[-empyre-] various to empyre Digest, Vol 77, Issue 12

[Warren Armstrong]

Alan,

In the mobile AR world, the idea of social applications is already very much
a part of the landscape. Here in Australia, a Layar based app called Street
ARt was recently released that allows user to take photos of street art,
geo-tag them and add them to a public database (thus providing a last
document of the works when local councils decide to paint over them). And in
Japan, there is an app that's been around for a year or more called Sekai
Camera that allows users to create "air-tags" - images with accompanying
text that are affixed to to particular geographical locations. You could
feasibly use something like this to create the set of site-specific
"warnings" you propose.

Beyond "socialising" AR, there's another development that will probably
start to have an impact in the next year of so - the coupling of AR with the
Internet of Things, that global array of environmental sensors that feed
data to services like Pachube. In the case of Fukushima, for instance, some
members of the Japanese public have taken the task of monitoring radiation
into their own hands; setting up DIY-kit-based geiger counters, then making
this data available to Pachube where it is published on a Google map in
real-time -
http://blog.pachube.com/2011/03/crowd-sourced-realtime-radiation.html (This
hasn't been integrated into any AR applications yet but it wouldn't be too
hard to do this.)

Another example: about a year ago, I came across an idea by an Irish web
developer of creating an AR application that would allow you to point your
phone at any office building or industrial site anywhere around the world
and immediately see its carbon footprint. The plan was to use the AMEE
database to provide this data but sadly it's not yet comprehensive enough
for something like this work.

In the future though, datasets with the comprehensiveness and levels of
granularity to make such visualisations possible and useful will become
available and we could thus see AR being used as an extra "sense"; one that
makes data about normally unseen (or unheard) environmental conditions, such
as carbon footprints or radiation/pollution levels, visible or audible
without the intervention of a human agent to provide updates.

Cheers,
Warren



On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, 18 Apr 2011, empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote:
>
>  Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:44:40 +0200
>> From: "xDxD.vs.xDxD" <xdxd.vs.xdxd at gmail.com>
>>
>> As the next steps of the REFF project (and its AR drug, and its "youth
>> program on the methodological reinvention of reality") we are planning two
>> very powerful actions for the next few months and if, anyone is interested,
>> i can keep you all updated about them: they will go straight into this
>> direction and include in all this a deep and disruptive reflection on
>> capital, and money.
>>
>>  Please do keep us updated! - if you have an email list for such, pleaes
> add me.
>
>  Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 06:04:31 +1000
>> From: Rodney Berry <rodberry at gmail.com>
>>
>> That ephemerality is an attractive part of it though. Plaforms live on
>> under emulation and remediation in the newer platforms, like how we watch TV
>> on the internet.
>>
>>  There are of course still issues of interoperability (as anyone using
> linux soon finds out - at leastt it's been my experience).
>
>  The piece was protrayed as a malfunctioning museum exhibit from way back
>> in 2010, the year that long-ignored predictions of global innundation by
>> elvis imersonators finally came to pass.
>>
>>  I'm really interested in this - the idea of failure as inherent in work -
> could you say more about this?
>
>  From: "Lichty, Patrick" <plichty at colum.edu>
>> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Subject: [-empyre-] JC's post
>>
>> Well, the first thing that I think of is having spoken with one of the
>> protesters on Tahrir Square in Cairo when she visited my school last week.
>>  She had mentioned that they had mapped out where all of the police where
>> and what all of the escape routes were in case Mubarak decided to crack
>> down.  So, consider this - could AR layers in the public spehere be used as
>> tools for activism, with people dynamically reporting bottlenecks and
>> trouble spots in real time via Layar? Imagine there being an altercation and
>> swinging up your phone and seeing the way out - very Max Headroom.  I see
>> this happening though, and it could have been used quite well in Seattle.
>>
>> But what about other applications, like JC's critical US/Mexican border
>> project, or even critical issues regardin abandoned spaces?  All of this
>> seems wide opemn for discussion.
>>
>>  It would be amazing to have a piece of AR software that could be loaded,
> like Google maps etc., by anyone, with specific content - an example I gave
> being radiation levels around Fukushima. So you might have an AR open
> structure that could delineate areas with specific symbols and content -
> something simple enough that a person with no programming experience at all
> could place in an app.
>
> Call the app 'Warning' for example. A creator would upload coordinates (or
> even places by walking around them); would then upload an accompanying
> symbol or symbols demarcating the area; would then upload a text
> accompanying both. A user would turn on the app 'Warning' and read out
> whatever was there. If there were more than one (overlapping or not) AR at
> the spot, they could be indexed. If someone spammed with an enormous number
> of AR, the user might be able to get a specific channel number to tune to,
> etc. The idea would be that the AR would be social, as easy to use as
> Facebook, interoperable, and capable of responding to everything from
> crowds/military to radiation leaks.
>
> - Alan
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20110420/f71dfe49/attachment.html>