Christian Renaud's Weblog

Functional 'Augmented Reality'?

Call it Augmented Reality, rev 1.

Now I know there have been experimental augmented reality platforms before.  The MIThril platform at the MIT Media lab was the foundation for a number of technology breakthroughs that my old team at Cisco sponsored over the years in the hopes of making 'presence' relevant in day-to-day interactions.  MIThril was the stereotype of augmented reality systems (AR), heads up display, location information, and so on.  Inevitably, the standard example for AR seems to focus on where you are how to get to restaurants your friends recommend (unless you are doing component assembly, at which point you receive 'in line' documentation while assembling). 

I was thinking about this, in the context of Charlie Stross' excellent book Halting State and his 'copnet' that the law enforcement officials wear plugged into their transparent glasses, when my wife was configuring all the widgets and applications on the new version of software on our iPhones. I'd say that she was 90% there on the phone, minus the application crashes.

If you discount the heads up display (which would be slightly difficult, to say the least, to get widespread adoption with when you have states outlawing pedestrian tasks such as speaking on cellular telephones whilst driving or security guards hassling people for taking pictures within a shopping mall), then what does that leave you?  Location, presence, metadata and the social aspect.  Lets approach those one by one.

My old iPhone (1G) could triangulate from cellular towers to determine general location, whereas the new iPhone 3G has built in GPS that tracks your location (in greater detail than my in car navigation and comparable to my TomTom).  This data is now requested by about every application which requests permission to access your location to narrow results, such as local movie theaters or restaurant recommendations.

Presence is trickier.  When you have a battery-operated device, you need to periodically sleep the interface else you run low.  You also don't want to constantly be updating your telephone if you are busy or not, so this is an area that could use some implicit-application innovation, versus explicit-updates like the AIM app on iPhone.  Imagine if twitter auto-updated ('spimey!') with your location periodically with references to your prior notes on the location ("this place has great tofu!").

Metadata is probably one of the easiest aspects of AR currently instantiated on the iPhone.  By this I mean augmented information about some location or item that you are currently either searching for or looking at.  Is that a good or bad noodle house?  Is this book cheaper on Amazon than this bookstore?  What do the reviews say about this book?  That is metadata.  I use EverNote and love it, and love it even more now that there is a iPhone app for it.  It seems like an automatic memory aid.  In the event that the metadata I seek is outside of my Evernote domain, I have the entire web available to me from either a standard search interface or customized apps of every shape and color (wine suggestions, restaurant recommendations, and so on).  Yelp or UrbanSpoon + iPhone-with-location rocks.

Which brings us to social networking.  Yelp already incorporates your social group's input into restaurant reviews and the like.  As the tools progress and we are able to work around tagging and categorization issues a bit more, you can expect that movie theater time widget to also tell you that your three friends panned the movie you are looking for before you spend the $11.00 for the tickets.  Handy.

So, what is the difference between the traditional definitions of Augmented Reality and a handheld device that has, as we used to say in the Emergent Collaboration team at Cisco, "The three C's: Contacts, Content and Context"?  Probably just the heads-up-display, although I am sure some savvy Apple developer could make my newest vga goggles do a pretty good imitation if there wasn't a police officer somewhere around to ticket me.

The iPhone 3G experience, Iowa style

11:56am, pull into shopping mall parking lot

11:58am, walk into Apple Store, greeted by friendly concierge who takes my name and gives me his business card

12:02pm, referred to friendly store checkout guy Jim who politely walks me through all the nuances of my new phone (in stock, no problem) and the changes to the AT&T plan.  I sign my name on his handheld twice.

12:16pm, walking out of shopping mall (with lunch in hand) speaking to wife on new 16GB black iPhone 3G, service already transferred. 

Received two calls on the new phone on the way home.

Score = 10/10

Got home to find out that the new phone has 1.5 bars in my office, where the 1st Gen iPhone had no service. The new phone also imported all my data from the old phone, including the apps I had already purchased at the app store.  Sadly, the new phone doesn't use the same dock as old phone so I need to work out a way to pair it with my Apple BlueTooth headset.

