A lot of people have already heard, or even seen, some final product or demo that uses augmented reality, and they were impressed by what they saw but, do they really know what Augmented Reality can offer?
Only the Augmented Reality sub-branch known as Augmented Reality Browser or Augmented Reality Geolocation view is an attractive sector itself, because it offers compelling applications across any sector that comes to mind since it can use geolocated points in order to give the user a better perception of the surroundings. For consumers, it can display the names of hotels and which has a vacancy across the phones’ screens, rates or customers’ feedbacks. Augmented Reality browsers can also show the location of closest restaurants and their wait times and menus, special offers or even coupons for special prices in that moment. And a lot of final uses that can place geolocated points in the device’ screen.
This was in the side of the user but, what about from the brands or companies’ side? Mobile augmented reality offers them a consumer engagement, including social sharing experiences and direct user interaction. With these new ways of interacting with advertisements, companies that decide to use Augmented reality somehow will likely have a bigger impact on customers and thereby advertising campaigns may be more successful. We have already seen some examples of brands using Augmented reality for their customers, like the Virtual Mirror of Rayban, where users are able to try several sunglasses models from their home, only using their computers and webcams. So imagine how the advertising campaigns of the future could be, with interactive media for customers, allowing them to have a perception of the products like if they were really there. This is amazing, isn´t?
These are only a couple of examples, and they are focused on advertising, but AR has been spread in more fields, like education, medicine or games. Augmented reality is a really cool in technology, which can be used in a wide range of applications, but what is particularly exciting, from a high level point of view, is that technology has evolved to the point that something that seems so futuristic also is highly practical in terms of applications. We could say that there is no gap between what it can really offer nowadays and some futuristic uses that were visioned few years ago.
In fact, there are video games that already include augmented reality but, generally they are mainly oriented to children . For example we can take a look to the “Eye Pet” developed by Sony, where children can have a “virtual” pet and play with it using only a card that works as target.
But actually, we want to talk about action games, or sports games, where the introduction of Augmented Reality could lead to new and engaging experiences for gamers. It is not strange to think that the spreading of the Augmented Reality technology will also reach the game industry, due to its wide range of possibilities. Using next coming generations of AR systems, we will be able to map our room, or the environment where we are, and display a huge set of Augmented objects which will give us a more immersive game experience. Apart of improving the direct user´s interaction with the elements of the game by adding new augmented objects that the user is able to play with, AR may enhance the cooperation and the experience of multiplayer games by geolocating elements where the action takes place.
In order to get this idea, please imagine an action game like the well known “counter strike”, where several users belong to a team and have to kill another game players. Now image that, instead of staying at home, in front of the computer, each player plays outside, and has a device with an AR system integrated that is able to track where each of these players is and show the location of all the players on their devices’ screens. Wouldn´t it be exciting?
All of this is mostly achievable at the moment. We don’t need complex 3D tracking, but provide the players with a space already prepared (for real) to this purpose. In the glasses, players would be able to see the typical HUD (Head up display), showing things like team scores, bullets left, and radar with the players on it.
This approach would take videogames to a whole new level… or take the reality to a new level! After all, this is what Augmented Reality is meant to do! Similar things have been done already, (even they weren’t including AR so deeply), but what about taking this to fun fairs? Or imagine going with your friends to play paintball using this new technology!
Nowadays, videogames are evolving a lot, but the improvements are mainly in graphics quality and interaction level with in-game events (more options, destructible environments, decisions which have an impact on the story…). But the thing here is that the player is always in front of a screen, playing with a controller. There have been also a lot of innovations in the controller field: devices like WiiMote from Nintendo or Kinect from Microsoft, which allows you to use your videogames moving the controllers, or your body. All these are cool technologies, but let’s be honest, nothing like hanging out with your friends for real, and play a “real” videogame!!
After all, we’re playing videogames with realistic graphics, but what can be more real than reality itself?? Augmented reality only increases the “usability” of reality to make it more enjoyable, or in this subject that we’re talking about, increase the entertainment experience of the players. Also, it would help fighting obesity! Let’s see what we have in a few years to play with!
In this post I would like to take a look backward and talk about how Augmented Reality began. Nowadays a lot of people know what is Augmented reality but, do they know how it was born?
Although Virtual Reality is much older than the 1980s or 1970s, older or nearly as old as the entire computer graphics field itself (in fact in 1956, Morton Heilig began designing the first multisensory virtual experiences), it wasn´t until late 1960s when it is considered as the beginnings. In 1968, Ivan Sutherland, an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer,and with the help of his student Bob Sproull, created the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system, which was named The Sword of Damocles. This system used an optical see-through head-mounted display that was tracked by one of two different 6DOF trackers: a mechanical tracker and an ultrasonic tracker. Due to the limited processing power of computers at that time, only very simple wireframe drawings could be displayed in real time. So we can state that the field we now know as virtual reality (promoter of Augmented Reality), a highly multidisciplinary field of computing, emerged from research on three-dimensional interactive graphics and vehicle simulation in the 1960s and 1970s.
The term “augmented reality” was coined in 1992 to refer to overlaying computer-presented material on top of the real world. Tom Caudell and David Mizell discussed the advantages of Augmented Reality versus Virtual Reality such as requiring less processing power since less pixels had to be rendered.
