No. But it’s close. (See the bottom of this post for a little addendum.)

Augmented Reality, as a field, has been threatened with co-option of its name in the past. There may even have been some angst a few years ago about using the term to describe what most people call Mobile Augmented Reality on smartphones.

AR is, in its true form and ideal implementation, the seamless visual fusion of virtual objects and data with the real environment, by way of overlay through optics that can simulate all of the visual characteristics by which we perceive physical objects in the real world. That’s the ideal. It’s okay to refer to less-than-ideal analogues as AR devices because that ideal doesn’t exist yet. But they’re stand-ins until the necessary hardware exists.

Is a mobile phone a legitimate Augmented Reality device? Yes. One looks through the “magic window” of the screen and that becomes the user’s active Field of View (FOV). It lacks depth and the full FOV of the human eye, but one can hold it directly between one’s eyes and the subject area at which one is looking. Something like the Nintendo 3DS goes one better, since it adds stereoscopy to the experience, but it’s still far from ideal.

I know I’m belaboring this point, but for those who have tried the Oculus Rift, let me make an analogy: Imagine that you’re really standing in the yard of the villa that inspired the Rift’s Tuscany demo scene, but with no fountain there. You’re wearing VR goggles with a selectively transparent display element and lenses that don’t distort anything that’s behind that see-through display. When you aren’t looking at the fountain’s position, the goggles don’t display any of the scene, but the computer to which they are attached has the scene’s model geometry in its memory, and the model is an accurate one-to-one representation of the real space. So here’s what we’re using:

• GPS (for initial rough positioning so the system knows that the villa model and accompanying data is what it should be using)
• Head-tracking data from sensors like the MPU-6050 found in the Rift, or the MPU-9150 in Glass (it’s the same chip with the addition of a third-party magnetometer built into the package… incidentally a chip for which I wrote a sloppy but ground-breaking and attention-getting hack). This is mostly to make the next step easier. Because inertial and magnetic sensors are inevitably subject to at least some error, (accumulated integration error for the inertial sensors and magnetic field distortions for the magnetometer), especially when trying to measure linear translation as opposed to orientation, this is not really how you want to determine where the user is looking. but having a good guess reduces, by an order of magnitude, the number of possible perspectives against which you need to try to match data from the visual sensors.
• Visual data from cameras (stereo cameras, depth cameras using code like Kinect Fusion, single cameras with really slick SLAM algorithms like PTAMM or 13^th Lab’s PointCloud™ SDK… interpreted by the CPU, or a dedicated vision processor… whatever… doesn’t matter) to precisely register position of the virtual field of view with what’s actually in front of you.

So the system knows where you are, the direction in which you’re looking, and precisely what your field of view is. The optics have the capability of displaying virtual objects with a real sense of depth, like the Rift, but don’t block out your view of reality except where displaying virtual objects. You look where the fountain should be, the systems draws it with the correct focal depth where it should be, and boom, your perception of the reality that is the yard around you has been augmented with a virtual fountain that looks like it’s really there… until somebody walks between you and said fountain. The system needs to be capable of perceiving that an object has passed into the portion of your FOV where the fountain exists, and that that object exists at a closer depth than the one to which the fountain is registered. With that data, it needs to apply a stereoscopic occlusion mask over the fountain and in the shape of the outer contours of the occluding object. Now the person between you and the fountain is visible through the person-shaped hole punched in the rendering of the fountain. Because the focal depth of the remaining visible portion of the fountain is correct, and your occlusion mask is perfect, the person appears to walk in front of the fountain. Oh yeah, don’t forget to make the lighting of the fountain match the lighting of real place. And also don’t forget to capture the shadow of that person occluding it and remap it if it would fall on the fountain. And that other person is wearing the same AR system as you and is tuned to the same channel… your system had better show you the virtual splash when they throw that virtual rock into it. Never mind the reflection of the scene in the water 0_0.

Anyhow…

Proceed to populate your virtual environment virtual objects. Don data-gloves or spatially tracked controllers, and whatever haptic feedback systems you have access to, and reach out and interact with those virtual objects. Or use a gestural mouse for a less seamless experience. Or use that depth camera on your head and be content to limit your interactions to those where your hands are visible to it.

