AR Toronto – AR Bootcamp thought provoking, spawns many puns. pt. 1

ARmani Suit

Minds were blown this Saturday at MEIC‘s AR Bootcamp.

Augmented reality ties in a lot of fields, from computer shape and motion recognition and tracking, to platform and interoperability issues, to ethics and privacy issues, and the attendees spanned the same range. Attendees ranged from complete n00bs like me to AR godfather and cyborg Steve Mann.

The above image is my immediate reaction to the assumption that AR markers are ugly. Like barcodes and QR codes, AR markers can have a certain tech chic about them. Imagine a suit that you could infinitely change, or use to display information.

I took a lot of notes from the event, mostly in the form of doodles and ideas. I’ll be synthesizing them in the next few posts. The following is a taste of what’s to come.

AR + Tattoos

AR + Porn

The success or failure of a new standard or medium is determined by its acceptance by the porn industry. With the mainstream adult entertainment industry struggling, adoption of AR could be a brand new way of attracting viewers again.

This would be a wearable marker. (it says PRAN which would be the chan/l337 version of pARn)

This would be how you use it.

SHIFT – A work in progress.

I’m working on a draft of an article for Shift, from the OCAD Student Press

This is going to be an epic deja vu for my thesis, and redemption. I finally get a chance to put together a cogent interpretation of all the research and thinking that went into my thesis project. The draft is below, and it’s still very early alpha stage.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Man’s principle gift, and the only thing that distinguishes it from
other animals, is his ability to tell stories. The first words created
the world. Ancient stories gave meaning to the stars.

The following is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any person, or to any actual events, or institutions is intentional and
anything but coincidential.

In 1937 the future of airships came crashing to the ground in a fiery, smoking ruin, amid the famous cries of “oh, the humanity!”.

Since the Hindeburgh crash in Lakehurst Naval Station, New Jersey, only the ghosts of these once important vehicles are seen: floating vestiges of the past above the Super Bowl, or largely ignored, hawking electronics above Queens and Manhattan. A few are still ferrying tourists on harbour tours and over vineyards for wine tastings, but they are largely seen as curiousities, if seen at all. In most of my conversations with people with airships, the first reaction is perplexity, then incredulity.

But everyone I have met agrees with me eventually, that airships are needed in this world again.

The Inuit are Canada’s Ninjas.

I’ve been fascinated by the Inuit for many years now. On the West Coast, we grew up with stories of the Haida, the Salish.  We learned of their cedar clothes and boxes, how they lived in cedar homes and cooked with heated rocks in cedar pots, and how they foraged and hunted.  The city has long since replaced the rainforests of the aboriginal time, but examples of it can be found less than an hour from downtown.  The point is, the first nations people didn’t have the same draw for me, because they were here, and BC is not the hardest place to survive, by any stretch of the imagination.  The arctic, however, is cold, barren and hostile.  In my eyes, it was a huge feat to survive up there. The ingenuity of the northern people amazed me, and their stories ( the real stories, not their myths, which I can talk about later) were legendary to me.

An example is the grandfather who hated the sedentary life that his family had adopted. So he snuck out, made a knife by freezing and shaping his poo, killed a dog and made a dogsled out of the skin and bones, and then harnessed the other dogs to it and vanished into the snow.

Personally the best and smartest thing is how they used to make the runners for their dogsleds.  Before steel and milled wood, dog sleds were made from walrus bone and drift wood. The bottoms of the runners were not guaranteed to be flat.  So the way they made it flat, was with moss and ice and fish. The moss and the fish acted like rebar to strenghten the ice, but also to fill in the gaps of the structure, be it bone or gnarly driftwood.  The ice was applied slowly, layer by layer by spitting water in a mist, and then buffing with a scrap of fur.  The result was a strong, straight runner.  The best part, however, is that that fish would keep all winter, and in the spring, when things were tough, the fish would thaw and they could eat it.  BRILLIANT.

Watch Wade Davis on TED talk about Cultures at the far edge of the world, and the story of the Inuit elder and his poop knife.

The ultimate test for WFP truckers: No problem for WFP airship pilot.

WFP truck on the Nationale 3 road in Congo

From WFP.org

Route Nationale 3 is a lifeline for thousands of people who depend on the [World Food Program] for food. It’s also a kidney-bruising, stomach-churning morass of hills, holes, greasy mud and rickety bridges.

Read the article to see just how bad the roads are.

It seems to me that this image of the WFP truck, carrying vital supplies stuck in the mud, would be all the indication of failure that an organization would need.  Yes we can blame it on the road, as it was built in the 60’s and poorly maintained, but as the WFP should know best, disasters don’t always happen in areas well serviced by roads.  The WFP is doing its best and also repairing sections of the road so that future deliveries may go through more easily, but it’s not the WFP’s job to build roads.  It is its job to deliver food to starving people in some of the worst places in the world.  If the current methods don’t work, then it’s their responsibility to find ones that do work.  The problem of hunger isn’t going to go away in 50 years, so it’s still not too late:  GET AN AIRSHIP.

Spying for good in Zimbabwe, Burma

From irevolution.wordpress.com

http://irevolution.wordpress.com/tag/burma/

This article outlines the use of satellites to monitor human rights abuses.

Cross this with the American spy airship, and you would get more coverage, cheaper.  It still doesn’t solve the problem of using surveillance photos. Interpretation.  Since photos of actual human rights abuse are rare, we can only interpret the traces left behind, burnt villages, destroyed buildings, patch of fresh earth denoting mass graves etc.  Such photos can be contested in court, and they’re not the most compelling to the layperson.  Even a hovering, unblinking eye in the sky such as a surveillance airship would only achieve what CCTV has achieved in Britain with crime.  It merely moved it down the street. The logical fix for that would be to survey the entire world at all times, since atrocities tend to occur where there is no accountability.  Seems to be much harder to murder your neighbours if someone is watching.