Afgelopen donderdag heb ik bij CoworkCompany in Leiden voor een tiental geïnteresseerden een introductie op het gebied van Mobiele Augmented Reality gegeven. De slides van deze gebeurtenis staan hieronder.

Deze workshop werd gegeven in de serie Networkshops waarbij regelmatig interessante workshops voor en door zelfstandigen worden gehouden.

My first thought about the iPad, triggered by Tim Bray: Nothing Creative.

At the first glance I could not agree more with Tim. There’s nothing revolutionary about this whole iPad thing, it just let’s you “consume the web”.

At the other hand, this looks like the perfect execution of the whole “web tablet” idea which surfaced ten years ago (2000, 2001) and then almost vanished. I think the iPad is the culmination of evolutionary innovation, helped by Moore’s law.

For geeks there’s not much fun, no way to tinker and extend. Then, as soon as you see it as a nice consumer device and have it lying around your coffee table this might be a very nice gadget (at a pretty hefty price).

For me there are also a lot of unanswered questions, like why would I want to have this lying on the coffee table, operating under my identity? Security and privacy anyone? Or is it not meant to share after all?

Finally, why do we (yes, including me) always have such a strong opinion about Apple products? They must be doing something right in marketing (remember: HP launched a very neat tablet, the Slate, only a week ago). Some introspection: why are we disappointed when we get the perfect version of something wished for 10 years ago? Is it because it’s too late and we’re already way beyond with our thoughts?

Update: Mark Pilgrim describes his disappointment about the closed nature of the iPad as Tinkerer’s Sunset – be sure to read this excellent writeup!

Image via CrunchBase

Today Dennis Crowley from Foursquare gave an excellent presentation at  Mobile Monday, Amsterdam edition (#momoams on Twitter).

If you were there, you now know everything about the city as playground (pacmanhattan.com) and personal metrics.

I’m very grateful and proud that he took the opportunity to announce my Foursquare application for Layar, which allows you to use the most popular features of Foursquare from Layar.

What it is

Foursquare is a very popular social network game which integrates virtual social networks with the real world. Friends meet friends in cafes and bars and let each other know where they hang out. If you haven’t yet, it is definitely worth to check it out.

The Foursquare Layar app gives you access to the most frequently used features of the network.

• Show venues around you, including which people are frequenting them, who is the mayor and user tips what to do.
• Find nearby tips what to do and see at a glance what makes a location special.
• Check in to a venue and let your friends know that you hang out there.

Open Layer with foursquare

A basic version of these views is accessible even when you’re not signed in to Foursquare, which gives you an excellent opportunity to look around before jumping in and signing up (I’m quiet sure you will eventually plunge in and sign up to connect with your friends)!

These views are greatly enhanced when you’re signed-in. Then all venues where you or your friends have checked in are prioritized and highlighted. Tips from friends stand out. And you’re able to view what users have on their profile, which “badges” they earned and so on.

Give it a spin: open the Foursquare Layer on your mobile device.

Short FAQ

A few words about the options illustrated with screenshots.

Filter Options

Select your list from the filters menu (presented at application launch or from the menu). For now Venues and Tips are available. The range slider lets you adjust the distance within results are looked up and displayed, up to a maximum of 50 items.

Venue list

Venues in Reality View

Venues are shown in the Reality View as an overlay over your current surrounding (as seen through the mobile device’s camera). Different icons are applied depending on wheter you or your friends have signed in at a venue, or if the venue is considered a favorite.

Alternative views are map view and list view (see below).

Tips

Tips presented on the map view

Just like venues, Tips are looked up such that friends and popular venues are prioritized. With each tip the user is shown who contributed the tip. This enables you at the same time to get some more info about this user.

User view

Mobile view of user dashoard

Quickly shows user info, e.g. at which venues they are mayor, what badges they earned and such. Links to venues are clickable and take you to the venue with all Foursquare related data. You need to be logged in to see user data.

