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Augmented Reality's Disruptive Potential
pbahra writes "A company called Layar, based in Amsterdam, is working on products that take augmented reality in a slightly different direction. They provide a platform that allows anyone to build an AR app. Consider these ideas: you can use your mobile phone's camera to view the world; your phone knows where you are and what you are looking at. The implications are profound. One of the most interesting apps that someone produced was a virtual tee-shirt shop. It was placed in the 20 most expensive shopping streets in the world, selling t-shirts. Stop and think about that for a minute. He built a virtual shop where a real one already existed. His shop was accessible via a mobile phone, while the real one was accessible through, well, being real. Real space and its virtual overlay are being used by different people. There will be lawyers."
Ok, let's think about this for a second. The guy chose the 20 most expensive shopping areas in the world to overlay his virtual t-shirt shop. Something tells me his shop is going to be selling a much different type of product, aimed at a much different clientele. If you are walking down Savile Row doing some shopping, you are probably not going to be looking for t-shirts, and you probably already have an idea of which shop you are going to go to, and where it is. This won't be a problem until it prevents you from seeing the actual, physical store. Even if the technology advances to the point where you can have augmented reality projected onto glasses or contact lenses, you can still see the real shop by taking off the glasses/removing contacts/switching off the display. To me, this story is a non-issue.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
... Because I know when I walk down the Champs-Elysees in Paris, what I really want to be doing is looking at the world through the screen of my smartphone! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
Even better: sell t-shirts that appear blank but display hipster slogans when viewed through an AR app.
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
This will be huge. People all over the world are going to walk around and perpetually stare into their phones to view a projection of reality instead of reality itself. Plato would be proud.
If only location or QR code can get the job done? Or a product search can also do the jobs.
Open is just another tactic for bureaucratism
I hearby claim all revenues from any and all commercial enterprises occupying any overlaying location, coordinates or appearance of my properties including but not limited to all shops on Parallel Earth, Alternate Earth, Mirror World, and Bizzaro Earth. All payment must be converted to USD. Bizzaro dollars will not be accepted as payment for debts.
Lawyers find their clients no longer require rosters outside court houses or on each court room door, as the system now recognizes NRA-inside.
This is not the drunken 1990s. You slashdot hacks, I presume, have been around. Can't you exercise bit of your brain cells?
Stop with the hype spam bullshit.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
see Halting State by Charles Stross and Spook Country by William Gibson for examples of how this overlay technology might work/look/feel like
both books are pretty good reads and the VR overlay is central to the Stross book and a fairly big plot point in the Gibson book. Also recommend Stross's 'The Laundry Files' series -where IT and Necromancy collide....
-I'm just sayin
porn. everywhere. and dicks too.
The implications are profound.
No, not really. Unless, maybe, you're Geordi LaForge.
Stop and think about that for a minute. He built a virtual shop where a real one already existed.
Big deal. I've already been able to walk into Sears and shop at JCPenney.com on my phone, if I chose, for the past several years. What this guy has done is basically artificially limit his online store's reach.
#DeleteChrome
They want their app back.
The original article is pretty incoherent, too. And the 'summary' is a clumsy and shameless attempt to plagiarise it.
The whole point of the virtual world is to be free from physical location. Physical retailers should be afraid of, oh I dunno, Blizzard opening a mall inside of WoW where physical goods can be purchased. Or a second life that doesn't suck.
And all they could think of was an AR display of tee-shirt shops?
Oh come on now....
Have gnu, will travel.
The problem with this story is the fact that the example given is so bad that it misrepresents the potential disruption.
Better example: Disruptive app that allows me to be standing in a store and view items on the shelf through my phone with competing prices from nearby stores or online displayed in the air next to them.
Yes, you can do that currently by typing and searching yourself, but this would allow it to be MUCH easier. Now that we have a better possibility, discuss.....
just. testing..something...with... . . . ....this new .... "feature" ... ... . . ....
I wait until we can project information directly onto the retina, or even push it directly to the optic nerve or the brain itself.
You could get real-time subtitles for the person you're talking to. Their name would float above their head so there's no embarrassed fumbling as you try and remember who they are.
You could even have a small note beside them; "Last met at Jake's party 10/10/2009".
You could turn ANY FLAT SURFACE into a computer monitor by holding out your fingers to make a box where it should go. Make a different sign for "make a keyboard here", then type away.
