AR Mavericks

Augmenting the reality of your life…

Journal

Let’s Get to Work!

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Let’s Get to Work!

BLOG POST ZERO 5-of-5: This blog post is the 5th of a series of 5 posts. These 5 posts were also cross posted to my Linkedin account as a single article

The hard work lies ahead of us. There are still some technology gaps. The current positioning technologies are OK but we need more consolidation of GPS with SLAM or plane recognition, etc. I would say we can charge ahead as enough good people need to solve this issue so it will improve dramatically over the near term. There are some OK alignment techniques/technologies coming online. Mapbox has some manual alignment stuff available in their SDK for Unity. ESRI also has some tools buried in their ArcGIS SDK. These, and the others out there pretty much require manual intervention which will not work on a mass adoption scale.

It seems like Apple, Google, etc. are mostly waiting for development of full blown 3D city models.  Apple is dabbling with projects like their indoor maps program. The chaps at Dent Reality, out of London, have leveraged it to start doing a discrete indoor AR map-app solution. Facebook also recently acquire Mapillary which is surely more than just about maps and has big-time AR indictions.

The guys at Augmented.City are doing some interesting and valuable work trying to first build spatially indexed cities using a crowdsourcing method, then providing geolocated AR tags. This approach does head down the path towards solving the problem. You can lock into a local coordinate system once they have created and indexed a local “AR cloud” of your location. However, to map a significant number of cites, let alone the entire face of the earth, seems a bit like trying to empty the sea with a teaspoon. I think some combination of Tango like machine vision, real-time spatial mapping linked with AI and known maps will be the best path but who knows?  I’ll just implement what solution emerges as the best available.

On the survey-grade front, Trimble has released the SiteVision solution. To me it looks a bit like a kludge, a handle with a phone and a GPS antenna strapped to it, (I’d like to see the original duct-taped prototype) but admittedly, also seems fit-for-purpose. It starts to solve the problem but isn’t simple, isn’t free, or at least doesn’t feel free.

I will reiterate, we need to deliver a simple method to deliver this essentially complex technology. We need to find business models that remove the barriers to adoption but leave some meat on the bones, some revenue for the makers. So much of what we need is here, ready to be configured into valuable solutions. Global cloud access is proliferating as various networks / technology-plays expand their coverage and bandwidth. We’ve been collecting the “location of Things” for our lifetimes. The IoT has started to spawn the creation of necessary indexes back into the data. The display mechanisms on our mobile devices, the glasses, heads up displays, etc. are all already workable.

It’s all there for the taking. Will we be able to paddle like hell, drop in and catch the wave? I don’t want to just leave it here, but my AR mashed potatoes are getting cold and I need to get back to them. I, for one, have waxed my board. I’m watching for the swell and waiting for the next set to roll in. If someone sees them breaking outside, please do give me a yell and I’ll try to paddle out to catch that outside break if that’s where it’s happening. I hope to see some of you out there with me; it is going to be one hell of a ride.

A Final Thought

Rod Serling opened the television show The Twilight Zone with this monologue “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”

Rod was describing the Twilight Zone, but this is exactly how I see the future of AR; a vast and awesome dimension of access to the knowledge of the ages, just beyond our natural senses.

I thank you for reading. I thank Wikipedia for always having appropriate and useful links to act as my digital footnotes. Follow me on twitter, comment here or contact me if you’d like to talk about any of this or maybe better yet, just get to work delivering on this promise.

Innovation Drives Markets

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Innovation Drives Markets

BLOG POST ZERO 4-of-5: This blog post is the 4th of a series of 5 posts. These 5 posts were also cross posted to my Linkedin account as a single article

The AR wave will be more than just cool new shit to play with. This wave is a business opportunity of immense proportions.  I have always been amazed at how innovation drives economies in a free market. It’s really the beauty of the thing. Consider how some college student innovated his version of MySpace and created Facebook (Isn’t that what happened?). That one innovation essentially created an entire social media economy out of thin air almost literally overnight. Billions of dollars of wealth have been and are being  generated, and not just for the founders. How many social media specialists in every corporation, advertising company, and sizable business now have a swelling 401k in a career that didn’t exist a decade ago?

