Tag Archives: augmented-reality

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Head-mounted augmented reality computers: the budget hack versus the bespoke device

One of the more interesting things about the hardware hacking scene is comparing the results of different methodologies. Some folk prefer to develop gadgets that are as close to production-grade products as possible, while others are more focussed on the low-budget proof-of-concept kludge… and this week has seen examples of both approaches as applied to augmented reality visor-computers.

First up, the craftsman approach. Pascal Brisset was frustrated with wearable computer cooncepts that relied on some sort of back- or belt-mounted processor unit to drive the headset, so he decided to build the whole system onto an off-the-shelf visor VDU [via Hack A Day]. As you can see, the results are pretty compact:

Pascal Brisset's wxhmd wearable computer

It runs on Linux, too, but that probably went without saying. Of course, it’s just a proof-of-concept rather than something that Brisset could start building for consumers. As he states in his documentation disclaimers:

The systems draws 1 A with no power optimizations. This is acceptable since nobody would want to spend more than a few minutes with two pulsed microwave RF transmitters, an overheating lithium battery and eye-straining optics strapped to their forehead anyway.

Quite.

Meanwhile, down at the other end of the brain-farm, Andrew Lim built himself a backyard VR helmet using nothing more than an HTC Magic handset and a few dollars worth of other gubbins [also via Hack A Day]. It’s quite obviously a much more lo-fi affair than Brisset’s contraption:

It does have a certain goofy charm, doesn’t it? But again, hardly the sort of thing you’d try selling for any practical purpose whatsoever – the point being proven here is that augmented reality (and other similar emerging technologies) are not necessarily the exclusive domain of big corporations or slick new start-ups; where there’s a will (and some ingenuity), there’s a way. Or, as I often end up saying here, Everything Can (And Will) Be Hacked.

Personally, I find that reassuring, because the battle for direct access to our retinas is just starting to heat up. The big tech corporations can see there’s money to be made with wearable tech in the very near future, and they’re preparing to roll out the hardware as soon as next year (if press releases are to be trusted, which they quite possibly aren’t)… and as Jan Chipchase pointed out, the way they’ll make the stuff affordable to you is by co-opting with companies who’re desperate for the direct pipeline to your brainmeat that said hardware will provide. They need to ride that augmented reality hype curve, after all – at least until it reaches the trough of disillusionment.

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Augmented reality monster-hunting

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While the vast majority of the European and Stateside augmented reality ideas I see galloping through my RSS feeds are stolid and practical apps with obvious commercial potential – mapping, navigation, informational – you can always rely on Japan to come up with something that little bit more alien. Pink Tentacle found this video of Miruko, a wearable eyeball-robot that:

… scans the surroundings in search of virtual monsters that are invisible to the naked human eye. When a virtual monster is spotted, the mechanical eyeball rolls around in its socket and fixes its gaze on the monster’s location. By following Miruko’s line of sight, the player is able to locate the virtual monster and “capture” it via his or her iPhone camera.

No details as to who Miruko’s creators are, unfortunately, but I expect we’ll be hearing more from them before too long. Probably around about the time they sell the idea to the Pokemon people…

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Owning eyeballs – Jan Chipchase on augmented reality and advertising

sale billboardI linked to Jan Chipchase in passing when we were talking about in-game advertising the other day, but since then he’s posted more detailed thoughts on the corporate future of contextual advertising and augmented reality. If you don’t believe that the colonisation of augmented reality spaces by relentless barrages of commercial messages and content is inevitable, think again:

Spend enough time around corporate sales folk, whatever the industry, and sooner or later someone will talk about ‘owning’ the customer – where they are so into your brand that the next sales are inevitable. When it comes to visual media its all about owning eyeballs – diverting your gaze to their advertising and content […]

Ah – nobody’s going to stick an advertising driven augmented reality lens in their eye, right? How about for ‘free’ healthcare monitoring? Or because speed-dating is so much more fun when you have real time sexual preference look-ups on the people you’re looking at? Or simply because the alternative ways of viewing at the world put you milliseconds behind your social network in the connectivity stakes.