As was the case last year, I waited two or three days post-launch to let the bugs get worked out on others.  Jim the affable sales associate told me that by the time he got back from lunch Friday, the registration system had been up and solid for him. 

I actually had to wait about an hour to renew my drivers license two weeks ago, because the flooding had taken out the two largest Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) centers here and everyone had to use the same location. People were speechless that they had to wait longer than 5 minutes.  In California, I used to bring a book with me to Mountain View to do any DMV business, and a snack, as it was an all-day affair.

Sometimes, living in a fly-over state works out to your advantage.

Blogging from the iPhone (again)

Once upon a time, I was blogging via my iPhone and Safari. The new TypePad app is INFINITELY easier to use.

Photo of my business partner Bob.

Speaking at Virtual Policy '08 London

The indefatigable Ren Reynolds is helping coordinate tVPN's Virtual Policy '08 conference in London, in conjunction with and hosted by the (British) Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) on the 22nd and 23rd of July.  I will be there speaking about the past/present/future of virtual worlds with an eye towards what government activity is needed (and not needed) to help accelerate the widespread adoption of virtual world technologies.

If you are in London in late July, please drop me an email and perhaps we can all get an informal roundtable together.

On a related note

In 2006, I took my family to London and Norway over the Summer holiday.  This morning, I broke the news to my girls that daddy had to go on a business trip to London for the conference.  Partial transcript follows:

Daddy:  It's in London girls, do you remember London from our vacation?
Emma (6): Yes, that's where the Queen lives!
Daddy: Yes Emma, that's right, the Queen.  The Queen called and wants daddy's help!
Emma:  What, to wash her floors?

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, it seems.

40, check!

Despite all of my best efforts, tomorrow I will be checking off another decade of life on the planet. And, as a result of my heightened awareness of the day, every book or magazine I pick up seems to have some article or another on what being 40 is all about.

One of the more amusing ones to me was the 'Happiness Across the Life Cycle: Exploring Age-Specific Preferences' by The European Centre, which reported that life satisfaction progresses along a U-shaped curve, bottoming out at....(drumroll).........40-49!  Luckily, the author also states that marriage plays a big role in life satisfaction, and I am very happily married, so I have that going for me.

Another completely unrelated 'Big four-oh' reference is buried somewhere deep in my shelves of books on Julius Caesar in my library.  There is an apocryphal story about Caesar celebrating his fortieth birthday and being downhearted in comparing himself at 40 to Alexander the Great and everything that Alexander had accomplished by his early-thirties.  Now, Caesar had already been a Praetor by 35 (so, presumably, he'd throw off some appropriate bon mot like 'de minimis non curat praetor'), and was crowned Imperator shortly after his 40th birthday, so he couldn't have been all that downhearted.

So, like Caesar, I'll endeavor to make life after 40 is just as eventful as the first 40 years were.  As the author Walter Pitkin wrote in the 1930s...."Life Begins at Forty".

SRIC-BI Friday & Metanomics Monday

Shame on me!  I am so accustomed to having a large firm behind me with a public relations and marketing team that I am still forgetful to do my own shameless self promotion.  :-)

On Friday, I participated with David Wortley of the Coventry Serious Games Institute, Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red, and Nick Wilson of Clever Zebra on a panel for SRIC-BI in Menlo Park, in Second Life.  We walked through the current state of Virtual World technology and future prognostications, and we were (mostly) in violent agreement about where things are and where they are headed.  I believe Nick put up some notes over at his blog regarding the questions, and hopefully Eilif Trondsen at SRIC-BI will post the transcript or mp3 of the event.

Tomorrow, Monday, I will be speaking with my friend Robert Bloomfield on his Metanomics program in Second Life at 11a Noon PDT (I refuse to say 'SLT', its seems like some childish affectation like calling your friends by their Warcraft names in the pub).  Robert is setting me up for some smacking around in his promotion of the event, as he quoted one of my prognosticating posts saying that Second Life and it's closed ilk will fade into the sunset in the promotion of the event.  So, tomorrow I get to walk into a room of Second Lifers and explain that sentiment.

Be sure to drop by for what promises to be an entertaining time.  I will have to make sure my blood sugar and green tea are well balanced before wading on in.