From earliest 1990s to present, there have been a lot of new advances and significant improvements in the augmented reality field, not only for desktop solutions but also for mobile devices. Here we will show a short list that shows some of these advances:
- In 1993, Loomis et al. developed a prototype of an outdoor navigation system for visually impaired.
- In 1995, Jun Rekimoto and Katashi Nagao created the NaviCam, a system that had a camera mounted on the mobile screen that was used for optical tracking. The system displayed some information according to the input that received from the camera image. In this projects color-coded markers were used.
- In 1997, Ronald T. Azuma’s “A Survey of Augmented Reality” examined the varied uses of augmented reality such as medical, manufacturing, research, mechanical operation and entertainment. Since then any Augmented Reality system has to be identified by three main characteristics:
it combines real and virtual world
it is interactive in real time
it is registered in 3D.
- In 1999, Hirokazu Kato and Mark Billinghurst presented ARToolKit, a pose tracking library with six degrees of freedom, using square fiducials and a template-based approach for recognition. Since it is an open source library (under the GPL License) it has been, and still is, a very popular Augmented Reality library in the AR community.
- In late 1999, the first mobile with GPS integrated was released, the Benefon Esc! NT2002
- From 2000 and 2004 a lot projects including GPS devices, wireless or LAN PCs communication or even camera processing were developed for research. Amongst these projects we can include RWWW Browser, which can be considered as the first AR Browser.
- From early 2004, Augmented Reality has experienced the evolution of a lot of promising computer vision algorithms which allow users, with the integration of powerful 3D render engines, to experience better this Augmented World. For example, markerless image tracking or PTAM techniques are some of these advances. Furthermore, the capabilities of new devices in last years have contributed to the spreading of Augmented Reality, not only in research but also for development and commercial purposes. The progression of AR and MAR has been amazing but it is not the goal of this entry, in which I just wanted to talk a little about the pioneers in the field.
I would like to thank the author of this summarize about the most important milestones in Augmented Reality. The link to this source can be found below.
We’ve submitted a panel proposal for SXSW 2013 on a super interesting topic, “Parsing Reality: Shaping Play with Connected Stuff.” The voting opened today so please do vote – go here to vote, if you would like to see us at SXSW 2013!
How clouds & atoms are coming together to make everyday things, and our actual lives, a platform for games.
The hardware startup community is on fire with kickstarter and a vibrant meetup community energizing the space. Smartphones opened the door for playful social, local experiences based on our actual lives. Now we are seeing connected stuff – hardware, cloud-connected devices, and robots bringing new forms of personal awareness into the mix. This panel will be a chance to hear from a group of people who are already deep into transforming this opportunity space into new genre of playful experiences.
The panel will be myself, Dave Bisceglia, co-founder of the mobile gaming company, The Tap Lab, and Phu Nguyen, who leads Romotive’s software team to create new experiences with robots that harness the power and extensibility of the smart phone, and Adam Wilson, co-founder and chief software architect, Orbotix – the makers of Sphero, the world’s first robotic ball gaming system.
Our panel will look at how our actual lives and everyday stuff are becoming the most interesting platform for games. We’ll discuss, from different perspectives, the ways games are shaping our experience of a new blended digital subjective/object space. Portables, wearables, and connected stuff mean bits and networks are everywhere we go, giving us the possibility of a new deep awareness of our personal state. As Will Wright says, “we are at a turning point for mobile gaming, a shift for games from being about simulating reality to being about parsing reality.” Sensors everywhere and advances like bluetooth smart are turning everyday objects into an opportunity for play. The future of our playful sociality is “toys” that are a customization of our interactions with the actual world and everyday life. We will explore how games, robots, and playful experiences are the key to making our new habitat of digital/physical complexity more accessible and fun.
Questions we’ll discuss will include:
What are the specific experiences of panel members in rising to this challenge?
The iphone and ipad are becoming the narrative and play control center for connected stuff. Desktop, files, folders, trashcans and lists were key metaphors that made the PC the master control center for sharing of information. What are the new metaphors for a Game OS for everyday life and connected stuff?
How is next generation connectivity like bluetooth smart going to change our attitudes to the playful potentials of toys and physical stuff? We’ll show some examples of what’s out there today and what’s coming soon.
What can simulation games teach us about the challenges of parsing reality and making it more playful and interesting? We’ll explore how this new paradigm has transformed game design while introducing new game mechanics along with interesting technical challenges.
What are the challenges for startups wanting to make apps / products for a connected playful digital/physical world? Our panelists have all experienced this first-hand and will share their stories as well as answer questions from the crowd.
ARE2012 is being live streamed this year, and the wrap up fire side chat between Bruce Sterling and Daniel Suarez and a surprise stupid fun grand finale is still to come. We have a live stream this year so you can see for yourself! Also you can catch up on any sessions you have missed, including the video of my talk, Augmented Awareness and Reality Games. My slides are here and my speaker notes are below, enjoy!
1. Hi my name is Tish Shute. Currently I am working with Will Wright and Stupid Fun Club on a new genre of personally aware mobile games that move away fromt he idea that games are a way to escape reality. If you want to know more about what I mean by Reality Architect please feel free to look up my TEDXSilicon Alley talk “On Becoming a Reality Architect..” .
2. As Will puts it, “games are getting more and more personal to the point that our actual lives are becoming the most interesting gaming platform.” Personally Aware Games, Life Based Gaming or Integrated Games are expressions that are just beginning to emerge to describe this idea that our lives are the most interesting gaming platform.
