Early in 2005 I drafted a project together with the Oslo School of Architecture & Design that was designed to look at Near Field Communication (NFC) with an interaction design and user-centred perspective. In December 2005 the project was funded in full by the Research Council of Norway. So since March 2006 we have been setting up the project and conducting preliminary exploratory research work. You can see our ongoing process on the project weblog (and pick up the RSS feed too).
A year ago, Even and I played around for an afternoon with ARtoolkit, an open-source application for handling Augmented Reality objects: physical markings that when processed through a video camera can be augmented with 3D digital objects.
I’m really not a fan of the goggle/glasses/helmet variety of AR, where the user wears something in front of their eyes that superimposes 3D objects into the physical world. In my experience this has been slow, inaccurate, cumbersome, headache inducing, the worst of VR plus a lot more problems. But AR is really interesting when it’s just a screen and a video feed, it becomes somehow magical: to see the same space represented twice: once in front of you, and once on screen with magical objects. I can imagine this working really well on mobile phones: the phone screen as magic lens to secret things.
On that afternoon we didn’t have a printer handy for making the AR marks, so we took to drafting them by hand, stencilling them off the screen with a pencil and inking them in. This hand-crafted process led to all sorts of interesting connections between the possibilities of craft and digital information.
We had lots of ideas about printing the markers on clothes, painting them on nails, glazing them into ceramics, etc. We confused ARtoolkit by drawing markers in perspective, and tried to get recursive objects by using screen based markers and video feedback.
Now as it turns out there is an entire research programme dedicated to looking at just this topic. Variable Environment is a research programme involving partners like ECAL and EPFL. The great thing is that they are blogging the entire exploratory (they call it ‘sketch’) phase and curating the results online. The work is multi-disciplinary and involves architects, visual designers, computer scientists, interaction designers, etc. Check out the simple AR ready products, sample applications and mixed reality tests with various patterns.
This seems to be part of a shift in the research community, to publishing ongoing and exploratory work online (championed by the likes of Nicolas Nova and Anne Galloway). Very inspirational.
I’m collecting images from around the world depicting ‘you are here’ marks or ideo locators at Flickr. I’m fascinated by this mapping in context, in particular the relationship to local physical space. This is mapping with a a point of view, and maps as direct interface to the world. The best example to date is from Seoul, where 3D cross sections of a metro station are directly related to the point at which you are looking at the map.
Timo Arnall is a designer working with interactive products and media. Timo leads an international research project on mobile technology, collaborates on interaction design work and lectures in design, physical computing and design methodology. More...
