Augmented Reality

Lest ye wonder that I'm some kind of Luddite, I will inform you that I was once a scifi novelist (amateur). I am published in a couple anthologies of short stories, but there was no money in that. I am very familiar with technology and make my living in it. Its just that much of the technology used replaces basic skills. GPS isn't necessary if you can actually read a map. I don't have GPS because I learned how. Its still useful for advertising purposes though, and helping people who don't read maps to get somewhere. I think GPS has probably cut down on the car accidents, but that might be wishful thinking. The one time I've used it in Texas, where there are no landmarks because its all flat as a board, it nearly caused me to have an accident if I'd followed the direction and required me to take an offramp in a nasty but abandoned part of town and back on again in the other direction. Those are always challenging experiences.

Anyway, cyberspace was first coined as a term by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, which has some plot holes but is otherwise deserving of the Hugo, Nebula and PK Dick awards it won in 1984. It was written in 1983, and the first half was re-written 12 times till the prose was fantastic, which is why its such a stunning read, even today. Gibson was horrified by Blade Runner, since it had a similar look to what he'd already written so he put more effort into defining it in hopes he wouldn't be labelled a copycat. Gibson is Southern, from the Carolinas, but moved to Vancouver (Canada) for some Vietnam reason despite the war being long over. Youth, probably. Cyberspace is all about what we do today. Gibson pictured it more immersive virtual reality, not realizing that technology wasn't ready to forcefeed images directly into our brains without the use of a monitor. Yeah, turns out that doesn't really work. People are still trying, but its not for me.

When Gibson wrote Virtual Light, as a sort of crossover between actual Internet and the cyberspace he'd already written about for far into the future, he posited that Augmented Reality glasses would someday become real technology with social implications. You know it today as "Google Glass(tm)". It's still vaporware, but the concept of GPS linked terminals disguised as goggles or clear glasses has already made its way into several Japanese anime, Japan being more ready and willing to put cutting edge scifi on the screen years before American audiences do. At this point, augmented reality is considered more of a background point in our future rather than some distant technology. This is something creeping into the real world, more and more.

Explaining augmented reality to my aged mother, who is 70 years old and really getting into computers now, and my Dad, who is seriously looking into an Android tablet with WiFi and GPS for less than $100, means that the TV shows aren't far from the real world. And programming expert systems linked to Hollywood stars, who long ago signed contracts licensing their voice and image to Hollywood to resell to technology companies. You could, in a few short years, have Ryan (Reynolds) or Scarlett (Johanssen) as your virtual digital assistant, the interface between you and your Microsoft OS that appears on your tablet display as part of the landscape, complete with sound and voice recognition as you pan around the room. No more secretaries. You'll have to get your own coffee, but they can handle multiple phone calls simultaneously and the snark button can be turned on or off as desired. If you've seen Iron Man, think Jarvis.

If you upgrade to Glasses, these 3D skins based on Hollywood actors will seem more real, a pretty ghost that talks to you, handles your finances and email etc. Augmented reality already exists in simple fashion on the iPhone and its competitors. This is relatively cheap to implement compared to most of the transportation issues so I expect it will continue to move forward, especially in dense cities like the Bay Area and New York. An easier interface for your information needs is pretty easy to do and takes little energy to do it with so I expect this to become commonplace. We already have people photographing produce in grocery stores with their phone to ask their spouse if this is the right thing to get. That's the downside: yet more consensus blame-shifting rather than actually making a decision yourself. Its a huge problem in business because the basic cowardice makes for bad outcomes.

A little distracting for your driving glasses.

I used to work in GPS, which enables augmented reality to function, tying structures to real world coordinate systems supplied by satellites and later cellphone tower triangulation. That's how your phone GPS actually works btw. It's not receiving data from satellites. That doesn't work without at least a 1.2 inch antenna. You don't see that on your phone because it doesn't have one. It's just triangulating off the available cellphone towers which is really easy to do provided your phone has three towers in range. This then provides the data, within about three feet, of what you're nearby, thus telling the phone what virtual objects need downloading and what to display. It then pattern matches, if its a good one, or uses a compass and the camera to orient, and displays the object as if it were really there. The wiki article above has examples.

Obviously, augmented reality today is still very crude and the background work hasn't been done yet. I'm sure everyone has a story about how GPS gave them bad directions at least once. Garbage In, Garbage Out, and GPS is one of those receding horizons problems because you always want more finely detailed data, which costs more money to gather, but yields ever smaller values meaning you are willing to pay ever that much less for it because you're used to the big sweeping generalizations and ignore the quality of the data source in your pursuit of Rock Star economics. Small wonder the nation is in so much trouble with that sort of reasoning.

