GM (or arbiter? what are they called in LARPs?) actually having to be present at the location?
As well as automating certain things.
Like keeping track of someone's "health bar" and then if a nearby player presses a button on the smartphone to cast Fireball, it'll keep track of the area of effect and calculate damage.
I dunno I suppose a regular LARP doesn't have that much GM influence cause they can't be near the action all the time, and you'd need several to cover the playground, and what I experienced from multiple-DM tabletop RPGs is that communication between the DMs becomes an issue.
We once did a one-weekend campaign with the group split in two, playing in different rooms of the appartment, and the DMs communicating via MSN or IRC. The players could only communicate if they were in the same game-location of course. It was still a bit cumbersome, though. Cause whenever the DMs had to consult eachother the game would halt as they spent a minute typing/chatting on their laptops.
Did the advent of mobile phones change a lot of things for LARPs? I assume the GMs would call eachother now and then to inform them of events happening on the playground? [I also assume that players in a regular LARP are not allowed to use their phones while in character, of course]
really depends on the game.
In really broad terms, the GM's job is to facilitate the players actions in a way that becomes a plotline or story. The GM might coordinate NPCs to play specific roles, or set up rewards to encourage certain types of behavior. (ie getting treasure from killing monsters, or creating things for players to cooperate/compete over) But this stuff really could be automated or automatically generated.
Without going too far into LARP theory, yes, a smartphone could remove the need for a GM in certain types of games.
"LARP theory"?
:x
believe it or not, in some countries they study this shit academically.
In Finland, Sweden, etc, LARPs are actually well accepted educational tools. They also do a lot of 'art larp' out there. I find it kind of disorienting because their ideas about LARP are significantly different than the American concept.
http://www.larpconference.org/
With AR and reasonably powerful (or internet connected) smartphones, situationally aware NPCs could be programmed on top of the AR layer the same way that they could be programmed into a video game. Jenny Everywhere can be tracked by GPS.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/010910-gunman-augmented-reality-sniper-game.html