ARrested Development: The Content Creation Barrier For Augmented Reality

The most impor­tant ques­tion fac­ing the aug­mented real­ity com­mu­nity — one whose answer will shape the future of AR — is con­tent cre­ation. Put sim­ply, it’s a ques­tion of Who can cre­ate What kind of con­tent, and How they will cre­ate it.  At the moment, a notice­able gap sep­a­rates those who can cre­ate AR expe­ri­ences from those who can­not.  High bar­ri­ers to entry in the form of skills, tech­nol­ogy, or expense like those in front of AR are accept­able for a new medium at the early stages of devel­op­ment, but in the long run, mak­ing it easy for all those peo­ple who don’t know a fidu­ciary marker from fidu­ciary trust to eas­ily cre­ate valu­able expe­ri­ences for them­selves and oth­ers is far more impor­tant to the via­bil­ity of AR than resolv­ing any of the many con­cep­tual, design, or tech­no­log­i­cal chal­lenges vis­i­ble at the moment.

In fact, unless the AR com­mu­nity makes it easy for ordi­nary peo­ple to cre­ate and share mean­ing­ful con­tent broadly, I wager aug­mented real­ity will remain a marketer’s over­worked dray horse in the near and mid­dle term future. And in the long term, aug­mented real­ity expe­ri­ences will become at best an inter­face lens [as Adam Green­field sug­gests here] sup­port­ing spe­cial­ized visu­al­iza­tion needs and a lim­ited range of inter­ac­tions (with cor­re­spond­ingly lim­ited value), all built around resources orig­i­nat­ing from else­where within the ubiq­ui­tous dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence ecosystem.

I think this is a ‘neg­a­tive out­ome’ for AR only because I see so much poten­tial. As a class of expe­ri­ences, aug­mented real­ity has the poten­tial to change our under­stand­ing of the world we are immersed in at every moment, but only rarely appre­hend in a way that makes informed inter­ac­tion with peo­ple and the envi­ron­ment pos­si­ble. As Tish Shute noted in her recent inter­view with Bruno Uzzan, I see the col­lec­tion of tools, tech­nolo­gies, and con­cepts affil­i­ated under the ban­ner of aug­mented real­ity as the lead­ing ambas­sador for ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing and the weird world of every­ware that is ris­ing around us.

Recent devel­op­ments show progress towards bridg­ing the gap. First is Mobilizy’s pro­posal of a com­mon markup lan­guage — ARML [Aug­mented Real­ity Markup Lan­guage], based on KML — to the Aug­mented Real­ity Con­sor­tium.  Set­ting aside all other ques­tions about ARML, the pri­mary con­tent cre­ation prob­lem I see with this approach is the explic­itly geo­graphic frame of ref­er­ence in KML.  Most peo­ple sim­ply do not think in the same terms used by geoloca­tive schemes.  When I ask how far it is to the mar­ket, and some­one replies “4 min­utes north”, they’re not think­ing in min­utes of lat­i­tude.…  But rather than attempt to reori­ent the GIS / GEO loca­tion world­view to one that’s more nat­ural in human terms, I think the prag­matic solu­tion is a trans­la­tion layer in the cre­ation expe­ri­ence that avoids coor­di­nates or other non-natural lcoa­t­ive schemes, much as domain names over­lay or bro­ker IP addresses.  As an exam­ple, recall how the travel ser­vice Dopplr prompts you to enter the name of a place, sug­gests likely matches from a library of defined and man­aged place names, and only then addresses the coor­di­nates asso­ci­ated with that location.

In addi­tion, ARML will need some sort of abil­ity to cap­ture markup that is *not* depen­dent on geo­graphic ref­er­ence.  This may seem coun­ter­in­tu­itive for a medium that aims to aug­ment real­ity (which is, after all, a place), but remem­ber that peo­ple also ori­ent them­selves in terms of other peo­ple, time, activ­ity, iden­ti­fier, etc.  Hang­ing every­thing that aug­ments real­ity off of the geo­graphic skele­ton will result in instant ref­er­ence scheme hack­ery on an immense scale.  At the least, AR con­tent cre­ation expe­ri­ences based on ARML will need some means of invok­ing other ref­er­ence schemes.

