See It, Follow It

Before our eyes and minds can “follow” something in our environment, we first must detect it. Similarly, before an AR application can “augment” something, the target object or place needs to be detected. Strictly speaking our eyes can’t detect a geo-location, but a GPS-enabled device can detect where it is relative to other points on the globe.

Since most of the world’s people, objects and places are not emitting radio signals which our mobile Internet devices can reliably detect, as was once envisioned in the early visions of RFID, other technologies are being used and new ones being developed for detection in AR applications. Further, even if there were tags on us (or other moving objects) and readers everywhere, RFID alone is insufficient to provide the six degrees of freedom necessary to correctly position a device relative to the object or point of interest. This isn’t to say that RFID has no place at all in AR, just that it is not a widely applicable tool for developers of today’s consumer AR applications.

Tracking for AR applications involves identification of one or more targets in the user’s field of vision or surroundings, then keeping track of the position of the user’s device relative to the recognized and/or selected object in three-dimensional space, and, for there to be an augmentation in the field of view, properly "registering" an overlay image or text to the real world object. The first two of these steps are closely aligned with the sequence which some types of robots need to perform when moving autonomously in an environment. They are also leveraging core ubiquitous computing technologies which are necessary in “intelligent environments,” as in spaces which exhibit Ambient Intelligence.

Tracking real world objects which are stationary (with fixed geo-location coordinates) has been achieved most widely and at relatively low cost using a mobile phone’s GPS and compass. There are many examples such as Wikitude, Layar and BionicEye. But there are situations in which GPS and compass are not the best, for example when the user is inside a building or near something which causes disturbances in the magnetic field and, in the best of circumstances, GPS and compass technology don’t provide the speed and accuracy which many AR applications require.

Let’s just take, for example, applications in which the user’s target object is not fixed in space. This challenge has been solved for years by affixing a marker, such as a QR (Quick Response) or Data matrix code on the object. For the past three or four years, markers have provided a suitable approximation for what most people designing AR applications really want: recognition of people, objects or places on the basis of their unique features, or, in the research community vernacular, “natural feature recognition.”

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Four short links: 5 October 2009

Bozo Cloud Talk, Annotation Fail(ish), Python MySQL Slash, and Infinite Books

1. Brown Cloud Marketing -- advertorial "interviewing" GM of a company offering "DNS in the cloud". This might be a worthwhile service, but the way he markets it (by saying open source is "freeware" and the market leader is "legacy") reveals a rich vein of bozo. Freeware legacy DNS is the internet's dirty little secret (actually, it's the reason we have a functioning DNS), Nominum software was written 100 percent from the ground up, and by having software with source code that is not open for everybody to look at, it is inherently more secure. (security through obscurity is equating clothing with being naked yet blind). The Internet kindly did the poor man's homework: screenshot of a cross-site scripting vulnerability in their customer portal, a Nominum security advisory from 2008, and the Nominum web server is running Linux, Apache, and PHP (all legacy freeware yet apparently not the Internet's dirty little secret). (via Bert Hubert and Securosis)
2. Public Annotations on Healthcare Bill -- using technology from SharedBook, Congressman Culberson hoped to get citizens marking up the healthcare bill. They're using the software but many are just commenting on page 1--turning the hosted annotation platform into a forum with an odd user interface. It's a UI challenge: designing a way to let focused people comment on specific things, while also permitting impatient unfocused people to comment on the general topic. It's like asking for a SmartCar that seats 80. See also OpenCongress and their annotation system which also has hundreds of comments on the first few lines of the bill (including 39 on the one line "111th Congress"--apparently more contentious than you'd think!).
3. MyConnPy -- pure-Python MySQL client library, useful because it requires no C compilation to install (and thus can work on systems without C compilers installed, e.g. mobile). (via Simon Willison)
4. The Infinite Book -- design concept for an ebook reader (not a product you can buy yet). Sexy. (via Gizmodo)

ICANN without restraints: the difficulties of coordinating stakeholders

People interested in coalitions and policy-making on a global scale--topics that are increasingly relevant in a world whose borders are irrelevant to carbon dioxide, flu viruses, and other critical entities--need to learn from other organizations that are dealing with these issues. This week brings particularly important news about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has been making policy for eleven years under a number of difficult premises:

• It was created hastily and arbitrarily without roots in the communities most interested in its mandate.
• Its concept of stakeholders is boundless, potentially involving anyone who uses the Internet or gets information that has passed at some point over the Internet.
• Its reach is global, and its decisions are affected by issues of language and culture.

