Isn’t that just typical: early yesterday we ran a succesful test with our little Skywriter app. Overjoyed with the results, we discussed it with the ARWave group and it became clear we just had quite a nice breakthrough.

Yesterday, Google decided to stop supporting Wave.

Reasons? Because they didn’t get the uptake they expected. Which could be a good reason, were it not for the fact that Wave is barely two years old and had just gone public in may. Six months is hardly enough time for anything to prove itself. Heck, HTML 5 is not expected to be standard until 2020+

I can only imagine how upset the developers themselves were. Their latest blogpost was only two days old.

So what does this mean for ARWave? Well, we’ve got to explore what exactly we will and can do. Will we write our own thing for the XMPP protocol? Will we continue with the Wave-code and hope people won’t shut down their servers straight away? It’s all still a bit of a mystery here. Fact is, we still want to continue ARWave. We still believe Wave is a fantastic platform and is perfect for what we want. It is just a lot trickier now to get an infrastructure up and running.

But hey, at least, people won’t think we’re from google anymore.

update: Go go go Pygowave!

Yesterdag evening we took our first Skywriter app for a spin on the streets.

Skywriter is our Android based program to display 3d content and use it as an overlay for a view of the real world. Augmented Reality, in other words.

Here’s our little demonstration. I’ll warn you, the camera was hardly any stable.

As you can see, there is still a lot of improvement we’ve got to make. For starters, the screen is still too jittery. This is because the sensors in the phone output any little movement you make. So we need to calibrate our filter a bit better.

Once we’ve got the 3d view looking like it should, we can start implementing our main feature: collaborative augmented reality layers. That way you and anyone else can create your own AR content and share it with anyone (or no one) you like. You will also be able to layer content on top of each other, so you won’t have to stick around with a single view. Then the real fun can start, yay!

For more information, see arwave.org

There is a lot of development currently going within a new medium named Augmented Reality. For those who know me a bit, know that I’m infected by the Augmented Reality-virus. It’s my boyfriend’s fault, I swear.

The other thing you should know about is that my background is in journalism. Now I’m not to keen to go into the journalistic world itself, but I am interested in trying to discover new ways of presenting people news and information. Preferably a way that not so much tells people about the news, but makes them more information-savvy. This is necessary because we have so many people claiming so many things, that we get drowned in information that may or may not be factual.

But the big question is: can you combine Augmented Reality with journalism? Would journalism really benefit from Augmented Reality in ways that we won’t go all ‘horseless-carriage-syndrome’? That last thing I can’t promise. After all, the very first thing we humans do when we invent a new medium, is trying to jam information designed for an old medium into it.

To answer the overall question, we might have to first think about what we really want from journalism. When it comes down to it, all we really ask from journalism is factual information that will help us make better decisions. All the information we consume eventually leads us to make a different choice of hair products, or a different choice in career, or a different choice in lifestyle. Even information we believe we consume for ‘background information’, is also there to influence our choices. We learn about the second world war so we won’t decide that exterminating an ethnic group for the glory of the nation is a jolly good idea.

For Augmented Reality to be beneficial for the purpose of journalism, it would have to be able to provide to us information that can help us with our choices. Whether these choices are to affect the micro-cosmic or the macro-cosmic.

The simplest application would be a pop-up review system. Whenever you’re in a store, you hold your phone to your desired product and the Augmented Reality Application will tell you what the (self-designated) experts think of it.

Still, we should be able to go further than this.

“1 in 5 girls approve of puppies”

One of the things that annoys me most about the current state of journalism, is that people get to make all sorts of claims in the media without those claims being checked. Some journalists will say that they’re only there to report on this person saying it, but quite frankly, that’s a load of nonsense. Yes, you can pretend to be neutral, but your task is first and foremost to inform people about the truth (with the truth being ‘the most accurate reflection of reality as we are capable of perceiving with our current insights and technology’). For this purpose, I propose to design an application that will check a statement for you. The best implementation would be that your Augmented Reality Provider (a smartphone, maybe glasses in the future) will simply check someone’s speech for statements that are supposed to be based on facts (“Most Americans don’t care about the environment”, “1 in 5 girls approve of puppies”). Is the information incorrect, the Provider will let you know through, for example, a large textbox hovering next to the speaking, displaying “citation needed”.

