Tag Archive for NESTA

Augmented Reality it’s not just for news

September 28, 2012 No comments

Over the past few months I’ve been working on the Nesta & Nominet Trust funded project HypARlocal (we really should get around to changing the name, suggestions?), where we are focussing on taking geolocated news content from hyperlocal blogs and publishing it for smart devices to find based on their location.

I’ve been quite wrapped up in the geolocation of content and pushing it out to Layar & Wikitude that I had stopped looking at what other AR things were out there.

I’ve been revisiting the app store and playing about with some of the new and some of the old apps to see whats new or how they have changed.

String, install the app print off some targets, point your phone at them and watch what they do. Along the same lines as Blippar & Aurasma where image recognition is used to trigger actions.

Aurasma, we have played with this quite a bit recently and have come up with some interesting public service uses for Aurasma and other image recognition apps. I’ll be writing a bit more on that soon but if you were at the Nesta event a few weeks ago you will have seen Will and I demonstrating one of our ideas.

One of my favourite apps that sort of falls in to the Augmented Reality group is Star Chart for the iPhone, for £1.99 I think it is worth the money. Fire it up point it at the sky roughly where you are looking and the stars and planets are shown relative to your location so you can work out what you are looking at.

screen capture of the star chart app showing the Lion

because it doesn’t use the camera it just uses your location and the direction the phone is pointing, it also works during the day.

If you often lie on your back in a park watching planes fly over head and wonder where they are going then the Plane Finder app is the one for you. Again it is a paid for app but based on your location it finds planes and then overlays them on to the camera view of the sky. There is a free (ad supported) version and a paid for version.

I’ve nicked a screen shot from the app page here because it is raining in Stoke and there are actually no planes around to see.

I’m sure you have all seen the ads on TV for the Halifax home finder app? An obvious and interesting use of geolocation and AR, worth a look even if you aren’t looking for a new house.

And finally if you want to see Zombies climbing out of your tiled floor then Zombie Hunt is the app for you.

 

What are your favourite Augmented Reality apps? Share them in the comments below.

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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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Destination Local winners announced by Nesta

June 29, 2012 One comment

In what must be the most anticipated announcement for hyperlocal publishers this year, Nesta has declared the winning Destination Local applicants today.

The scheme attracted 165 entrants looking to innovate in the hyperlocal space using mobile technologies and the final ten all have a different take on that proposition.

Destination Local showed the huge range of talent out there in the UK hyperlocal scene.  And what an important time this for an innovation funder like Nesta to be in a learning exercise. Web usage is tipping inexorably towards mobiles which are mainly smart phones.  Smart phones are usually location aware and local web content is tightly tied to a place.  So people who publish for the local web need to explore and understand how mobile, location aware content is produced and consumed.

In a competitive world research to help the industry as a whole will only come from publicly or charitably funded organisations like Nesta.  Nesta’s innovation remit makes them best placed to help produce and share in a new field – especially to benefit public service driven elements of the community.

The winners were:

- My Town from Welshpool and Newtown, Wales.
- Local Edge from Leith and Broughton, Scotland
- Leeds Online from Leeds, West Yorkshire
- Papur Dre from Caernarfon, Wales
- Our Town from Scotland
- #21VC from Loddon in Norfolk
- URTV from Helensburgh, Scotland
- LocalSay from London
- Kentishtowner  from Kentish Town,
- Locali from Craigavon, Northern Ireland

On the Nesta blog, Jon Kingsbury said Nesta would be able to learn a great deal from the winning applications: “We think that because there are different possible research areas across this portfolio, the evidence generated from the projects should provide some useful information for most current hyperlocal media practitioners.”

The winners, subject to the legal agreements, now get cash and support to make their ideas a reality in a scheme which must surely be the biggest shot in the arm for hyperlocal publishers across the UK.

Talk About Local is very pleased to have been involved in the process – both myself and William took part in some of the early assessments (along with several others) – our personal thoughts below.

William Perrin
Talk About Local is already taking forward a joint Nominet Trust/Nesta project ‘hypARlcoal’ on geotagging and local augmented reality.  We’d applied to Nominet who then partnered with Nesta, so we didn’t enter the competition.