And THAT is Augmented Reality. And it sure as hell ain’t easy.

So, back to our original question: Is Google Glass an Augmented Reality device?

Well, what’ve we got? We’ve got GPS. We’ve got an inertial measurement unit with a magnetometer. We’ve got a camera and a host processor capable of running some SLAM analysis on what we’re seeing. We have network connectivity with which to reference an online database of virtual objects and their precise coordinates in the real world. What we don’t have is the display. Google Glass is as much an Augmented Reality device as your phone is… IF you take your phone and hold it out, up, and to the right of your head and then glance over at it to see virtual objects overlaid on the 2D image of what is actually right in front of you. Or Google Glass is as much an Augmented Reality device as the GPS display you have suction-cupped to the windshield of your car beneath your rear-view mirror (which isn’t an Augmented Reality device), not even close to being as much of one as the badass HUDs that are projected onto the windshields in front of the drivers of some newer vehicles. I wouldn’t say that that’s really Augmented Reality, but at least it’s a real see-through overlay. I would say that the automotive HUD exhibited by MVS California a couple of years ago IS a real Augmented Reality system.

So no, Google Glass is not an Augmented Reality device. But a lot of the ingredients are there, and there will be lots of apps that can display useful contextual data up and off to the side of what you’re looking at. But that isn’t Augmented Reality. It’s something useful, it’s something in the same family, and it’s something that should be of interest to everybody who is interested in Augmented Reality, but it isn’t Augmented Reality. Some people think that Glass is a bad thing because the current focus is on the capture of images and video using the onboard camera, and that that is going to creep out the public and give a bad name to head-worn computers. I’m hoping that that focus will have evolved by the time the consumer version launches. Where I think Glass is of great importance to Augmented Reality is that it is set to be the first mass-produced consumer electronics device that places all of the necessary non-display components of a basic AR headset on people’s heads. The only thing missing is the correct display modality.

Addendum:
So I just had a conversation with Steve Feiner while on a conference call to prepare for a panel that will include both of us at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara next month. He made the argument that, with a rooted device (not limited to the Mirror API) and the eyepiece slightly repositioned, and with the addition of bigger battery (no problem; I sometimes carry an 18Ah backup battery with me anyhow) then sure, the Glass hardware could be used as a legit AR device. Stereoscopy is not a prerequisite for AR. But geometric registration of graphics with the scene is a prerequisite. So, arguably, the Glass hardware is capable of being used as an AR device… just not a very good one. So really, you shouldn’t want Glass to be used as an AR device. But it will be a great contextual data display. And I suspect that the supported programability of Glass will grow far beyond the Mirror API in short order. Keep in mind that there was no App Store on the first iPhone for a long time, and that developers were limited to web apps. I think that this is just Google’s attempt to curate and guide the experience for users and developers who aren’t hardware, interface, and kernel experimenters. It is a technology that will augment the human experience, but not with Augmented Reality. Maybe that will come with Glass Mk II, or from another company in the meantime. We’ll see.

The Golden-i is clearly intended for industrial and professional applications, and makes very few concessions to style-consciousness. There’s a lot to be said for that. Where Glass and the M100 feature QVGA and WQVGA microdisplays respectively (my info on Glass resolution is second-hand and, while from a source I trust, shouldn’t be considered reliable) note: this has since proven to be misinformation
, the Golden-i boasts a full 800×600 SVGA display engine. And it makes quite a difference. The optics are pretty much perfect, and the articulation of the display boom makes it really easy to get the alignment just right.

The device I tried was running Windows 7 Embedded, which makes it the only device I know of that does. One hopes that they have an Android version in the works. That said, the experience of using this device was one of the most compelling I’ve had. The voice navigation is pretty much flawless, responding to murmured commands even on the noisy show floor of CES. In the image viewer app, I was able to zoom in and out by speaking the command “zoom level” followed by an integer. Then I could control panning and vertical scrolling of the image using the built in inertial sensors. Both of the other devices can do this, but this was the first execution of this navigation type that I’ve gotten to try, and it was great.

Of course, I was on the same page as the guy guiding the demo as soon as he directed me to speak the sequence of navigation commands to open the video player. The sample clip that he’d loaded was of that scene in Iron Man just after he’s suited up for the first time and we’re treated to a nice extended bit of first-person HUD footage. I’ve spent just a little too much time replaying that scene on my own Vuzix stereo HMDs, so that may have won him a bit of positive bias from me. It just let me know his heart is in the right place.

