Tag Archive for ar

Geolocated content – what do we want?

September 11, 2012 2 comments

Most people who read this blog, or know me, will know that I have been working on a Nesta & Nominet Trust funded project on Augmented Reality for the past few months.

We have been taking content from various places and delivering it to people via their smart device based on there location, it is a bit of a hotch-potch of content with potholes from Fix My Street sitting beside food standard ratings from Rate My Place and content from local blogs. Nesta & the Nominet Trust have signed the project off now and are more than happy with what we have produced.

The AR project allowed us to create and test a platform that almost completely removes the barrier to entry for presenting content in to AR environments. We have a working proof of concept that we can show people and 99% of the people we do show go ‘wow that is so cool‘ or ‘if I give you this feed/data/content can you put it in there?‘ while pointing at the iPad.

Now we are starting to look at further developing the fantastic Apollo platform written by Adrian Short, to filter different types of content or produce different streams from different content creators. As part of this future development it would be really good if we could get a list of content types that people would find useful if they could be delivered based on location. Once we have a list then we can look at where we could get the data from, does it exist, do we need to create it etc. So two versions of the same question:

From a consumer of content perspective, what public service content would be good, useful, interesting if you could have it delivered to your smart device based on your location?

Or the same question to #localgov people, what content would be good, useful, interesting if you could have it delivered to peoples smart devices based on their location?

In other news about the same subject, we have submitted a proposal to the Knight News Challenge to develop the Apollo platform and build an Augmented Reality & Geolocation Toolkit, it would be really cool if you could go and like this so the nice people at the Knight Foundation can see that people are interested in what we are doing. If you are in a particularly Liking mood then you could also Like the n0tice entry as well.

So any ideas, suggestions & thoughts on Geolocated public service content or if you are in #localgov and have datasets that you might want to let us play with then talk to us in the comments below.

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iPhone 5 and augmented reality – a potential game changer?

September 10, 2012 No comments

It’s most unlike me to contribute to the rumour frenzy around an Apple launch, but i wanted to put a marker down about Augmented Reality. At Talk About Local we have been doing a lot of work with phone based AR in the field, mainly using iOS devices.

It’s clear that AR apps stress the phone more than almost anything else – the GPS, camera, 3G and CPU all hammering away. My iPhone4 gets hot when using Layar or Aurasma for a time and iPhone3s really struggle.  iPads though, work great – much more grunt.  If you really want to stretch the hardware and show what a phone can do that your competitors can’t then AR is a prime battleground. Indeed, Nokia’s new Lumia 920 phone majors on AR (although it isn’t clear yet where the content will come from).  I’m also struck that Blackberry (remember them) use Wikitude AR to advertise their new handsets.

Apple filed a patent on AR earlier in the year.  And if you have been to an Apple store in a quiet moment recently the sales staff are keen to show you the Apple Store app that reads barcodes very snappily, even if the back end sometimes goes wrong.

But, and it’s a big but, the content for AR at present is fairly weak – mainly bits of often well crafted but ultimately empty marketing stuff.   Talk About Local has been exploring new ways for local bloggers to get their content into AR environment via a simple RSS feed, we’ve even demonstrated it on BBC TV.

But Apple have the new Apple Maps service up their sleeve.  One of the strengths of geo-triggered AR is it’s marvelous ability to show you things around you that aren’t necessarily in your immediate field of vision.  It can help you break out of your tunnel to your destination and explore more serendipitous things, in a flaneur walk sort of way.  Satnav, by eschewing the trad map display for a simple ’3D view’ is part way down this track, but focuses on the tunnel.

So Apple Maps teamed up with the processing power of a new iPhone with baked-in AR could see a fascinating leap forward for AR in general.

Of course Apple could differentiate itself from Google by embracing third party geo-tagged content and rescuing us all from the dreaded Starbucks Street of closed AR mobile search environments culled from tired corporate listings.  Or even try some sort of ‘apple map store’, where you could buy in map layers – but again they would have to be good third party content.  If Apple Maps essentially just gives us a fancy satnav then it might be a missed opportunity.  If it gives us AR native to the handset, baked into the OS then it could be a game changer.

Anyway, we’ll know in a couple of weeks and you can tell me if this post is fluffy iphone link bait of the sort that i should be ashamed of or a cogent contribution to the debate on the new wonder product (ducks for cover).

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hypARlocal demo at Nesta event for makers of tech for community good

September 5, 2012 No comments

Talk About Local got the opportunity to spread the word about the hypARlocal prototype we’ve been working on at a Nesta organised event for people working with innovative tech projects in London last night.

The hypARlocal work takes a different look at the potential that augmented reality platforms offer for content with a public service emphasis such as local news and information.

So far we’ve worked with a number of hyperlocal publishers, including the Edinburgh Reporter, to showcase local content via AR (you can read more about this at the dedicated blog here).

During the event, William and Mike gave a demo of the two differ types of AR – the geo-tagged content from the hyperlocal publishers and then object-triggered AR where a physical object triggers an interactive experience via a mobile device.

Will Perrin presenting at Nesta

Using this technology the demo showed how information from public health posters can be instantly displayed in a different language or take the reader to further resources.

Earlier in the evening the group – all makers of technology aimed at supporting communities – heard about the #wewillgather project. Its founders were inspired to create the platform after starting the riot cleanup using nothing but twitter. They realised the organising power technologies offers despite there being no organisation and are now rolling out a beta service which helps people locate and volunteer to ‘do good things’.

See it in action using the hashtag, via twitter @wewillgather or at www.wewillgather.co.uk.

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Using augmented reality (AR) with e-government

August 16, 2012 No comments

“Residents can then view this information on a mobile device, seeing – for example – graphical circles attached to a building containing information (such as opening times for a museum) when selected.”

Here at Talk About Local, we’ve been talking to people across the public sector about the opportunities which augmented reality offers for the delivery of important information for citizens.

Above is just one practical example which Tristan Parker of the E-Government Bulletin picked out during this recent interview with William Perrin about the hypArlocal initiative we’ve been trialling.

William goes on to explain more:

“What augmented reality allows you to do is order that by geography, so you can see things in a geographical way, vividly in the street in front of you. There are very few people in the world doing this, so it’s a great opportunity.

“Councils are the ultimate guardians of local information … and we think there’s a lot of potential for local authorities and other local public bodies who hold lots of data about places to use the service to show their data in a new and imaginative way”

If you’d like to find out about joining the hyARlocal experiment, there’s more at the dedicated project blog here.

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