The sec­ond devel­op­ment is Layar’s launch of buildAR.com, a pub­lic web-based con­tent cre­ation tool that sup­ports map based inter­ac­tion that extends the model for cre­ation expe­ri­ences beyond coör­di­nate tagged text data.  BuildAR.com is an early stage tool, but it marks a step toward the evo­lu­tion towards the goal of reflex­iv­ity; the stage of matu­rity wherein it is pos­si­ble for peo­ple who are unaware of the struc­ture and con­cepts that define the medium to eas­ily use tools pro­vided within the medium to cre­ate expe­ri­ences.  In McCLuhanesque terms, this effec­tively entails mak­ing pro­vi­sion for using the medium to extend itself.

I’m talk­ing about both direct and indi­rect cre­ation path­ways for aug­mented con­tent, though the empha­sis is on the direct end of the con­tin­uüm.  Indi­rect cre­ation could take many forms, such as trans­lat­ing exist­ing geoloca­tive tags or append­ing ARML meta­data to exist­ing dig­i­tal con­tent items; per­haps social objects like pho­tos, tweets, hotel reviews, or recipes.  Or con­tent that is cre­ated as a result of Google Wave, or the instru­men­ta­tion of urban set­tings, and our basic eco­nomic processes.  (A deep dive into the ques­tion of direct vs. indi­rect con­tent cre­ation path­ways would require map­ping out the poten­tial aug­mented con­tent ecosys­tem of linked data, and assess­ing each type of data from the cloud of apis / ser­vices / sources using tbd criteria.)

Address­ing the con­tent cre­ation gap is crit­i­cal because enabling broad-based cre­ation of aug­mented expe­ri­ences will speed up exper­i­men­ta­tion for all the sup­port­ing mod­els that need to evolve: busi­ness and rev­enue, data own­er­ship, tech­ni­cal, con­cep­tual, etc. Evo­lu­tion is needed here; the early mod­els for con­tent cre­ation include adver­tiser only (a default in the exper­i­men­tal stage for media where mar­keters and adver­tis­ers are pio­neers), sub­scrip­tion based, open source, and non­profit (aca­d­e­mic and oth­er­wise).  None of these yet offers the right com­bi­na­tion of con­ve­nience and con­text, the implaca­ble twin giants who rule the domain of value judg­ments made by dig­i­tal con­sumers and co-creaters.

Guide­lines for Con­tent Cre­ation Experiences

So what should the AR com­mu­nity offer to close the cre­ation gap?  We’ve learned a lot about what works in broad-based con­tent cre­ation from the evo­lu­tion of blog­ging and other main­stream plat­forms for social inter­ac­tion.  With­out con­sid­er­ing it exten­sively, the guide­lines for a con­tent cre­ation expe­ri­ence (mind, I’m not dis­cussing the tech­ni­cal enablers) are:

  • No cost of entry: Cre­at­ing con­tent can­not require spend­ing money (at least for basic capa­bil­ity), as the effort involved is already an investment.
  • No cog­ni­tive over­head: Cre­at­ing con­tent can­not require under­stand­ing new abstract con­cepts, mas­ter­ing tools with low usabil­ity, learn­ing com­plex lan­guages or ter­mi­nol­ogy, etc.
  • No main­te­nance: Cre­ation tools must act like self-maintaining ser­vices, i.e. tools that do not require effort or attention
  • No acces­si­bil­ity bar­ri­ers: For global adop­tion, con­tent cre­ation expe­ri­ences need to be acces­si­ble, which means low-bandwidth, multi-lingual, cross-media, and plat­form agnostic.

This is a start­ing list, but it cap­tures the essence of the offer­ings that have been suc­cess­ful in the past.

In addi­tion to the expe­ri­ence, the con­tent that peo­ple cre­ate needs to fol­low some guidelines.