3. Will Wright’s talk at Where 2012 is a must see. He pointed too a turning point for mobile gaming.- a shift for games from being about simulating reality to being about parsing reality.
4. The ghosts of AR past. Bruce Sterling at ARE2010 mentioned that AR eyewear was haunted by the spectre of ARs Gothic Stepsister – virtual reality, and Jesse Schell probed on the other hand AR’s aspirations as the ubiquitous all seeing data eye– the man with the x-ray eyes.. As Jesse put it, “You guys are going to put it together…and then everybody is going to be like, oh my god we are freaking naked, all this information about me is out there…I had security through obscurity, but not anymore…”
5. Yes, it seems we have put it all together. Although the ubiquitous all seeing data eye – our x ray eyes have turned out to be carried around in our pockets or integrated into our clothes and eyewear is not yet ubiquitous, at least yet. But, for the moment, we are looking at the most intimate aspects of ours lives only as an opportunity for optimization and efficiency, (but there are some interesting apps/products emerging – try out the Heart Rate app – if you hold your finger up against the camera an you will get a pretty accurate reading). But as the explorations of makers, hackers and self trackers move out into consumer culture the quantified self is ripe for new forms of expression http://www.electricfoxy.com/projects/modwells/The term “gamification” has been worn out already . We sense its shallow inadequacy. So what’s next?
6. There is barely a trace of AR’s Gothic stepsister VR in the Google glasses pitch which is super simple and seems to be aimed at optimizing Pinterest like social shopping experiences, by taking photos and videos from your direct eye-line and disseminating them through Google+ No mentions of mapping, tracking and registration or how they are working the hands free part yet – all I’ve seen for input is nods so far. Is eye movement tracking up next – or what? Thrun was pretty down on the AR ghosts – the man with the x ray eyes stuff (I’m already feeling nostalgic for classic AR!). But seeing with shared eyes is what makes AR technology super interesting as Jesse Schell pointed out at ARE2010, “The internet allowed us to think with shared memory…Augmented Reality will allow us to see with shared eyes,” Jesse Schell ARE2012. Applying our design chops to this possibility space seems like a pretty good project to me. Bruce has always said that AR should be more about creating experiences than the technology.
7. And we do need new forms of expression in our digital culture where technologies of seeing are primarily technologies of watching used for power and control.
8. If you haven’t already drunk at the New Aesthetic fountain you have some googling to do after this session – start with James Bridle’s Tumblr and Bruce Sterling’s essay http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/ perhaps. James Bridle might have already closed the New Aesthetic tumblr but this collection of images is a provocation to explore the possibilities of feedback loops between people and machines – a reflexive augmented awareness where we play with modes of digital seeing. I think AR and digital seeing is in need of a New Aesthetic more than most technologies because augmentation implies that we have an idea of what is aesthetically valid at a given time and place, and that we have a position re the difference between augmented and degraded reality, and machinomorphic and anthropomorphic modes of perception. Howie Woo’s “in yo face facial recognition” project (pic in my opening slide too), uses crochet + cunning to transform facial recognition into a reality game.
9. Reality Games can give us new opportunities to explore the free play in the systems of our lives. AyseBirsel, a friend and brilliant designer from New York City has being showing people, in a series of innovative workshops, how to bring powerful design tools to their lives, to design not necessarily a better life but at least an original life, beginning with a method of deconstruction,reconstruction, and visualization. The goal of an original life rather than an optimized more efficient life challenges AR and reality game designers to explore the possibility space of our lives.
10. We are already parsing our lives through powerful digital filters. Four Square has shown us the power of the fundamental change to maps that has at it’s center the notion that “you are here”. See Adam Greenfield’s Where 2012 talk for a deeper understanding of the significance of this change to mapping. While location is a powerful filter to parse what Will call’s the GPS “global possibility space” of our lives, it is not the only one.http://dornob.com/you-are-here-3-real-life-works-of-digital-map-inspired-art/
11. Time is another a powerful filter for our lives and games. Jonathan Blow’s Braid explores how time can be manipulated in different game worlds.
12. Cosplay (or costume role playing) is different from earlier incarnations of say renaissance fairs or civil war reenactments in its integration into the present. In Tokyo a commuting hub turns into a cosplay mecca every Sunday and as AT Wilson puts it “turns a non-place to a place.”
13. “[TimeHop] sends users a daily e-mail reminder of what they did a year ago, and it does so by retracing the subscriber’s digital footsteps Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.”http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/fashion/timehop-a-new-online-service-tells-you-what-you-were-doing-a-year-ago.html
14. Reality Games have of course predated a machine readable world. This book on Cold Reading by Ian Rowland parses the rules of the game that enables “psychics” and “fortune tellers” to deploy techniques that border on actual mind reading. http://www.thecoldreadingbook.com/Life’s players – “pick up artists” & “psychics” and “con-artists” are master gamers of the intimate social dynamics of life but NLP and semantic tech are bringing digital seeing to the kind of intimate social dynamics that are the domain of cold reading.
15. Status games are a core dynamic of life. The great ethnologist Erving Goffman, devoted his career to analyzing the face-to face relations of everyday life. Goffman, described everyday social life as a strategic game that could be understood through the metaphors of the stage.- front stage and back stage. But, as we parse reality, digital hierarchies and the abstractions of data viz begin to control the information flow and create a new stage for status games that demand a a different kind of awareness of what is back stage and what is front stage in social lives.
