Augmented Reality (AR) is the practice of adding computer-generated information to something you are experiencing already. Often, this involves injecting computer-generated images into a live video feed, and there’s some very impressive stuff out there which sees computers spotting special tokens (fiduciary markers is the jargon name) and overlaying images or videos.

However, it turns out that there is another, simpler way of letting the computer know what you are looking at: if you can specify the exact location of the camera in relation to what it is viewing, then you can go ahead and enhance things to your heart’s delight, without having to go around tagging everything with markers.

As an example of this, I’ve found that augmented reality has become a lot more, err, real, thanks to my new phone, an HTC Dream. It contains some handy embedded hardware that means it knows exactly where it is and where it’s pointing (the GPS tells it where it is on Earth, the accelerometer tells it which angle it is pointing relative to the surface, and the compass tells it which direction it is facing relative to the poles).

One application that takes advantage of this is Wikitude AR - it will search publicly available sources of information, and then overlay their position on top of the camera feed from the phone, as you can see from these screenshots taken while I was looking out of our office windows:

Then, there’s the truly amazing Google Sky Map: you simply point your phone at the area of sky that you are interested in, and it will overlay constellation information. You can also type in a search term (e.g. Venus), and it will give you a handy arrow and target, helping you to swing your phone round until you are pointing right at it. This is extremely useful for any other parent who has been pestered by their child wanting to know what that bright star is called…

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Last Saturday saw Brighton’s first Outdoor Gaming festival (a.k.a. BOGfest), organised by Richard Vahrman, COO of innovative GPS-gaming company, Locomatrix. The day featured a variety of games, mainly featuring mobile phones, so I thought what better way to contribute than to resurrect the Hunt the Wumpus game that I originally created to demo at Brighton Barcamp back in 2007.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, the idea is to navigate around a series of interconnected rooms and to shoot the Wumpus before he eats you, all while avoiding other hazards such as giant bats and bottomless pits. The original 1970s version was entirely text based, but my updated version uses a series of Quick Response (QR) barcodes to represent each room in the maze. Players scan the codes using a camera phone, and are given clues on their telephone handset.

In its first incarnation I printed these codes out on stickers, and created a cave on a roll of wallpaper. For BOGfest, however, I thought it needed to be much bigger, so I regenerated the codes on A3 sheets of paper (all hail OpenOffice, which, because of its XML format, allowed me to automatically generate the document instead of manually inserting all the graphics). I then enlisted the help of my sons to stick these bits of paper on a 10m x 10m area of Hove promenade, and to draw the rooms and tunnels in coloured chalk.

Then it was just a case of helping people get the barcode software running on their phones (or just lending them one of the Cogapp R&D handsets) and letting them get on with it. During the afternoon dozens of people played, and it was fascinating to watch their reactions: everything from extremely skeptical (”what are you selling? How much does it cost to play?”) to the extremely enthusiastic (”this is a lovely idea”).

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On Wednesday I attended a one-day seminar at the excellent Dana Centre. Organised by Museum ID, it focused on the cultural sector’s use of social media, broadcasting and the web, with lots of concrete examples from UK museums and heritage organisations.

The day started with a presentation from John Stack, Head of Tate Online. In it, he emphasised the need for a two-way dialogue between museums and their audiences, and provided several concrete examples of when the Tate has done exactly that with regard to tying in with physical exhibitions. These projects included: How We Are Now, where visitors were asked to contribute photos to a Flickr pool, the best of which were exhibited in the gallery; Tate Tracks, with visitors contributing their own artwork-inspired audio; Street or Studio, where the best contributed photos were made into a limited edition book; and finally a short-story competition to tie in with the TH.2058 exhibition in the Turbine Hall, with the best entries made into an audio podcast narrated by ex-Dr. Who Christopher Eccleston.

Next up was a presentation by Adrian Arthur, the Head of Web Services of the British Library. He outlined some of the BL’s experiments with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and podcasts, as well as their experience in opening up their sound recording archives to user generated content such as tags and annotations. Then he emphasised the need for cross-departmental cooperation in achieving the goal of disseminating the two key strengths of the library: its enormous amount of content, and the expertise of its curators. His colleague Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services, then took over to discuss the changes in both technology and user expectation which will be instrumental in shaping services in the future. As part of this he demonstrated some innovative and exciting ideas for researcher tools, including a rich multi-tiered interface that can provide for both lay and specialist audiences, and which could incorporate cutting-edge visualisation techniques alongside original source material (e.g. a 3D terrain view, synchronised with historical maps).

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Joe has already mentioned the first three presentations we saw at This Happened. Over to me to tell you a bit about the last two.

