Augmenting History: Riffing on Augmented Reality Pt. 3

...This is a continuation of the 'Augmenting History' posting I stared a few weeks back and is the final entry (3 of 3)

This entry covers some ideas on monetization.

AR Applied to Sporting Events

View of the mobile client

While users are waiting for sporting events to begin they could purchase and download official datasets from their favorite teams. They may be able to view the datasets by date or big game.

It would also be possible to ‘Augment stats’- that is, users could advance through the game they are currently watching, inning by inning or quarter by quarter and see the big plays or track trends in where the action is occurring on the field.

Monetization

Generally speaking, the app and tools should be free to help catalyze rapid adoption.

There are a number of angles in which the platform could be monetized including some of the following ideas:

Sponsorship - A session or a dataset would be sponsored by a company for a fee

Paid Premium Content Creation Feature Set - Premium Content Creators (e.g. Official Boston Red Sox) would pay a yearly subscription fee for access to premium features in the content editor. This would make them ‘official’ creators of premium content for the platform. The datasets would look more polished and may be more interactive because of the enhanced feature set they would be using for creation and editing.

Banner Ads - Banner ads would be served in the app - the user could ‘turn them off’ for a small fee

Paid Download of Premium Feature Sets - The ‘Official Gettysburg Data Set from the National Parks Dept. would be available for a small fee.

Note- At first blush the sponsorship model seems the least attractive of these ideas. In order to support the deployment of such a system, alot of support in terms of infrastructure, business relationships and sales would be needed.

Socialization and Datasets

There would be two classes of datasets ‘Free’ and ‘Premium’. Premium datasets are vetted and created by professionals and available for purchase while free datasets can be created by anyone.

Users will have the ability to ‘vote’ and rate data sets (ala Yelp or really any customer review-based app) and filter and search for relevant datasets via their mobile client.

When loading datasets users could filter out lower rated datasets.

'Legend Sports'

Tinkering on a brand idea.

Bobby Orr. Number 4. 1970. Who remembers? Who can forget?

It seems as though there is a  lack of poignant, strong, 'emblematic' marketing/brand figures related to hockey. With over 20 million amateur hockey players in North America, and such a tremendously rich history here in the states and to our north, why not consider introducing a new, high quality, bell weather brand.

This indelible, stalwart, brand-related iconography could be transcendent. A brand at its heart is a mark, first and foremost, and will go as far as its character will carry it. The character is strong in this one.

Augmenting History: Riffing on Augmented Reality Pt. 2

This is a continuation pf the Augmenting History posting I stared a few weeks back.

This entry adds some more details around how the editing tools could work as well as some more applications of the technology.

Adding Datasets

The Web-Based Editor

User will be able to enter Datasets in to either a web-based or mobile client. These Datasets may be classified as either ‘Free’ or ‘Premium’ with premium sets being made available for a small download fee.

For example, if a user wants to download a premium Dataset such as the ‘Official National Park Dataset’ (vetted and accurate) they will pay $0.99. Alternately, they would also have the flexibility to use an anonymous user’s dataset for free if desired.

All Datasets can have ‘subsets’ which, in concept, act as ‘pages’ of sorts in the parent (main) Dataset container. More details around subsets are included below.

Editing & Creating Data Sets

Users begin by naming their datasets and filling out information about the historical event - an overview of the event (if they desire)

They can then add subsets to their dataset. These are like the pages of a book, each one is independent, but is contained within the parent dataset.

Editing & Creating Data Subsets

Data subsets can be time based, groupings (e.g union, rebel) or general (organized by the user).

Time based subsets will include a playback control on the client when users are viewing these types of datasets. This will allow users to step through/play back time, whether that means advancing through the subsets by minutes, days or years etc.

Subsets that are of the type ‘Grouping’ and ‘General’ don’t have any associated time-based (playback) UI controls, but would be filterable via UI controls like any other subset.

All subsets can be filtered when viewing the data on the mobile client.

Nested subsets (subsets of subsets) will be allowed but only to a level of 1 nesting. For example, ‘day 1 of a battle’ may contain subsets for groups of combatants.