Venue view

Detail view of Venue

The baseic venue information, including address, phone and Twitter link if available. The big blue checking button lets you quickly check in at the venue (provided you are logged in of course). User tips and the mayor are shown, their avatars link to the user detail page.

Login / connect

Connect / login screen

You will be taken to a friendly “connect” dialog ss soon as you access an action for which you need to be signed in. Then you are securely connected to the Foursquare service, the same way as modern Twitter applications do. This means that you can break the connection from either side, the Layar app or Foursquare, whichever you happen to be at. For geeks: this is called OAuth and the current best practice standard way to connect social applications.

Beta version

The current implementation is to be considered an early beta version. The feature list above is not complete yet.
Emphasis has been put on those services which revolve around your current location. In other words, they present the view of your social network with your location at the center. This means that searches are done by proximity rather than name or some other property.

Also, some quirks between the Layar app and the Foursquare API are likely to pop up from time to time.
These will be fixed and smoothed out during the coming months. Then a new version of the Layar app is in the works, which will provide a much nicer integration at the User Interaction level.

I’m really excited to have this basic version up and running and I’m looking forward to your comments. Please share them in the feedback box below, or drop me a line.

Update 2009-11-20: the Foursquare layer was mentioned on the Layar website today, nice!

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Tweeps Around Reality View

Earlier today Layar announced the next all new version of their Reality Browser Application for mobile devices (also known as Augmented Reality application).

This finally lifts the embargo on my work for this platform: Tweeps Around, which adds an overlay of what people on Twitter are saying, right here and now!

Update: I added a short FAQ for Tweeps Around, be sure to check it out for more detailed information.

Basic principle

Suppose you have the all new Layar 2.0 app installed on a supported device (Android, iPhone awaiting Apple’s aprovement). You open the application and search layers for tweeps around (or just tweeps). Activate the layer and look around on the phone’s screen. You’ll see circles popping up, each representing a Twitter user (Twitterers also known as a “Tweeps”, hence the name), selecting it gives you all the details of their message and links to relevant references.

The Layar promise

While the Layar app in itself is already quiet exciting, the most important promise lays in its tiered distribution approach. In fact, the Layar app is indeed a browser which does not contain, nor limit reality content to display. This way, responsibilities are distributed over various parties in the industry.

Some roles include:

• Content owners: make sure the content is marked up with accurate geolocation information.
• Independent developers (such as me): build a wrapping API to interface between content (e.g. a geo database) and the Layar service.
• Layar: negotiate distribution deals with platform owners (Apple, Google, …) and Mobile operators (to have Layar pre-installed on devices).

I strongly believe in this strategy, where domain knowledge, marketing + distribution and development each are in the hands of the respective experts.

Branding and monetization opportunities

Layar allows for a quiet some customization of graphic elements, e.g. company logo and banner on top, custom icons for points of interest (POI’s) and action links to call a phone number, send a text message or go to any conceivable web URL. Here are some opportunities for monetization as well, e.g. by inserting advertisements, call premium phone numbers of have users sign up for additional web services and revenue shares with destination sites.

The future

Of course, this is just the beginning. The beginning of Reality Overlays on mobile devices becoming ubiquitous. The beginning of Layar as platform for easy access of geo information. Many exciting new applications are around the corner to be discovered and become “best practice” in less than no time. Distribution and localization can be local as well as worldwide (e.g. Twitter is a global phenomenon, while your data may well be focused on a single city or country). Any type of data can be visualized, as long as it is somehow relevant to a specific location.

I’m ready to dive into this exciting world with lots and lots ideas waiting to be tested and implemented. The Twitter overlay serves as a test case which was in fact surprisingly easy to implement for the Layar platform.

Please let me know when you have geo data waiting to be explored as reality overlay and we will work something out!

Note that there is no sign up fee for Layar until the second half of September, 2009. After September 15th a one time sign up fee is required (depending on company turnover).