  • Address­able: Includ­ing find­abil­ity and search­a­bil­ity, AR con­tent must be fully address­able by a broad spec­trum of tools and pro­to­cols.  AR will fail at bridg­ing the real and dig­i­tal if the con­tent peo­ple cre­ate for aug­mented expe­ri­ences  can­not — at least par­tially — be addressed across this bound­ary, which is what makes AR an enchanted win­dow rather than a sim­ple browser / UI lens.  This seems like the sim­plest of these guide­lines (after all, what isn’t address­able in a dig­i­tal space?), but I think in the end it will be quite chal­leng­ing to realize.
  • Inter­op­er­a­ble: Con­tent must work across plat­forms, for­mats, and browsers, in terms of cre­ation, shar­ing, and management.
  • Portable: Con­tent must be mov­able or portable for peo­ple to make the effort of cre­ation; it can­not be con­fined to a sin­gle stor­age loca­tion, ser­vice, tool, owner, etc.  This touches on the famil­iar ques­tions of data own­er­ship and the commons.

The goal of these sug­ges­tions is to push AR toward matu­rity and broader adop­tion as quickly as pos­si­ble, using lessons from the evo­lu­tion of the Web.  What sug­ges­tions for guide­lines for con­tent cre­ation expe­ri­ences and the nature of AR con­tent do you have?

If I am off base in think­ing the cre­ation bar­rier crit­i­cal at this early stage of aug­mented reality’s rise above the exper­i­men­tal water­line, then what is more important?

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Category: User Experience (UX)
 Tags: , , , , 19 comments »

19 Responses to “ARrested Development: The Content Creation Barrier For Augmented Reality”

  1. Tweets that mention ARrested Development: The Content Creation Barrier For Augmented Reality — Joe Lamantia.com -- Topsy.com
    September 29th, 2009 at 9:46 am

    […] This post was men­tioned on Twit­ter by MoJoe. MoJoe said: Look­ing for com­ments on my lat­est post “ARrested Devel­op­ment: The Con­tent Cre­ation Bar­rier For Aug­mented Real­ity” http://bit.ly/4qHUGV […]
  2. Thomas Wrobel
    September 29th, 2009 at 10:55 am

    I agree with pretty much all of this.
    Its absolutely essen­tial that a future AR net­work not only has user-content, but user con­tent on the same level as proffe­sional con­tent.
    Moreso, I think these con­tents should be view­able at the same time.

    Public/Private data from mul­ti­ple sources in the same field of view at the same time.

    Its for this rea­son I pre­posed IRC in a paper as a poten­tial way for­ward for AR devel­op­ment, as it pro­vides any num­ber of chan­nels of infor­ma­tion cre­ated by any­one who wants to, and its updated the fly.
    I noted at the end that Google­Wave might be a bet­ter choice, and have since been shift­ing much more towards that direction.

    The Wave fed­er­a­tion pro­to­col seems like an absolutely per­fect choice for AR data exchange.
    Its pretty fast, open and free. Any­one can cre­ate a wave, colleb­o­rate with any­one else, and allow any­one else to view it, and see changes in real time with no cost.
    Any­one can also set up and run their own wave sever too, and data exchanged only between those in the sever, is kept in that sever.
    (So, a sever in your own city, wont auto­mat­i­cally be share­ing data worldwide.…a sig­nif­i­cant band­width advan­tage over every­one world­wide tak­ing data from one cen­tral sever).

    Anyway…nice post, and a well rea­soned argu­ment as to where we need to work towards.
  3. AG
    September 29th, 2009 at 9:32 pm

    Well argued, Joe, and it’s great to see a cooler and more dis­pas­sion­ate look at AR’s near-term prospects.

    I’d put it even more sim­ply: the proper anal­ogy for AR is CSS, not HTML. It’s a pre­sen­ta­tion strat­egy first and foremost.

    Of course, nobody much wants to cop to that at the moment (or is capa­ble of see­ing it?). I sup­pose it’s inevitable, but the folks dri­ving this wave of hype around the tech­nol­ogy are per­haps those least qual­i­fied to assess its actual, quo­tid­ian inter­est: the kind of geekly guys (and they are guys) who’d read a Bruce Ster­ling novel as a poten­tial busi­ness case rather than a cau­tion­ary tale.