16. We are entering a new era of social intelligence where people and algorithms are interacting in interesting new ways. OKCupid has been getting a lot of attention for offering social intelligence that can help us play better in our dating lives. Did you know your profile narratives can reveal whether you like rough or gentle sex?
17. We are also beginning to see an interesting New Aesthetic for Artificial Intelligence -the expressive interaction between algorithms and people. SIRI, for example, is no cold reader, but she does have has a more developed character than Google voice.
Jeff Kramer has an excellent post on Weavrs – personality based social – web robots. I like weavrs a lot because they are out on there at the edge with there exploration of the expressive power of bots. Bots shape our algorithmic world from call centers to Wall street but we have barely began to explore their expressive potential .
Weavrs exist on their own. You can ask them questions, but you can’t tell them for example ‘I like this, post more like this. Weavrs are social web bots that evolve and grow without your direct hand guiding them. But as Jeff Kramer in his interesting post on Reality Augmented notes,
“it’s also obvious that having more full featured persona creation/control options is going to be a big part of the future of social bots too.”
18. The eruption of the digital into the physical is a catch phrase for The New Aesthetic. And RjDj’s Dimensions app and awesome Inception app, I think are exemplary explorations of new aesthetic dimensions for Sonic AR. The dimensions app pulls data from your surroundings — including movement, time of day and microphone input — to give you a very personal experience that adjusts to and transforms your environment and actions.
19. Imrov practitioners are early explorers of Reality Games. The Life Game is one of Keith Johnstone’s projects and his books on Improv have been a great source of inspiration for RPG players and game designers. A CMU student visiting Stupid Fun Club once asked Will what he should do to be a better game designer and Will said study Improv!
Will Wright’s talk at Where 2012 is brilliant. It elucidates a turning point for mobile gaming.
Will describes an important shift:
gaming has primarily up to this point been about simulating parts of reality, now I think it’s moving toward the idea that maybe we can start parsing actual reality, and incorporating that into our play experiences.
He unfolds a vision for a new genre of personally aware mobile games that move away from a “presumption that reality sucks and we want to get away from it.”
I’m super excited to be working with Will Wright and Stupid Fun Club to create a new genre of mobile experiences that express this vision.
Will notes:
as a designer nowadays, I don’t feel like there’s any meaningful limitation that I have. The amount of technology that used to be applied to NORAD, tracking incoming missiles, is basically now in my pocket, helping me find frappuccinos. Actually quite a bit more technology than NORAD had back then.
It is a rich, dense talk so enjoy the video and explore the CaptionBox too!
I have been too busy to blog much lately, but there is a lot to unpack in future posts in my quote in Michael’s SXSW post!
“Really we’ve entered a new era where the world has become a platform for storytelling and the goal is to turn everyday life into an opportunity for play, relatedness, and new forms of autonomy and fun. We’ve now come to a point where software has moved out of the computer and into the world. Rather than viewing this process in terms we’ve already grown out of, like gamification, we view this as an opportunity to explore everyday activities as possibility spaces.”
For the complete post, including Peter Swearengen of Stupid Fun Club on StoryMaker, see here http://sxsw.com/node/9969
1) Like most of us I wear a lot of hats. And I frequently work under a designer title. But recently someone said to me, “So you’re a Reality Architect.” I found the suggestion intriguing in part because I have been thinking about what it means to have agency in the algorithmic landscapes of the future that Kevin Slavin describes in his awesome TED talk, How Algorithms Shape the World. And, Reality Architect, if it implies anything, it implies a lot of agency and that is very appealing. But what does a “A Reality Architect do?”
2) When a very brilliant friend came up with this tag line for me, Tish Shute, Reality Architect, “She puts the reality back in Augmented Reality,” I began to become quite enchanted with the idea.
3) My career began with motion control photography creating visual effects for film and television. The Motion Control era which includes Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Terminator, Star Trek, 2010, brought us many of the early design fictions for augmented reality.
4) With the arrival of smart phones I focused on the mobile local experience and making AR a reality. I co-founded Augmented Reality Event and ARWave – a completely open federated, realtime updating system for geolocated data of any sort.
5) But the AR dream has a dark side. This is a still from Keichi Matsuda’s great dystopic vision of AR’s future. Kevin Slavin pointed out in his talk, Reality is Plenty Thanks, that AR as visual layers over reality can obscure what is best about reality rather than enhancing it.
6) Recently I have been exploring what it means to make reality more interesting. Meet Gatsby is a location aware networking startup that I love. Gatsby orchestrates small world moments and creates contextually aware opportunities and serendipity in real life.
7) But we already have experts at making reality more interesting they are called Reality Stars. And when I say I want to make reality more interesting, I have no ambitions to be a reality star. Technology and Story telling are my passions.
8) OKCupid is a startup that has been making reality more interesting and solving dating problems with a combination of data, math and story telling.
9) We are entering a new area of social intelligence where people and algorithms are interacting in interesting new ways. OKCupid has been getting a lot of attention for offering social intelligence that can help us play better in our dating lives. And by connecting social graph, interest graph and location Meet Gatsby hopes to creates new opportunities in our daily activities beyond dating.
10) The combination of math, data and story telling is also a key to a new era of corporate intelligence. Quid works with Government and big corporations, “augmenting our ability to perceive this complex world,” to help them make better decisions on big questions in a complex world.