AR, done right, could drive the next big economic wave. However, good ideas don’t always equal good products. Big opportunities don’t always pan out to big gains. Some hard work lies ahead of us to make some good products and see this opportunity turn into gain for us all.

All that Glitters is Not Gold

You need more than a good idea for success; you need to build the right product to deliver the real value of an idea. Even though it looks to me like there are golden nuggets of AR opportunity just lying on the ground, I’ve also learned from my career in delivering technology that you must thread the needle to success. You need to find that specific combination of features, price model, audience focus, etc. to find true product breakthrough success.

I’ve enjoyed a career focused mostly on software technologies for industrial applications and construction (AEC) markets. I’ve been employed by leading global corporations and startups alike. I’ve worked in the areas of CAD/CAM/CAE, 3D Laser Scanning, Drones/Photogrammetry, 3D GPS Machine Control and survey/measurement/positioning technologies in general. I also came up through the Internet 1.0 era involved in early web portals and SaaS offerings back before AWS, Azure, etc. when you had to build your own heavy iron with physical boxes in a secure, rented server closet. In all that time, some of the most exciting innovations, to me, were not the technical achievements. They were more related to the “How” and not the “What” of the products. How they were priced, how they were marketed, how you reached your audience and led them to realize the value of your offering. This is, as opposed to what the exact and most innovative features were.

All those experiences have confirmed for a me a few basic product principles that, taken together, seem to quite often deliver success for the makers and the takers (users).

  • Configure existing and emerging technologies into a product vs spending your focus on trying to invent. Build on the shoulders of giants. Giants who have invested their money, not mine, to create the base innovation.
    • Faster time to market.
    • Potential competitors inventing better mouse traps are not competitors at all but your next mouse trap vendor for your tech stack.
  • Build the business, not the gadget.
    • There are lots of great inventions, but the best features don’t necessarily win, the best business does.
    • Identify your audience and how to reach them.
    • Let them buy the way they want
  • Make the complex simple. If you can wire together a complex stack of technologies into that proverbial big red “Do” button, you have a winner.
  • Make it “feel” free or make the purchase part of a natural progression of using the solution. This is the least resistance path to mass adoption.
    • Let a content provider pay for your tool to distribute her content to her audience, so it feels free to them. They will eat it up.
    • Of course, let advertisers buy access to your user’s eyeballs.
    • Then, let your users decide to pay to opt-out of the advertising once they have a habit of using your solution. This doesn’t feel like a buying decision, it’s just a convenience to improve/upgrade their ongoing experience, something they want.
    • Freemium or in-app purchases where a virtual coin slot lets users painlessly, mindlessly buy content, access, feature enhancement.

If we can configure the tech that exists and is emerging, adapt it for the audiences we know best and develop the correct delivery models AR will be a wave wide enough for all of us to catch a good ride.

The Glasses

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The Glasses

BLOG POST ZERO 3-of-5: This blog post is the 3rd of a series of 5 posts. These 5 posts were also cross posted to my Linkedin account as a single article

I’ve been riding the metaphor of a wave and I’ll extend that to propose the glasses as the metaphorical surfboard. Corny? Yes, but you’ve come this far–don’t abandon me now! AR on your phone or tablet is already more than viable. However, once we get the glasses right the surf will be up big time.

Like the first big lumbering (actually lumber) surfboards used by Duke Kahanamoku the first glasses such as the Google Glass fiasco (which weren’t really AR glasses anyway)  and others haven’t yet provided a very smooth or exhilarating ride or even really support a true AR experience.  Right now, there is not even a decent taxonomy to describe the variations of (quote unquote) AR glasses.

  • 2D
  • 3D
  • Heads Up Display (HUD)
  • V and H FOV
  • Degrees of freedom
  • Eye tracking
  • Head tracking
  • Plane detection
  • Hand tracking/gesture capabilities
  • AR, VR, MR XR
  • Location-based
  • World-scale
  • etc.

For my purposes, placing geolocated data in the visual scene, only a few current “AR” glasses provide the necessary capability. In any regard, its likely a few years before any of the glasses are mass market ready anyway.