The most compelling bit of the demo though, was that they had a second unit loaded with first-responder software and a thermal camera. I didn’t get to try this, but my girlfriend did and said it was awesome. They had a second thermal camera of he same type hooked up to a monitor in the booth. This piece of kit would be an absolute life-saver for firemen (and those they’re trying to rescue in smoke-filled buildings) and also for law-enforcement officers in manhunt situations and the like. And I’m sure for many other people, in many situation that don’t even begin to occur to me.

When I asked about a price point, the rep replied “Let me put it this way: this doesn’t cost any more to manufacture than your cell phone does.” He also said that Verizon would start selling the devices here in The States this year. As to whether its purchase would be contract subsidized, he could only say “we’ll see.”

So while I don’t expect we’ll see image-conscious consumers rocking the Golden-i in its current form, this is by far the most functionally mature integrated HMD that I’ve gotten to try. I am, of course, still looking forward to seeing what Glass has to offer.

They’re about to launch a Kickstarter campaign for an AR glasses development kit.

My first impulse was that they were biting off more than they could chew and promising something that they couldn’t reasonably deliver. Their current demo uses a uses a set of Epson Moverio glasses and a low-latency camera capable of performing finger-tracking. It’s worth noting that they’ve already done something interesting here by feeding HDMI into the Moverio display. As far as I know, the standard Moverio doesn’t have a user-accessible video input, and Meta had the glasses being driven from electronics in an opaque laser-cut box. That box presumably contained the heavily hacked Moverio handset, or an Epson device specifically for 3rd party hardware developers who want to feed their own signal into the display. And that’s where it gets interesting. Meta’s press release announces a partnership with Epson, which is the first big point to their credit. The second is that the esteemed Professor Steven Feiner, a long-time ARNY member, is also a member of their team. Third, their CEO claims to have a 30-page patent which he’s coauthored with Professor Feiner.

Trying out Meta’s demo hardware in its current experimental state

Meta has input from the their camera running into a fun little Unity demo that superimposes little glowing transparent tracking blobs on your fingertips when you hold them in front of the camera. The demo is imperfect, but my impression is that it was a quick hack so they’d have something to show at the meetup. My biggest critique is that the video output in their demo isn’t scaled and cropped to align to the view through the glasses. I’d forgo displaying the camera feed and just use the camera’s tracking data to superimpose the overlaid tracking indicators on a black background, which should appear close to transparent. Only close, but not perfectly transparent, because all of these transparent display glasses are still using backlit LCD microdisplays, where the backlighting still leaks through pixels that are set to black. Eventually this will be addressed by using emissive-pixel microdisplays like those shown by Microoled.

While he wouldn’t comment directly, when I asked Meta’s CEO, Meron Gribetz, if he’d approached Primesense about the Capri sensor, he said that he’d been at CES, implying that he’d at least gotten a look at it. In it’s current form, the device isn’t suitable for outdoor use, but who knows what new sensor technologies might come along between now and the eventual release of this young company’s consumer product. That’s just me thinking out loud. The Meta folks were pretty hush-hush about what their future plans might hold.

Overall, Meta’s team has great energy and is admirably ambitious. It sounds like they’ve got the right patent, partnerships and people, so I’ve got high hopes for them. I’m looking forward to their Kickstarter campaign.

Hit up Meta’s website and check out their cool launch video.

Sergey Brin on the 3 Train

Last night I ran into Sergey Brin on the subway ride home. I got on the downtown 3 express train at Times Square. Almost got into a different car, but switched to the next because the there were some people exiting slowly from the set of doors at which I was standing. I plopped myself down in an open seat, admittedly looking a little worse for wear after the two-hour bus ride down from a weekend in Woodstock. Now I’ve already encountered a couple of people wearing Glass, and an acquaintance is actually a member of the UX team. I also met and spoke with somebody from Google X who was attending the Invensense Motion Interface Developers Conference at which I spoke last year. So I looked up and there was a fellow wearing a Glass unit. Cool. I’ve been to Google NYC for a tech talk (a great one about Street View) and I see Googlers on the subway periodically, so it wasn’t that much of a surprise. But… that guy sure looks a lot like Sergey Brin.