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Four short links: 2 October 2009

Social Media Parasites, Open Government Data, Prime Numbers, Amazon Image Abuse

1. I'm Tired of Your Analogue Attitude -- hilarious animated clip about social media gurus, made using xtranormal. (via trib on twitter)
2. Three Laws of Open Government Data -- 1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist; 2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage; 3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower. (also see slide deck)
3. Structure and Randomness in the Prime Numbers -- paper about some of the fun mathematics around prime numbers. (via Hacker News)
4. Abusing Amazon Images -- decoding and doing fun things with the Amazon images API. The cool thing (if you want to generate unlikely Amazon images) is that you're not limited to one use of any of these commands. You can have multiple discounts, multiple shadows, multiple bullets, generating images that Amazon would never have on its site. However, every additional command you add generates another 10% to the image dimensions, adding white space around the image. And that 10% compounds; add a lot of bullets, and you'll find that you have a small image in a large blank space. (You can use the CR command to cut away the excess, however.) Note also that the commands are interpreted in order, which can have an impact on what overlaps what.

More on how web performance impacts revenue...

At Velocity this year Microsoft, Google and Shopzilla each presented data on how web performance directly impacts revenue.

Their data showed that slow sites get fewer search queries per user, less revenue per visitor, fewer clicks, fewer searches, and lower search engine rankings. They found that in some cases even after site performance was improved users continued to interact as if it was slow. Bad experiences have a lasting influence on customer behavior.

What about smaller websites that aren't yet at this scale?

Alistair Croll and Sean Power, the authors of the new book Complete Web Monitoring, have continued this research for sites at smaller scale.

They used a Strangeloop Networks web acceleration appliance to optimize half the sessions to a smaller production website, tagging optimized and unoptimized visitors so they could be analyzed in Google Analytics. The Strangeloop device applies many of Steve Souders' performance rules to an existing site automatically (a kind of "Steve-in-a-Box" ;-).

The results of their analysis show how significant a reduction in page latency can be. In addition to reducing bounce rates, and increasing pages per visit & time on site, they found a 16.07% increase in conversion rates and a 5.50% increase in average order value.

Check out the full post on the Watching Websites blog.

Four short links: 1 October 2009

Objectivity Be Gone, Public Screens, Lobbying Patterns, DIY Africa

1. The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version -- Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh)
2. Screens in Context -- ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, it’s a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers at the coal face of web and mobile encounter every day. Everything can be considered in context, be timely, reactive, and data-driven. I’m going to try to outline some dimensions to think about, with some incredibly quick, simple, off the cuff dumb ideas [...] The technology to achieve some of these may be over and above what is possible now, but the biggest step - installing powered, networked computers in the real world - is already being taken by advertising media companies.
3. Interactive Network Map of Lobbying Patterns Around Key Senators in Health Care Reform -- fascinating visualization of political activity, via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. The Doers Club -- How DIY design gave a teenager from Malawi electricity, and can help transform Africa.

Four short links: 30 September 2009

Smart Materials, Google OCR API, Teaching Webinar, HistEx

1. Smart Materials in Architecture -- Using thermal bimetals can allow architects to experiment with shape-changing buildings, Ritter said. Thermal bimetals include a combination of materials with different expansion coefficients that can cause a change in. Under changing temperatures this can lead one side of a compound to bend more than the other side, potentially creating an entirely different shape, he said. A little impractical at the moment, but think of it as hackers experimenting with what's possible, iterating to find the fit between materials possibility and customer need. (via Liminal Existence)
2. Google OCR API -- The server will attempt to extract the text from the images; creating a new Google Doc for each image. Experimental at this stage, and early users report periodic crashes. Still, it's a useful service. I wonder whether they're seeing how people correct the scan text and using that to train the OCR algorithms. (via Waxy)
3. My O'Reilly Podcast: Dan Meyer -- I'm not pimping this because it's O'Reilly (O'R do heaps of stuff I don't mention) but because it's the astonishingly brilliant Dan Meyer. For everything it does well, the US model of math education conditions students to anticipate narrowly defined problems with narrowly prescribed solutions. This puts them in no place to anticipate the ambiguous, broadly defined, problems they'll need to solve after graduation, as citizens. This webcast will define two contributing factors to this intellectual impatience and then suggest a solution.
4. Inflation Conversion Factors for Dollars 1774 to Estimated 2019 -- in PDF and Excel format. I've wanted such a table in the past for answering those inevitable "... in today's dollars?" historical business questions. (via Schuyler on Delicious)