Firstly there were Russell Davies and Ben Terrett, a.k.a the Really Interesting Group, who talked about how they created a newspaper-format booklet, composed entirely of text and images culled from the net. The booklet, called Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 included all sorts of content, including the complete Twitter transcripts of the Mars Phoenix lander, and Dan Hill’s epic blog post The Street As Platform.

As well as discussing how they chose the content, and the typographic in-jokes that they used, their talk pointed out how easy it was for them to get a 1000-edition print run made, and highlighted the way in which denizens of the internet can now co-opt traditional media (they started with this provocative challenge to print journalism: we’ve stolen your business, now we want your machines). For instance, to get your very own magazine printed, you simply have to upload a PDF to MagCloud. Or, get creative with a snail-mail API such as ViaPost.

The final presentation was by Michael Cross, who talked about his current obsession: to create a system to allow people to walk on water. Called Bridge, it was first demonstrated in London in 2006, although his ultimate goal is to create a permanent installation to let people walk across a lake. As well as discussing the purely mechanical, human-powered system he used to build this, his talk was a fascinating insight into the design process, and his motivations for creating it (for instance, making something that is simultaneously peaceful and dangerous). Watch the video of it in action to appreciate what it does.

Last month saw the first meeting of Brighton Robotics, a group organised by self-styled robochick, Emily Toop.

Around 25 people turned up for a meeting in the basement of the Skiff, and after a round of introductions, there was some wide-ranging discussion (how to control a robot using an iPhone’s accelerometer, where to get laser cutting done locally, what’s in store from the next-generation RepRap etc.)

Then it was on to the main attraction: playing with everyone’s robots. Several people had brought their creations along to demonstrate, and the main themes seemed to be collision-avoidance, light-following and line-following. Bill Bigge from the University of Sussex’s CCNR had brought along several range-finding robots, while Emily had a SumoBot and a strange flipping Turbot. There was also a fantastic set of retro-robots from the 80s provided by Steve Carpenter, including the Logo Turtle, controlled by an 80s-vintage BBC micro:

Given that I’m a big fan of the Arduino, I had hoped to see some bots that used it as a brain, and I wasn’t disappointed: Steve had the beautifully-constructed ‘RoundBot’, complete with a backlit-LCD that told you what it was thinking (generally fairly simple thoughts such as “I’ve hit something with my left whisker; turning right…”):

And Thom Hopper had brought along a distance-sensing prototype he’d made out of an Arduino, IR-rangefinders, converted servos, and balsa wood:

You can read more about the event from Emily’s blog post. Also see photos on Flickr or on the Brighton Robotics site.

Yes folks, it’s that festive season again, and thoughts naturally turn to ‘what application should I use to draw a snowflake?’

Well, for starters, there’s Cogapp’s own Infinite Snowflake. This allows you to draw a pretty snowflake using our tasteful Christmas colour palette, and to optionally send it as an e-card to your friends. You can see and create snowflakes using the Flash interface at snowflake.cogapp.com, or you can just see what everyone else has created using good ol’ HTML.

Then, there’s Make-a-flake, a Flash application that replicates the age-old children’s interface of folding paper and cutting bits out of it. You can email your design, and even download it as an EPS file.

There’s a similar, paper-removal idea at Snowdays. It lets you email your designs, and then adds them to the constantly falling snow on the welcome page. As well as being able to email a link to your design, you can also leave comments about other people’s flakes.

For a no-frills, HTML interface to snowflake design, visit the geometric snowflake generator. You can let your friends see your designs by sending them catchy identifiers like 011000001110000011101000110110001000101100011010 0011000001100110000011101000100010100010000 and getting them to click the ‘regenerate’ button.

At the opposite end of the frill-spectrum, there’s a 3D snowflake generator from Ze Frank. It may not be physically accurate, but it sure is purty.

Finally, owners of a laser-cutter or CNC machine (or those of you who fancy placing an order with Ponoko) will be interested in this cross-platform programme to generate vector-based snowflakes, from the good people at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Happy snowflake creating, one and all!

Last month saw the first meeting of a Brighton-based group called Culture Geeks. The idea is to link up people from technical fields (geeks) with people from the world of museums, heritage, etc. (culture).

The event started with a great presentation by Karina Rodriguez Echavarria, a researcher at the University of Brighton. Her talk focussed on the use of 3D by cultural institutions, and specifically the various techniques to capture, process and display it. Her talk can be downloaded here (PDF, 1.1Mb).

The things that piqued my interest the most were low-cost ways to capture 3D information. One of these is photogrammetry, where multiple 2D photos are analysed to build up a picture of what the object looks like in three dimensions. Microsoft’s PhotoSynth does this, as does the ARC3D Web Service from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

To try this out, I went to the churchyard opposite our office and took a dozen photos of a treestump from different angles. I then uploaded these using the (Windows-only) ARC3D software, and in a few minutes received a link to download the data after it had been crunched by the ARC3D computing grid.