Data Points

Data points will consist of latitude, longitude and altitude (if input by the user)

Data points are also organized into the following types which will dictate their in-app behavior and the types of data that can be associated with them:

• Waypoint (path creation)

• Person (visual distinction)

• Object (visual distinction)

• Event (visual distinction)

Users can add data points based by simply selecting the data point type, clicking on the map and entering some data for the data point. They can also move (edit) data points on the UI by simply clicking and dragging. (Latitude and Longitude appear on the UI and dynamically update as the user moves a datapoint.

Alternately they could also type in GPS coordinates and click add for exact placement.

Note- the mobile editing client would have a ‘live mode’ so users could add data points to their exact/current locations by simply tapping the screen. This way they could walk specific routes in buildings etc and create data.

Concerning altitude, users will also be be able to type in/estimate altitude for a given point. (This would, for example, allow them to properly map a path up a staircase)

IDEA: Specialty objects like ‘ghosts’ may be made available in future iterations for fun events such as ghost tours.

More Examples on the Mobile Client

Aerial Tourism

History is often ‘too big’ to be completely experienced by a walking tour. Aerial and skyline tours could include Augmented History to help enhance the user experience.

For example, a helicopter tour could actually fly riders along a re-creation of the path John Wilkes Booth used to escape from Washington D.C ir over Day 2 of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Or maybe they could take a skyline tour of New York City and advance through the years and see how the City evolved over time or where specific historical events happened.

iOS Game: Hard Rippin' Santa

Intro

HeeeHaaaww!!! You know what mamma always said, “If you're going to rip them hard! Rip them Loud!”

Santa is coming to town and he is delivering more than just Christmas presents! Work your way up through the levels of this mad capped, gas-passing adventure and see if you can score the ultimate deployment and peel the wallpaper off of Little Jimmy's walls!

The more our little animated friend eats, the more gassy he becomes and the more likely he is to deploy the ultimate payload that will leave Little Jimmy's house in disarray...and a little stinky. But be careful, don't feed him anything that is likely to settle his stomach or the opportunity to pass some gas may pass you!

It's mad rippin' fun!

Available in the App Store: here

General Info - Feeding Santa

A 3d Santa stands on a 'set' a 'ready, set go!' appears- the counter begins to count down from 1 minute.
In one minute the user 'feeds Santa as much food as possible trying to increase his 'indigestion' shown
on an indigestion meter.
The user moves Santa across the screen (left to right) and tries to catch the proper food sources as they
'fall from the sky'- while trying to avoid negative 'food sources' that will relieve his indigestion. ex.
Chili Dogs are worth extra points as antacids are worth negative points.
As Santa collect/eats each food kind a score/number will float up accompanied by a sound effect. The
converse being true for negative items.
Some more valuable items may have particle trails (e.g. flames falling off the chili dog)
The avatar can be moved across screen by whatever means seem to be the most fun – maybe Santa
'sticks' to the users finger or there are directional arrows or we use the gyro.
At the end of the minute the user has accrued a score and Santa is either

Design Samples

Some Ideas on the Mobile Keypad

Mobile Keypad

Obviously, we all use our phones in a different way than a keyboard or a typewriter, so I often wonder why we use the QWERTY setup. Typing taught to us at younger ages involved correct posture, proper hand position and no peeking at the keys. These tenets simply no longer matter on handheld devices.

What this means is that there seems to be little need for these 20th century conventions on our mobile phones - other than the familiarity makes us feel good. Now, in fairness, there are some mobile experiences (E.g. larger tablets) where users may actually be able to type old school style. It is for this reason, that I would think that QWERTY conventions should still be kept alive through users settings and options.

However, given the obvious usability issues on mobile devices, there is probably some room for improvement. I propose ideas on a number of fronts.

Give the keys size priority based on how often they are used

Let's see if we can break the QWERTY convention. The old convention seems less useful for people typing with their thumbs as I assume most of us will be looking at the keypad. I'm sure there are reasons for the QWERTY layout (which I haven't really researched) on a typewriter - key proximity etc. that could probably be considered and translated to a new convention. The MOBILE convention.