11) Sean Gurley of Quid at Strata NY described understanding complexity as a dimensionality problem. And, where the dimensionality reduction powers of Math meet the human powers of visualization and story telling powers of people is where insight arises. This is where I think, perhaps, the work of a reality architect emerges. An alternate title for a Reality Architect might be a Data Story Teller?
12) There is also a new space of personal intelligence emerging. Quantified Self, Self Tracking and Start Ups like, MyMee – that transforms “symptoms into empowering data,” are giving us new tools to understand ourselves and unravel pressing problems like allergies that frequently leave Drs drawing a blank.
13) Moodscope adds the power of sharing and benchmarking to the personal intelligence equation. “Lift your mood with a little help from your friends?
14) I am beginning to realize I know a lot of Reality Architects. Brian Krejcarek from Green Goose is designing simple fun sensors that turn everyday things into opportunities to play and give us new ways to play life together and be happier people.
15) There is also an interesting community of practice emerging around Habit Design, Nick Crocker demonstrates in, Floss the Teeth You Want to Keep, that there are a bunch of little hacks that exist to improve your ability to change.
16) The wonderful designer Asye Birsel through her project Design the Life You Love (the illustration above is one I did from her recipe) is teaching us organizing your life is not unlike other design problems. If you can visualize it you can change it.
17) With everyone carrying a powerful sensor device in their pockets, the World is Now a Platform for Story Telling. HipGeo keeps track of your movements and then spits out a slick, animated travel diary. Narrative Science is a company that among other things can turn excel spread sheets into compelling stories for executives.
18) But to return to design fictions again. One thing interesting about the HUDs in Iron Man is the emphasis on dialogue, and the sentient portion of the HUD as a character. The Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence is increasingly directed at the interaction between algorithms and people. SIRI, for example, has a more highly developed character than Google voice. So the Aesthetics of AI is something I think aspiring Reality Architects might want to be think about and will probably play a significant role in future job descriptions and job titles we are yet to think of.
19) There is lots more I could say particularly about the importance of agency and putting people at the center of their data – please check out The Locker Project. But here are some thoughts on what I hope Reality Architects will do.
Create tools (not just maps and visualizations) to make reality more reliable, more constructable, and more useable.
20) Build technology that helps us live extraordinary lives. Situationist is an app that “injects our present lives with the unexpected.”
21) Create more opportunities, for serendipity, and fun in our daily lives. And last, but not least, never forget the potential of the phone toss!
Thank you @chrisgrayson and @kellyhadous for organizing TEDXSiliconAlley – great work!
I’m really looking forward to the O’Reilly Strata events that are coming to NYC in a couple of weeks. I’m fascinated to see where the art, science, and business of data has gone since February, when I attended the first Strata Conference in Santa Clara – a sold out event imbued with an awareness that this was an important gathering of cognoscenti working on the next big thing.
Strata in New York City is a sequence of events, Strata JumpStart, Sept. 19th, and then The Strata Summit, “The Business of Data,” Sept. 20th & 21st, and followed by the Strata Conference, “Making Data Work,” Sept. 22nd, 23rd.
Below is a transcript of a conversation I had last Friday with Strata Program Chair, Edd Dumbill about some of the highlights of the schedule from my perspective. However, I highly recommend taking a good look at all that is planned through the three events because there is a depth and breadth that could not be covered in one conversation.
The video opening this post is from visual.ly.com – a start-up making it easier for people to create, explore, share, and promote data visualizations and infographics.
Talking with Edd Dumbill
Tish Shute: It seems a dialogue between the art of data and the science of data is going to be center stage at Strata NYC, and there will be much discussion about story telling with data.
Is that observation correct or is there something else going on there?
Edd Dumbill: No, I think that’s a great characterization. For the Summit, the core realization for me has been that when you have these tools for getting value from data and when you can drive what you’re doing by data, then actually, the biggest consequences are human ones, and they are organizational ones, and they are strategic ones once you have the technology in place.
So what the summit is doing is really looking at how, in a variety of industries, governments, and within disciplines within those, how the amount of data, the ease of which it can be communicated and mined is changing the way industry is shaped.
Tish Shute: Also, I noticed that the Strata Summit Schedule (Sept 20th & 21st), and even through to the Strata Conference (Sept 22nd & 23rd), has more of an emphasis on pop culture; sports – baseball, dating – OKCupid, and Narrative Science, all have a place on the schedule, for example?
Is this the culture of New York City being reflected – interests in media and marketing, or is there something else going on? Has the data tool stack matured since the Strata Conference in Silicon Valley at beginning of the year?
Edd Dumbill: Yes, there’s certainly a different flavor to the event because we’re in New York. And, yes, the tool stack has matured, but it is, by no means mature, and the maturity’s only coming at the lowest level.
I think there’s many years left in maturing the tool stack. But one of the beauties of big data is that once you have the data together, the algorithms to get value from it initially are pretty simple.
So, focusing on the stories of success of being data driven, particularly in the Summit, is important to us because the two questions people are asking are, “One, I’ve got data. Two, What do I do with it?” We don’t need to make the argument that data is important anymore. But we do need to demonstrate what you can do with it.
The data isn’t necessarily big; it’s just there. It’s about having an analytical approach to your business that compliments your intuition, and compliments your vision.
“One of the most powerful ways of presenting data to people is in a story,” Edd Dumbill
Tish Shute: Yes I can see the emphasis in the schedule on how to tell meaningful stories with data. Narrative Science seem to be doing something very interesting re turning data into stories?