Judging innovation is always tricky – absolute innovation and totally and utterly new idea no one has ever had before is very rare.  It’s all about the context and like any competition we won’t know if we got it right until the winners start to deliver.  The final panel has selected a great spread of use-cases so we should see some very interesting stuff.

It was an exacting exercise helping Nesta come up with a short list for the final panel – huge amounts of reading and research.  I’ve judged quite a few public competitions now for different clients and as ever, bids with numbers did better than those without – basic traffic figures, attempts to evidence demand, basic business models, focus on sustainability etc. made bids stand out.  As did evidencing rather than asserting partnerships.  Copy and paste bids, submitted many times to different potential funders with only tiny amendment also stood out for the wrong reasons.

Nesta’s publication of bid videos is a great bit of transparency.   You always feel sorry for people you know well who don’t quite make it through. And we are all conscious that there are 10 elated winners and 150 disappointed teams out there.

Sarah Hartley
This was the first large-scale public competition of this type I’ve been involved in and I found the process both demanding and interesting. It contained a great many cross-checks and second scoring procedures – to such an extent in fact that we didn’t actually know who the winners were until yesterday!
All the applications have been made public almost from the start via the youTube videos of their pitches and, has been noted elsewhere previously, fell into three main categories – taking an existing service mobile, a tech solution or funding to keep on doing a hyperlocal activity.
We saw many bids essentially for continuation or linear growth funding but often there wasn’t a strong enough innovation proposition. That’s not to say that what these sites do isn’t hugely valuable, it’s just they simply don’t fit the innovation remit.
It was also difficult to assess some potentially great projects because applicants hadn’t provided enough research into likely demand. So, if there’s one tip I’d pass on to anyone applying for funding from this sort of pot in the future, that would be it – establish the demand. It doesn’t have to be professional market research – simply get out and talk to people and report back the findings.

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Hyperlocal websites and augmented reality – hypARlocal

May 23, 2012 8 comments

Talk About Local is working on an experiment to bring public service content from hyperlocal websites into the world of augmented reality. We want to make it easy for people who run hyperlocal websites, the sort of folk we bring together at our unconferences, to consistently put their work into an augmented reality environment. Most stuff published in augmented reality environments (AR) right now is commercially-driven and often uninspiring. We wanted to bring some of the public service ethos of hyperlocal sites into AR and in so doing start a conversation about geotagging with hyperlocal publishers.

This is a continuation of our long term thinking at Talk About Local on futures for hyperlocal publishing and means of local content delivery. We are convinced that geotagging of the great public service stuff people write or photograph for hyperlocal sites is important as people use their mobiles more and more – see n0tice for instance. And AR is a fascinating demonstration of what geotagging can do.

Hyperlocal bloggers write content that is specific about a place, often very specific – a particular building or street corner. The days of AR as ‘geeks with glasses’ or huge headsets staggering around the corridors of MIT are now largely past.  Talk About Local is working with mobile phone based augmented reality applications. When you hold your phone’s camera up to see the street in front of you augmented reality apps arrange information from the blog in say speech bubbles on screen hovering over the thing that they relate to. Two factors combine to label things you can see through the camera:

  • the hyperlocal blog post has a ‘geo-tag’ with the latitude and longitude of the place that the post relates to within its HTML, and
  • the smart phone has a GPS receiver and inertial compass so that the phone knows where it is an in which direction it is facing.

Augmented reality on mobiles is just breaking through to the mass market as the apps stabilise, the phones become more powerful and gain higher bandwidths and GPS. Mike Rawlins of PitsnPots first showed phone-based AR to me a couple of years ago and I thought at the time that it was ‘a bit Bladerunner/Terminator’. Even now it still has something of a wow factor.  Recently there has been huge excitement about Google’s Project Glass but for that to work fully there needs to be much more accurately geotagged content out there.

We approached The Nominet Trust for funding for a technology demonstrator, focussing mainly on public service content and they partnered with innovation funder NESTA just as NESTA was starting up its Destination Local programme. Talk About Local is delighted to be funded by these partners in a project we call hypARlocal (apologies for the cheesiness, it was late at night, we had a form to fill in etc and at least i haven’t used SoLoMo so far).