My redesign is simply a proposal to enhance usability. The most commonly used keys are given priority in terms of size. This will reduce typos. They have also been moved to the 'thumb hotzones'. While letters like 'Q' and 'X' have been moved to the 'thumb deadzones'.

Contextually enable/disable

Contextually enable and disable invalid key combinations. For example if you type a 'Q' most of the the keys on the keypad would be disabled as invalid key combinations.

Keys inactive depending on context. Note- darkening probably would not be this obvious as the flashing would be very distracting as you type.(or maybe small dashes appear on the keys - something too subtle for a static pic)

Settings

Make these keyboard layouts a selectable setting. Give the users what they want and allow them to use the devices how they want to.

For example, if a hipster wanted to type 'rotfl' or 'lmao' they would turn off the contextual keyboard setting. If a user was using their device for business purposes they would probably want it enabled.

Settings could look like this

• Slang
• Business
• Business Contextual
• QWERTY
• QWERTY Contextual

Swipe Punctuation/The Punctuation Key

Let's consider what I've named 'swipe puncuation'. Let's get rid of the period, question mark and comma. Maybe we could break our messaging into 'sentence containers' when you finish a sentence swipe the punctuation key right for a question and left for a statement (down for a comma) on the 'punctuation key'. This would allow us to make some of the keys even bigger because we could reduce the key set by 2.

Coming Soon

Augmented Reality ptIII....

App Idea: LocalNation: Consolidating Community Communication

 

This is an idea from a while back, I s'pose most of what is here could be achieved using existing social/broadcasting apps IF we could somehow get towns and cities to effectively streamline and share their information across agencies.

Loclnation is inspired by the idea that people at local levels around the world have the need to share information more effectively. While some of this 'local information' is available through a variety of sources, some of it is not. Loclnation will 'aggregate' all of a user's local info into one app. The app will update automatically which will prevent the user from having to check multiple sources to get their local news and information.

Some of this information is also on local websites and bulletin boards but, again, the user, in almost all cases would need to check multiple sources. The app is free and easy to use which lowers its barrier to adoption.

Loclnation looks to inspire people to use technology to communicate and revolutionize the way they interact with one another.

The main thrust of the idea centers on a mobile framework that users can upload content to. The content is then relayed to the front end app/reader.

The Mobile App

The mobile app is downloaded for free, like many other apps. A user either enters their current zip code to retrieve data or the device's geo location will be used.

• It is available on both iOS and Android
• It is/has portrait mode only
• It auto updates
• When updates are present the app indicates this

New updates are always organized to the top of categories (bulletin board) and announcements that have already been viewed are grayed out.

The Framework

At its core it is a base mobile framework to which users can add content pertinent to their locale. It will be built and deployed in a number of tiers, Base, I and II. These tiers represent different levels of monetization and may possible represent phases of implementation.

Base

• Police
•   Fire
•  Announcements
• Town/City Business
• Schools
• Churches

Once a town or city adopts the framework they will be encouraged to 'advertise' it. This can be easily achieved by posting on town websites, bulletin boards and/or sending home announcements with school children. Sample announcements will be provided to the Towns to be used as a guideline.

The base framework only allows for text based posting (ala twitter) and is limited to 200 characters per post/announcement.

Posts can be flagged as sticky (permanent) or they can be time based. They can also be scheduled, either in the future or to recurr.

The town framework will be great for sharing information with the community, such as:

• Weather Alerts
• Church Bbqs
• Health Advisories
• School Cancellations
• School Sports

etc.

A pivotal advantage of adopting this framework is that it is a local aggregator for news and events. By having it in a mobile app these announcements are delivered instantly to the clients. User will no longer have to go searching for this info in  multiple places. It will be delivered to their mobile device automatically and they will be alerted that there is an update present.

Tier 1

Tier one will be a both a free and a paid tier where local businesses can advertise. By adopting the framework a town will ensure that there are many local residents using and viewing the app.