Quick link

Open layar/tweepsaround

Use one of the barcode scanners from your Android phone to open the Tweeps Around layer in Layar: point your camera to this QR code (image to the right) and select “open in browser”.

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Alexander van Elsas compiled an excellent list of 10 reasons why Google just reinvented online communication. You should read that blog post now, if you haven’t already!

I do agree that Google does Wave the right way – it’s all about openness, Alexander’s points 2 and 3 should make most critical users and developers happy.

But then Google still has the business advantage of having all aggregated data in their silo’s – they will be the exclusive owner of virtually all communication data in the world. This gives them enormous business advantages in terms of finding out what people are discussing, right now. All this can be put in perspective with data mining of all previous communication. The logical exploitation is ever more targeted advertising (adding location, local time, mood, communication partners and such to the expression). But being able to watch real time trends in high resolution, fine grained up to the user level in the context of their social network will likely enable entirely new business models, which we can not even imagine right now.

Does this matter for the individual user?
Maybe, privacy is potentially at risk even more than it is now. Whatever will happen, great power comes with great responsibility and the slogan “do not evil” applies more than ever before.

At the same time I’m really excited to see this happen and will most likely join Wave as soon as it becomes available.

What did Scott McNealy say again? “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it” . And that was ten yars ago.

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CSS Naked Day 2009 April 9th

It’s already a tradition started in 2006 by Dustin Diaz: CSS Naked Day, on April 9th.

Many many blogs and sites will strip all CSS during 24 hours (effectively 48 hours for international compliance) and show the content “unstyled” as if no CSS existed.

A great opportunity to show off how your site structure stands if all styling is removed, from the official website:

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.

Are you using WordPress? Then join the movement by simply installing this CSS Naked Day plaugin for WordPress by Aja, activate it and you’re ready:

CSS Naked Day plugin for WordPress automatically strips off XML/HTML stylesheet references, embedded stylesheets and inline styles—all without editing your template! It also provides a function to determine whether it is the 9^th of April on the recommended worldwide 48-hour CSS Naked Day period or just your local 24-hour period if ever you want to automate a message telling viewers why your site is in the nude.

Then head over to the CSS Naked Day website to add you to the list of participating sites.

Follow CSS Naked Day on Twitter!

Steven PembertonImage via Wikipedia

“XForms and Declarative Applications” – Steven Pemberton

HTML Forms are a great success, the basis of the e-commerce revolution etc. but unanticipated at the time.

After more than a decade of experience time to move on, move away from the misconception of HTML as a presentation language. More abstraction is needed for advanced purposes. Compare presentational HTML to the Zen Garden approach of basic HTML and rich CSS.

Principles:

• Ease of authoring
• Good user experience
• Ease of changing
• Device independence (mobile platforms anyone?)
• Accessibility
• i18n
• Validation

The essence of XForms

Complete separation of Date from Content: Instances and Controls

The instance specifies the values being collected. Datatypes specify client side validation and constraints for values entered, even more complex logic like state is only required if county equals USA. Submission actions define the target for the data and what should be done with the result. Together this forms the model, the datasheet.

Abstract or intent-based controls. These are bound to the data (values). Syntax is simply binding an input control to a data item, by which the input knows what data type should be expected and the correct control is chosen. E.g. input for birthdate, whre birthdata is of type date, renders a calendar input popup.

The default XForms give you a toolbox which is very similar to a spreadsheet, no programming needed for common use cases. The actual XForms definition consist of standard XML and the data / values are transferred as XML as well.

Any XML data can be bound to a control, so there’s nothing which prevents editing a xhtml document (as instance) by using XForms syntax. Any page element can be bound by using XPath. Only restrictions: the page must be well-formed xhtml and the server must accept PUT or POST in order to update the page.

Other nice features include:

• i18n for all form elemens, including labels.
• auto-complete on form fields (demoed with live google translate per word, as you type.
• live search: flickr images
• geo-location as pair of lat/long or a map, bound to the same resource and so updating each other on change.

