Last week I spoke at Mobile Convention Amsterdam. This time I did not talk about Layar and its vision for Augmented Reality, but about my personal vision on mobile and where this is all going. It was the first time that I shared these thoughts publicly, and it was pretty exciting to see the reactions!
And here’s an easier-to-view version of the presentation:
What did I learn?One of the other participants, Ewan McIntosh from NoTosh, also wrote a very nice blogpost on his impressions of the session.
First, we in the Commission need to get our communications right: more clear and compelling stories to tell, less bureaucratic-speak.
Second, we can and should reach out to the citizen, not the other way round, and we have to make sure we are supporting people to become digitally competent citizens.
Third, we should “co-design.” The public can help us define the problem, then help us design solutions for it.
Fourth, we talked about issues of privacy and cyber-security, and how the law should find the right balance. There are clearly risks online, as there are out there in the real world, but if we over-regulate in response then we risk losing what is most precious about the internet—its openness and freedom. For me, the best way to tackle security and privacy issues is to inform and empower digital citizens so they are aware of, and can deal with, those risks—just like they would in the off-line world.
Lastly, we talked about EU funding for research and innovation and how well this fit with the needs of digitial innovators. It’s a sector where new projects need to be implemented quickly to avoid becoming outdated. Many of those with bright ideas are small-scale SMEs and research teams who may have relatively small financing needs, but also have a low tolerance for bureaucracy and form-filling. Also, in many cases private financing can complement or replace public funding.
I took the point that EU funding doesn’t match up well to this environment; it can be exceptionally cumbersome, bureaucratic and time-consuming to access, and the many different funding streams can be confusing for non-experts. The taxpayer rightly expects us to be careful and responsible in managing public funds, and that imposes certain obligations on us. But equally, if we want to support the sector and compete globally, we have to adapt to the needs of its bright young star performers.
In my recent Ignite talk Hijacking the Here and Now: Adventures in Augmented Reality, I showed examples of how creative people are using AR in ways that modify our perceptions about time and space. Now, Ignite talks are only 5 minutes long and I think this is a big idea that’s worth a deeper look. So here’s my claim: I assert that one of the most natural and important uses of AR as a creative medium is hacking space and time to explore and make sense of the emerging physical+digital world.
When you look at who the true AR enthusiasts are, who is doing the cutting edge creative work in AR today, it’s artists, activists and digital humanities geeks. Their projects explore and challenge the ideas of ownership and exclusivity of physical space, and the flowing irreversibility of time. They are starting to see AR as the emergence of a new construction of reality, where the physical and digital are no longer distinct but instead are irreversibly blended. Artist Sander Veenhof is attracted to the “infinite dimensions” of AR. Stanford Knight Fellow Adriano Farano sees AR ushering in an era of “multi-layer journalism”. Archivist Rick Prelinger says “History should be like air,” immersive, omnipresent and free. And in their recent paper Augmented Reality and the Museum Experience, Schavemaker et al write:
In the 21st century the media are going ambient. TV, as Anna McCarthy pointed out in Ambient Television (2001), started this great escape from domesticity via the manifold urban screens and the endless flat screens in shops and public transportation. Currently the Internet is going through a similar phase as GPS technology and our mobile devices offer via the digital highway a move from the purely virtual domain to the ‘real’ world. We can collect our data everywhere we desire, and thus at any given moment transform the world around us into a sort of media hybrid, or ‘augmented reality’. [emphasis mine]
In their AR piece US/Iraq War Memorial (pictured below), artists Mark Skwarek and John Craig Freeman transpose the locative datascape of casualties in the Iraq War from Wikileaks onto the northeastern United States, with the location of Baghdad mapped onto the coordinates of Washington DC. In addition to spatial hackery evocative of Situationist psychogeographic play, this work makes a strong political statement about control of information, nationalist perspectives and the cultural abstraction of war.
Now let’s talk about this word, ‘hacking’. Actually, you’ll note that I used the term ‘hijacking’ as well, so let’s include that too. My intent is to evoke the tension of multiple meanings: Hacking in the sense of gaining deep understanding and mastery of a system in order to modify and improve it, and as a visible demonstration of a high degree of proficiency. Also, hacking in the sense of making unauthorized intrusions into a system, including both white hat and black hat variations. I use ‘hijacking’ in the sense of a mock takeover, like the Black Eyed Peas playfully hijacking the myspace.com website for publicity purposes, but also hijacking as an antagonistic, possibly malign, and potentially unlawful attack. In the physical+digital augmented world, I expect we will see a wide variety of hacking and hijacking behaviors, with both positive and negative effects. For example, in Skwarek’s piece with Joseph Hocking, the leak in your hometown, the corporate logo of BP becomes the trigger for an animated re-creation of the iconic broken pipe at the Macondo wellhead, spewing AR oil into your location. It is possible to see this as an inspired spatial hack and a biting social commentary, but I have no doubt BP executives would consider it a hijacking of their brand in the worst way.