For free, the adevertisers can post a classifed of sorts but will be will limited to 100 characters, 3 days maximum posting and they cannot schedule any announcements. (Note free postings never shuffled to the top of the list when an update occurs, they only shuffle to the top of the free section)

 Advertisers that pay $1 per day to list a special event will enjoy more benefits including scheduling, and up to 500 characters including a headline. This is mostly a different service then what is being offered in other outlets. Things to be advertised here would be:

•  Live Music (when and who)
•  Garage Sales
• Bake Sales

This low cost advertising would be very attractive to local residents who don't want to go through the hassle of creating advertisements or maybe want to promote something cheaply at the last minute.

Both the free and Paid Teir 1 framework(s) only allows for text based posting (ala twitter). It would seem roughly like classifieds to the user.

Tier 2

The Tier 2 framework is also a payed tier. It will be used mainly like by local publishers, free town circulars etc. Many of these local publishers do not have mobile apps or access to creating them. By using the loclnation framework they will easily enter into the mobile sector and be able to generate a profit.

• Tier 2 is a subscription ($99 - $149 per month) to the full suite of online tools, this will allow publishers to post entire editions of their publications as native mobile apps.
•  User can also upload ads which will periodically appear at the bottom of stories.
• Users can also flag certain ads as 'feature' ads. These are basically the equivalent of full page ads and take over the whole screen when a user taps on a story.

By selling the additional ad space in the mobile app to their existing clients the cost of the monthly subscription will more than pay for itself.

Having Schools and town news in the app ensures a local audience for the publishers.

Further, printed papers are going away. Many local publishers have been slow to realize this. As the shift to electronic/mobile medium continues, these local publishers will have more and more users online, this will eventually allow them print fewer papers. The result will be thousands in savings on printing costs to each publication.

Loclnation will allow these small publishers to have a professional, monetized presence in the mobile sector.

Using the Framework

The framework will be simple to use.

To publish to the mobile app users will be supplied with a suite of online tools. These tools will include areas to cut and paste text and add photos.

Once the user adds text and photos (if supported) to a story they can then assign a category in which the story/announcement will appear.

 

Ice-King: Iceless Cooler System

Introduction

A modernization of the age old ‘camping style’ food and beverage storage cooler. The Ice-King is a storage device that needs no ice cubes and can be partitioned off resulting in differing configurations. It is great for camping or weekend getaways.

The idea for the Ice-king cube-less cooler system is based on the fact that consumers want more flexibility out of their storage coolers and more options to configure it for maximum storage usage.

Generally, when stored for a period of days, cheese, bread and other foods become soggy and mushy after floating in the cool water from the melted ice.

Ice-King offers solutions to many of these problems.

Overview

The Ice-King cube-less cooler system is a revolution of conventional storage coolers and offers the consumer several different options when it comes to food and beverage storage.

The system is primarily based around re-freezable, gel-filled, pre-formed plastic inserts that fit into special ‘tracks’ mounted in the cooler. In addition to its’ cooling benefits, the center insert can also serve as a partition to bisect the cooler’s storage compartment. This allows the user to utilize one side for food storage (using the cube-less system) while using the other side for traditional ‘iced down’ beverage storage. An additional option for the consumer would be to completely remove the inserts and use the cooler in a more conventional way.

Special grates (Dry Grates) fit into the bottom of the cooler and keep food out of the melted ice thereby helping to preserve freshness.

When freezing the inserts they are simply folded up and stacked into a home freezer thereby occupying the smallest amount of space possible.

Additionally, the Ice-King system comes with pre-formed plastic storage containers that are also filled with a re-freezable gel. This additional method of cooling and storage will help keep food it’s coldest without the consumer having to resort to the use of ice cubes.

The containers are designed to be stacked one inside of the other while freezing in order to also use smallest amount of freezer space possible.

Marketing/Price Point

The system will be marketed in sizes (small, medium, large) which result in different prices depending on the consumers desire/ability to store the inserts for freezing and the amount of money they want to spend on the system.

