‘Realities’ – Blurring the Boundaries at The Fantastic Tavern

OK, so I’ve always had a vivid imagination and love virtual reality, 3D and the more recent Augmented Reality as they blur the lines between what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t. So when I was invited to join The Fantastic Tavern for an evening on ‘Realities’, nothing short of an ‘act of God’ was going to stop me being there to find out more.

The evening kicked off with a humorous introduction from EMC’s Matt Bagwell, who framed the evening as an exploration of Augmented Reality – is it a fad or is it here to stay, a technology that has commercially viability? 

Matt took us back to the early 90’s, when blending realities became pervasive – starting with the fantastic game ‘Doom’ and moving to the military and their use of data by blending reality with an information layer. After providing the context for the evening, Matt left it to the speakers to explain what Augmented Reality actually is and how do you work with it – what’s good about it and what’s not so good? How can it ‘permeate the everyday’?

First up was Paul Dawson, Experience Director of EMC Consulting, who gave an overview of the definitions and roles of ‘realities’ by presenting a number of examples, including the best and the worst.

Paul held up The Terminator as being a great example of augmented reality (referring to the first film in the series and in my opinion the best). He also mentioned that the first Augmented Reality head up display in a car was back in 1988 (Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme) – a great ‘did you know’ if I’ve ever heard one.

He then moved on to popular iPhone apps like Tube Finder, and asked if there was really any difference between the services offered by Tube Finder and those provided by a compass? He made the great observation that in practice, what tends to happen with apps like these is that too much of the data is incorrect – one example was data showing Southwark Tube station sits on top of EMC’s offices…

Paul then asked ‘…so what does work’? Augmented Reality currently only uses dimensions and not senses. What we want to know is information that directly affects us – for example, what we want to know is queue times in the local Tesco, or the nearest ATM and whether it has cash in it. Paul moved the discussion a step further by asking how we bring senses into the mix?  What if we could listen to conversations in a room to help us decide which ones to join – essentially a tag cloud?

The conclusion was there are some beacons of hope emerging where not only correct data but also relevant data is added into the melting pot, indicating Augmented Reality could stay relevant and commercially viable.

Paul was followed by Johannes Kebeck, Technical Specialist for Bing Maps in EMEA. Johannes focused on Bing services (no surprises there!) to demonstrate what advancements in augmented information means for anyone who uses maps (i.e. all of us who invariably stumble around a strange town or city at some point).

Johannes talked about the number of new (or seemingly new) developments in technology in general and how they can be applied to mapping. He referred to Crowd Sourcing, for example, to harness the power of the community and of course referred to the ubiquitous Flickr photos rendering historic images onto maps to provide historic context – see the TED session by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

But then the deeper questions were asked: How do we interact with this? How do we talk to it? Johannas drew on an example used at an art gallery where visitors can not only zoom into the building but drill right down to view a specific painting and get all relevant data on that item.

But how easy is it to use? It’s no easy task to stitch hundreds or thousands of images together. However, with the help of a free Microsoft tool called ICE, or Image Composite Editor, an advanced panoramic image stitcher, images are seamlessly and automatically sewn together – plus for the user the information is only a couple of mouse clicks away.

Content is becoming richer and richer – users can not only zoom right into objects but zoom out to see the stars and the moon, all from a mobile phone.

Johannes also pointed out a local sensor application to highlight relevant data about an area, with the demonstration he gave focussing on real time news about crimes happening round the corner integrated into the map view, for example images and text update confirming a criminal was apprehended after breaking and entering.

But how do we augment reality with spatial information?If I see a house for sale nearby, I want to know how much it costs. Or if I visit the ‘House of Versailles’, I want to find out where the disabled entrance is, where the toilets are, etc. It’s possible to superimpose data onto the image through the camera using geo spatial information. This is technology that people already understand. Sometimes sticking your mobile phone out and staring at a tiny screen is limiting and can be dangerous!

Johannes rounded up the session with a fascinating peak into the future to a world where contact lenses are not only used to improve vision and change the colour of our eyes but actually function as an LED computer display. personally, I can’t wait for that!

Finally (from a speaker POV that is), the EMC Consulting creative team, aka Glennis McGregor, Matt Ratcliffe and Chris Gannon talked about the practicalities and challenges of working on various realities applications, including pushing the immersion factor, using games to create an ‘Augmented Virtuality’ with the aim of empowering teams and enhancing training. Finally, of course you need to consider health and safety, with the ideal being that the Augmented Virtuality environment is actually safer than reality.

The evening was rounded off with a Q&A session where random questions could be fired at the panel of speakers from the increasingly rowdy audience (fuelled by the freely flowing beer and sausage fest that kept everyone’s stamina up throughout the evening). Although there were a number of very interesting questions – including whether games inhibit creativity and individual expression and the danger of encouraging people to do things in a virtual world they may feel is OK in the real world – the best question of the night was whether Augmented Reality was being used in the adult entertainment sector… accompanied by cheers of encouragement by the audience.

The final poignant question ‘How do you mediate the important information from the vast amount of data? Who controls it? How much filtering will you have to do to get the information you need?’ was deemed too good to answer and left for future pondering.

The quick poll was between the iPad or sausage – and sausage won hands down!!

After that it was time for the 100 or so crowd to continue drinking, eating sausages and of course network, network, network.

All in all an interesting, insightful way to spend a Thursday evening. Cheers!

Find out more about EMC and The Fantastic Tavern, plus there’s a new event called ‘The Lock’ scheduled for 19th August – essentially 3 taverns running 3 streams on 3 different themes and run by the Fantastic Tavern team.

P.S. Michael McClary ate all the sausages while I was writing this!