I asked if I could take his picture and he smiled and consented. I asked how the project was coming along and how he liked where it was right now. Of course he told me that he loved it and that it was coming along really well. Somehow, though, I just didn’t trust my own eyes enough to believe it was really Sergey Brin sitting across from me. I mean, I’ve seen the dude’s private jetliner with my own eyes while working out at NASA Ames in my previous job. What would he be doing on the subway? Aside from the fact that he has a ginormous corporate facility and an apartment here.

Anyhow, I asked if he was part of the core X team and he said that he was. He told me that there are about one hundred other people outside of X who have prototype devices. I told him that I was a Vuzix M100 developer and was looking forward to getting a dev unit and getting to do a side-by-side comparison with Glass. Actually, as it turns out, I inadvertently lied and told him that I was expecting to receive a dev unit shortly. The tracking number sent to me was actually for the M100 SDK, which arrived today. As I’ve signed an NDA, I can’t say anything about it, but it looks really good. I’m not sure when I’ll actually get my hands on the hardware.

M100, the Vuzix entry into the class of devices that will include Glass

But seeing as I wasn’t at Google I/O, I know for certain that I won’t be getting Google Glass Explorer Edition anytime soon. I told Mr. Brin that I know a few people who are eagerly looking forward to the Glass Foundry events. He told me that the Explorer Edition would be shipping out to devs in a couple of months. If I’d really been confident that it was him, I’d have given him my card and asked for an invite. I have been told several times today that I’m a punk for not having asked regardless. Oh well.

So we got to the 14th Street station and were still talking when he realized that it was his stop and jumped up. I bid him “take care” (by all accounts, he does), and that, as they say, was that. I took out my phone. Looked at the pictures, and thought “yeah… that really was Sergey Brin, you dummy… couldn’t you have thought of something intelligent to say? Or told him that you’ve been working on building a wearable Human Interface Device accessory specifically suited to HUD applications?”

But I have a funny way of running into people, so I’ve got no regrets. I recently wired up some Hasbro NERF Stampede guns up to some Neurosky headsets from  a Mattel Mindflex Duel game to create a fun little mental face-off game. At CES, my girlfriend and I, by total coincidence, ended up sharing a cab with the designer of Mindflex Duel, who left Mattel and is now at Hasbro. I know that doesn’t quite compare, but I’m just saying that the universe seems to have a funny way of timing my random introductions.

Now it’s rather funny, all of this excitement about the upcoming consumer-ready HUDs. People keep talking about them in the context of Augmented Reality, which seems to cause confusion on several fronts. Yes, Google Glass is a see-through display, but it clearly isn’t the visual overlay that is necessary for “real” AR, and Google isn’t positioning it as such. There are still a lot of challenges to overcome before we can expect those. Those who are new to the term Augmented Reality, and to HMDs in general, seem frequently to lack understanding of what a fixed focal-depth means for these displays.

This post isn’t finished, but I’m hitting publish just to have something up for now.

Check out a small sampling of the work we do at my day-job.

As long as you’re here, check out this just-released music video that I helped make this summer. I used a bunch of Arduino Megas to drive about 250 fluorescent tubes to the cues in Robert DeLong’s first single.

One should note that there has been mention of image analysis being performed using cloud resources in Google’s scenario. This is part of the scenario that I envisioned after hearing Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas introduce Read/Write World at ARE. While I haven’t heard anything about it since, I wouldn’t be surprised if it pops back up this year. What I think will happen is that a wearable system will periodically upload an image to a server that will use existing photographic resources to generate a precise homography matrix pinning down the location of the camera at the time that the image was taken. The GPS metadata attached to the image will provide the coarse location fix necessary to select a relatively small dataset against which to compare the image. Moment to moment tracking will be done using a hybrid vision and sensor-based solution. But at least in the first generation of such systems, and in environments that don’t provide a reference marker, I expect cloud-based analysis to be a part of generating the ground truth against which they track.