Review of Guobin Yang's "Power of the Internet in China"

I've posted my review of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, a combination of research and sociological analysis, here:

Book review

Relevant comments are welcome on this blog.

David Hoover's Top 5 Tips for Apprentices

Finding a Good Mentor is Key

If you're a senior developer with years of experience under your belt, it may be hard to remember what it was like coming out of college with a newly minted CS degree, and entering the workplace. But as David Hoover argues, helping these newcomers to the workforce to succeed can be the difference between effective, motivated developers and confused, discouraged ones. Hoover is the author of the new O'Reilly book Apprenticeship Patterns, and he says that people coming right out of college may, in fact, be less motivated than someone who has been working for a while. "One of my theories is computer science education is really hard, and it's expensive. And so when you're done with it, you're ready to cash in and sit back for a little while. 'Hey, I just spent a lot of money. I spent a ton of time and effort and pain on four years of getting this certificate and okay, now it's time to make that pay off.' You're definitely going to be less incentivized to start a new job, and now realize that you've got so much more to learn still. As opposed to someone who's just coming up, who's going to be at a big disadvantage knowledge-wise, but is probably actually going to be at a big advantage motivation-wise because they're going to be hungry, and just assume that they have to learn everything on their own. Whereas, like I said, some computer science people are going to be disincentivized. They're going to be surprised that they've come into their first job and, geez, they have to learn source control and they have to learn unit testing and they have to learn about these different processes that we use. And some programs prepare you for that stuff; some programs are very theoretical and very outdated. And you just have a ton to learn in your first gig."

According to Hoover, one way to ease the transition into real life development is to use an apprenticeship model. His book draws on his own experience moving from being a psychologist to a developer, and the lessons he's learned running an apprenticeship program at a company called Obtiva. "We have an apprenticeship program that takes in fairly newcomers to software development, and we have a fairly loose, fairly unstructured program that gets them up to speed pretty quickly. And we try to find people that are high-potential, low credential people, that are passionate and excited about software development and that works out pretty well."

Hoover says that most developers have benefited from one or two key people in their career that helped them move along. "For people that had had successful careers, they only point back to one or two people that mentored them for a certain amount of time, a significant amount of time, a month, two months, a year in their careers." He also points out that finding that person may mean looking outside your company. "For me personally, I wasn't able to find a mentor at my company. I was in a company that didn't really have that many people who were actually passionate about technology and that was hard for me. So what I did is I went to a user group, a local Agile user group or you could go to a Ruby user group or a .net user group, whatever it is and find people that are passionate about it and have been doing it for a long time. I've heard several instances of people seeking out to be mentored by the leader, for me that was the case. One of our perspective apprentices right now was mentored by the leader of a local Ruby user group. And that doesn't necessarily mean you're working for the person, but you're seeking them out and maybe you're just, "Hey, can you have lunch with me every week or breakfast with me every other week." Even maybe just talking, maybe not even pairing. But just getting exposure to people that have been far on the path ahead of you, to just glean off their insights."

(continue reading)

Four short links: 29 September 2009

Bletchley Park No Longer Blech, Contest Mania, Palm Process Fails For Free Software, Open Source Web Analytics

1. Bletchley Park May Have a Future -- the UK birthplace of modern computing, where Alan Turing worked during WW II breaking German codes, is dilapidated and in need of major repair. They appear to have a supporter in the UK National Lottery, who have given them a grant to begin work and prepare for further grants. It should be secured for the future as a place of significant historical merit in the development of computing. (See also The Geek Atlas)
2. Google Opens Voting on Ideas to Change the World -- there are a lot of contests at the moment: Project 10^100, Apps for Democracy, Apps for America, a plethora of X Prizes, the Netflix prize, and more. I wonder whether contests are like communities: you need a manager to cultivate and boost interest, or else your contest withers on the vine.
3. My ongoing Kafka-esque nightmare of dealing with Palm and their App Catalog submission process (jwz) -- This is my story about attempting to simply distribute this free software that I have written, and how Palm has so far completely prevented me from doing so. Epic Palm fail. (via Hacker News)
4. Piwik -- Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. GPL-licensed.