Yeah, this reasoning is all so base, ugly, techno-utopian. Sure, it *may* be about delivering the optimal augmented reality experience, but optimal for whom? There ain’t no such thing as (looking at a) free lunch.

Do no evil? To the shareholders!

To quote a band I’m rather fond of, this is the first draft of a worst case scenario – perhaps it won’t work out quite so badly. If we’re lucky. [image by Arturo de Albornoz]

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The imminent future of contextual advertising

Virtual worlds of all stripes are becoming the next gold-rush frontier for an increasingly beleaguered advertising industry, with lots of research being expended on finding the best way to gets brands in front of the captivated gaze of the average computer gamer.

Trouble is, it’s not quite as simple as cutting a product placement deal and hoping for the best. Ars Technica reports on one research paper that claims the important things to do are to not interrupt the game, and to make sure the brand “fits”:

When ads were placed into Sony’s WipeOut HD they played within the game’s loading screen, and artificially inflated the time it took to get into a game. The ads were quickly pulled, but it’s a powerful object lesson: don’t mess with the game itself. Any company that bought time in such a slot could easily do damage to their brand instead of spreading awareness.

[…]

The most important aspect of ads that follow the rules of fitting into the game world and not interrupting the flow is placement, which the study calls the “key element,” explaining “why some advertisements do not get much attention or are not remembered, even though they are constantly present in the field of view.” Brand awareness does not matter, it was found, so even a popular brand can’t overcome poor placement.

There is always a risk when advertising within a game. “If the advertising is presented at the wrong time or place, it just does not catch the player’s attention in the best case. In the worst case the player might even develop a disliking for the advertised brand,” the study showed. Of course, to find the optimal placement found in the study, you’ll have to buy the results, which will run you €800.

Meanwhile, The Guardian mentions another report which suggests (rather shakily, from the look of it) that brand recall is enhanced by violent game content:

The team based at the University of Luxembourg created a simple driving game named AdRacer in which players needed to drive over targets to gain points, while adverts were displayed unobtrusively on roadside billboards. In one version of the game, the targets were just symbols, in another, players had to run over pedestrians to increase their scores. Apparently, “Those who played a violent version of the game […] demonstrated significantly better recall of advertised brands than those who played the regular version.”

The problem is, although the violence seems to trigger something in the mechanism of human memory – it’s not always good news for the advertiser; the connotations can be rather destructive, negatively impacting the gamer’s opinion of the brand.

Why mention the crude commercial nastiness of marketing on a near-future science fiction blog? Well, even I can think up a passable plot for a story from the above two articles, for a start…

But we’ve also been talking about augmented reality a fair bit of late, and the metaverse is a perennial here as well – and both of those conceptual spaces can – and will – be colonised by marketing in exactly the same way that the physical surfaces of the “real” world already have been.

Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes… and as Jan Chipchase points out, if you already find regular ads to be ugly, annoying and intrusive – be they on the internet or on a wall – the future of contextual advertising isn’t going to be pretty at all.

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Augmented reality contact lenses

cyborg eyeAll this talk about augmented reality is all well and good, but wandering around holding up a little rectangular gadget to see things through is hardly an elegant science fictional solution, now is it?

As a fully paid-up cyberpunk, I want everything as tightly integrated to the meat as possible – so I want my AR operating no further from me than the surface of my eyeballs. Luckily I shouldn’t have too long to wait – at least not if Babak Parviz of the University of Washington has the successes he hopes for with his augmented reality contact lens concept:

Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.

These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

Parviz has a long old article there, and for those with a more technical bent it gives an insight into the way the contacts will actually work… though he’s canny enough not to put a solid date on the technology becoming available. [via New York Times; image by pasukaru76]

I wonder if he needs any test subjects?