You could also "airbrush out" advertising and unwanted images ("I'm a Fundie so I never want to see a nipple ever again!").
You could ask for directions and get an arrow. Couple the system with tiny cameras arranged, say, on your hat, and you could give yourself full 360 degree vision, or visual warnings ("CAUTION: CAR APPROACHING LEFT", etc).
You could take a picture by blinking twice.
You could zoom in.
You could make T-shirts that had a barcode on them instead of an image. The barcode gets read, and then the device projects something else over the top. If you're a metal fan, it says "SLAYER". If you're a Christian, it has a picture of Jesus. Etc.
And all that's off the top of my head. The possibilities are endless.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
The reason physical space has any value at all is that there is only ONE of that given space. If / When AR becomes a thing that actually matters, there is zero chance that only one AR 'space' within a physical space exists, making it meaningless if someone took your physical space and used it for whatever they wanted to in AR. No single entity will hold a monopoly over AR 'space'. There would be all sorts of varieties, such as MS, Apple, Starbucks, TPB, you name it. As soon as that 'space' is available to anyone who gives enough of a shit to set up something in an AR, all value it may have held is lost forever.
So the only way to buy T-Shirts from the store is to go to the physical store, with the bonus of being able to whip out your mobile device and being able to buy online from the store while you're already at the store but you have to point your phone at the product or store. It's like the 60's thought up the Internet.
How about some actual innovative ideas? Are you a big fat fatty? Maybe it can send you on a tour of town while you work off your cheeto gut. How about transparent wearable displays with built in camera so you can see AR all the time instead of through a tiny window that you have to hold in front of your face? Maybe people can share their personal information on some AR-enabled social network/networks, and you can see the information when you look at them.
The only thing these morons could think up is taking a physical object and making it virtual, bravo, maybe soon you'll think up a way to replace the square wheels on my car with round ones.
I, for one, welcome our Laughing-Man overlords.
A great app for augmented reailty would be underground service location.
Millions of people are digging up streets every day. If you could map all the underground services like sewer, water, electrical, data, storm water, you could use your iphone type device to 'look into' the ground before you begin excavation.
Obviously limited by the accuracy of the existing mapping data.
46137
Who cares about store fronts?
Instead, project your WoW avatar onto yourself. Increase your dating potential.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmVSQ2DrBUo
Sounds like you're the one who wants to be the Thought Police.
Virtual billboards. A rather lame application of augmented reality, neither original or impressive.
There are far more interesting things one might do. Show the area as it existed at some time in the past. Show the tracks of all taxis and buses that have passed through. Show who owns each building, and its sales history. Color restaurants based on their inspection reports or reviews. Show locations of crimes in the area.
Or even show social stuff. Figure out who the cool people are from their Facebook links, and show the coolness of areas of a city from their tracking data. Show which businesses have negative feedback. Do something useful.
But no. All we get are ads.
Computing has become a branch of the advertising industry. It's discouraging. When IBM and Microsoft were on top, they were somewhat annoying monopolies. But at least they sold products to end users. Now, the end user is the product. The customers of Google and Facebook are their advertisers, not their end users.
Fascinating to see how quickly someone attacked it. And with such a base dialog.
/. has some IP tracking and can filter it out fairly quickly.
Gotta wonder what drives people to such infantile behaviour. Child abuse maybe? I couldn't imagine engaging with this person in real life without thinking 'Sheesh. This guy has some seriously faulty wiring'.
Here's hoping that
This is only profound to people who haven't grasped modern technology yet.
They're right about one thing... You can't make an app that works on MY property. These are MY GPS coordinates, you can't trigger shit on them.... Oh man, somebody patent suing people over that so it can't happen.
"There will be lawyers"
There always are...
Like bacteria, you can assume they will always be probing every orifice looking for a way to disrupt you.
I'd like one of those glow-lights that reveal the presence of bacteria and make people exclaim in disgust, "Ewww! They're all over everything! They're all over ME!"... except this glow-light reveals the presence of lawyers and the friction and cost they introduce into everything we do, "Ewww! There is litigation all over everything! It's chilling effect is all over ME!"...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
And to all you bleeding hearts out there: you don't honestly think that that sick, disgusting shit is okay do you?