In his book Smart Things, ubicomp experience designer Mike Kuniavsky asks us to think of digital media about physical entities as ‘information shadows’; I believe the work of these AR pioneers points us toward a future where digital information is not a subordinate ‘shadow’ of the physical, but rather a first-class element of our experience of the world. Even at this early stage in the development of the underlying technology, AR is a consequential medium of expression that is being used to tell meaningful stories, make critical statements, and explore the new dimensionality of a blended physical+digital world. Something important is happening here, and hacking space and time through AR is how we’re going to understand and make sense of it.
You don’t get to stand next to your Prime Minister every day - let alone be able to debate with him in front of 300 fellow entrepreneurs in a majestic theatre.“In the less than two years of the existence of our company, the context in which we operate has changed tremendously. We are continuously re-inventing ourselves - what we introduced less than a year ago is already completely outdated.Here’s the radio version of the speech (in Dutch). You can also listen to the entire event on April 9 via livestreaming on BNR, starting at 8h35 (my speech starts at 10h04).
But not only my reality is changing. As we know from recent history, technical innovations which have a large impact on the way we interact, live, consume and produce are coming at us at an ever increasing speed. This change is a given.
But as human beings are not all by nature capable of coping with rapid changes - and the systems and processes we create usually aren’t either, these are big challenges our modern society is facing.
As this is a very broad theme and I have only 3 minutes, I will focus on one aspect: Knowledge.
There is a lot to do about knowledge, and the ‘Knowledge Economy’ [Kenniseconomie]. But in a world where knowledge is being transported to and shared with the other side of the globe in less than seconds, and is outdated the moment it has been invented, I dare to say that the term “Knowledge Economy” should be replaced.
Having or consuming knowledge is not of much value. Value and a leading position can be achieved in an environment where new and unique knowledge can be created, shared, built upon and applied. So it’s all about Thought Leadership and Innovation.
How can we optimize the creation, sharing, evolution and application of unique knowledge?Unique knowledge is being created by unique people with unique talents. However, in our Dutch culture where ‘please act normal - that’s already crazy enough’ [Doe maar gewoon dan doe je al gek genoeg] is deep in our genes, this is easier said than done. We tend to spend a lot of energy on behaving to ‘the norm’. Look around you - also here today, everybody is wearing dark grey suits. Even I put on my black dress. The only things that distinguishes me from you are perhaps my high heels and my big pregnant tummy.
And regarding knowledge sharing. Our current educational systems are set up in a very traditional way: the teacher teaches and the pupil or student listens. Knowledge is being transferred and being tested in exams. When you are able to reproduce the knowledge, you get high marks and eventually your diploma.
But where does this system leave us when knowledge is outdated almost the moment it is being transferred? Why don’t we put students in the place of the teachers at school - and let everybody discuss and build upon the lecture material? Great new insights can be created!
Now I’d like to come to my two pieces of advice to our Prime Minister, as stated on the screen.
1) Learn how to speak in public. It is still possible to graduate from University, without having been trained in any public speaking. Super-smart students who get a 9 at their final exam but who are not even capable of bringing their message across verbally, in a human-to-human interaction, are pretty useless to society. Usually at international conferences, the Dutch are pretty much blown away by Americans with their speaking skills. Everybody, from primary school until university and beyond, should be stimulated to sharing thoughts, and develop both verbal and non-verbal communication skills.
2) Embrace unique talents We should emphasize much more on what is unique and different and embrace these - instead of (and now I am looking especially at you, media and journalists!) criticizing, just for the sake of being critical. When our company had raised 10 million EUR in funding and we already had 40 employees, a not-to-be-named leading Dutch newspaper was referring to us as ‘The little Amsterdam software company’ [softwarebedrijfje] and ‘Boonstra’s little company…’.
I am rushing to say that this complaint is not about us, but in general about the ‘Calimero-thinking’ in Dutch media. ‘If it is from Holland it can’t be big’.
Show that it pays off to be unique! Put unique people in the spotlights and serve them as great examples for others to be inspired by.
Thank you very much!”
Ignite is a world-wide series of fast-paced talks that focus on just about everything. Cities all around the world wrangle up participants to speak for 5 minutes at a time about a topic they are passionate about, and each gathers a unique group of speakers.
In San Francisco, Ignite speakers tend to be of a techy/geeky persuasion, and this was the status quo Monday at the most recent gathering. You know how we know it was geeky? Layar’s own Gene Becker was one of the speakers, as he spread the good word about augmented reality.
The focus of Gene’s talk was “Hijacking the Here and Now: Adventures in Augmented Reality,” which featured examples of engaging augmented reality content. Here’s how Gene describes the talk in his own words:
“Augmented reality is all about webcam marketing gimmicks and filling the world with geotagged logos, right? Nope, wrong. Instead, we’re learning that the natural mode of expression for AR, is enabling people to *hack time and space*. In 5 minutes, I’ll show you ~20 solid examples of how artists, journalists, historians and citizen activists are using augmented reality to hijack the here and now.”
Videos of the Ignite speeches should be viewable online in a short amount of time, but we thought we’d help give you a head start in case you missed his talk. Embedded below are the slides from Gene’s talk, so have a look and see how augmented reality is helping us hijack our everyday lives.