Small- small cooler, inserts, dry grates, some food storage containers

Medium- medium cooler, inserts, dry grates, more food storage containers

King- large cooler, inserts, dry grates, many food storage containers

Augmenting History: Riffing on Augmented Reality

A user could stand outside of Ford's theater hold up his phone and see where and how history happened.

I was recently inspired by Tomi Ahonen's presentation on Augmented Reality  that I came across on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvyfHuKZGXU

I thought he made some salient points on AR - how it is the 8th Mass Media and how it may affect our lives in the next 5 to 10 years. It inspired me to start thinking of some of the potential applications of this new and emerging technology and this is one of those ideas.

This will be the first of a 3 part series riffing on AR where I will also explore some ideas on how to monetize it.

 

Augmenting History

 

 Want to walk the same path John Wilkes Booth did as he ascended to the Presidential Box in Ford's theater? Or how about stand in the same spot that Abraham Zapruder did on November 22, 1963?

It seems to me we could leverage the emerging AR technology to really make for richer and more immersive tourist interactions at places of historical significance and, to a lesser degree, locations of general interest.

When a user visits a landmark they would have the option of loading a data-set related to the history associated with that area. These data-sets would include the major players that are historically linked to the event or place, how they got there, the paths they walked etc. - as well as plenty of drill-down info to make for a rich, immersive AR experience.

It would take alot of data to prime the pump and get something like this up and running. ALOT of data. So, in order to help achieve a critical mass, in terms of data entry, the paradigm would be broken into two data tiers; Open Source and Premium. The open source data-sets would be contributed by the public and policed and organized by a peer rating system (think yelp/Wikipedia) while the Premium data-sets would be constructed by historians or other professionals and vetted.

Creating the open source data-sets could involve some sort of web-based or mobile client that allows users to enter GPS coordinates and/or even draw paths on the terrain - the way some of these jogging and running sites do.

The User Experience

 

A user can trace the path of Lincoln or Booth through Ford's theater

The user would visit a landmark or historical area and use their mobile device to view the additional historical data. They would also have the ability to load the data-set they desired and filter different data depending on what they wanted to see on their screen.

A user scans Dealey Plaza with their mobile device using the November 22, 1963 dataset.

It is plausible that there may be hundreds of data-sets for the more popular tourist attractions and users will have the ability to sort through what is available based on a data-set's rating or they may opt for the higher quality, more comprehensive premium data-set.

Part 1 of 3, to be continued...

Mobile Digititis

Stardate: Sometime in the future.

A man walks into an old folks home to visit his Father who has been a resident there for the past few years. Upon entering the 'Recreation Area' he sees a number of elderly people. Some are in wheelchairs, some in walkers and others are seated on various chairs and sofas. To a resident, almost all of them are looking at the palms of their hands and or making gestures with them. The man asks a nurse, "What is it they are doing? What do they think is wrong with their hands?" The nurse replies, "Oh, they don't think anything is wrong with them. They just all still think they are holding cell phones and texting their friends. A few decades ago everyone carried these devices all the time. Their brains are impulsively telling their bodies that they still are holding their phones since it was such a huge part of their lives."

Game Idea: Collective Social Gaming

Introduction

 2012 is a social game based around the idea that people believe the world is either good or bad and they have a chance to voice their opinion through the UI mechanics of choosing a side and the associated gameplay that comes with that decision.

The game itself can be considered sort of a glorified, realtime, online poll that runs continuously. There only real depth to the game beyond voting, would be some light social sharing aspects and the strategy involved in diplomacy. The mechanic of the game to inspire users to play is one of the core social components of the game play (e.g. wanting to be on the winning team) not necessarily the mechanics of the game itself.

Another metaphor for the game would be a tug of war. Users choose a side when the first sign up and ‘cast their votes’ to determine whether or not the world is bad or good.  At 12:00am on January 1, 2012 the game will cease to function and play an animated Unity scene to reveal which side has won. The scene will play continuously looping for a week until the application is removed or blocked from being accessed.

The game can also be thought of in terms of seeing a movie and the emotional arc that is commonly associated with many Hollywood plots. A key aspect of the overall design will be to entertain the user base for a year using such tried and true methods. As such, events and the availability of certain graphics and 'trophies' will be carefully considered and revealed to the user base at specific times according to an 'event schedule'.

