With all the current hype surrounding Augmented Reality (AR) I often wonder where we stand, in terms of its overall evolution and logical conclusion. No doubt we will continue to see countless gimmicks but what will happen when we all become immune to the initial excitement and when assumed expectations cannot be met? The ‘hype cycle’ (a term first coined by Gartner Inc. in 1995) is a novel, yet surprisingly accurate way of explaining such a phenomenon. A new technology trigger causes a surge in expectation before peaking at over-inflation. A subsequent ‘trough of disillusionment’ is often accompanied by a hefty slump. Steady improvement, along a ‘slope of enlightenment’, then reaches a so-called ‘plateau of productivity’. But what does all this mean for AR? Are we set to become disillusioned or will we be steadily englightened?

With speculation rife and the technology in its relative infancy, realistically we are only at the very start. Of course the time frame for such a cycle could span decades or more: If we consider the Web as an example – from it’s early beginnings in 1991 to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in March 2000 – it was just short of a decade. The ‘trough of disillusionment’ was comparatively short but the growth and success spearheaded by Web 2.0 has afforded another decade of growth, the ‘plateau of productivity’ now appears firm and consistent.

In terms of AR, Google Trends may already suggest we are beginning to show signs of inflated expectation with search indicating a noticeable slowdown. However, this phase is likely to be temporary with an improved surge yet to come: When a lightweight portable device such as the iPad (or similar) includes a camera, we may really begin to witness a degree of innovative use, but admittedly it still leaves a lot to be desired. The other key milestone of course is the migration from hand-held device to eyewear or even contact lens, the holy grail in terms of interface. This is something I explored in part during my MArch thesis though as something of a counter to a pure physical architectural manifestation, as a way of enhancing the true experience thus ensuring the technology was never an end in itself.

The hypothetical conclusion and speculative prediction of technology whilst in its infancy will always serve to enhance inflated expectation. What we don’t always know is whether an imagined reality could in fact be a successful reality, obtainable during the so-called plateau of productivity. Furthermore, evolution is impossible to predict: It is quite probable that the eventual outcome will be fundamentally different than that of the expectation, if not unobtainable or even undesirable.

Two notable examples of future realities are Augmented City by Keiichi Matsuda (shown above) and Mixed Reality by Nokia Research, both sensational yet completely fascinating.

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The Haitian earthquake on 12th January 2010 was catastrophic in scale, with an estimated 230,000 deaths and 1,000,000 people made homeless. The Haitian Government estimated that 250,000 residential and 30,000 non-residential buildings had either collapsed or been severely damaged.

The ensuing response from the international community included humanitarian aid, military support personnel, medical teams and engineers. However, the scale of the disaster had caused unprecedented disruption to communication and transport systems – not to mention electrical and water infrastructures – severely hampering both rescue and aid efforts.

Within hours of the initial earthquake, satellite and aerial imagery passes of the area had been made to improve geographical knowledge in a bid to assist the wider relief effort. In the following days the data was released to the public, prompting a surge in tracing and analysis from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community. The sheer speed of the response enabled OSM to provide direct support to aid workers on the ground. Large additions to the map are made with many roads (green primary, red secondary) added including the blue glowing refugee camps that begin to emerge.

The animation was produced by ITO World, with support from Ideas In Transit.

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I have been sifting through some of the work produced in the final days of my Thesis, in a bid to catch-up and clear something of a backlog. I could not think of a better place to start than with these two posters, which were produced in an attempt to provide an introduction (non exhaustive but plain speaking) to the concept of the semantic city. The beginning of the Thesis followed my Dissertation City 2.0: New Urban Realities Through Open-Sourced Ubiquitous Informatics, which explored the intersection between architecture, urbanism and information communication technology in this, the Information Age.

Conceived as a new text-based language schema, City 2.0 acts as a semantic framework to the built environment enabling professional or layman alike to quite literally author the city. From cultural or historical reference to analysis and research, City 2.0 links the key paradigms of the Web 2.0 revolution (the open source, hyper-locality, user content creation etc. - factors that have already begun to revolutionise both our spatial and socio-economic relationships – to our understanding, approach towards and indeed experience of the city. One of the key elements of City 2.0 is its ability to describe geometries, events and artefacts semantically in both time and space, ready for when the temporal relevancy of the Web improves.

The covering page is speculative in extending Charles Jencks’ Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture (2000) as provocation for what this next century may hold in response to technological advance. The following page provides a more detailed introduction to the emerging concept of the digital city and relevant key paradigms.

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Street Slide is a recent research project by Microsoft that allows seamless transition between the  360° panoramic  ’bubbles’ already familiar from photographic mapping services such as Google’s Street View and Bing’s Streetside. Similar to the Community Photo Collections project at the University of Washington’s GRAIL Lab research which has already made it to front-line software application, the system represents another leap in re-spatialising photographic data – in this case navigable 2D street elevations, enhanced with geographic and other informational references. The following is an extract from the research paper:

We present Street Slide, which combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multiperspective strip panoramas. We demonstrate a seamless transition between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas. We also present a dynamic construction of the panoramas which overcomes many of the limitations of previous systems. As the user slides sideways, the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the immersion. We call this form of sliding sideways while looking at a street façade a street slide. Finally we integrate annotations and a mini-map within the user interface to provide geographic information as well additional affordances for navigation. We demonstrate our Street Slide system on a series of intersecting streets in an urban setting. We report the results of a user study, which shows that visual searching is greatly enhanced with the Street Slide interface over existing systems from Google and Bing.

