Imran Ali

Mixed Reality & Exploring Deep Place

In recent weeks I've been thinking that a confluence of innovations could begin to usher in an era of mixed reality and augmented reality applications...

• Together, Google's APIs for mobile maps and mobile search provide a ubiquitous substrate for locative media.

• Phones & cell networks  are now capable of multiple methods of locating themselves - GPS, cell-ID and even SMS commands.

• Gestural interfaces are becoming widely accepted thanks to the iPhone and Nintendo's Wii.

Though producers of actual reality games, such as area/code, gestural handset manufacturers like GeoVector and researchers such as Markus Kähäri have been exploring mixed reality platforms for many years, I believe the Android platform and the upcoming iPhone SDK are where we'll see some action in the next few months.

Rafael Spring and Max Braun have already taken up the Google Android developer challenge with Enkin (thanks Aaron), a 'link between maps and reality' that uses positioning data from GPS, accelerometers for orientation and gestures along with a number of web services to overlay data onto a 3D maps or live camera feeds. In essence, Enkin can alternately provide a God's Eye View of your immediate environment or a 'head-up display'  for whatever you happen to be looking at.

Though Enkin is ergonomically clunky, it points the way towards for multimodal mixed reality; there's no hardware used in Spring & Braun's work that's not in current and future handsets.

A couple years ago, I was mesmerised by the possibilities of my friend Victor's Herescan project at IDII - he playfully describes it as Exploring Deep Place. It looks like Mixed Reality is about to join the fabric of Actual Reality :)

UPDATE: One step closer with Evolution Robotics' ViPR visual search technology for the iPhone...check out the video demonstration on YouTube.

Blogger's Guilt...

So, it's been almost two months since I posted for O'Reilly and Corante, so I figured I should pull my finger out...

• Haptic Messaging
• Phones Are People Too
• Over The Air
• Talktiva

See you in October ;)

Corante: Mobile Messaging 2.0

I just finished up my first trio of posts for Corante and Airwide's Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog

• Locative Messaging and MIT's Mobile Experience Lab
• ITP Spring Show 2007
• Twittularity

I'll also be covering the Global Messaging 2007 conference for Corante next week, in Monte Carlo :)

The Next Billion

When considering social software, we tend to conceive of software that is a filtered aggregation of individuated and personalised experiences.

Nokia's Jan Chipchase and Indri Tulusan reframe this perception by asking what happens when people share an object that is inherently designed for personal use?

There's a lotta talk about the 'next billion' mobile customers, largely from the developing world, but very little real empirical study of what those users might need. Contrast Doom-playing OLPCs with the work of The Fonly Institute...

Chipchase and Tulusan's field study of Ugandan mobile, this past July, documents some very revealing observations...

• Phone borrowing is is driven by cost and price sensitivity.
• Phone lending is driven by hospitality, personal relationships and community well-being.
• The notion of 'sente', using prepay airtime as a form of cheap, secure and convenient banking.
• Employing missed calls - 'beeping and flashing' - as a form of free messaging.
• Phones as community ATMs.
• Pooling prepay credit between customers when sufficiently small prepay denominations are available.
• Mediated Calls - where literacy becomes a barrier to participation.
• Community address books to encourage repeat business and conveniently recall commonly dialled numbers.
• Step messaging - physically carrying a phone containing a message to its recipient...

Chipchase and Tulusan conclude that sharing is driven by cost, but that low costs lowers the propensity to share; with initial experiences governed by sharing, they also conclude that this may shape future usage. It'll be interesting to see how individual ownership might affect social cohesion and mobile usage in the very same communities.

What's striking about the research is that all the observed innovations in shared usage are a result of user inventiveness, rather than handset design or network services; a case of user-generated services that really serve the needs of the consumer...if the mobile industry paid closer attention to such innovation, it might provide that 'next billion' users with the tools they actually need.

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BTW, during a vacation in Pakistan this year, I noticed that a lot of people carried 2-3 handsets and SIMs as tools to mediate their friendships, family and professional availabilty...