Edd Dumbill: Yes. They absolutely fascinate me with what they do. There’s this kind of hierarchy and sort of chain of needs right now where business is going, “We need data scientists. Find me data scientists. Train me data scientists. Hire me data scientists.” And the data scientists are all going, “I need visualization. I’ve got this data, I now need to turn it back into a story that’s going to be useful to people or provide interfaces that are going to help people understand and explore this,” because it doesn’t scale to have to have an interpreter all the time between the data and the results.
You need to be able to present it in a way that means something to people.
People can look at a graph and get many things out of it, maybe not even get anything at all out of it if they are not used to it. But particularly for digesting certain kinds of high-level summaries and results, if you can put the data back into prose, it makes it very accessible to people.
Tish Shute: Natural Language Generation from data really opens up so many possibilities..
Edd Dumbill: Yes, it’s interesting. I think it’s a very novel use. A lot of people would consider that the end result of their data was a spreadsheet or a graph that they are processing.
But if you turn that back into a story, I think there’s a lot of potential of helping executives understand what’s going on. It makes it possible to use language to understand the results.
Tish Shute: I am really excited to see the emphasis on stories, data design and visualization, and the way we experience data is as much part of The Strata Summit and The Strata Conference as some of the more hardcore big data challenges and analytics stuff.
Edd Dumbill: Yes. We are definitely ramping up on visualization. And I think that’s going to become more important. Having a fundamental grasp of how to use graphics and charts is still incredibly core to what we’re saying. But I’m also interested in ways that go beyond, because at least 50% of the point of visualization is to help people understand the dynamics of the data, to really augment their senses with the results of the computation.
You know, the people who are some of our best leaders, the ones who know how to ask the right questions of the data, have a sort of indefinable fingertip feel that you get for numbers when you live around them for a while. And anything we can do with interfaces to accelerate this is going to be very beneficial, whether it comes to being visual and flying through the data or hearing it in natural language.
Tish Shute: Have I missed anything in that in terms of what you’ve got on the schedule re visualization? VisualizingData.com published an ideal schedule from the visualizing data perspective. But have you added anything recently?
Edd Dumbill: Well, there’s one event which isn’t actually listed on the schedule yet, which is on Tuesday night. There’s a venue called EyeBeam in New York; we’re having a visualization showcase that evening. So there will be stuff to walk around and then a few talks, really from some of the most interesting companies doing viz and viz approaches. So that’s not up on the schedule yet, but that will be in addition. It gives a nice focus on Tuesday night.
Tish Shute: Oh, that’s super awesome. I’ll definitely go to that.
Tish Shute: I am very interested in mobile social communications and augmented reality – especially augmented reality that feels different, not just looks different, as Kevin Slavin puts it.
Edd Dumbill: Yes, absolutely. That is where we view this as going. I will be incredibly depressed if I’m still looking at the world through a glowing rectangle in 10 years time.
Tish Shute: Yes, it would be! I am looking forward to see the new data start ups too.
Edd Dumbill: Yes, there are a variety of interesting startups, that I feel are particularly important in the data space. Media Sift and Data Sift, for example, Data Sift is doing a lot of real time processing on the Twitter fire hose. They provide real time analytics on Twitter, which I think is very important.
Tish Shute: In terms of using data to provision mobile experiences, real time is massively important, isn’t it?
Edd Dumbill: Absolutely. Yes.
Tish Shute: But real time data is still a big challenge, isn’t it?
Edd Dumbill: Yes. I mean right now, our focus on real time is probably at the technology level. Looking at real time, people are kind of building out the frameworks, companies like Media Sift and Data Sift creating parts of the experience.
And yes, our Where 2.0 conference will be focused more on the mobile experience.
Tish Shute: Re mobile experiences, I am very excited about Infochimps and their new geo APIs, and sensor data is becoming such a big part of the picture now too. But the Kinect has also opened up a whole set of possibilities for the future of sensor data!
Edd Dumbill: Yeah. I still think Kinect is probably one of the most exciting things going down because of the democratization of that kind of capability. Interesting things happen when the sensors become cheap, right?
When alongside a little camera in your iPad you have a Kinect sensor equivalent. That’s become extremely interesting because everybody has it with them and can do things based off it.
So the things that always fascinate me are when it becomes cheap and hackable.
Tish Shute: And if Kinect went mobile, that would be exciting?
Edd Dumbill: I think it’s entirely likely in the next couple years, yes.
The more sensors we can start instrumenting our mobile and personal devices with, I think it’s going to always result in some much more novel uses that we ever dreamed of.
Tish Shute: There was a lot of hoo-ha about Color when they launched this year. They were unable to capture a user base, but if they had issues of privacy might have come to the fore because they were really collecting more sensor data than any other app, right?
We are still waiting to see a breakthrough app in that area in terms of using all the phone sensors in ways that will really enhance a user experience rather than just the aims of data mining, aren’t we?
Edd Dumbill: Yes. I think this is one of the things where, in parallel, we’re really learning out the social and privacy implications of this kind of technology. It seems to me the focus has shifted from the tech in the second half of the year too. Frankly, everybody getting kind of freaked out about the amount of data that’s being mined and, you know, what’s acceptable use for that.
But on a slightly more prosaic level, there are some rather fabulous things being done. If you look at the Google Maps navigation experience on an Android phone. For instance, there’s some very practical applications of sensors collecting data with traffic and a variety of other augmentations going in that to actually do something useful.
