Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The fi rst AR apps for smartphones were launched in 2009. In the inter-
vening years, we have seen a predictable trajectory. First comes consumer-
ism. The earliest AR apps were likely to show you the names of restaurants
and shops fl oating on the street ahead and maybe the associated customer
ratings. The fi rst AR ad was introduced in 2007. And there are games. Chase
virtual ghosts, play virtual paintball, shoot at cars. Some go deeper, using
the natural and architectural world as the skeleton for a global game of
“king of the hill.” Of course, navigation is a popular application type, spic-
ing up travel with references from Wikipedia or giving the outdoor traveler
look-ahead information about terrain.
Although the technical challenges are great, a lot of this is pretty trivial
stuff in my opinion, at least until we get to nonconsumerist interactions
with the natural and urban landscape.
One might say that a trajectory in media is that things move up the
grade from triviality to genuine meaningfulness. It seems so, looking at
AR applications. And yet, much is stalled by the smallness of vision; it's
not about computing power. It's about marketing and the whole idea of an
“app.” I should apologize now to the many folks in architecture, geophys-
ics, urban planning, wilderness protection, disease control and prevention,
and other scientifi c fi elds who are actually doing meaningful things. There
is a lot of wonderful stuff. Nazarian speaks about “the city” as something
comprehensible at deep levels through AR. But these ideas are not yet mak-
ing it into the smartphones of regular users, probably because the consum-
erist apparatus does not deem them important. The fertile ground in AR at
this moment seems to be in automobiles, a worthy and productive use. But
what of all the other possibilities?
Distributed sensing means populating a place with sensors that can trans-
mit various kinds of data. It can also apply to sensors that are already in
place in the world if we can get data from them; for example, excellent
weather station data is available through Weather Underground (
www
.wunderground.com
) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organi-
zation (
www.noaa.gov
). Water and air pollution sensor data is harder to
get to from already embedded sources, but there are movements afoot like
Code for America (
http://codeforamerica.org/
) that seek to fi nd ways to
get governments and municipalities to “unlock” data that is siloed away