This data is then rendered using the visualisation software which you can see in the screen capture below:

In it, you can see a source photo, and how that transforms to a particular view of the treestump. Then, you can switch off the photographic texture to leave a raw set of points. Another interesting technique mentioned by Karina was a low-cost laser-scanning system called DAVID, which only requires a normal webcam and a laser pointer to work.

The talk led on to an interesting discussion. A Linden Labs employee talked about museums in Second Life, as well as an experiment in recreating Van Gogh’s Starry Night (I couldn’t help place-dropping by pointing out that I had seen the original the week before at the opening of MoMA’s latest Van Gogh exhibition).

It wasn’t all geeks doing the talking, however. Ruth Harper from Culture24 mentioned that Seb Chan from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum has some interesting ideas to overcome the long-standing friction between curatorial voice and user-generated content. Powerhouse apparently put huge numbers of their works on Flickr, and then have a ’semi-permeable membrane’ whereby they selectively re-import user-contributed tags and metadata back into their main online collection pages.

All in all, it was a very interesting evening, and I look forward to attending more of these in the future. If you want to get involved too, head over to the Culture Geeks website to find out more.

This weekend saw Brighton’s third barcamp, held at the Students’ Union building at the University of Sussex. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, barcamp is an ‘ad-hoc unconference’: a whole weekend of talks provided by the participants themselves. Every one who attends has to talk, and the schedule is created simply by people writing down their details on a piece of card, and then pinning it up in an available time slot.

Photo credit: Jessica Spengler

And that is why they are great: the ‘you must talk’ barrier to entry means that barcamps are generally where you find the most committed and passionate geeks. You also get a great range of talk topics: from grindingly technical, highly-focussed explanations of specific pieces of software, to far-reaching group discussions on very broad topics. It’s this very quirkiness and unpredictability that makes a barcamp so entertaining.

Anyway, back to what happened: each day was taken up by presentations, interrupted only by breaks to eat and drink (Cogapp sponsored the lunch on the Saturday).

Then the evening and night-time gave way to mass social activities such as drinking, playing Werewolf and ‘War on Terror- the board game‘ (here’s another reason I like barcamp: it has the distinct feel of ‘lunatics taking over the asylum’)

I gave a talk on Scratch, the drag-and-drop programming language for children. It was something we played with a while ago here at Cogapp, which I then went on to use with my 6 year-old son (he shouts out how he wants each game to work, and plays it, while I frantically try to implement all of his feature requests). I gave a live demo, creating a game of pong in under 10 minutes, followed by showing how you could make your own giant joystick and link it up to Scratch using the Picoboard sensor board.

Photo credit: Jez Nicholson

In the spirit of ‘eating my own dogfood’ I created my presentation using Scratch itself rather than Powerpoint or Keynote, and you can see it on the Scratch site.

I didn’t manage to spend as much time there as I would have liked, but some of the interesting talks I saw included:

• How social sites deal with death by Paul Silver
• Lillypad Arduino by Marrije Schaake (view presentation on Slideshare)
• Stackoverflow by Jon Linklater-Johnson
• The A to Z of Game Design by Cennydd Bowles
• R3 by Steve Marshall

Honorable mention must also go to all the switched-on people I chatted to over the course of the weekend. Including but not limited to: Ant Miller (the BBC micro, power-sensing microcontrollers), Ian Forrester (BBC Backstage projects), Nigel Crawley (Arduinos and electroluminescent wire), Jez Nicholson (agile programming and zombies).

Further info:

• Barcamp Blog
• Backnetwork
• Photos on Flickr
  

While watching a video about the UK Museums and the Web Mashup Day, I came across ManyEyes.

ManyEyes is an IBM service for data visualisation. You can upload data and then visualise it in dozens of different ways (one of the nicest of which is Wordle).

For example, here is a clickable tree of the text on war memorials (data from the National Maritime Museum):

Or, one I created myself, a Wordle of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

I just spotted Enkin.

As you can see from the video below, it’s an Android application that combines Google Map data with GPS-and-compass positioning info, plus video footage from the phone’s camera.

It’s all very very clever. Three things to note about the cleverness:

1. In map mode, they use camera motion to drive the interface (i.e. no need for an accelerometer)
2. In live mode, they use accelerometer (and compass?) data to keep the camera view steady

3.In live mode, they use compass and GPS data to keep the ‘augmented’ data in the right place

P.S. Also see this bonus interview with the creators.
P.P.S. This is similar to the (defunct?) MARA project by Nokia research. More about that here and here.