Blog posts from July 2009

When I wrote about Text In The World over on my personal blog a few weeks ago, our colleague Matt Jones left a comment:

“preparing us for AR” (augmented reality)

And this got me thinking about the ways that design and media can educate us about what future technologies might be like, or prepare us for large paradigm shifts. What sort of products really are “preparing” us for Augmented Reality?

A lot of consumer-facing the output of Augmented Reality at the moment tends to focus on combining webcams with specifically marked objects; Julian Oliver’s levelHead is one of the best-known examples:

But when AR really hits, it’s going to be because the technology it’s presented through has become much more advanced; it won’t just be webcams and monitors, but embedded in smart displays, or glasses, or even the smart contact lenses of Warren Ellis’ Clatter.

So whilst it’s interesting to play with the version of the technology we have today, there’s a lot of value to be gained from imagining what the design of fully-working AR systems might look like, unfettered by current day technological constraints. And we can do that really well in things like videos, toys, and games.

Here’s a lovely video from friend and colleague of Schulze & Webb, Timo Arnall:

Timo’s video imagines using an AR map in an urban environment. I particularly like how he emphasises that there are few limitations on scale when it comes to projecting AR – and the most convenient size for certain applications might be “as big as you can make it”. Hence projecting the map across the entire pavement.

Here’s another nice example: the Nearest Tube application for the iPhone 3GS:

This is perhaps a more exciting interpretation of what AR could be, and what AR devices might be (not to mention a working, real-world example): the iPhone becomes a magic viewfinder on the world, a Subtle Knife that can cut through dimensions to show us the information layer sitting on top of the world. It helps that it’s both useful and pretty, too.

Games are a great way of getting ready for the interfaces technologies like AR afford. Here’s a clip I put together from EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space, illustrating the game UI:

Dead Space has no game HUD; rather, the HUD is projected into the environment of the game as a manifestation of the UI of the hero’s protective suit. It means the environment can be designed as a realistic, functional spaceship, and then all the elements necessary for a game – readouts, inventories, not to mention guidelines as to what doors are locked or unlocked – can be manifested as overlay. It’s a striking way to place all the game’s UI into the world, but it’s also a great interpretation of what futuristic, AR user interfaces might be a bit like.

Finally, a toy that never fails to make me smile – the Tuttuki Bako:

This is Matt Jones playing with a Tuttuki Bako in our studio. You place your finger into the hole in the box, and then use it to control a digital version of your finger on screen in a variety of games. It’s somewhat uncanny to watch, but serves as a great example of a somewhat different approach to augmented realities – the idea that our bodies could act as digital prosthetics.

All these examples show different ways of exploring an impending, future technology. Whilst much of the existing, tangible work in the AR space is incremental, building upon available technology, it’s likely that the real advances in it will be from technology we cannot yet conceive. Given that, it makes sense to also consider concepting from a purely hypothetical design perspective – trying things out unfettered by technological limitations. The technology will, after all, one day catch up.

What’s exciting is that this concept and design work is not always to be found in the work of design studios or technologists; it also appears in software, toys, and games that are readily consumable. In their own way, they are perhaps doing a better job of educating the wider world about AR (or other new technologies) than innumerable tech demos with white boxes.

Next week is Develop in Brighton, the UK’s premiere games industry conference, and I’m going to representing Schulze & Webb in two sessions there.

The first session is part of “Evolve“, a single day before the conference proper combining their old online and mobile tracks into something more focused on the edges of the games industry – so now including social and casual gaming as well.

With a panel of industry experts, I’ll be asking the question “What Do Social Networking Sites Have To Offer The Games Industry“:

Facebook and Myspace each have over 100m unique users. The users of these sites are not only coordinating their leisure time through them, but spending their leisure time on them, and even playing games on them. What does that mean for the games industry? How can traditional games and game companies engage with the social networks – their users, their platforms, and the core gamers already using them? Are Facebookers casual-gamers-in-waiting? This panel invites representatives from top social networks to explain what gaming means for their products, and how they can support your efforts as games developers.

Hopefully, given the panel’s strengths and expertise, we can come up with some wide-ranging – and interesting – answers.