    What I find most inter­est­ing is what they’re blind­ing them­selves to: I don’t see AR as a really robust busi­ness at all, in and of itself. Any­one who invests in these early-stage efforts had bet­ter be pre­pared to flip quickly — and to some party totally con­fuz­zled by the jar­gon and cir­cle­jerk­ing — or see the value of their stake con­verge on zero. Remem­ber all those for­tunes built on best-of-breed, bleeding-edge CSS. : . )
  4. Blake Callens
    September 29th, 2009 at 11:18 pm

    I agree with your state­ments, as they per­tain to loca­tion based AR (espe­cially your state­ment about ARML). That being said, I think that the mar­ket is being flooded with GPS/Compass based apps, because they’re com­par­a­tively sim­pler to pro­duce than other AR apps, and there­fore, much of the talk of AR is shift­ing to this small sub-genre.

    The real power in the dis­play por­tion of AR has been and always will be photo recog­ni­tion algo­rithms, which noth­ing in this wave of loca­tion based tools use. I’ve tried using sev­eral of the most pop­u­lar loca­tion based mobile AR appli­ca­tions on both iPhone and Android to not just spin in a cir­cle :o ), but find actual loca­tions and they always wound up point­ing me at least a block from the actual loca­tion, due to the inac­cu­ra­cies of mobile GPS and Com­passes . IMO, these apps won’t have any real world use until they inte­grate photo recognition.

    A uni­ver­sal loca­tional AR data­base (worth using on a daily basis) would have to include a photo recog­ni­tion schema. IMO, that would require a mas­sive coör­di­nated effort to accomplish.

    Sec­ondly, the more pow­er­ful AR expe­ri­ences of the future will always be push­ing the bound­aries of not just inter­faces, but arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as well, and there­fore not be some­thing that the aver­age user will con­tribute to.
  5. joe lamantia
    September 29th, 2009 at 11:26 pm

    @Adam: Indeed: many will be called… and few will be cho­sen :)

    At a meta level, there’s a lot of ‘direc­tive input’ about where AR should go next in order to suc­ceed (or just sur­vive) float­ing around the inter­webz these days. I won­der if all this ‘col­lec­tive intel­li­gence’ will stream­line or accel­er­ate the evo­lu­tion of AR? Will so many eyes and voices help AR change the all-too-familiar new media / tech story of birth > bub­ble > bust > (maybe) business?

    There are some com­pa­nies mak­ing money — or at least earn­ing rev­enue — via AR, mostly with work­ing on the tech­ni­cal tools (early stage, so need­ing invest­ment) and cre­at­ing con­tent for pay­ing cus­tomers (thus my stance).

    Look­ing fur­ther ahead, Gary Hayes sug­gested the land­scape of pos­si­bil­i­ties (as he sees it), in 16 Top Aug­mented Real­ity Busi­ness Mod­els”. No coin­ci­dence that Gary pub­lished this list just at the time that curios­ity about the pos­si­ble busi­nesses behind AR reached a peak, and it’s worth look­ing at given his expe­ri­ence with evolv­ing media.

    But like every­one inter­ested in AR, I’m frankly curi­ous to see which exper­i­ments turn out to be a decent busi­ness model, and it’s waaaaay too early to say.
  6. joe lamantia
    September 29th, 2009 at 11:59 pm

    @Blake: Tish Shute put it well when she said that we’re see­ing “the thin end of the wedge” for what’s pos­si­ble with AR; the cur­rent focus on what you describe as GPS/compass appli­ca­tions for mobile (Robert Rice refers to these as ‘direc­tory AR’, all fol­low­ing the Tri­corder inter­ac­tion pat­tern) really shows this in action.

    Is photo recog­ni­tion the only way to close the res­o­lu­tion gap that makes cur­rent AR apps liable to spin you in cir­cles, and then lead you to the wrong place?

    What about using blue­tooth, or wifi tri­an­gu­la­tion? Google Maps offers lim­ited 3D mod­els for some urban areas — would this be enough to bridge the GPS res­o­lu­tion issues you’ve seen?
  7. moombe
    September 30th, 2009 at 5:22 am

    Just want here to point out that Layar is very good at com­mu­ni­cat­ing exten­siv­elly about what they do, but if you want to fol­low inno­va­tors in that space you’d bet­ter stick to Mobi­lizi. Basi­cally, Layar is a copy/paste of Wik­i­tude, BuildAR.com is a copy/paste of wikitude.me and Layar 3D is a copy/paste of Gamaray.