Unfortunately, our speech-recognition software isn’t good enough to be able to interpret speech accurately enough to make that possible. However, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software might be able to help out already. See a text stating any specific factual piece of information? Use your Provider to scan it and the phone will check the sources. Now the Provider won’t be intelligent enough to recognise whether a source is correct, it still depends on the databases it searches in. For this purpose, it might be useful to limit the database to sources with a high degree of reliability, such as scientific databases, university websites and *gasp* maybe even Wikipedia.

This system can also discover whether someone really said a specific quote. Very useful when politicians or experts are quoted on controversial subjects. Now with websites like Youtube making political speeches text-searchable, we can make disinformation through misquotation less likely to happen.

Readers might benefit a lot from Augmented Reality in general. I’m currently working on a dissertation about the narrative in newspapers. Specifically, I want to see if newspapers are using techniques that are normally used to make a drama as affective as possible to the audience. Based on the criteria, you could have your Augmented Reality Provider check a text for you and decide the affect of the information. Those criteria are hard to check with our current OCR technology, but we can already learn computers to spot weighted and emotional wording. I, as consumer of news, don’t really like it when someone tries to sneak an opinion into my news, so I would appreciate knowing the amount of bias in a newspaper. You could have it that your view would colour green to red, depending on the amount of sensationalism.

So if we try to conceptualise this, we get this:

(Foto by me, news by Volkskrant and Financieele Dagblad)
Here’s an example where my Provider checks the text on dramatised news. Because my Provider ‘knows’ I don’t like very dramatic news, it takes this into account when scanning things. My Provider also noticed that one article quotes Chancellor Merkel. Seeing as my Provider ‘knows’ I understand German, it will display the quote in its original language so I know exactly what Merkel said. Unfortunately, my Provider is not well versed in literary columns, so it has no idea what Arnon Grunberg said in that particular snippet.

Augmented Reality might also be used to aid journalists in finding and providing the news. With the current available technology, we can already spot where exactly all the Twitter-users are. Seeing the obsession with Twitter that the Dutch parliamentarians have, it will be pretty easy to see where exactly all Twitter-using Dutch politicians find themselves. This sounds rather stalkerish, and to be perfectly frank with you, I felt rather uncomfortable when I used that specific application. It was as if I was peeking into someone’s bedroom.

Tweetworld :

(ignore the wobbliness of the background please )

New view on information

Now most of these ideas are based on searching information that is provided to you. Question is, can Augmented Reality also aid the provider of information? The biggest concern I have is that providers of news will simply create gigantic floating textboxes with text cut in. We don’t need Augmented Reality for that. That’s like using a television to display a painting. Yes, you can do it, but it’s less practical than the original medium. The only way I see text in Augmented Reality working, is when there are specific points designated for text, like billboards. Some people don’t want to actively look for news (like actually visiting a website) but do want to be informed of specific events. A user might be able to use one of these designated spaces to apply the ‘News-tag’ to. They can configure the type of news they want to receive and every time something of some importance happens to it, it will display it. For example, I am very interested in foreign affairs, but I couldn’t care less about sports. My Designated Areas will show when there’s news of a revolt in Thailand, but not the world-cup winners.

Here’s a simple mock-up of the idea.

(photo by me, news by NOS)
Current photo-recognitiontechnology allows AR content to be placed on more sophisticated images than just huge QR-codes. You can still keep the map or the advertisement.

Now you could say, “Why do you need specific places?” I first thought of this system to be simply something that’s always and everywhere available. The problem is that text by nature occupies all your attention, and I don’t think it would be a good idea to have news pop-up in people direct view when they’re about to cross the street. However, people wouldn’t mind reading these sort of things when waiting at a bus-stop.

Now these are just a few ideas and sadly, I’m limited by my experiences with all the other media. I assume that in the future, when Augmented Reality can proudly proclaim itself to be a proper medium, we can expect to see much more innovative and diverse ideas around Augmented Reality and journalism. Until that time, we’re still stuck with Augmented Reality 1.0.

-Bertine van Hövell

Yes, this website too has switched to wordpress.

Why? Because my old website was kind of shoddy and really needed updating. It will be interesting to see if this website lasts a little longer. Planning to, though.