Tactical Transparency

Interview with Blair MacIntyre of Georgia Tech on Augmented Reality

I had a great interview with Blair MacIntyre of Georgia Tech today (listen below).  Blaire is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at GT (his full bio is here) and we chatted on the implications of Augmented Reality and how it can be used for gaming, marketing, and social networking.  You can learn more about his work by going to You Tube and checking out their video on how their Augmented Reality zombie game interacts with Skittles. 

The marketing implications here are really interesting, since a 2-D game board could easily be created for other businesses and interact with customer phones and items in said business.  Blair talked about a beer coaster they had worked to create which I think is genius as you could interact with different beers you ordered and use the coaster for a dating game or whatever in a bar environment.

Blair said he'd let me interview him again in the future as this interview focused more on marketing than the specifics of his work.  I highly urge you to check out GT's College of Computing site and special thanks to Jen Walsh of GE who told me of GT's work in this field.

Interview with Jen Walsh and Sean Gannon of GE - GE Reports and Augmented Reality

Had a great interview today (above) with Jen Walsh (Global Director of Digital Media for General Electric, where she is responsible for ge.com, inside GE, and digital advertising and brand initiatives) and her colleague Sean Gannon, Managing Editor for GE Reports.  Here's what the site's About Page says in terms of GE Reports:

GEreports.com is a simple, no-frills-way of communicating what’s happening at GE. Our goal is to be a resource for people who are interested in learning more about GE.

As you'll hear from Sean and Jen, the site provides a great way for GE to have its own voice about its brand and activities and has frequently been used/cited by journalists as a source for news about the company.  The language above - simple and no frills - also seems to embody the tone that Sean works to culture with their stories.  Avoiding hyperbole and hype, they focus on delivering stories objectively while also embracing comments from users, even if they always aren't pleasant.  This, in my humble O, is a major step forward for the blogosphere if an organization like GE lets us see how others feel.  Leaving all comments up (with the exception of racist language, slander, etc) engenders trust since we're allowed to recognize that people don't always say the nicest things about a company, even one they hold dear.

But what I always find interesting is the fact people forget you fight or have problems with the people you truly love because you want to have a relationship with them. Meaning, you know you can risk being honest because they've provided you a safe standing on which your relationship is built.  If you have an acquaintance who avoids any sign of contention at all costs, you'll have to keep things very light and insubstantial.  Which also typically can mean boring and fake.

But I wax tangential.  After we focused on GE Reports we turned to chatting about Augmented Reality which as you know is my new favorite passion.  Jen provides a great definition of Augmented Reality (a 3-D interface / hologram interacting with a special logo/symbol on a piece of paper or object held up to your computer's webcam or certain mobile phones) while also comparing it to the technology from the original Star Wars movies where we got to hear Princess Leia ask Obi-Wan for help.  GE is using AR in a number of ways, one of which is with their Smart Grid campaign that allows you to see a wind turbine in 3-D when you print a piece of paper with an appropriately tagged symbol on it and hold it up to your webcam.  You can even blow the propellors in the 3-D rendering and watch them spin.

This allows for high geekage, surely, but as Jen points out, the focus on fun is a way to visually demonstrate the value of the idea/service that GE is providing.  As it's difficult to have everyone tour a solar turbine facility, if I hold it in my hands I can viscerally start to recognize why it's important to the environment and maybe try to change how I view energy.  Pretty amazing way to embody a value proposition by using just a piece of paper.

Jen sent on a few links for me to check out, one of which was about Layar which I wrote a post on the other day.  The other was a link to a You Tube video from Georgia Tech's Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design.  (Note that I'll be interviewing Blaire MacIntyre from Georgia Tech Monday at noon on my Tactical Transparency show).  Here's a blurb about the video:

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones, created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD-Atlanta). The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

The Skittles integration is especially compelling when you think of the marketing ramifications for other brands.  Think about visiting your favorite bar or restaurant whose placemats are rendered for AR?  You get your mobile phone out and start playing an interactive dating game while you wait for your food.  Then if you get certain drinks from the bar (I'm thinking the glasses could have code or emblems or what have you on them) you put those on your placemat and they interact in different ways.  Perhaps they'd light up like a poisonous elixir from an old Warner Brothers cartoon.