So maybe we’d like to think we carry our sixth sense around with us in our pocket, and maybe we will. But we certainly can in our car right now with all the automatic rerouting and so on. That’s slightly more prosaic, but I think a lot more significant in terms of a pattern of how that can be applied.
Tish Shute: One of the Startups that really excited me in February at Strata, Santa Clara was Singly and The Locker project. They are really thinking innovately in the area of putting people at the center of their data.
I am looking forward to seeing the fruition of that work. And, while I’m enjoying Google +, it seems, we are just sort of holding up our hands and saying, “Well, there’s only one business model for data, and that is a centralized Fort Knox,” isn’t it? Or is there something that I’m missing?
Edd Dumbill: You’re right. I mean I think Google +, for instance, is rather the walled garden is a hedged garden. You know, there is a certain barrier there that I think is more about the fact that you need to put certain barriers up to actually create a decent user experience in the first place. I think user experience is one of the BIG problems with open data, and private data, to be honest.
There’s a reason we are not all writing PGP encrypted emails to each other, right? Because it’s so hard to make a UI for encryption that’s safe. Most people don’t use passwords properly. And I think a lot of the same user experience considerations come into this whole data thing.
Facebook can get away with anything they want to because have you ever tried using their privacy settings? Google, I think, more than anybody has tried to address this issue using sensible defaults, making the explanations clear. And they probably succeeded for a geek tech audience.
So I honestly think, probably, Locker’s biggest challenge, in that kind of approach, is definitely UI and giving the concept to the users so they can understand it.
But there’s certainly a very useful contribution to this conversation.
I think there are parallels in blogging, actually. There is a case where people have information they want to disseminate. And do you choose to do in on your own website, set everything up, publish for yourself, host for yourself, so you have complete control, or do you cede, for convenience, control to Blogger or Tumbler, knowing that you are being monetized somehow and that you’re playing in somebody else’s walled garden and don’t have that control?
So I haven’t really expanded that thought too much, but I think there’s something there in following that along and seeing where that actually leads.
But, you know, there is a whole technical challenge as well.
I really like the idea of being able to give permission to people. Being able to say, well, “I’m engaging you to do X,Y,Z in return for such and such. That seems like a good bargain to me. Giving up my data is a decent bargain for the services I’m getting back.” I mean that’s generally the contract we make in real life with people anyway.
That’s another thing re Google+, –why it’s a promising approach. At least in their rhetoric, they’re trying to say, well, “We’re trying to model this on the real life economy, the economy of real life interactions.”
Tish Shute: Yes. Any movement towards saying, well, “I’m not just collecting your data randomly, I’m collecting this data because I want to give something back to you that will enhance your interactions,” definitely feels like an improvement, doesn’t it?
Edd Dumbill: Yes. I think that bargain is clear. I’m just fascinated by who could be trusted and… I do actually wonder if there will be some kind of, rather than necessarily everything being decentralized like Lockers suggests, there might be an idea of a variety of inter-operating, trusted identity brokers. People who we would actually trust. Banks, right? We do that right now. Banks are pretty much our identity brokers. Who knows?
Tish Shute: I think, that is where the Locker project’s going with Singly, isn’t? Isn’t Singly the trusted broker for the Lockers, right?
Edd Dumbill: Yes. Now the question is whether you trust a startup with that or whether you’re going to trust… I mean, who knows? Trust levels are at such all-time lows with everybody right now. People in America won’t trust the government. I think Google are probably one of the most trusted brokers out there online.
Tish Shute: Perhaps, that’s interesting, isn’t it?
Edd Dumbill: I did write a piece, which kind of speculated that Google may become some sort of center brokering of social information and kind of a platform.
But back to the Strata schedule! I notice you have DePodesta doing the Moneyball talk, right? What’s the 2011 twist on Moneyball?
Edd Dumbill: I think the twist on that is that the’re a lot more people can play now, really, which is why we’re having Strata in the first place. That 10 years ago the people doing this kind of stuff are McDonalds and Walmart and sports teams. Everybody, where there was large money, they could afford to gather the data. Maybe they could try this service out in making decisions based on it.
Well, we’re now in a very instrumented society where every business, every person has instrumented data about their interactions. I think the kind of resistance and dynamics and opinions that Moneyball brought up are the ones that people are going to be facing again right now as they seek to be more data-driven in what they’re doing.
It’s also very interesting to know 10 years on, what do you think? You’ve had 10 years of this, of sort of sabermetrics and so on. Have you matured in your view, have you softened?
What I’m endlessly and ultimately fascinated by is, where does this fit in the decision process and in the organization tree? Where does it mesh with vision?
Steve Jobs achieved it perfectly. He had vision and all kinds of things for his products. But Apple succeeded through a relentless operational efficiency. Absolutely relentless in their suppliers, their supply train, their manufacturing lines down to their detail. They are an utterly data-driven, process-driven organization at the same time as melding that with vision, design values and good quality. That’s a case where it worked together.
I’m eager to try and tease it out, figure out how that really works and how those things come together.
Tish Shute: And that’s another thread I see being explored at Strata, NYC. It’s not human versus machine or machine trumps human, but it’s human with machine. This is another theme, isn’t it?
Edd Dumbill: Exactly. We all operate by feedback loops. Really, what machines are doing enables us to get better quality data and in a tighter feedback loop.