On a related note, I have had the distinct pleasure to work with Aliza Sherman/Cybergrrl Oh again in preparing the lead-in to the Metanomics event, as she aggregated some professional background on me as context.  I don't know exactly how that will play out but she already has incriminating photos of me in flip flops in an early mail-room job, so it can only go uphill from there.

I'll look around to see if anyone captured the output of the SRI event, and I'll make notes of the Metanomics conversation tomorrow as well on the blog for those who cannot attend.  (Update- the Metanomics text/audio/video transcript of the event is here.)

Time for a change

"We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In October 1996, I moved from a very comfortable and sunny Southern California bachelor lifestyle to cold and dreary San Jose to work with Cisco.  In the nearly 12 years there, I have personally worked on remote access servers (the ISDN and 56k modem varieties, if you recall those, dear reader), router encryption modules, packet voice gateways of a practically infinite variety, IP telephony for the enterprise, home gateways (routers), broadband over powerlines, grid computing, spam, data loss prevention, autonomic networking, intelligent power grid systems, and networked virtual environments (avatar mediated communication).  I long ago lost track of how many products and technologies I helped create over those  many years. 

One consistent thread during all of those years was that we were Inventing and Creating.  Sometimes they were completely new businesses or technologies, sometimes they were simple (albeit lucrative) adjacencies to existing businesses.  There was an entire portion of the technology map that said 'here lie dragons' that we charged headfirst into to be first to market with each new innovation.

It is time to Invent and Create again, however this time outside of the comfortable embrace of a large corporate sovereign.  Today is  my last day at Cisco.  I am both starting a new company (more on this soon)  as well as working with two other startups on helping them with their technology strategy and go-to-market. 

Cisco is an excellent company, the best I have ever worked for.  John Chambers and his executive staff are some of the most brilliant people I have come into contact with, bar none.  As is the case at good universities and working with top researchers from MIT, Stanford, and the Santa Fe Insitute, working at Cisco is an addiction for mental adrenaline junkies.  You are always pushing yourself to do better, think faster, be smarter than the Mensa co-workers of yours.  It will be a form of withdrawl to wean myself from the daily interactions with that group of such amazing people as well as the access that the 'Cisco' business card could grant me to some of the best 'outside' thinkers on the planet.  I hope I am able to stay in touch with them.

Moving forward, look for more detailed updates on the new businesses and how I manage to balance work and actually being physically present for my wife and daughters. 

Apple fumbles 3G iPhone Launch?

Let me get in my time machine for a second.....

Apple predicts that it will ship 10M iPhones within a year from it's July 2007 launch.

Apple ships about 5.7m iPhones (by multiple analysts conclusions) before supplies mysteriously begin to dry up in late March. By early May, even New York City has no inventory and a line for iPhones starts forming.

April 2nd, Henry Blodget at the Alley speculates that non-authorized international demand is consuming 'buffer inventory' and driving the shortage.

When Apple first introduced the iPhone 1.0, they could ship it 30/60/90 days post-announce because they had no shipping revenue product to stall.  You really don't want to induce a revenue stall in a shipping product if you can avoid it, however Apple learned the hard way that you also don't want to anger your installed base of loyal/feral customers as they discovered with the iPhone price drop.  So, you end up walking a fine line between angering your customers with lack of supply (or over-supply of new models) and angering Wall Street with periodic flatlines in your revenue stream.

The answer is to gracefully manage product transitions.  This is an art form in itself, in the timing of messaging transitions, moving manufacturing lines, selling off inventory, upgrade and price protection programs, and the like.

Apple seems to have been caught in a perfect storm of unanticipated demand (Blodget's article about Europe) that they needed to quickly react to in the form of temporarily increasing the production line of iPhones so they could gracefully trickle out of them about May 30th....just in time to release the iPhone 3G and open up the larger price-sensitive and 3G-hungry market, and a new product introduction when they need to ramp down production of the older model in favor of the newer one.