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Pedro M Cruz has been developing visualisations of Lisbon’s traffic movements over various periods of time. I particularly like this one above, which has been somewhat abstracted, but the overall effect is visually stunning. His Empires Decline animation is also well worth a view as it provides a fascinating depiction of the evolution of the empire-orientated world order between the late eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Anonymous utility buildings dot our cities, keeping the other buildings humming – but they’re almost never part of the aesthetic fabric of the urban scene. Taking this into account, it is exciting to see this unique power plant clad in one square meter beautiful Delftware tiles. Designed by Dutch architecture design firm Cie in collaboration with artist Hugo Kaagman, this new Combined Cycle Energy plant (CHP) in downtown Roombeek is an extraordinary ode to the past and a celebration of modern infrastructure. The building has been named Stadshaard (which translates to ‘city hearth’), to honor the source of the city’s light and heat.

Via: Inhabitat

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The above video demonstrates use of TFL’s new API Beta, which fetches live departure data and places it onto a Google map in realtime. A live version is normally available but the API is currently down due to overwhelming demand.

The project was realised at the 2010 Science Hackday by Matthew Somerville (with support from Frances Berriman and James Aylett), with station icons by Tim Diggins. The source code is available here.

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Having been impressed with Google’s steady introduction of their auto-generated 3D city meshes, I was equally surprised with Yell’s offering (above), which is the first of its kind for London.  Powered by C3 Technologies the photo-realistic 3D maps are created from aerial film footage shot from light aeroplanes, which is then merged with other film taken from ground level. Unlike Google’s offering (below), this seems to produce a far more seamless effect as there is no obvious transition between aerial and plan projection. The result is a novel way to explore with the 3D map providing all sorts of otherwise unobtainable views and vistas.

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In the Air is a visualisation project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.

I am particularly interested by this project namely due to the provocation that environmental data (not just pollution) relating to the living, breathing city could be mapped spatially – possibly even in realtime (this particular data is sourced hourly from the Ayuntamiento de Madrid) - and viewed via the Web or through AR. Of course a real benefit would be for this to be part of the semantic city where the data  can be used beyond purely visual means perhaps enabling city-wide Building Management Systems (BMS) to actively respond to changing conditions.

Developed at Visualizar’08 and directed by José Luis de Vicente at Medialab-Prado, the team propose that the data feeds a physical prototype called a “diffuse façade,” a massive indicator of the air’s components through a changing cloud that serves to “blur the architecture with the atmosphere it has invaded.”

System Diagram from In the Air by Nerea Calvillo

TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION

1. Organic colourant used for deserts
2. Urine dispensary plastic bag
3. Mini-motor +plastic pin + dispenser
4. 25L plastic tank
5. Submergible fountain pump
6. High pressure pump
7. Arduino
8. 10 units water diffusor system
9. Brumizone diffusor
10. Lights

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Image: New York from The Geotaggers' World Atlas by Eric Fischer

Eric Fischer has conducted some interesting studies of major world cities by re-mapping them according to the frequency of geo-tagged images sourced from both Flickr and Picasa. His method is not exactly clear but I assume the vector information is generated by joining a single user’s individual snaps in order of sequence. The product is something of considerable beauty and may help to pre-empt the spatial extent of computing such information via programmes such as GRAIL’s Building Rome in a Day project, as demonstrated in their animation of San Marco Square, Rome. The image underlay is extracted from the OpenStreetMap dataset.

Image: London from Locals and Tourists by Eric Fischer

In addition Fischer has conducted a second study aimed at differentiating between photos taken by locals and tourists, which he demarcates as follows:

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month).

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Layar is clearly leading the race in developing AR for the smartphone masses. As the number of layers approaches 1000, I would argue there has been little in the way of real interest and quality to date, but this one – developed by German programmer Marc Gardeya – certainly stands out.

German news magazine Der Spiegel recently met Gardeya and the interview can be read in full here.

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It may be an advert but this clip is a superb demonstration of the notion of using the virtual to enhance the physical by way of augmented reality. Such a reality may be a long way off but if achieved or curated in the right way, it has enormous potential to transform our experience and understanding of the world – from past to present and beyond. This is similar to what I was hoping to achieve in my Memorial Memory animation sequence.

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This is a short test sequence showing the transition between the street and ground foyer. This is the ‘open’ configuration with shutters rotated to form a canopy above with the aim of drawing people in. The space is deliberately minimal and cavernous with a stair leading up to the existing roofscape level. The finish is predominantly masonry and fair-faced concrete with exposed corten steel beams. A roof-lit ‘slot’ runs along the far wall allowing sunlight to illuminate it for during the afternoon. It is my intention to put together a two minute film sequence to portray the materiality and character of the scheme for the final exhibition.

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I have been exploring the use of Augmented Reality (AR), a pivotal part of my Thesis in terms of experiencing both the building and the city. This is a quick demo showing a range of geometries including simple animated content, which are being tracked simultaneously. I hope to use this technique not only to represent different aspects of the scheme interactively but also to portray different layers of the digital city relevant to the story and experience of my building. The big issue now of course is the interface…

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