Last week in Santa Clara, California, luminaries from the augmented reality (AR) industry gathered for Augmented Reality Event 2010 – a conference focused on the business of AR. The two-day event was a great success filled with eye-opening sessions about AR and its possibilities for the future. Fortunately I had the chance to sit down one-on-one with two of the biggest names in the space – leaders of the pair of companies some refer to as “the titans of AR.” Sponsor In two separate interviews, I chatted with Bruno Uzzan, CEO of Total Immersion , and Peter Meier, co-founder and CTO of metaio – two of the leading forward-thinking AR experts from two of the largest AR vendors in the world. Our conversations focused around standardization and how to continue to bring useful experiences to consumers from now on into the future – hot topics of discussion at ARE 2010. Bruno Uzzan – Standards Pave the Way By far the most frequent topic of discussion last week at ARE 2010 was the idea that standards need to be set to help AR break-out of its emerging tech shell and blossom into a fully functioning industry. In his opening keynote at the conference, AR evangelist Bruce Sterling suggested the industry is at “9am,” a play on his earlier speech a year ago – “At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry.” As he then added, perhaps AR “needs some caffeine.” If Bruno Uzzan has anything to say about it (and he certainly does), the caffeine the industry needs is standardization. During his keynote at the event, Uzzan introduced what he calls “a good first step” towards the introduction and adoption of industry-wide standards – a standardized black-and-white packaging logo that communicates to customers if devices or experiences are “AR ready.” But as Uzzan said, a logo is just a solid first-step on the road to standardization. The other steps he pictures helping the industry reach this point include interoperability and quality control. While most AR vendors are working on their own proprietary platforms, they are all pretty similar, so Uzzan suggests the various vendors sit down together and talk about better communication between these platforms. Some have suggested the introduction of a standard augmented reality markup language (ARML) which would make platform compatibility as simple as browser compatibility. Uzzan believes this to be a lofty goal, however, since these platforms have been developed for some time now and getting everyone to switch to a new language would be difficult. Instead, says Uzzan, quality control should emerge as the result of standardizing the various technologies embedded into AR experiences. From image recognition technology, to marker and markerless tracking and to computer vision – user experience and product quality will benefit from the standardization of these technologies. AR is mature enough, says Uzzan, and the time for standards is now if these small firms want to survive against larger players when they inevitably enter the game. Peter Meier – Reaching Consumers is Key Peter Meier largely agrees with Uzzan on the issues surrounding standardization, and says his company, metaio, will participate in helping to establish these standards. But Meier has a bit of a different approach beyond standards to how AR can continue to succeed in the future. He compares AR to the invention of the motion picture and says the industry is at the point right now where the novelty of simply showing anything is wearing off. “The first movies that ran could show anything, like an elephant in the zoo,” Meier said. “100 years ago it wasn’t about the elephant, it was ‘that thing is moving!’ Eventually it became more about the content, and AR is headed the same way. AR is successful when you start creating great content and making content that is special.” One way Meier and metaio are attempting to create special content for consumers is by focusing on current customer habits and aiming their products to be used where people are already spending their time. At the start of the conference, metaio launched a new initiative , which they call Glue, which introduced the first image tracking technology to a mobile AR browser. Now when a user accesses special channels on the company’s junaio browser, pointing their device at special real-world triggers will launch 3D interactive experiences that are “glued” to the trigger. The interesting part about Glue is not the technology itself – experiences like these have existed on desktop platforms and on mobile devices in the past. What makes Glue unique is that its a mobile experience meant to be used indoors. Meier says this is a deliberate attempt to reach users where they spend the majority of their time. “AR is super cool but not enough to change peoples habits – people aren’t gonna go outdoors more,” says Meier. “Brand experiences are where the money is – sitting on a couch in a warm living room where no one is watching you hold your phone up.” Meier says he hopes one day kids eating breakfast will beg their moms to let them use the phone to see that day’s interactive cartoon message from the colorful characters on their favorite box of cereal. Why cereal? Because people sit down to eat breakfast every single day, and they don’t have to go out of their way and break with routine in order to enjoy a fun AR experience. Reaching the customer where they already spend their time is a main goal of metaio going forward, says Meier. What to Watch For As AR matures into its young-adulthood, users should expect to see more practical applications of the technology and less eye-grabbing gimmicky experiences. The tone around the sessions at ARE 2010 was one that seemed highly in favor of weeding out the gimmicks and finding the truly unique and innovative uses of augmented reality. We have highlighted some of them recently, and plan to talk about more in the near future. I would also expect to see much more competition heat up in the mobile AR browser space as large players like Layar, junaio and Wikitude battle for features. Meier says junaio will soon launch its own store for buying and selling AR experiences, much like the one launched recently by Layar. Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, co-founder of Layar, says the company is preparing another large announcement at their anniversary event later this month. Discuss