Tish Shute: One feedback loop that we’re finding machines very useful for is understanding how we feel. I think that’s really interesting.
Tish Shute: Yes! But the thing is we don’t understand ourselves in isolation, do we? I am definitely going to attend the session by Sean Gourley, CTO of Quid, on semantic clustering analysis. It seems like sentiment analysis is going big-time now, isn’t it?
Edd Dumbill: Yes. I mean, sentiment analysis is actually becoming a checkbox feature in databases now. The latest release of Greenplum has it built it. It’s that kind of level of feature that people want as social data is so important. Of course a lot of this is being driven by marketing and advertising.
Tish Shute: Yes but even re marketing data story telling has been taking some interesting and quirky turns hasn’t it?
Edd Dumbill: Yes, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of interesting research ahead of us there as well.
Tish Shute:OkCupid is a very interesting example of data story telling that leverages our desire to know ourselves, and ourselves in relation to others. .
Edd Dumbill: Yes. I mean they’re an example of a shift that’s happening in the PR industry, actually, which is companies understanding that telling marketing stories with data is very, very compelling. OkCupid really used that to hit well above their weight. Of course they got acquired as a direct result of that and their profile.
Tish Shute: I know OKCupid got acquired by Match.com, but you were saying they hit above their weight by using this analysis? How did that work?
Edd Dumbill: I think a lot of it’s down to their blog. That they analyze these things, publish them on their blog. It got a lot of attention, generated a lot of media stories, which brought them to Match.com’s attention. There’re millions of – well a large number of dating sites. But they differentiated themselves through the smart use of their data.
Tish Shute: Data and Games is an area I am very interested in. Zynga changed the game with game analytics and social games. And now we are seeing Rovio partner with Medio for analytics,(see Green pigs and data). But I noticed that you don’t have games as a strong theme on the schedule?
Edd Dumbill: I think you’ll see more of that on the West Coast to be honest. It’s not that we’re not interested. I just feel that the center of gravity to that topic is probably back on the West at the moment.
Tish Shute: So what’s after Zynga in terms of game analytics? A nice easy question!
Edd Dumbill: Sure. Let me predict the future for you.
Tish Shute: Yes please do!
Edd Dumbill: I don’t know, to be honest. One of the very interesting things about games is that it helps us understand the real world by modeling and playing around. I’m highly fascinated to see some more of those things played out through real life actors. There’s been some examples right out of Scavngr and whatnot. But if any of those techniques can really start to make a way into mobile technology, that’s one interesting thing.
What lessons can we take from what we’ve actually learned in game analytics that are reproducible and useful elsewhere?
Gamification is a bit of a trend right now. I am slightly skeptical… But I am fascinated by a lot of systems that are having these game elements added to them. And so the second question is, if you’re having games added to things, like losing weight or saving money or writing a book, I’ve seen that too, what can you apply from the analytics world on top of that, and learn about systems and tweak them?
I don’t have that good of an answer for you. How my game is, is not steeped in that. But I am aware that there’s probably a lot of progress in games that has yet to be applied anywhere else.
Zynga and whatnot, is kind of a space race, isn’t it, to monetize that. Space races generate technologies that can be applied in a variety of places.
What are the spinouts of game analytics that we can actually use elsewhere?
“These Bloom Instruments aren’t merely games or graphics. They’re new ways of seeing what’s important.”
Cartagr.am by Bloom
Tish Shute: Last February, at Strata, I was very struck by the new work by Ben Cerveny and Bloom on “pop cultural instruments for data expression” (also seeBen Cerveny’s talk at ARE2011).
Edd Dumbill: Yeah. I love every time the visualization comes onto a tablet….there’s an interesting back channel there.
And Google has done this in extreme to add to their great advantage. There’s a potential when you read an E-book, or you interact with the visualization of a tablet, that it can learn from your interactions.
If you read an E-book, and the book is instrumented and sends stuff back, then the book can read you at the same time that you’re reading it. That kind of collective intelligence can then be harnessed.
So what if Bloom’s pop culture visualizations are instrumented so that they know how people are using it? Well what can they learn about that? About either the quality of the visualization, about what’s interesting to data and back at the same time?
This is what the fundamental principles I think even of Web 2.0 and definitely in this era of big data that we’re in, is that the secondary signals, the exhaust from any electronic product, can be incredibly valuable.
We know that every time you run Google you are probably a part of at least one experiment that they are running to determine an optimal, and optimize their product through that. And how can you turn this up to generalize that out?
Tish Shute: I agree. This is at the core of the art, science and business of data. I hear your phone ringing, but do I have time for one more quick question?
Edd Dumbill: Oh yes.
Tish Shute: So it sort of follows on from my previous question. The relationship between the crowd sourced intelligence and machine intelligence has played a huge role in making data work and solve real world problems – Crowd Flower, for example.
Where are we at now with this relationship between crowdsourcing power of, for example, Crowd Flower and Mechanical Turk when combined with machine intelligence. Is there anything new going on here?
Edd Dumbill: What we’re actually starting to do is learn where to apply these tools. We’re reaching a point of understanding what crowd-sourcing is for, how to better design crowd-source tasks and so on in innovative uses.
One of the things I am particularly excited about is Natala Menezes who was at Amazon working on Mechanical Turk, she’s now moved to a company called GigWalk, which is a Turk platform that’s mobile.