Ah, what a great argument, that if we disagree that people should be jailed and killed for outputting their desires in a way that doesn't harm anyone, we're championing the acts themselves, or somehow partaking or approving of them, which makes us as bad as the perpetrators in your eyes. Newsflash: People will like what you don't like, you'll never stop them. As long as it doesn't hurt others, what's the harm? You may not be into fisting little girls, but if someone was, and instead of fisting little girls, they played videogames to relieve their needs, why do you feel the need to stomp on other's freedoms? These are the same type of disingenuous turn-around that bought-out Politicians did with the internet monitoring bill. "If you're against this bill, you like CHILD RAPISTS, OOOOH~"
Not in my app there won't!!
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=btaG034fJgg
oh and hoverboards would be cool too.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
you are on the wrong page.
Honey, I'm done remodeling. Bring your phone and have a look. Don't tell your friends just yet. It'll be a surprise when they come this weekend.
I heard you like shopping. So I put a virtual store inside your physical store so you can drive across town to mail order crap.
You! Yes you. The space you currently occupy coincides with my virtual augmented lawn. Get off.
Just like there's no monopoly in search engines, digital music stores, desktop operating systems and all those? I'm sure Google will push their street view pretty hard and having an AR shop on "maps" will get you well over 50% of cell phone users. If you don't believe me, just substitute Google for the company you think will dominate this market.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Truer words were never posted.
No high priced outfit will allow such cyber squatting of their realty.
They will unleash hordes of lawyers to peel back the augmented reality layers.
Yes, being able to display a google earth layer over the camera on my phone would be cool. In theory. The problem with AR is that it combines cheap in-phone GPS results with low quality solid state compass data. I’ve got an app called “go sky watch”. It’s really cool in that it can show me where constellation, individual stars, elliptic line and the current locations of the sun and moon are. Too bad that more likely than not, it thinks my phone is pointed to a different part of the sky than it actually is. Wikitude suffers the same problem and is most useful in overhead map mode, where it is reduced to being a not as good as google maps, google maps clone.
For the foreseeable future, AR is just going to be a gimmick that” will become the next big thing sometime soon”.
Today AR is mostly just used for marketing but it might become more useful when Kinect-like devices can be miniaturized enough to fit into a phone thus allowing it to truly see and understand its surroundings.
Heh; that's like saying "there will be rain."
Face it; anywhere there's the least bit of money, there will be lawyers sniffing about.
Regards;
Why bother making a "virtual" store that is only accessible at one physical location?? The whole point of the internet is that you can access it anywhere. Surely it makes more business sense to make barcode scanning app so that someone can walk into any store, scan the item that they are interested in and either be given a list of online stores to buy it from at a cheaper price or a list of recommended alternatives based upon their tastes?
I keep downloading and trying Layar, then promptly uninstalling it. It's kinda cluttered, unattractive, and generally useless unless you are walking around Manhattan.
And the example they gave in the summary: "One of the most interesting apps that someone produced was a virtual tee-shirt shop"
Ok, let me get this straight. Rather than going to stupidteeshirtidea.com and looking around, you download Layar, then you download the stupidteeshirtidea app listed in Layar, then you walk around until you find the stupidteeshirtidea virtual store and click it to get redirected to stupidteeshirtidea.com.
THAT'S F'ING STUPID.
I8-D
TFS said:
A company called Layar, based in Amsterdam, is working on products that take augmented reality in a slightly different direction. They provide a platform that allows anyone to build an AR app
TFS meant to say:
Check out my new product. It's great. I need publicity. Seriously, come now and get it. kthxbai
I worked for a startup in the late 90's doing this. Back then it as iPaq's using wifi or cell cards and GPS. We would create geo points where info could be tagged so while you were walking down the street and passing a chinese shop you could see a virtual sticker that said "hey been here great food".
That was 13-14 years ago, not new.
I would like to see an actual real world Law Firm setup shop in SL (must purchase a full sim). SL has all the fun of a WORLDWIDE location so it would have to be a MoFo level Firm but hey i think they would be the ONLY firm in SL.
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you are lucky if the data available is within a METER and you need to be within a half foot.
guess wrong and BOOM is in your future
CALL BEFORE YOU DIG
If those guys make an error they can fix it/ have the fixit guys on "Red Phone" speed dial
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Is this different in any non-graphical way from using your phone to buy something off of Amazon while standing in a real store?