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We’ve entered an era where the cost of sensors, processors and transmitters are so low that it’s fast becoming cost effective to put them inside everything, even the clothes we wear. Even our own toothbrush may soon sense and communicate socially about where it is and how it’s being used in space and time. Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling has coined the term ” spime “, to describe objects that can be “tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object.” David Orban, the creator of the iPhone app WideNoise , also offers WideSpime , which helps developers build mass data collection services for real-time data management in a way that maintains the autonomy of both the data and the object generating the data. Sponsor In our most recent Internet of Things post Objects Aren’t Social , Orban comments that objects ” …are going to form their own independent social networks, which are going to be fundamentally incompatible with human communication.” These new machine networks will be so redundant and reliable that we will be freed from most of our machine-operating duties. We will get to be human again. We will soon see cars that don’t rear end each other because onboard sensors won’t allow it. Or how about a vacuum cleaner that knows about a mess your cat made and cleans it up before you even notice your machine-network’s admin message about it. Also, consider an Internet of Things home that tracks your habits so well it knows which rooms to heat and light because it knows what you’ll be doing on that particular day. Orban’s dream is that thousands of years of human subservience to machines will end because we will teach our machines how to not only take care of themselves, but how to take care of us as well. But what if someone wanted to manipulate these systems for an unethical advantage? Or even worse, what if these manipulations were built into these new machine networks at the earliest stages? On Sunday night, ReadWriteWeb reported on a presentation by Tim O’Rielly regarding the future Internet of Things. In his presentation he said, “You see increasingly the giants of the Internet are trading for their own account – they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that; we have to work for openess in that web.” That’s why Orban stresses the importance of autonomous machine networks, which are built on open-sourced standards. Another open-source Internet of Things project we’re excited about is Pachube ( pronounced patch-bay ). What WideSpime and Pachube share in common are real-time global maps, which present data generation in a fair and open way. Because these projects aspire to a high level of transparency and user adaptability, we may have a chance to achieve Orban’s dream of all us machine operators getting a chance to be human again. Free To be Human Video Free To be Human PowerPoint David Orban – Free to be human View more presentations from Mobile Monday Amsterdam . Discuss

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Andrew Keen is no stranger to controversy. He has irritated bloggers by equating Web 2.0 with communism and enraged citizen journalists with his best selling book, Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture . Naturally when I saw Keen’s core conversation “Is Innovation Fair?” on the SXSW program, I knew it would incite lively discussion. Sponsor SXSW and the term “read-write web” are perhaps the antithesis of what Keen has become known for. While we as a publication (and often as a community) celebrate the participatory culture of Web 2.0, Keen sees the rise of amateur publishers as the fetishism of change-based culture and the breakdown of centralized moral authority. In less diplomatic circles, he’s accused of being an elitist. When an intimate 40 person setting of bloggers like Stealthmode Partners’ Francine Hardaway and legendary futurist Bruce Sterling failed to erupt into an angry mob, I was surprised. In addressing the question “Is Innovation Fair?” Keen maintains that there is no definitive answer. He says, “If you asked a peasant whether innovation was fair during the industrial revolution, he’d answer no. But history is written by innovators.” Keen explains that the voices that have legitimized change from the industrial revolution to the late 60’s, have been those of the cultural elite. Professional poets, musicians, academics and writers have always had a place in creating the histories surrounding major paradigm shifts. Nevertheless, as the digital revolution rapidly destroys the barriers to creating historical narratives, a new elitism has emerged in the form of a-list bloggers, social media experts and web developers. While digital utopians generally see technological innovations and social media as vehicles for democracy and positive solutions, Keen argues that the proponents of innovation tend to forget the victims of change. “Innovation doesn’t lead to justice and fairness. I’d argue there is a more dramatic inequality now then there ever was during the industrial revolution. We have fetishized change, but we are unfettered. If anything, the new media is less transparent and less accountable…I don’t have a problem with Twitter or new media, my problem is that digital utopians have dressed up their ideology to sound like democracy…Google has become the master of seeming like an altruistic and public company and yet laughing all the way to the bank.” Keen argues that because established elites are being displaced by the digerati, the web ecosystem is suffering from a crisis in authority. He believes that a lack of thoughtful skepticism and the overwhelming emphasis on real-time sound bites rather than academic treatise is leading to the vast majority of netizens consuming only mulched versions of the truth. Says Keen, “You can’t get nuggets of truth in 30 seconds on Twitter…Skepticism requires deep thinking. We have an increasing nihilism when it comes to traditional authority and yet few of the new authorities are doing the reading or groundwork. …When we simply assume that all traditional structures are wrong, we risk the populism of a Sarah Palin…” As a blog with an audience of entrepreneurs, self-publishers and technologists, we know Keen won’t hold you back from innovating. But he may make you question whether or not you have enough information to accurately assess your life decisions. Love him or loathe him, let us know your thoughts about Keen’s assertions in the comments below. Discuss

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