Augmented in Berlin

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in a half day workshop on “Augmented Life and Work” at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. It was an impressive get together of about 100 international companies and individuals such as trend experts Nils Müller and Max Celko, Augmented Reality pioneers Zugara and Metaio, telecommunication industry leaders Deutsche Telekom and Swisscom, UI experts TAT, and more. As someone who has organized many conferences and events myself, I thought Nils Müller and his team at trendone put together a great event. It was a particularly good “mélange à trois” of inspiration, insights, and networking.

Augmented Reality (AR) is not an easy topic to talk about. According to Lee Dryburgh, founder of eComm, AR is “technology for overlaying and infusing the physical world with digital media, information, and experiences.” Amazing animations like this one offer a good visual definition of what it is. As far as I understand it, AR is making computing more accessible and putting computing more squarely in the context of what we find important: people, places, and things. At his last keynote speech at eComm Amsterdam, frog Chief Creative Officer Mark Rolston created a three tiered paradigm around that. “Our spaces are becoming the computers. Our things are becoming the computers. We are becoming the computers.”

Most people agree that AR — which is currently mostly an academic phenomenon — holds a lot of potential. People like Layar’s Claire Boonstra (whom I have been lucky enough to meet several times in Amsterdam) are energetic and convincing advocates of a technological shift that will change the way we experience our daily lives.

And yet, AR is still an idea in its early stages. When presenting AR to an audience, as I did, you have to hit the right balance between this-will-change-everything future scenarios and real-world business relevance. A lot of examples of its use — found in a growing number of places on the Internet — seem like gadgets without much beneficial use. That’s partly why I was curious to see if this mini-conference in Berlin would drown in demonstrations of “look what happens if I put this AR code under my web cam,” or if it would engender a serious discussion about how meaningful this new technology can be to our lives and businesses. Thankfully, there were both, and in combination this was just great.

For my 15 minute presentation I wanted to see if I could generate some questions about some of frog’s concept studies like its Facemask or Dattoos. I also showed some of my colleague Fabio Sergio’s intriguing thoughts on the “body electric”  to offer some possible AR direction. Some of frog’s recent work for Intel demonstrates a state-of-the-art use case at a larger scale.

I thought my presentation added some good examples and strategic thoughts to the first presentation of the day by Nils Müller. He’s a trend researcher with great rhetorical skills, and he was able to draw some connections between emerging AR technologies in easy and understandable patterns. He didn’t cover all aspects of the potential social and technological change we will experience (naturally; the very nature of AR is to be different things to different people). And there were some in the room who were shaking their heads when asked to believe in some of his visions for 2030. For example, here are the stages he sees for the evolution of augmented reality:

AR1 Augmented Objects
— Marker and picture recognition
— augmented print and augmented packaging
— augmented POS terminals
— augmented shopping

AR2 Augmented Layers
— Mobile AR, no marker
— location based and compass
— AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode)
— Pico Projectors (MIT)
— cloud computing
— wearable displays
— augmented goggles
— outernet,
— gesture control
— object and face recognition

AR3 Augmented Vision
— active contact lenses (total immersion)
— MARE (Massively Mobile Multi-User Augmented Reality Entertainment)
— MMTRG (Massive Multiplayer Trans Reality Games)
— augmented cinematic games
— pervasive wireless broadband
— semantic search
— intelligent pattern and image real-time processing
— brainwave control and voiceless communication
— mood detection
— real-world avatars

AR4 Augmented World and Augmented Brains
— artificial intelligence
— eye chips
— brain-computer interfaces
— “Web of thoughts”
— five-sense immersion

AR5 Full AR perspective
— neuro enhancement
— full body prosthesis
— “Neurobots”
— telepathy
— artifical brain/brain transplantation
— brain upload and caching 
— reverse-engineered brain

Compared to such a futuristic outlook, it required a big step to get back to 2010 reality examples. Daniel Gelder from Metaio managed to do that by showing appealing solutions in live action, including the AR enhanced Lego boxes. (On a side note, I visited the the Lego store in HH recently and this very product didn’t work…). Also, Matthew Szymczyk, CEO of Zugara, showed his company’s impressive example of a gesture controlled AR shopping experience. One of the key takeaways from Zugara’s speech was the importance of extending AR into social networks. His point to developers was that whatever AR application they build, make sure it gives users a chance to create content that they feel is worth sharing with their friends, and worth adding to their digital life stream.

The last speaker of the day was Dan Gärdenfors, Head of UX research at TAT in Sweden. He gave a great speech on “Augmented ID” and  showed a live demo video of an augmented ID face recognition application.  Although the face recognition was rather slow, this is an amazing and somewhat scary example that will have impact once it hits the market.

The workshop ended with a two-hour working session. Small break-out groups brainstormed on future use cases,  business drivers, and more. All ideas were created under a creative commons license, so you can find them soon (as well as all presentations of the day) on this wiki. My colleague Andrew Barker also led a break out group developing an AR timeline — once he visualizes it, we’ll certainly publish it here on design mind.