The list of work going on in this area would fill the rest of the page. To name just a few, we’ve had Epson’s MOVERIO glasses for a while. Their premium version seems to support location and augmenting the 3D scene. Bosch’s  Light Drive  an OEM HW/SW toolkit solution for “AR” glasses is a great start down the toolkit path but is just a HUD method right now, not 3D location-based, or whatever we will call it. I do wish someone like Norm Glasses would add location, and Snap Spectacles seem to be close but I’m not sure they have actual location capabilities.

I’ve only started my organization down this path of research and for now the phone and tablet are still king. Also, if this posting is a few days old, who knows what else has come onto the market since I wrote this. So, for now the field looks mostly like HoloLens, MagicLeap and maybe nreal. HoloLens and Leap both have lots of good and bad aspects but at least they are out there trying to catch (or create) the wave. nreal remains a bit of a mystery but doesn’t quite look geo-aware yet, but maybe, just not sure. Maybe it does take mega-corp or a Rony Abovitz (Visionary and CEO of MagicLeap) with billions in funding to make this happen. Honestly, don’t look to me to instruct you on what solutions are available. The market has new entrants every day and once someone nails it, we will all be dropping in on some epic waves for a full ride. I’ll ride whatever board can give me the best ride for the current conditions.

Some may even question if AR enabled glasses will ever be a viable business after the early failures and slow adoption. The assumption that a massive wave of adoption will occur might even seem foolhardy. Of course, there are a lot of folks in my camp as well who all consider it a foregone conclusion that the wave is coming, and the glasses will be prolific. Consider a few of these thoughts.

According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction and about 64% of them wear eyeglasses (it’s on the Internet so it must be true). If an ergonomic and affordable value-add can be offered to the wearers of those glasses, it seems there is a huge audience already primed for adoption.

On many/most construction job sites, safety glasses are already mandated. Who would reject the additional value-add of an AR hyperlinked jobsite once the economics work and access to valuable data is easily and readily available?

Another argument to support adoption of glasses by the masses is to consider another form of reality augmentation that required a like-kind adoption curve. We’ve relegated “Augmented Reality” to the visual context. What about our “audio reality?” We’ve been augmenting our audio reality with devices since Edison. Remember the Walkman? Who thought the world would accept such a thing? And yet ear buds, beats and office headsets are all now just part of our daily attire.

Yeah, we surely need some killer apps but if that’s all that stands in the way, let’s innovate!

Connecting “Things”

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Connecting “Things”

BLOG POST ZERO 2-of-5: This blog post is the 2nd of a series of 5 posts. These 5 posts were also cross posted to my Linkedin account as a single article

As I said in a previous post, for me, the real opportunity for AR lies in the combination of mobile AR and world-scale geolocated things. Many “Things” live in one specific location on the earth. Many of those Things already have data somewhere in the cloud that could be useful to get now. AR solves the problem of connecting the Thing with its data. Extend that thought to all the things that could have useful data available and well, it boggles the mind. Me…I start making those virtual AR mashed potato mountains I mentioned in a previous post.

To look at a simple infrastructure use-case, the Thing in question could be a residential gas meter, an electric transformer on a power pole or a fire hydrant that will be sitting in the same (geo) location for a long, long time. I would venture to say we have the geolocations of those Things already documented in some GIS or spreadsheet, or some surveyor is out collecting that information right now. I would also venture it is not a bridge-too-far for that Thing data to be accessed via the cloud. So, the work at hand is to connect the Thing to its data, and to distribute or deliver an AR-enabled link to the geolocation of the Thing so an interested party can enter the data path of that Thing from where it lives. Link to the Thing, where it lives, and we can get into the associate data repository in a business system, control system, work order system, BIM, Bam, Bing (or Google), you name it.

Of course, not everything we care about is locked to a given location. In addition, with the IoT firestorm churning out Thing data at an incredible rate, both the “what” and the “where” are huge (literally) moving targets. Fortunately, we can always build on the shoulders of giants. For instance we have the important indexing work being done by the brains at Terbine where they have a super forward thinking solution to getting a handle on the data of the IoTs and it even has potential to track the “where” also. So, if we can establish a reliable method to identify the current physical location of a Thing or a method of recognizing that Thing itself, then AR can act as our on-ramp to the cloud to access its relevant information.

