[-empyre-] Augmented reality as public art, mobile location based monuments and virtual memorials

[Damon Loren Baker]

Hi

I'm yet another manifest.ar person. Jumping in here at the end.



On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there the possibility of live AR? - or using bvh files - similar to
> their Second Life application? So that AR can be real-time interactive?
>

this discussion is the part that prompted me to actually post something ( I
think there is a lot to be said about craft and tools, as for the rest
wovon man nicht sprechen kann...). The most interesting possibilities for
what AR could be (or a thing that lets you, a real person, enter into or at
least have real experiences with unreal worlds. If it gets called AR or
happens on a cellphone doesn't really matter to me.) lie in what AR isn't,
at least right now. Layar doesn't really strike me as the mosaic of AR (and
definitely not a mozilla, no not at all), more AOL than anything else (maybe
a compuserve on a good day). There are things that can be done with it (and
I do them, such as they are), but to go farther it needs things done to it
(and it needs to go farther, so much farther),and its closed nature limits
that. This is a fundamental problem, and there are options. I don't want a
Layar++, I want AR (or whatever you want to call it, I don't care as long as
I get it). The mobile device world is (or at least has been mostly) a
variety of walled gardens connected by a maze of twisty little passages
littered with advertisements all alike, tons of lock in, secret little deals
with this company and that, and leads to things like Layar (which is fine
and all, I'm not anti-layar, or anti what you can make with it, I'd just
like something else). Fortunately people are doing things about it, I even
help when I can and teach as many others as possible in hopes that they will
do what I cannot. Pd, openkinect, processing (especially on android and
processing.js),arduino blender game engine, openframeworks, cinder and all
the other usual suspects are good examples of places to look for the
future.(especially when those are used to build on things like opencv,libmv,
opencl, cytoscape, etc etc) They work as a gateway drug to deeper levels of
code, without them having to stop doing whatever is they are doing now just
to get some things working and provide a way to move people from where they
are now towards something better instead of being  yet another an end point.


Will I make stuff with layar? sure, I guess, and also monkey around with
other  things to make sure my work  can creep into all the other walled
gardens (google has some nice ones) but I want it to creep out of them too,
and hopefully scamper off somewhere better, never to return. The more
effort, interest, attention and care that can be put into open systems, the
better. The more that reality and unreality can interact, the better. This
requires the kind of liveness that alan inquired about.  (i don't want to
just browse, I want to live) There are some definite technical hurdles here.
The highest common denominator of processing horsepower in your audience is
a pretty solid limiting factor for this sort of thing, but things like Layar
aren't pushing at that limit very hard. The other limits are unlikely to be
pushed against by a closed system made by a little company trying to make a
return for their investors. It wouldn't make sense and certainly wouldn't
make money. (though once it is there for all to use there is tons of money
to be made off it, but that's different than making money from it) Doesn't
mean it shouldn't be done, and that means its up to us.


Damon Loren Baker
Assistant Professor - Emerging Media and Entertainment Technologies
CUNY Citytech - Brooklyn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20110428/c085d716/attachment.html>