A segment of users are expected to be heavily engaged, while another segment is expected to be passive. Some users may leave the application open in a window to watch it or ‘check in’ from time to time. (As they would with a pet rock or a Chia pet) Some segment of passive users will be come more engaged and increasingly active as the ShutDown date approaches. We expect the cinematic nature of the meta game will keep the passive user engaged and interested.

2012 can also be considered a social experiment in an entertainment wrapper.

Where 2012 stands alone is that is a truly social game in that the end result of this gaming experience is a communal effort- and the fact that there is a definitive end. It is not a game where users build their own kingdoms and then engage each other on the social level of the application. The application is the social level of this game.

“2012  is upon us.

Many have predicted that this will be the end for our planet. But still others believe we hold our fate in our hands. Will our world be redeemed or will it be destroyed.

You Decide…

Welcome.

2012 is the most profound social experiment in the history of Mankind.

Do you believe the world is filled with more evil than good or more good than evil? Cast your vote below by choosing which side you will join in this epic struggle of darkness versus light. Or just pick a side to have fun!

At 12:00 a.m. GMT on January 1, 2012 this application will cease to function. At this time the ‘final votes’ will be in place and we, as a people, will decide if the planet will either be saved or damned. Cast your vote today, stay strong and battle vigilantly for those convictions in which you believe. For when this game and our ultimate battle concludes we will have the finally have the answers we have searched for so long...what do we think of ourselves?

Choose your side with conviction, fight for what you believe in and stay strong.

Making Rotaries More efficient

Why aren't all rotaries designed to be more efficient? It seems to me that you could reduce the congestion in the rotary itself by diverting a proportion of the traffic before it reachs the circle. Obviously, there are your ever-present space restrictions and cost, but it could be a good solution for some of the rotaries I drive on. 

App Idea: Trinka: Big BIG Data

Are you prepared to reconsider how we, as a species, interact, meet people and consider the world around us? 

Trinka – The trinkets of life we collect and hold through the vestiges of encounters with others.
  

We all  have routines.

• Have you ever wondered how many of the same people you see every day without realizing
• Have you ever wondered if the person in line behind you at the grocery store is the same person that sat behind you at a baseball game 7 years ago?
•   Have you ever wondered how many times you have seen the same person at a night club and never recognized them?

We, as humans, are oblivious to the social world around us that exists beyond the bubble of what is digestable to us. The man in the powder blue coat, the woman with the giant sunglasses...our friends and acquaintances. Familiarity and impression is how we interpret and ultimately recognize our world.

We can change this.

Trinka is a mobile application that tracks your relationships with everyday people and has the intrinsic potential to disrupt our modern socially accepted conventions for meeting and interacting with one another.

Chance Encounters (Trinkets) can be tracked anonymously or, with willing participants, anonymous relationships can be converted into a friendship.

Overview

A user downloads the mobile application and it begins tracking and detecting other devices around it. When other devices are in proximity more than once or repeatedly in proximity the user is alerted. It is through these alerts that users will begin to detect the patterns in the world around them.

The app will give the users daily and weekly updates of activity and sort them in order of importance (to the user) according to configurable settings.

If a user would like to use paid features of the app they would be able to contact proximate devices that they are interested in learning more about. (Provided the proximate target is set to 'receive introductions)

Emoticons can only be immediately received by users who have their apps set to receive. For users in 'do not disturb' mode communications will be suppressed until 'do not disturb' is deactivated.

Motivation: I want to know if I am standing in the same room with someone I walked past 20 years ago. That's cool.

Full design available upon request.

Energy

I was thinking alot about energy how we acquire and how we use it. This led me to consider how much energy the 7 billion of us exert and waste everyday. If we could instal some sort of padding on sidewalks that would compress when it was stepped on an actually generate a small amount of energy we, pedestrians all around the world, could give some

Brow Beast

Here is an idea I got while I was out running the other day. It was cold but I was still sweating alot, so I had to wipe my brow with my running gloves (which I didn't like).