Worse, that kind of data is used not just by marketers looking for a way to fine tune advertising campaigns but politicians making real decisions about development and spending. I did GIS/GPS for the local government, you see. The data became part of software that all the executives and their assistants were required to use for data mining purposes. Drill down? I was saying that 12 years ago, and knew the proper context. SQL became my buddy. Unfortunately, budget cuts resulted in me finding a new job and I ended up working in high speed wireless data (aka 3G) which enables augmented reality to function. Japan is on up to 7G or so by this point. That's what you get when you do NOT support legacy hardware, which typically hogs bandwidth by generating noise and slowing everyone around you down. New tech, properly implemented, nets you fancy outcomes. Another point for Japan.

Even as we approach the end of cheap oil, and will be riding bicycles as primary transportation in a few short years, we'll probably do it with tablet PCs tied wirelessly to augmented reality goggles, and there will be people updating the GIS data and photographing addresses as an actual career. I imagine there will eventually be video games for driving in rush hours that don't exist anymore, for anyone feeling nostalgic towards commuting traffic in stop and go, and the sprints between the snarls that we know so well today. That may seem silly to you, but lots of people play video games where they fly airplanes they can't afford, or play football with players they've never met, or swing swords and point arrows at historical enemies centuries dead. Virtual escapism has its place.

The biggest upside of augmented reality is the ability to do engineering. We've seen it in Iron Man 2, the wireframe visualization scene. We've seen it in recent James Bond films, and you can buy versions of it in modern computer operating systems with touchscreens. Many are very intuitive, which is what is needed so that educated older people will use them. Back in the day, my elderly parents wouldn't do much with the computer because they didn't understand it and it didn't seem very useful. Now that they've got digital cameras and websites and everybody they want to talk to has email, suddenly all that stuff I was muttering about 15 years ago is hitting home. Computers ARE useful after all. And not just to geeks in cubicles.

I used to work with a guy named Paul (last name forgotten) at my GPS job, who rode a bicycle and had a laptop in his bike saddlebag. He made me look reasoned and polite, a class A(ntagonistic) Liberal (Splitter) Green party guy with anger management issues. Like me, he worked with dots and lines in a GIS database. He and my supervisor both had laptops when that was a bit unusual and made sure people saw them using them in the cafes on Broad Street in Nevada City.

Nevada City is where your Football Game got all those fancy graphics flashing all over the place, and how the scoreboard updates, and how your TV news has those windows in the screen and banners popping up or sliding across. The hardware to do that literally comes from there, supplied to the whole world. Nevada City is no stranger to high technology, not at all. However, its also the closest town to San Juan Ridge so there's a huge hippie population that comes and goes, hanging around. You end up with this clash of cultures, and some crossovers that are even more extreme than Apple Computer pretends at, or Google actually implements. If Make hadn't been started in Sebastopol, it probably would have a year later in Nevada City. I could easily see O'Reilly publishing moving there too. Conflict is good for evolution. I haven't seen him in 10 years and its entirely possible he's writing GIS augmented reality apps for iPhone or Android. It would be the right direction for his career ambitions. I'm not into application development. I like analysis and content, thus the blog. I currently live in the town next door so those who still work, many of them work at that TV display control company. This is a tech center.

I can foresee a future where augmented reality is implemented, up here in the woods. Where people up from the City for a romantic getaway, stroll up the street wearing Google glasses and getting lectured on the local Gold Mining history, flickering through the slideshow of what a building used to be before it tells you what's on sale there now you might be interested in if you act now. It will watch your pupils dilate, which reveals your interest or disinterest and fine tune its records of exactly who you are, and what they should try to sell you.

I can foresee virtual billboards on your windshield as you drive down the highway. The view is still out there if you roll down the window, but the windows display ads instead of the real thing while Google Car(tm) (or Nissan or Mercedes or BMW Autodriver) drives you to wherever you're going. You have to pay to get rid of the ads and see the actual cityscape or countryside outside the window. That's an advertisers dream. I shudder, but people get tattoos of political candidates who lose elections so there's an unlimited amount of dumb going around when there's money involved. Signing contracts for a lower price on your electric car in order to be forced to view targeted advertising while you drive? Yeah, people would do that. Expect the outside to display ads too, ones the scroll across on display space leased to the advertising network that paid for your car discount. Laugh. I dare you. What is Candlestick Park's name this year? Ultimately, Augmented Reality is going to take all that internet spam and ruin the real world too. How long before Viagra ads break through that sale at JC Pennys and offer to augment something completely different? I dearly hope that Ryan Reynolds (Assistant) has a decent spam filter.