    This being said, I agree with the article’s con­tent. I think too after look­ing at Google Wave that it looks like a nice solu­tion to col­lab­o­ra­tively work on the “out­er­net” content.

    I’m wait­ing first to see what Total Immer­sion will bring on the mobile AR arena. They claim to deliver in a very few months a solu­tion that solves the posi­tion­ing issues of cur­rent Wikitude/Layar/whatever. And I under­stood they would deliver first on the iPhone. Prob­lem is : iPhone does not allow to ana­lyze real­time video sig­nal — as of today the SDK only allows to put a layer on top of the video feed. Total Immer­sion seems to be based on near field recog­ni­tion, which would mean video feed analy­sis to me. Which is not allowed by Apple’s SDK…
  8. Blake Callens
    September 30th, 2009 at 7:17 am

    @Joe, I don’t know about blue­tooth, but wifi tri­an­gu­la­tion wouldn’t help, because it’s radius of error is larger than civil­ian GPS. I think photo recog­ni­tion is going to have to be the way. Here’s a video demon­strat­ing a com­pany called Occipital’s efforts in that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXt21v8Hjhw

    @moombe, Inter­est­ing that Total Immer­sion is get­ting into the loca­tional AR realm. Could you post a link to more info?
  9. admin
    September 30th, 2009 at 7:51 am

    @Blake re: wi-fi tri­an­gu­la­tion, I was think­ing of this indoor posi­tion­ing tech from Nokia: http://www.nokia.com/technology/upcoming-innovations/indoor-positioning — though the res­o­lu­tion on this may not help in the outside.

    @moombe mobi­lizy *is* ahead of the AR curve with their offer­ings in many ways (about 8 months, I’d esti­mate). yet they’re also not attract­ing as much main­stream atten­tion as Layar, so they’re not as much an indi­ca­tor of aware­ness and focus from the non-tech world.

    i’m not a tech­nol­o­gist, but I under­stand that TI will launch a plat­form for pro­vid­ing AR expe­ri­ences on mul­ti­ple phones / devices. i didn’t see any­thing in their announce­ment about enabling con­tent cre­ation — which leaves us basi­cally in the same place regard­ing the evo­lu­tion of the medium. (if it is in fact a new medium, as some of the other com­ments here call into ques­tion [AG]) regard­less: *if AR wants to be a viable medium, it needs a par­tic­i­pa­tion architecture.*

    maybe Google Wave will be one of the pieces of that archi­tec­ture? maybe some­thing else?
  10. abc3d (Francesco D'Orazio)
    September 30th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    ARrested Devel­op­ment: The Con­tent Cre­ation Bar­rier For Aug­mented Real­ity http://tinyurl.com/y9fhyf6
  11. fabfo (Folu A.)
    September 30th, 2009 at 12:26 pm

    RT @abc3d: ARrested Devel­op­ment: The Con­tent Cre­ation Bar­rier For Aug­mented Real­ity http://tinyurl.com/y9fhyf6
  12. keferstein (Michael Keferstein)
    September 30th, 2009 at 1:17 pm

    excel­lent arti­cle about the nec­es­sary changes in #AR bye Joe Laman­tia:
    http://tinyurl.com/y9fhyf6
  13. ARtweets (Augmented Reality)
    September 30th, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    ARrested Devel­op­ment: The Con­tent Cre­ation Bar­rier For Aug­mented Real­ity http://bit.ly/KJfsi
  14. ewaldroodenrijs (Ewald Roodenrijs)
    September 30th, 2009 at 3:49 pm

    RT @ARtweets: ARrested Devel­op­ment: The Con­tent Cre­ation Bar­rier For #Aug­ment­e­dReal­ity http://bit.ly/KJfsi
  15. Thomas Wrobel
    October 2nd, 2009 at 2:44 am

    What you need for truly accu­rate AR is recog­ni­tion of envi­ron­ment to pre-known point clouds of data.

    Point­clouds can be gen­er­ated, on mass, from pho­tos.
    see;
    http://io9.com/5370575/software-recreates-an-entire-city-from-tourist-photographs
    For a par­tic­u­larly impres­sive example.