Another very cool Georgia Tech project is an audio AR thingie they did in a graveyard called Voices of Oakland.  If I fully understand what they did, GT mapped gravestones and created vocal histories that played when people were in a close proximity to the sensors that started their audio tracks.  If I get it correctly, it's the equivalent of doing an audio tour at a museum and having the various messages play automatically (if I have this wrong I'm hoping Blaire can straighten me out on Monday).  What I think is or will be so powerful about this type of integation is when in the future I geo-map audio/video I create on my mobile so I can mark a spot geographically with my comments/video.  Then, instead of hearing just one voice from a grave, you could hear an array of voices who have come before.  Or, 3-D holograms of a thousand princess Leia's all vying for attention.

But with the arrival of the Semantic Web to arrange our preferences before we'd come to any geo-area, we'd only hear those choice voices we wanted to hear.  The same will apply to stores we shop in.  I think in the near future, you'll walk into Target, wave your mobile left to right, and have your friends virtually tell you (from the past or present) about the specials you should focus on since they (with their collective and communal intelligence) know your taste in clothes combined with whatever other factors you have put into your preferences (price ranges, how many kids you have, etc).

Long story short, I continue to have my mind blown by this stuff. To help you to have your mind blown, beyond Blaire I'm also going to interview folks from Metaio, a company focused on AR Wednesday July 1st at 3PM Pacific on my show, as well as a writer whose work I admire a great deal, Jamais Cascio.  

Thanks again to Jen, Sean, and their colleague Megan Parker for a great interview.  To learn more about GE Reports, you can also check out Sean and Megan's Slide Share presentation from Blogwell about their work at GE. 

Augmented Morality

So I've been ruminating lately about Augmented Reality since the new iPhone has the Compass feature that, combined with their camera, can allow you to map out information in 3-D in real time.  You essentially pan your camera from left to right and pop-ups tell you information about the places within your close proximity.  It could be restaurants, bank ATM's etc, which can eventually be linked to other geo-tagged information people may have left about that particular place ("this ATM stole my card!")

What I'm intrigued by is how, combined with search/organizational technology via the semantic web, when you or I scroll our 8th generation iPhone or 7th gen Android from left to right we'll see, "John, you'd love this restaurant for their vegeterian curry" or "John, your friend Jason is buying a book at this Barnes & Noble right now" or whatever.  Meaning we'll eventually have a system for organizing our data that is utterly specific and controlled how we want it.  We'll have privacy settings, preference filters, etc and because of how we interact with our social networks we'll also be able to get the benefits of "communal filtering" so that if I have the same movie tastes as my buddy, I will only get movie theatre recs for theatres in my area playing just the movies I want to see.

So all of that blows my mind and I'm not sure how much of it can really happen or is just something I think will happen.  (Although I'm pretty sure it will).  Here's a new layer I'm thinking would be pretty extraordinary--Augmented Morality.  Probably not the best term and it sounds a bit like a Vatican version of Second Life.  But it seems to me that once AR really takes hold and I hold up my phone to look around, messages may pop up for me (even through filters) that would have to do with emotional filters versus simply location and status information. 

Here's an example.  I'm at Jury Duty today and heard about an amazing program called CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates).  When kids go from foster home to foster home, if they can have a CASA volunteer to watch out for their special interests, they'll know that at least one person cares for them on a regular, ongoing basis.  This person interviews their doctor, families, etc so they can represent the child in court and be the True North that helps guide them into a steady home.  Watching the video on these kids is heartbreaking, especially as a dad. 

So I'm wondering if I can eventually 'wear' an Augmented Reality signboard as I walk through Manhattan letting people know things like, "Do you have a heart to help foster kids find a good home?" Of course, you're thinking everyone will also wear signs that say, "Do you know you can get your penis enlarged?" But work with me here--the point is that once these technologies get nuanced to the point they will be fairly soon, perhaps these layers or maps can avoid certain types of spam filters to help kids in need or other organizations by breaking through our busy lives and mapping a spot in our hearts.

