Robert Rice, the CEO of Neogence Enterprises and blogger of augmented reality on Curious Raven, spoke back in June at Mobile Monday. His speech targets the intermediate developer of augmented reality. If you’re new to the technology, most of this speech will go over your head.
The video is long, but if you’re serious about augmented reality and the future of mobile, the speech hits major points about the industry. And at 40 minutes, I’d give it a good five minute buffer if you’re going to watch the whole thing.
“Mobile is dead,” said Robert to begin his speech. He goes on to explain it should be brought back to life in a different format. Reincarnated, if you will. The point-to-point communication that we use right now will need transform into an immersive, predictive, meta-enviroment and can’t just be another way to access the internet.
Robert briefly explains the history of communications and tells us that if we do augmented reality correctly, it’ll join the pantheon. If we can remove the excess hardware of keyboards and screens in our mobile devices and convert to sunglasses, then the computer can become a buckle or a watch, conspicuous computing. We need to get away from the 2D mindset of flat screens and create 3D spaces where we can throw a YouTube video to another person through our AR enviroment, or send an SMS as a paper-airplane.
Augmented reality needs more than graphics over video, Robert goes on to explain. Should move past being even interactive and more dynamic and meta. It should answer the who, what, where, when, why and how. Computers have been vague points of demographic data because multiple people can use them, but mobile is an individual thing which allows us to break away from aggregate statistics and start answering questions for individuals.
Robert goes on to talk about venture capital, which he believes doesn’t get AR yet, and smart cities, and give suggestions to developers to keep the tagging of the world in mind, so we don’t have to go back and retag later.
Overall, I have to say I enjoyed the speech, though I was hoping Robert would get into specifics about Neogence Enterprises and their recent Mirascape announcement. And having spoken to him at length at ISMAR09 about the details of augmented reality, I thought he might elaborate on his anecdotes about furries and micro transactions. But maybe those weren’t appropriate for MOMA, anyway.
(edit note: while this was originally filmed back in June and even covered on GA by Ori, it’s still very relevent. Enjoy.)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: augmented reality, Mirascape, Mobile Monday, MOMA, Neogence Enterprises, Robert Rice |
Games Alfresco 
Hey Thomas!
That speech was back in June, and I didn’t want to get too far into the specifics about Mirascape…no sense giving anyone else any ideas (I’ve done that a little too much already). Also, I didn’t want to get up there and plug the company, there will be plenty of venues for that soon enough.
All in all, I loved the opportunity to speak at MOMA and I had a great time. I was fortunate enough to meet a lot of very interesting people and feel a wonderful vibe of excitement, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit.
PS Furries + AR + microtransactions = gold mine
Heh. So hard to keep track these days! :)
I guess this would be the second time that GA.com has posted this video. Not sure how I missed it the first time back in June. Then again, I’ve watched so many videos and read so many posts, they all run together at times. Still, it was good stuff.
The funny thing is, you even linked to the first posting of this video (https://gamesalfresco.com/2009/06/05/robert-rice-at-mobile-monday-amsterdam/) from the future digital life
lol. Well, I missed it the first time too.
Wonderful wonderfull speech, agree with basically all of it. Hell, its more or less everything I preach, only I don’t do it so elegantly.
(Id still say we perhaps don’t need the stylish glass’s if the functionality is there….after all, the first laptops and phones weren’t exactly stylish. Style effects speed of mass adoption, but it will happen regardless as long as functionality is appealing.)
The other possibility often forgotten is having retina projections into the eye from the side. As I understand it, this is quite possible and safe, but no ones really working on it.
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Also agree very much with the idea of webpages not becoming AR. Its just thinking about things the wrong way around.
Its something we have done historically wrong with every medium, however. The first TV shows were like threater plays. The camera moving for the first time was a big thing. We treated one medium like the ones before it. It took awhile for it to be treated in its own right. Even today, Id argue we see far too many videogames wanting to emulate films. The medium even decades on hasn’t fully learnt to be its own entity.
Sadly I think the same will happen with AR. People will put the data in 3d spaces. But not think from the ground up how to make it -for- the 3d spaces.
I do think distributed seversever communication is essential, but I’m quite sceptical with a lot of people building ar on http/html as a standard. AR.
http is ok for onemany, but not other combinations for communications, and not suitable at all for personal notes.
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Another problem with projectors; cant project black. No contrast. Useless in daylight.
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OpenID is a great software solution, imho. It lets us use a wide range of different services while only having one trusted source for our ID. We can all use different, diverse, trusted sources so….as a soceity…we arnt all putting our eggs in the same baskit. We need a hardware solution to address the walking-away problem.
And that will come with AR easily enough. (remove your glass’s? = instant logoff).
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One of the most interesting aspects of our potential future is the increased ability’s of the average person once they are used to AR. By information coming to them, or being called up, and by seeing stuff in context this in many ways turns us into super-humans. The skills and knowledge of all of us, becomes accessible by any one of us. And that’s quite profound.
Instructions + Vark + AR = superman.
Even relatively simple things to simulate also become incredible once you add an AR headset into the mix.
Extrapolation of physics would let us see where the football would land before it does or exactly how to take that pool shot. AR would naturally be banned from sports ;)
Heres to the future!
And if there’s one thing I’m confident of, I’m going to get my Densuke before my flying car.
Great to see this back. Alot happended last 6 months ;-)
Was great to meet you there Robert.