Implementations vary from plugins (for msie) and native (mozilla). Big vendors use XForms as part of their CMS and Application servers already. Most of this is not user visible, you just experience a rich user interface in the browser.

As a proof of concept, someone built a google-maps like application entirely in XForms which needed 25k of XForms data, compared to over 200k Javascript for Google Maps. Experience learns that one order of magnitude more code takes 34 times as much of effort (time, costs, bugs).

Current browser support is still limited, but the ubiquity-xforms library aims at extending existing Ajax libraries to add XForms support for a broad range of browsers.

Image via Wikipedia - this version is in fact outdated again, by now the open resources have already doubled.

“Linked Media: Weaving non-textual content into the semantic web” – Raphaël Troncy

Traditional media cunsumption (like TV) is declining and moving to the web. The question is: how can we make media into a first class object on the web?

Lots of issues: codecs, metadata, content protection and so on. Is there a viable OSS alternative?

Media Fragments WG

Case: media fragments identification and selective retrieval of media fragments, the goal of the Media Fragments WG of the W3C. Basic principles apply: fragment identification needs to be based on the URI.

There are four dimensions which define a fragment: time (point or interval), space (rectangle for now), track (video, audio, subtitles) and id (the unique name of the fragment).

The possibilities are limited by the container format can express (e.g. quicktime and such) Protocols include http, rtsp and a lot of proprietary protocols like mms, and the various p2p protocols.

Much of the fragment identification is already possible for the most important players in the market, but the syntax is not standard in any way.

Warning, hardcore geekery ahead…

The current proposed standard uses hash marks appended to the URI, which a smart user agent has to strip off and convert into some appropriate http headers. Media servers handle the request, do the slicing and make sure that the fragments are cacheable as well.

Example: mypodcast.mp3#t=15,45

translated into the Request

GET .../mypodcast.mp3
Accept: application/mp3
Range: seconds=15-45
...

Response:

HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Accept-ranges: bytes, seconds
Content-length: 2310034
...

First implementations can be based on plug-ins: Apache mod_annodex combined with for instance a Firefox add-on to create the right requests.

Media Annotations WG: Core Ontology

A couple of proprietary metadata schemas do exist, the first approach is to make the semantic meaning of all of these more explicit and to be able to map various schemas to each other.

There is a simple client read-only demo for metadata which looks very similar to the schema I used for the Twones Active API.

Another demo is about the linking of resources within the Cultural Heritage project. A very simple web interface allows for fast data entry where  terms are auto-completed with linked resources (canoncal names etc.). The interface looks like the Freebase web front-end.

The Web of Data

Interesting: the Semantic web is now being re-branded as the Web of Data. Oh well, maybe that is a good idea after all…

So what is it about:

Expose open datasets as RDF. Example DBpedia with slightly over 9M RDF triples. All of this linked to the rest of the Linked Data Cloud, which is expanding rapidly.

Explained by Tristan Nitot

The numbers are huge:

• 230M+ Mozilla users (Firefox, Thunderbird etc)
• 1000+ code contributers

Now both numbers are huge, but there could be even more innovation happening with even more contributors. Most often these are just people “scratching their itch”. These are not only coders – for example an artist who couldn’t bear looking at the crappy logo designed an elegant new logo.

So what does the Mozilla foundation do to help this happen?

• provide improved frameworks for development (under a OSS license)
• organize events, Mozilla Labs nights and café (Paris & London)
• concept series (online) and contests.

Technology

• Ubiquity (command driven UI)
• Personas (profiles beyond skins, more lightweight and easy to use, based on just a PNG image)
• Weave (sync profiles between Firefox and Fennec instances)
• Bespin (online collaborative source / text editing).

So what does the innovation cycle look like?

We start out with a smart idea, make a prototype which is in fact a bad product, see if it can live up to its expectations and either improve it to turn into a real product, or abandon it and work on something else.