I'm up for helping with that anyway.  Not to be a downer, but seeing the video made me wonder what life would be like for my kids if my/their circumstances would have been different.  So if I can geek my way into helping kids in the future somehow I'm up for it.

Layar (and Happy Father's Day)

First off, Happy Father's Day to all the Dad's out there. Their families, too, of course, but as a Dad it's great to have a day to focus on how freaking lucky and blessed I am to have the wife and kids that I do. And the handmade cards from my six and four year old totally blew away the new Garmin GPS my wife bought me (although it's quite cool and I totally appreciate the gift).

That said, my mind is still swimming with the notion of Augmented Reality and there's a brand spanking new video on Tech Crunch today that shows a demo from the company Layar. Check out the review/interview on TC and the demos at Layar because I'm still finding myself too beta-breathless to talk about a lot of AR related stuff without simply using too many exclamation points or hyperbolic prose. Still--all of the techie side of things (how you can point your phone/camera if it has a solid camera, compass, etc and literally see local real estate listings, or ATM's) pales in comparison to how these types of devices blended with our social networking communities will change the way we think, act and feel.

To that end, I link again today to my new fave tech writer Jamais Cascio and his recent article in The Atlantic, Get Smarter. You simply need to read the whole article to attempt to get a grasp on how AI (artificial intelligence), our exposure to complex and multitudinous data, etc is changing the way we think.  But in the immediate future what caught my attention was the idea of "focus assistants" along with "collective intuition."  FA's would essentially assist us in regards to how we interact with data on our devices and social networks.  I would initially tell software geared towards this practice to avoid spam, or certain keywords.  Eventually, it would filter on its own accord in the same way Amazon makes book recommendations to me.  But imagine how relevant your Twitter stream could be if no "click here to learn how to get more followers" or comments about bathroom experiences never appeared.  Although I have a bit of a concern on the loss of the power/notion of 'serendipitous search' (the potential of stumbling on something wonderful you normally wouldn't surf due to its proximity to other data) one would likely sacrifice the random gem in lieu of a digital life of high relevance.

Here's a paragraph from Cascio, re: collective intuition:

And such systems (from JCH: Focus Assistants, etc) won’t be working for us alone. Intelligence has a strong social component; for example, we already provide crude cooperative information-filtering for each other. In time, our interactions through the use of such intimate technologies could dovetail with our use of collaborative knowledge systems (such as Wikipedia), to help us not just to build better data sets, but to filter them with greater precision. As our capacity to provide that filter gets faster and richer, it increasingly becomes something akin to collaborative intuition—in which everyone is effectively augmenting everyone else.

So this idea (as with a lot of technological innovation) both terrifying and titillating.  Imagine if you're traveling and go to a popular restaurant and when you click a certain application on your mobile device it not only gives you professional reviews but the aggregate thoughts of 100 of your closest online connections?  I'm assuming technology to sift and search the collective recent Tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts, etc for relevance towards your location and/or restaurant either already exists or will soon.  Combined with Layar, you could also point the camera on your phone (Android for the moment although Layar is coming out with an iPhone app soon) two feet to the right to discover not only the restaurant next door but the dozens of virtual notices from friends helping guide your decision about where to eat, shop, or whatever.

I was ruminating about what would get lost in this type of data and social interaction yesterday when I got my GPS.  One thing I realized is that my kids will likely never (or at least rarely) get lost when driving in the future.  They'll never feel the high level of vitriol I've experienced when shouting in blind rage at a map after realizing I missed my exit on The PA turnpike and can't turn around for another 43 miles.  However, they also may not experience the pleasure of discovery at getting lost and finding an out of the way restaurant or bed and breakfast where they can feel they're uncovered a gem they can share with friends.  I'm thinking they'll probably deal with virtual ennui at the notion that anywhere they go with be littered with geo tagged critiques that could potentially mar their experience more than enhance it.  Or the service industry will have to imagine ways to play/trick technology so that they can stay open long enough to garner more positive reviews than negative (thinking about Yelp here and glad they're letting businesses respond to UGC posts in the sense of objectivity in reporting or at least giving them a tool to have their own voice).

My son's up now so my collective intuition is telling me to turn off the computer and revel in the new picture he's just drawn me (he's totally into Captain Underpants and has started creating his own characters like "Dumb Dolphin" which is hilarious, inventive, and uses alliteration which makes me utterly proud). 