So, do you ramp up or ramp down?  Do you flatline sales of your iPhone line for 75 days during a key fiscal quarter (Summer/graduate presents) or do you enable your overflow production lines and meet demand at the risk of price-protection/exchange/returns exposure on your bottom line for a percentage of the customers who buy in May?  It reads like a loaded MBA mid-term question from a sadistic professor who enjoys handing out 'C' grades to all students.

It appears Apple chose to flatline.  I don't envy the beating they will take from Wall Street for this fumble, even though every Wall Street Analyst is slobbering over themselves today to say how much of a fait accompli the 3G iPhone is to wrest the title from the Blackberry for #1 in sales.  I wonder how they will balance the stick and carrot of beating them for the quarter stall while praising them for the new product.

And it isn't an inevitability that Apple will more than address the revenue shortfall with the 3G iPhone.  Even if Foxconn can overcome their initial production issues and achieve their 10M unit number, the revenue and profit per unit of the $199/$299 iPhone 3G are abysmal compared to the initial 1.0 iPhone at $499/$399.  We used to have a sarcastic punchline back in the early Cisco IP Phone days..."We'll sell it at a loss but we'll make it up in volume!"

It could be worse, you could be the product manager at eTrade who announced yesterday the new eTrade Mobile Pro trading platform for mobile devices, exclusively for the BlackBerry.

Officially 'Wiitarded'

And it finally came to pass that I purchased a Wii Fit for the family (lie: the non-XY majority of the entire family is fit already and has obscenely low bodyfat, whereas I, the XY contingent.....). 

This rounds out the trinity of edutainment/ exertainment that we have in our home. From Brain Age on the girls' Nintendo DS' to Brain Academy on the Wii, we are doing math puzzles, pattern recognition, logic puzzles and otherwise keeping our gray-matter 'plastic'.  On the Exertainment side (not counting the AppleTV affixed to the Sony TV in front of my treadmill), we now have the Wii Fit to help us with our yoga, core training, and ski-jumping..... barring any 'wiinjuries'. 

One of the things that should be covered in serious detail by an emerging technology analyst firm (hint hint) is this entire segment of making exercise more enjoyable than the hit/miss eye-candy at your local Gold's Gym franchise. Sports are fun exercise, however suffer from time and space dependencies that are increasingly impractical in this busy age.  If you could do for competitive exercise ("Beat your brother's 5k record!") what is being done in MMOGs and FPS' with leaderboards and team competition, the US would go from being the fattest country on the planet to the fittest in no time.  My wife has already asked me how I could hack the wii fit software to use our treadmill.

The Edutainment portion of the market already has a head start with people adopting serious games for use in the workplace and in higher education.  People like Tony O'Driscoll in North Carolina are making great strides there and will ultimately make me wish that I had taken undergraduate statistics in 2015 rather than 1987.

Meanwhile, if I ever run into the model for the female trainer on Wii Fit, it will take all my willpower not to throttle her for all the constructive feedback.........

One more time, with feeling!

I have received a number of responses to my prior post regarding the future of the virtual world space.  Although I stand by each prediction I made, there was one clarification that I wanted to make.

There is a need for shared virtual spaces for events, specifically events where the participants do not know each other a priori and this is a particular strength of the Second Life model.  You have the network effect of many people combined with a shared virtual space.  At Cisco, we use this function frequently to have focus groups, product launches, and press conferences.  This allows for a bi-directional exchange of ideas from an ad-hoc group of attendees in a manner that you cannot achieve with other technology solutions.  If we use traditional voice bridges, then you need to mute the participants during the 'presentation', and the experience is pretty spartan......if you use web conferencing, you achieve a richer media experience but lose the intimacy of horizontal interaction (where the speaker to attendee is 'vertical interaction', but attendee to attendee is 'horizontal interaction', like students passing notes and whispers in undergraduate Biology class lecture).  This is where shared virtual spaces shine.

I still believe that there needs to be widespread deployment of standard protocols, like COLLADA, however am skeptical that the business rationale is there for anyone to abandon the walled-garden model we see in current virtual world implementations (OpenSIM excluded).  The wildcard is if the 3D conferencing and small event space vendors, led by companies like Transmutable and Qwaq, end up stealing the aforementioned (juicy/lucrative) shared virtual spaces business from public social worlds.