Of course, the question of “where” or “what” a Thing is, is simple to solve for many available technologies like GPS or machine vision joined with AI. We also have the question of data standards, standard access methods, display methods, etc. Like Terbine working is working on IoT standards, groups like Open AR Cloud are busy at work on a path to develop those standards for AR. If you are as geeked out about this industry as I am it is probably worth reading the Open AR Cloud (170 page) 2019 manifesto. While I disagree with some of their conclusions and approaches, they do have a similar vision to mine in the expansive nature of this coming wave.

Our work lays ahead to start connecting the dots. Connecting technologies into solutions. Creating necessary technologies to fil in the gaps. Obviously, one of the biggest dots I’ve assiduously avoided mentioning until now is the glasses; AR enabled glasses. Interestingly, when one thinks of AR glasses one of the first things to come to mind is Magic Leap. The visionary of that venture, Rory Abovitz, has also envisioned a similar future when speaking about what he calls the Magicverse. I just hope my vision doesn’t start to fade away as it seems may be happening at Magic Leap.

Cue the 5-tone tuba flourish, voice of the mothership, from Close Encounters.

Surf’s Up: The Augmented Reality Wave is Coming!

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Surf’s Up: The Augmented Reality Wave is Coming!

BLOG POST ZERO 1-of-5: This blog post is the first of a series of 5 posts. These 5 posts were also cross posted to my Linkedin account as a single article

It has been a persistent tick, tick, tick in the back-of-my-mind for years. Augment Reality is coming and it will change our world. Please understand, I am not talking about putting mustaches on apples, Pokemon Go or star-fighters placed hovering in the mall. All of those are valid (and kinda cool) implementations but I am talking about a wave of change as big as the Internet, as big as the cloud and in fact a confluence of those two behemoths, plus IoT and well, pretty much everything else. The AR wave is coming, and it will wash over everything we know.

To be clear, I am speaking about mobile AR coupled with world-scale Geo-located information. AR will deliver the visual index to everything we want to know. Our world will be hyperlinked right before our eyes. For the most part the tech is already here. We see new AR-focused tech announced every day. There is also a huge swell of associated technologies in IoT, 5G, AI, machine vision, reality capture, etc. which all play into an amazing future just ahead. There remains just the hard work and opportunity between today and the realization of that reality… that Augmented Reality. I believe that those of us in the technology delivery stream, especially those of us in the geospatial arena, should almost feel obligated to get on with the work required to deliver on the real promise of AR as a refence system to the word of information that surrounds us.

I am enthralled by the prospects of the massive effect this impending wave will have. As I opened with, it is a persistent thought I just can’t seem to shake. I liken my condition to that of Richard Dreyfuss in the movie Close Encounters, and I have a strong compulsion to start building mashed potato AR mountains on my kitchen table.

If you’ve had similar thoughts or are intrigued by the proposition, I hope you’ll find this quick read validating, informative and thought provoking. My perspective presented for your consideration.

The Wave

I have just founded a new AR focused startup, AR Mavericks, Inc. It’s been a fantastic experience so far. I‘ve really enjoyed finding team members and engaging in the creative process of refining the vision. I chose the Mavericks name for two reasons. A maverick is of course a rebel or someone who blazes their own path and I like that attitude. Apropos the pending AR wave, Mavericks is also a world-renowned surf break near Half Moon Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, near where I live. When the surf is up at Mavericks they are riding 30 foot waves.

The metaphor should be obvious. This is one of those subjects where I could go on for several thousand words exploring the rich correlation between aspects of Mavericks’ break and the pending AR wave. However, for now I’ll just say if you are in the technology business and in any way involved with information (Information? Uhh… everything), you will want to be sure you are paddling to catch the AR wave. The storms out at sea are building up energy, the wind is right  and the swell is headed our way. Don’t get caught outside the break and miss the ride or worse yet, be sitting at the bottom, looking up at your pending doom.