Four short links: 28 September 2009

Science Blogs, Concussion Games, Packet Sniffer, and an Astonishing Product Name

1. Sci Blogs -- aggregated and hosted blogs from New Zealand scientists and researchers. A planet aggregator has become a key part of building a community, even outside programming.
2. Super Better, or How To Turn Recovery Into a Game -- Jane McGonigal had a concussion, and created a game to keep her doing things that aided her recovery. Interesting discussion of how to build a game around a serious real-life problem. And honestly, people: if she can make concussion into a game, surely you can make your crap websites suck less?
3. Justniffer -- packet sniffer that identifies HTTP requests and emits an Apache-style logfile showing what was requested. (via Simon Willison)
4. Vegemite Names New Spread -- the original name was crowdsourced in 1923. They decided to repeat the process for their new product, a spread made from Vegemite and Cream Cheese. The winning name came from an Australian web designer: "Vegemite iSnack 2.0". This does not appear to be a joke (no mention that the commercial will use music from Rick Astley). Unsure which will make Americans more ill: the name, the idea of eating Vegemite mixed with cream cheese, or the idea of eating Vegemite at all.

RFID Fun at PICNIC 2009

I just left Amsterdam with Geeks on a Plane. We were there for PICNIC, an annual technology-art conference in Amsterdam. One of the highlights of the conference are the RFID projects. Each attendee is given an RFID tag (an ik tag) that can be linked to their conference social network profile (we modeled our own RFID experiments at ETech after PICNIC's). The RFID tags unlock fun projects that are scattered across Club PICNIC's (pictured above). Most of the projects were built the week before PICNIC in a Hack Camp hosted by media-arts lab Mediamatic.

Most of the projects required at least two people to play. Once you unlocked a project with someone you were connected on the conference social network. A record of your interaction (be it a picture, a drawing or your win/loss record at a game) was also added. There were 10 projects in total. Here were some stand outs.

ik-a-sketch - This is a huge Etech-a-Sketch that requires two RFID-enabled people to draw with. Each person only controls one axis of the drawing line -- it's not easy to draw with it. The interface was written in Processing. The knobs are potentiometers that feed into an Arduino.

ikGnome - There are photobooths all over PICNIC. If you wave your RFID tag your photo is taken, tagged and uploaded. There are also two Gnome hats being passed around. One is red and the other is blue. When you wave the hat's tag your picture in one it is added to that color's page (blue is currently beating red). There was something about the simplicity of this one that appealed to me (and about 300 other people).

ikTrek - This is a game of tug-of-war. However, the more people you have in your social network the greater your advantage. The rope is wrapped around a motorized axle in between the two teams. If your team has more people in their social network then the motor helps you. As someone who was on the losing end of a match I can attest that it makes a difference.

The tags cost less than a dollar each. They were ordered from a vendor in China. When we went through the process (with the same vendor) we were able to choose the shape and custom artwork. The hardware component moves the challenge beyond the web. How will the person and project physically interact? What mechanical elements are needed? I suspect that Arduinos were used in a lot of the projects to route sensor data to networked machine.

However, the challenges are definitely worth it. The projects at PICNIC (and at ETech) all involved getting people to play and socialize. It added an element of fun to people's interactions with technology - something that I think is always worth doing.

Recent Posts

• Four short links: 25 September 2009 | by Nat Torkington on September 25, 2009
• Four short links: 24 September 2009 | by Nat Torkington on September 24, 2009
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• Four short links: 21 September 2009 | by Nat Torkington on September 21, 2009
• Ignites Around the World: Amherst, NYC, SLC, Portugal, Austin, Prague and PICNIC | by Brady Forrest on September 20, 2009