Let’s do a little recap of some of the most notable HUD glasses options these days:

Vuzix STAR1200 – I got to try these out at ARE back in June of last year and was quite impressed. I’ve since picked up a pair and love them, with some caveats. Because they use a backlit LCD micro-displays as opposed to an emissive technology like OLEDs, you don’t get perfect transparency in areas where the signal source is sending black. That means that if the glasses are on and you are sending them a blank black screen, you still see a slight difference between the display area and your peripheral vision. Also, the field of view (FOV) of the display area could definitely stand to be a little larger. The STAR1200 is intended primarily as a research and development device, and is priced accordingly at $5000. The device comes with a plethora of connectors for different types of video sources, including mobile devices such as the iPhone. The STAR1200 is the only pair of HUD glasses that I know of that come with a video camera. The HD camera that it originally shipped with was a bit bulky, but Vuzix just started shipping units that come with a second alternate camera which is much smaller and can be swapped out. The glasses also ship with an inertial orientation tracking module. Vuzix recently licensed Nokia’s near-eye optics portfolio and will be utilizing their holographic waveguide technology in upcoming products that will be priced for the consumer market.

Lumus Optical DK-32 – I finally got to try out a Lumus product at CES, and was quite impressed. I’ve spoken with people who have tried them in the past and, based on my experience, it looks like they’ve made some advances. The FOV was considerably wider than that on the Vuzix glasses, and both contrast and brightness seemed to be marginally superior. That said, you as an individual can’t buy a display glasses product from Lumus today, and they are very selective with respect to whom they’ll sell R&D models. You can’t buy the glasses unless you’re an established consumer electronics OEM, and it would set you back $15k even if you could get Lumus to agree to sell you a pair. I’ve heard that part of the issue is the complexity of their optics manufacturing process. As I was several years ago, I’m looking forward to seeing a manufacturer turn the Lumus tech into a consumer product.

Seiko Epson Moverio BT-100 – I’m rather ashamed that I didn’t know about this device before heading to CES, and so didn’t get to hunt them down and try them. I love that these come with a host device running Android. I can’t, however, find mention of any sort of video input jack. It’s a shame if they have artificially limited the potential of these ¥59,980 ($772) display glasses. Also, with a frame that size, I’m genuinely surprised that they didn’t pack a camera in there. I’m looking forward to getting a chance to try these out.

Brother Airscouter – Announced back in 2008, Brother’s Airscouter device has found its way into an NEC wearable computer package intended for industrial applications.

I don’t mean to come off as a fanboy, but I like Vuzix a lot. This is primarily because they manage to get head-mounted displays and heads-up displays into the hands of customers despite the fact that this has consistently been niche market. I have to admire that kind of dedication to pushing for the future that we were promised. I also love that they are addressing the needs of augmented reality researchers specifically. It will be interesting to see how these rumors about Google will affect the companies that have been pushing this technology forwards for such a long time. I’m hoping that it will help broaden and legitimize the entire market for display glasses, which have long been on the receiving end of trivializing jokes on the tech blogs and their comment threads.

Things in the Augmented Reality world have progressed rapidly, if not as rapidly as I might once have imagined they would. In one of my first posts, I closed with an idea about streaming one’s first-person POV to a giant Microsoft Photosynth system in the cloud. The Bing Maps team, under Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Avi Bar-Zeev, is doing exactly that. With Read / Write World, Microsoft is developing what I think will be the foundation of what Blaise called “Strong AR.” This is in contrast with the “weak,” strictly sensor-based AR applications that we’re seeing on mobile devices at the moment.

To clarify, there are two paradigms of current AR usage:

One of these two is local vision-based AR using marker or texture tracking to position virtual objects relative to a camera’s perspective. This is done by calculating the homography that describes the relationship between the captured image of the tracked pattern, and the original pattern. From this, one generates translation and orientation matrices for the placement of virtual content in the scene. This is Strong AR, but on a local scale and without a connection to a coordinate system linked to the world as a whole.

The other is the AR found in most mobile apps like Layar and Wikitude. The information visualized through these apps is placed using a combination of geolocation and orientation derived from the sensors found in smartphones. These sensors are the components of a MARG array: triaxial magnetometric, accelerometric, and gyroscopic sensors. By knowing a user’s position and orientation, which are together referred to as a user’s pose, one nominally knows what a user is looking at, and inserts content into the scene. The problem with this method is one of resolution and accuracy, and this is what Blaise was referring to as “weak.” This method, however, provides an easy means by which to place data out in the broader world, if not with precise registration.