    We basi­caly need open database’s of point clouds which AR apps can access.
  16. Thomas Wrobel
    October 2nd, 2009 at 3:07 am

    “What I find most inter­est­ing is what they’re blind­ing them­selves to: I don’t see AR as a really robust busi­ness at all, in and of itself”

    Thats quite cor­rect.
    AR isnt a busi­ness in the same way the web isnt a business.

    An aug­mented real­ity plat­form wont be prof­itable in itself, its devel­op­ment is more “for the ben­e­fit for human­ity”. Those at the fore­front will have plenty of oppor­tu­nity for money, but the key is its not the new medium thats valuable.…its what you do –on– it that is.

    Over­lay­ing 3d stuff onto the real world will have a short period of atten­tion grab­bing in itself, and after that only the func­tional ben­e­fits will remain. Any­one relay­ing just on the usp of hav­ing AR will find their apps quickly sink.

    For­tun­tely, like the inter­net itself, the ben­e­fits will be huge in func­tional terms as well. But almost all these poten­tial func­tional advan­tages depend on good trans­par­ent hmd tech com­ing out. Hold­ing our phones up in the air will be a bar­rier for any mass adop­tion beyond geolo­ca­tion apps.
    So, aside from hard­ware firms, I dont think theres huge amounts of money in AR just yet. (For hard­ware firms, I think theres a big whole in the mar­ket for a mass pro­duced sleak hmd aimed at com­pa­nys and uni­ver­si­tys rather then con­sumers at this stage)

    As soon as we have consumer-suitable hmd, how­ever, some rather far-reaching and dead sim­ple AR apps could come out. (using AR in lose terms here), but imag­ine the impact of hav­ing a site like http://www.instructables.com only with the film footage from a fps per­spec­tive and over­layable in your field of view?
    Or bet­ter yet, get live-help on some­thing in real time (like with vark.com), you merely have to copy the arm and hand motions and some­one walks you though the process.
    Sud­denly the skills an indi­vid­ual has avail­able dra­mat­i­cally increases. Repair­ing your car, plumb­ing, and even emer­gency med­ical help could all be given remotely. I dont think we have scratched the sur­face of its poten­tial use’s.

    AR deserves every sin­gle bit of the hype it gets, and worlds such as Denno Coils are very pos­si­ble. All we gota be care­full of is the tech­nol­ogy isnt per­mi­nately asso­ci­ated with just adver­tis­ing. We have to ensure when theres real ben­e­fits, con­sumers can see them quickly so uptake will be fast.
    Its the func­tional advan­tages of hav­ing a shared AR world thats impor­tant, not the “cool” fac­tor. (of course though, by func­tional, I’m not exclud­ing video games as a poten­tial dri­ving force.Functional dosnt have to mean pro­duc­tive ;) )
  17. Weekly Linkfest « Games Alfresco
    October 4th, 2009 at 6:15 am

    […] Laman­tia on why cre­at­ing AR con­tent should be acces­si­ble to every­one, and how to make it […]
  18. Jamie Thompson
    October 25th, 2009 at 11:38 am

    Great blog! Not much more to say, but this — AR is about _search_ — that’s the fun­da­men­tal value propo­si­tion to users. Cer­tainly some gaming/entertainment aspects or appli­ca­tions will ben­e­fit from aug­mented real­ity, but IMO the great­est ben­e­fit is a hor­i­zon­tal search that is as rel­e­vant as pos­si­ble to the human; based on where we are, what we’re look­ing at, and maybe even, what we’re think­ing about…

    Nice work here, Joe.
  19. Johnny Holland – It's all about interaction » Blog Archive » Radio Johnny: Joe Lamantia on Augmented Reality
    March 8th, 2010 at 7:08 am

    […] Arti­cle: Inside Out: Inter­ac­tion Design for Aug­mented Real­ity Joe Laman­tia Blog Post: ARrested Devel­op­ment: The Con­tent Cre­ation Bar­rier For Aug­mented Real­ity Joe Laman­tia Blog Post: Geek to Chic: The Cul­tural Brand­ing of Aug­mented Real­ity Expe­ri­ences Joe […]

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