It's been such a long time since I've posted anything here, that I feel slightly abashed about just wading back into spatial musings, especially because there's so much to catch up on. Foremost on the agenda for me is to chime in on the hubbub about augmented reality applications now that so many of them are beginning to spring to life on the iPhone. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are entering a new age in which we will not only witness people meandering from lane to lane on the highway or driving through red lights while talking on cellphones, but we will also have the pleasure of watching legions of early-adopters marching like zombies, peering at the world through the tiny annotated screens of their phones so that they can witness the great wonders of the world -- the nearest subway station, Tim Horton's or Upscale Executive lunch spot -- surrounded by textual halos filled with links to Wikipedia, reviews, and various other bits of cyber-graffiti. I'm not as sour about all of this as I might sound. AR will be amazing fun for many of us. I confess I have the AR starmaps on my phone and I've had some fun pointing the thing at the sky. I've also had the pleasure of discovering the hidden AR feature on Yelp and from there being able to pinpoint the exact compass bearing of every local eatery from the comfort of my office chair. Not that it helped me get anywhere, but it did hold one or two surprises for me, and it made me infernally hungry as well. I think there's some interesting psychology at play in using these devices, but will ruminate a bit longer before giving an account of myself.
There's been much else going on in my life as well that needs to be unspooled here. I had a great couple of days with some environmental graphics design groups in the US. I'm really not sure how much value these groups got from my talks, but I have to say that after having "talked the talk" for some time now about how I thought the work I was doing had implications for real world stuff, it was bracing to spend a couple of days in the company of people who grappled with that real world on a daily basis. It strengthened my conviction that there's much that my research could contribute to the design professions, but helped me to understand that there's a way to go yet to realize those contributions. What's needed is a test case. There's one in the works with some great private support that I hope I'll have a chance to talk about soon.
In the aftermath of my book release, the people I've met and the ideas I've had for new projects, I've been a lot busier than I had expected, and this space has been neglected. Especially now that I'm beginning to look ahead to my next writing project, I'm going to try to ramp up my meager offerings here.
Like pop up video for life. Cool.
Posted by: kp | November 17, 2009 at 05:56 AM
Yes KP that's exactly what it's like. And thanks for the reminder that what this is really all about is having fun. We don't wave our phones around to make a better world -- we do it because its so much fun.
Posted by: Colin | November 17, 2009 at 03:48 PM