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."

Comments

Retailers are shaking in their boots

[ratnerstar]

... 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.

Re:Retailers are shaking in their boots

[theshowmecanuck]

There is an excellent SciFi book called The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds where something like this plays a key role, but in an even grander scale. People chose what they want to look like in augmented reality, and most everyone have implants that pick this up and automatically route the image into their brain without having to look elsewhere like a smart phone screen (at least that is how I read it). People could walk around looking like they had horns, or were fauns or satyrs, etc. The lead character(s) who were a form of police had to wear special glasses since they could not afford to have artificial implants in their brain that could be hacked. But the augmented reality also hooked everyone in the society together (in ten thousand habitats orbiting a planet around a distant star from earth). It was an interesting take on how technology might impact reality in the future. Anyways, FWIW Reynolds writes some interesting stuff.

Re:Fascinating

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen the real world lately? People ARE walking around perpetually staring into their phones.

read the book

[hguorbray]

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

Re:read the book

[bughunter]

An even better example, more pertinent to TFA, would be Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.

Some selective quotes from the linked Wiki page:

In the novel, augmented reality is dominant, with humans interacting with virtual overlays of reality almost all of the time. This is accomplished by wearing smart clothing and contact lenses that can overlay and replace what the eye would normally see with computer graphics, using advanced virtual retinal display (VRD) technology.

There are many realities to choose from in the novel; however, the largest and more robust of them are built by large user bases in the manner of a wiki or Second Life, including worlds based on authors such as H. P. Lovecraft, Terry Pratchett, and the merged fictional universes of Steven Spielberg and J. K. Rowling.

In other words, people walk around in a fantasy world of their own choosing, and tend to associate only with those people subscribing to the same fantasy. Disruptive, indeed, but an effect that doesn't necessarily require technology to achieve...as recent non-fictional events have demonstrated.

Re:read the book

[jnpcl]

There's also an anime called Denno Coil that takes place in a world with AR glasses.

However, they're mostly used by kids and techie geeks. It's not seen as a "big thing" to the adult populace.

Tried it

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Bad Example

[Anonymous Coward]

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.....

There can only be one!

[quiet down]

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.

Re:Same space, different market?

[Skarecrow77]

when you put it that way, it sounds just like pop-up spam.

i'm sure that as soon as someone invents an ad-blocker extension for AR, we'll be fine.

Obligatory...

[Dr Herbert West]

I, for one, welcome our Laughing-Man overlords.

Underground Services. btw I patent it first!

[labnet]

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.

Re:Underground Services. btw I patent it first!

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Already done and buried here in NY. It was a nice concept, but the base maps are wrong, the GPS isn't accurate enough, the compasses are totally crap (go play with a star map AR viewer some time), the facility maps are wrong anyway, and the facility depths are always changing with erosion and landscaping.

An excavator is typically required to hand-dig / vacuum excavate within 24 inches of a marking, and will use a backhoe right up to that point. Considering the stacked errors and different mapping accuracies and coordinate systems involved... you'll be lucky to get 5 meter accuracy on your best day. And then there's the large quantity of plastic pipe that's been buried with no tracer wire. Nobody knows where that crap is, nor will they find it without GPR. Same with drainage, sewer and culverts, CATV drops - none of that stuff is typically mapped.

People often mistake how inaccurate GIS systems are, and don't understand the implications of that inaccuracy. They see it used for 911 and fire trucks and whatever, but GIS in the Facility Location World is not the same as 911 routing. 911 does NOT use the map to decide IF an ambulance will be dispatched - it merely decides WHICH. Make sure you read and understand that statement - while totally obvious, many people don't get it. Especially the map providers.
More, the ambulance does NOT go home if it reaches the exact long-lat of the call and finds nothing. The ambulance will help the screaming people who are one inch outside the perimeter of where they claimed they'd be. In that sense, 911 GIS does not require any more accuracy than Pizza Delivery - and Pizza Delivery Accuracy is exactly what most maps have.

Facility location is different. If the geo lookup says there's no facility under the exact dirt you're referencing, then no utilities are sent to mark anything. The device you've proposed is asking a very simple question - "can I drive this bucket five feet into the dirt, HERE, yes or no." That question can tolerate about six inches of total error on a good day. Wrong? You're dead.

This may sound silly from a myopic "google maps" perspective - but in places with no landmarks, or with callers who have no idea where they are, or facility owners with no clue where their stuff is (water companies, DPWs, sewer, etc) - facility location stops being about where the facilities are. Facility location becomes a process of proving where the facilities are NOT. In that sense, the 811 centers must hedge the facility location data with every place a person might say they are, when they're actually somewhere else. "We're a half mile from the intersection". Yeah, sure you are. "We're digging on the right side of the street." Uh, seriously, NSEW? "Ok, and which direction are you facing when you say that?" "Oh, I'm facing the left side." Facility mapping is little better - "water line runs 1500 feet along river edge and turns right at oak tree.", circa 1966. "Chart shows the gas line under the lawn, so replacing the sidewalk should be clear." "You know they widened the road two years ago, right?"

That is the general case that must be covered on every single call. And as I said, AR is a neat concept that does not cover it - the base maps are wrong, the GPS does not have the six inch accuracy needed, the stupid "compass" sensor can't truly figure out which way you're actually facing most of the time, and the facility maps either don't exist, are wrong, or are relative to a different coord system and accuracy. The result would be an anecdotal curiosity, at best. No reasonable person would actually base a LIFE SAFETY decision upon it. About the closest you can get to such a thing is the head-tracking system on a directional bore - and even that takes a magician to make work, and that's with active sensing.

Re:Same space, different market?

[macshit]

So one person pays for the physical space in a high-profile location, the other guy just pretends to be there and gets the location for free.

Is this fair?

But he doesn't really "get the location," he "gets" a shoddy half-assed and barely usable cellphone gimmick. It's not going to impact the real shop one iota (so no loss on their part), and the t-shirt guy isn't actually going to get any significant number of customers by doing this — nobody's going to travel to physical location just to get a shoddy cellphone app experience, so any kind of physical location linkage is quickly going to be discarded.

Re:A thought

[Anonymous Coward]

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~"

Re:Same space, different market?

[ceoyoyo]

If I hold up my smart phone in front of my face while I'm facing someone's shop, with Amazon loaded on the browser, is that fair?

This is a stupid story about a silly publicity stunt.

"There will be lawyers."

[quax]

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.