Why Augmented Reality Should be Blowing Your Mind - especially for marketers

So I've just been getting into researching Augmented Reality (AR) and forgive me if I'm behind the times a bit (many of the articles I'm reading are from January). But with the release of the new iPhone, the simplicity of a camera being combined with GPS/location track technology plus the compass feature apparently makes the iPhone adaptable to many AR usages that imo with be utterly transformative to technology, marketing, and culture in general. And I do my utmost to refrain from industry hyperbole, so that means a lot coming from me.

First off, check out this video to get a sense of how freaking cool AR can be while sitting at your computer and combining your video cam plus a tag embedded on a product, in this example a baseball card: (thanks to the blog at Make in the UK where I discovered the video - to blow your mind further check out the folks at Total Immersion who created the technology shown in the video)

Along with this video, I highly recommend you read Jamais Cascio's Fast Company articles, iPhone Augmented Reality and When 'Mad Men Meets Augmented Reality'.  The second one is particularly fascinating in terms of how privacy and technology always have an interplay that reflects on culture, sometimes in a negative or dark way.  Here's an excerpt, where Cascio make the point that AR when utilized on your new iPhone could eventually allow you to hold up you phone, snap a picture (or simply look through the viewfinder) and have AR technology show you a virtual map of just what you want to see--it could block ads or even images (suggestive billboards, etc) you don't want to see.  But there's a concern here as Cascio points out:

This may sound appealing, but it has a dark underside. The moment that we can easily display location-aware images on a blended-reality system, people will try to block any images they don't like. Forget ads: Some people will block even slightly suggestive images, or signs proclaiming religious beliefs that they oppose, or newspapers and magazines with arguments they don't like--anything that would upset their custom-built reality. Or maybe anyone. Consider the "Prop 8 Maps" site, mashing up Google Maps and public records of people who donated to support or oppose the 2008 California proposition on gay marriage. Suddenly, you could easily see who around you agreed or disagreed enough with the proposal to put up money.

That's not too hard to imagine. Face recognition technology is progressing quickly, and often relies on the same heuristics that enable the recognition of physical objects. This means that, technologically speaking, it's not too far of a leap from blocking advertisers to blocking out the people who annoy us. With one click, we construct our own realities, ones that don't include the ideas -- and people -- we dislike.

I can't even begin to fathom how important this technology will be for the culture in general, but specifically to advertisers.  Right now we're all wondering about the metrics for social media (like Maura and the very smart/cool folks at SMAC, the Social Media Advertising Consortium) which is great and necessary.  But I read about AR and I'm thinking of the ethical implications of both my being able to block out whatever I want, and advertisers having to work around the fact that I can do so.  And what do I mean by "work around?"  How can I try to commuincate value for clients or even friends when I'll have to wonder how I can relay ideas to them?  And who determined where it's okay for me to relay ideas and how?  Can I tell you about a book I liked on Facebook but not blog about it?  What if you give me an author's copy of a book that you got from a friend and I review it?  As long as I disclose where I got it, am I safe, or do I have to wonder if I'm a Mom that I might catch heat from the FTC?

A lot of question marks in that last paragraph but I have to say I haven't been this excited on a topic since I first delved in to transparency years ago.  And I think the convergence of the following four factors will be mind-blowing in terms of where marketing/advertising along with culture will be going:

• AR technology
• Privacy Issues (how do I let you know what I want and what I don't?)
• Open ID type technology - how soon until my unifiied identiy (all of my social network URL's, personal info validating I am who I actually say I am, etc) can be more actively and easily merged with my mobile life so I could eventually be walking in NYC, search under 'restaurants' and know that a place that has my favorite meal will be open in ten minutes, that three of my geek-buddies are in the area, that 35 friends (searched instantly via Tweet Deck or whatever) have enjoyed the meal) and that I could order and pre-pay for my meal before I even arrive?) I realize I melded about seven technologies there, but the power of mobile with AR in conjunction with the concerns of privacy (and opportunities when well managed) are amazing.
• Social Networking (like I mentioned above--this is nothing new, but Dopplr and other location based networking will up the power and relevancy of Twitter for networking and marketing to a major degree)

Pretty fascinated by this subject.  If you have any thoughts or info on this, please feel free to email me at: johnhavens AT blogtalkradio DOT com.

