Article

Other industries serve as incubators for augmented reality apps

At the Society for Environmental Graphic Design annual conference, speakers talked about augmented reality technologies that could someday translate into digital screen media.

June 7, 2010 by

One of the things that we in the digital signage industry benefit from the most is the fact that there are other, bigger industries where the technologies for our industry are tested and proven.

This was demonstrated recently at the annual conference of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design in Washington, DC, when a trio of talented young designers made it clear that what they call "augmented reality" will extend far beyond the early uses of augmented reality (AR) that we see today.

Their definition of AR — integrating intensive experiences involving digital media into the everyday life that happens to people in public spaces — already is getting futuristic:

• heads-up displays that Air Force fighter pilots experience in the skies when chasing enemy combatants,
• pornography that automatically and digitally senses muscular reactions from porn viewers which, in turn, changes the "action" that these porn consumers view on-screen,
• smart phone applications that allow people to view little annotated balloons identifying urban restaurants and bars which pop up on Smart Phone screens when one points the Smart Screen's viewfinder down a city street.

As Keiichi Matsuda, a young architectural designer and recent graduate from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, said in the June 3 morning plenary conference session, the merging of the real world and virtual world is inevitable in many public venues.

Although Matsuda acknowledged that we don't yet know the precise nature of how and where these two worlds will come together in everyday experience, this real-time augmentation of physical reality — as opposed to a video-game or flight-simulator escape from the real world into a virtual world — is already happening.

One of the indications of this merger of the real world with the virtual world is the evolving biographies of Matsuda along with the other two speakers in today's panel: Keywon Chung and Richard The.

• Chung is a former software interaction designer at Microsoft. Today, she is leveraging radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology in her studies at the MIT Media Lab to make toys and other everyday physical objects interact digitally, via automatically generated sounds, with both children and adults.
• The, a German national and current MIT Media Lab student, has worked in the recent past as a graphic designer and interactive designer. Now he uses both analog techniques and digital technology to create unique forms of social interactivity which involve lots of different people – sometimes friends, sometimes strangers, sometime both -- in public spaces.
• Matsuda formerly worked as an architectural designer. Today his student thesis work at the Bartlett School of Architecture captures moving real-time images in his home and augments it with information about those objects which allows him to interact with those objects in a more informed way.

So, what does all this talk by sophisticated designers about augmented reality have to do with the hanging/banging reality of digital signage? Well, it's really simple. It tells us that we don't live in a vacuum. It also points us to our future.

As we can see, these rapidly evolving augmented-reality scenarios are developing rapidly in the military establishment, in the porn industry and in fourth-generation mobile-phone applications.

In effect, these are the three industry pillars which support the platform on which Matsuda, The and Chung stand as they transition their careers over from architecture and computer-based interactivity to a merger of these two disciplines.

Led by these three massive industries — aerospace/defense, porn and telecommunications — big investments are being made in AR and (most importantly) these investments are paying off big-time.

Just like aerospace/defense spending proved out eye tracking tech and the porn industry made digital video prevalent online, these massive industries that dwarf the digital signage industry are incubating and testing out new technologies we're eventually sure to end up using.

In the world beyond telephones, star wars and porn stars, our small-but-growing world of digital screen media sits at this intersection where digital audio/visual technology collides with the physical world that exists outside the home in public space.