In addition to that, as part of the conference proper, I’m going to be talking about Games As A Service: what service design is, what it means for games and products of the future, and how some of the territory Schulze & Webb has been exploring when it comes to unproduct might apply to games. It’s called Beyond The Box: Games As A Service:

The effort and finances needed to build full retail games is growing unsustainable. But what if you weren’t making a product? What would Games As A Service look like? Services encourage loyalty; they turn products into platforms; they empower users; they play well with others and connect to existing services; and at the large scale, they wrap other products and become super-products. Using examples from inside and outside the games industry – from tiny, open-source Davids to console-licensed Goliaths – Tom Armitage examines already successful notions of service design and explores what it will mean for your games, big or small.

If you’re in Brighton for the conference, do say hello; alternatively, if you stumble across this after the talks, do drop us a line – it’d be great to hear from you.

This is the Bayer Didget:

Didget is a blood sugar monitor that plugs into a Nintendo DS, and interfaces with its own game cartridge. Bayer explain that it ‘converts test results into reward points that children can use to unlock new levels and buy in-game items‘. Cheap, too, at only £30 (plus the cost of a DS, obviously), but what a great idea: turning a serious health issue into both visualized data and fun. And it fits a much more pressing need than Nintendo’s own Vitality Sensor pulse monitor:

Still, other companies are also experimenting with toys and games built out of simple feedback loops driven by peripherals. Uncle Milton Industries have the Force Trainer (with obligatory Star Wars tie-in branding):

which “monitors brainwave activity and allows [the player] to control a small ball that moves through a 10 inch training tower using focus and concentration“. To clarify: you don’t think about moving the ball; the ball moves based on your brainwave patterns, and so the trick is to learn how to control the output of your brain at a very general level. The effect is still close enough to magic, though, for the purposes of entertainment.

Mattel are also getting in on the neurofeedback toys with Mind Flex:

which Engadget explains as requiring ‘players to concentrate really hard in order to power a fan that’ll float a ball through the hoops‘. Perhaps underwhelming as a game or toy, then, but the novelty factor of the neurofeedback loop has got to be worth something. Mattel reckon it’s worth $80.

More fun in the world with your DS: Tecmo’s Treasure World turns every wifi hotspot in the world, locked or otherwise, into a potential source of treasure – and you can hunt for treasure with your DS closed. And, on top of that, there’s a remarkably comprehensive web integration. Brandon Boyer at Offworld has got an ultra-detailed writeup, but if you’re short on time, the trailer video should do:

And finally, some text design from videogames and movies.

A screengrab from the forthcoming Splinter Cell: Conviction, which turns the mission objectives into text overlaying the world for only the player to see. I take a quick historical tour of the idiom of representations of text within 3D space over at infovore.org.

Just a little obvious aside, this – but something that only struck me this morning as I was heading to the studio. I mentioned it to Webb, and he said “write it down” so here we are.

It’s been said that 2009 is the year that e-books go mainstream, with the industrial and service design of Amazon’s Kindle and Stanza on the iPhone doing the same for the format as the iPod and iTunes did for MP3/digital music.

Maybe – but 2009 could be said to be the year that one-handed reading became enjoyable for the first time since we invented the form-factor of the book when the codex arrived about 2000 years ago.

Since then, we’ve made all sorts of gizmos and gadgets to enable one-handed reading.

And machines too!

Look at this handsome fella for digitising entire volumes quickly:

It features SureTurn™ Advanced Page Turning Technology!

I guess that’s no-handed reading, but… anyway…

We’ve invented technologies to deal with the form-factor of the book and change our bodies’ relationship to it, but now we’ve separated the wine from the bottle, we’re free to try different ways of reading.

As I say, it’s stating the bloomin’ obvious, but the freedom to read in short bursts and constrained situations that the UI of Stanza gives is transformative.

Reading on trains, tubes, buses, queues becomes not only possible, but a pleasure.

That’s perhaps the thing I’m trying to get to.

We just did something it took 2000 years to figure out. Amongst all the talk of disrupting business systems, revolutionising access to knowledge etc, ergonomic innovation is being overlooked in the discussion of the e-book future.

What’s next?