The possibilities of Dopplr

Been seeing friends posting Dopplr badges on their blogs, and have been a part of TripIt for a while as well (although I don't use it much as of yet). Here's my badge below:

Besides being a cool way for me to follow friends literally and show off when I visit towns where I'm likely going solely to visit fun clients (Bentonville, AR for Walmart or Minneapolis for General Mills, for instance) I see a huge marketing opportunity in this tool, depending on how it gains in popularity and the omnipresent need to better understand potential privacy issues surrounding its usage. Opportunities:

• Depending how on the ball people are at listing when they're going on trips (and my guess is you can integrate with Outlook so that could be automated), the ability to market via geo for travel is enormous. Instead of getting general travel emails or spam I can get social community focused messages like, "Hey, John see you're coming to WOMMA in Miami.  Since your company is a sponsor, thought you might like to know about our bar IMPRESSIONISTA* that offers a great venue to host clients with great food in a quiet yet festive environment. 
• Relevant Mashups, Tweetups and other unconferences of opportunity (UOO)**.  Any entrepreneurial event planner could start to see that X number of influentials were converging on one locale for a different event, vacation, or whatever.  They could look to partner with a pre-existing conference (if they didn't compete) or throw a party/whatever in conjunction with the event knowing who already was going to be in town.
• Relevant geo or even GPS based advertising.  Thinking if you know I'm going to Chicago to go to BlogHer you might somehow be able to track who I'm flying with and who I'm going to rent a car from.  Seems like if you could get a text based ad on my GPS (waiting for me when I rent my car) listing all the best bars, clubs, restaurants, etc near my hotel I'd be much more likely to visit them than others.  And those venues would likely pay (and offer coupons, etc) if they could get on my GPS.  May be a bit far fetched/futuristic, but I'm thinking it's probably already being done. 

As I said, privacy is an issue I'd like to ask the Dopplr folks about.  I will likely only list my business trips versus family ones unless I can get a sense of what levels of protection would be based around the information I provide.  But to be fair, I didn't provide many personal stats when signing in and I'm a bit paranoid after writing a book on transparency and delving pretty deeply into privacy issues.

So all in all I'm likley dumping my sextant in favor of Dopplr.

*Not a real restaurant name (as far as I know). Sounded like a good venue to go and be professionally sycophantic .
**Not a real term but if you think it's cool please attempt to popularize. 

Jeff Pulver's 140 Character's Conference

Had fun at Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference Networking Party.  Took this picture while Jeff Pulver stood above us--I faced the other direction and took a picture of everyone watching Jeff which is the type of thing I enjoy doing.  It cracked me up but was completely appropriate that a guy was punching his iPone/BB and likely tweeting while Jeff was speaking.  The combination of in-person and on-device activity at these things (myself included) always strikes me as ironic and funny.  So I'll call it irunny or fionic.

By the way, I have not blogged/posted for a while so I'll just note that versus having you look at the next post and say, "Wow, no posts since February?" As a rule my focus is on writing proposals and working my tucus off at BlogTalkRadio versus posting, but I'd like to turn that around a bit.  I'm finding a lot of similiar behavior at a lot of our pitches in terms of where brands are in regards to moving forward on social media.  See if you've heard phrases like these in recent meetings with folks in large brands contemplating social media:

• "We're just dipping our toes into social media at this point."
• "We're worried about the extra work we'll have to take on creating content, etc for social media."
• "What the hell is Twitter?"

I find it difficult to be patient at times, especially with the notion that a platform and paradigm as powerful as social media continues to take a back door to banners and other online advertising that isn't rich or content laden at all.  The relevant posts or casts of creators or community take a back seat to clicks.  And ad dollars still go towards the mediums that have proven successful in the past (or so we all tacitly agreee) and people don't want to move forward and take risks. Yet a lot of the ROI of doing these social media campaigns is in reaching more directly, fruitfully, relevantly and deeply to your consumers and employees.

So for now I guess I'll keep pitching.