In hypARlocal with some volunteer hyperlocal websites we are looking at:

  • geotagging content
  • pushing geotagged content into different AR environments
  • exploring those environments
  • talking with people as they use AR, including users with disabilities. And in general
  • blogging this as we go.

This is an experiment and consumer facing AR and geotagging services are relatively new stuff. The process isn’t easy, many things don’t quite work as advertised nor always do what a local blogger might want them to. We want to learn lessons and share them so that others don’t have to. As well as feed back to software and platform developers what independent local publishers might want from their products.

It’s great fun also to be working on this with the talented developer Adrian Short. Much of what we learn and publish will be far more generally applicable than to hyperlocal sites. And many of the things we try won’t work, which is why it’s great to be working with funders and partners who understand innovation. Useful suggestions, tips, trackbacks would be welcome in the comments.  Watch this blog for more on the Augmented Reality tag, especially from Mike Rawlins who is doing much of the work in Talk About Local – you can sign up to help on his post.

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Ahead of #TAL12 – meet our sponsors

April 26, 2012 One comment

When the the annual Talk About Local unconference opens its doors this Saturday, it will be the culmination of some hard work and planning which couldn’t happen without the generous support of our sponsors.

Ahead of the big day we invite you meet our sponsors. They will all be represented to participate and provide more information about their hyperlocal offerings on Saturday too.

In alphabetical order, here’s what they say:

Media Trust

media-trust-logo

Media Trust’s newsnet gives people the unique opportunity to connect, share and learn to tell their local story. newsnet is a UK wide community of community reporters and local storytellers, which gives them the tools, skills and connections to get more from their local news.

Through our newsnet beacon projects we will support a cross section of community radio stations, hyperlocal sites and local TV stations to demonstrate the variety and scope of this community. newsnet is open to anyone, but our beacons can access a higher level of support from us, from training opportunities to equipment. newsnet is about supporting, fostering and ensuring an even stronger hyperlocal community so find out how we can help tell your local story at http://newsnet.mediatrust.org/

NESTA

Nesta Logo

NESTA is a charity that supports innovation in the UK. Through our new innovation program Destination Local we intend to fund 10 proposals that develop and test prototype services for the next generation of hyperlocal media. In particular, we are looking for prototypes that make the most of mobile technologies to deliver geographically-relevant local media.

Our goal in funding the prototypes is to understand what new business models may be required, what types of service work well with audiences and the challenges and opportunities of using mobile technologies. Successful applications will be able to demonstrate how they help to understand these themes. You can hear more about Destination Local at the unconference or apply online – it’s a simple, straightforward form.

n0tice

n0ticelogo

n0tice.com is a community noticeboard, a platform that simply seeks to answer the question – what’s happening near you?

Released by Guardian Media Group, at its most straightforward, n0tice.com is a new version of a very old idea – a community noticeboard. Users can post reports, offers or events for everyone in their area to see or set up their own noticeboards – become ‘noticeboard owners’ with a complete tool kit for local/hyperlocal publishing. Visit the site at www.n0tice.com, twitter @n0tice, blog www.about.n0tice.com.

South Leeds Life

South Leeds Life

South Leeds Life does what it says on the tin. A group of people who live and work in South Leeds got together to start the blog. We aim to tell you about events and stories going on in South Leeds – Holbeck, Beeston, Cottingley, Hunslet, Belle Isle & Middleton and encourage local residents to file their own posts. This collaborative blog stands in South Leeds’ long tradition of welcoming people into its communities. We celebrate the diversity of our communities and value the contributions that people have brought to South Leeds from all over the world. Most of the articles on this site come from a large network of local people who send in information.

UCLan MADE

uclan_made

The #uclanMADE (Media and Digital Enterprise) project works to support creative, motivated communicators who want to start or grow digital news enterprises for civic, educational or commercial purposes. Winner of the inaugural International Press Institute’s News Innovation Contest sponsored by Google, we’re currently accepting applications for the first MADE:UK Startup Weekend from 14-17 June and a chance to join the MADE Hothouse. Links: http://uclanmade.blogspot.com Twitter: MADEupdates

* We also received generous donations from a handful of well-wishers we’ve contacted individually and would like to add a big thank you to everyone who has supported #tal12. If you still wish to pledge a donation, there’s still time to do so on the #TAL12  Eventbrite page.

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