The future of Strong AR is the fusion of these two paradigms, and this is what Read / Write World is being developed for. The underlying language of the system is called RML, or Reality Markup Language. Already, if photographic data for a location exists in the system, and one uploads a new image with metadata placing it nearby, the Read / Write World can return the homography matrix. According to Blaise’s statements during his Augmented Reality Event keynote, pose relative to the existing media is determined with accuracy down to the centimeter. And the new image becomes part of the database, so users will constantly be refining and updating the system’s knowledge of the world.

Anyhow, I think Read / Write World has the potential to be the foundation for everything that I, and so many others, have envisioned. That’s on the infrastructure side.

So what about the hardware?

In the last couple of years, mobile devices have really grown up, and are getting to, or have reached, the point where they pack enough processing power to be the core of a real Strong AR system. Qualcomm has positioned itself as one of the most important entities in Augmented Reality, providing an AR SDK optimized for their hardware, on which most Android and Windows Mobile platforms are based. In a surprising move, at ARE, they announced that they are bringing their AR SDK to the iOS platform as well.

With peripheral sensor support and video output, we’ve got almost everything we need to be able to connect a pair of see-through display glasses (more on those in a little bit) to one of these mobile devices for AR experience. But the best that those connections can provide is a “weak” AR experience. Why? Because the connectors don’t support external cameras. True, there are devices like the Looxcie, but the resolution and framerate are paltry, and are a limitation of the Bluetooth connection. On top of that, the integrated cameras in mobile devices are wired at a low-level to the graphics cores of their processors and dump the video feed directly into the framebuffers, facilitating the use of optimized processing methods, such as Qualcomm’s. What we need is the inclusion of digital video input in the device connectors, providing the same sort of low-level access to the video subsystems of the devices. This is absolutely vital to being able to use visual information from the camera(s) on a pair of glasses for their intended purpose of real-time pose estimation.

So… glasses…

At ARE I got to try out a Vuzix prototype that finally delivers what I’d hoped to see with the AV920 Wrap. The new device is called the STAR 1200, for See-Through Augmented Reality. It looks a little funny in the picture, but don’t worry about the frame. The optical engine is removable and the final unit’s frame will probably look substantially different. It provides stereo 852×480 displays projected into optically see-through lenses and, let me tell you, it looks good. It is a great first step towards something suitable for mass adoption. The limited field of view coverage means that it won’t provide a truly immersive experience for gaming and the like, but again, it is a great first step. Now before I get your hopes up, this device will be priced for the professional and research markets, like the Wrap 920AR. Vuzix isn’t a big enough company to bust this market open on its own. But once apps are developed and the market grows, we’ll see this technology reaching consumer-accessible price points. I’m going to refrain from predictions of timeframe this time around, but I think that things are very much on track. Also, keep in mind that this is a different technology than the Raptyr, the prototype that Vuzix showed at CES this year. The Raptyr’s displays utilize holographic waveguides, while the STAR 1200 is built around more traditional optics. I did get to see another Vuzix prototype technology in private, and can’t say anything about it, but it is very promising.

One last development that has me very excited is Google’s new Open Android Accessory Development Kit. It’s based on the Arduino platform, making it instantly accessible to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of existing experimenters, developers, and hardware hackers, including myself. This opens up all kinds of possibilities for custom human interface devices.

Right now I”m just going to give you the beginning of my takeaway.

The paper that resonated most with my basic desire to see the big platform problems handled first was “Global Pose Estimation using Multi-Sensor Fusion for Outdoor Augmented Reality” by Gerhard Schall, Daniel Wagner, Gerhard Reitmayr, Elise Taichmann, Manfred Wieser, Dieter Schmalstieg, and Bernhard Hofmann-Wellenhof, all out of TU Graz, Austria, with the exception Mr. Reitmayr, who is at Oxford. This is the kind of fusion work that I’ve been talking about since my first post, and it was really exciting to see people actually doing it seriously on the hardware side. The two XSens MTi OEM boards headed to the new lab for a non-AR project should have cleared customs by now. I’ll find out if they’re there on Tuesday. I only mentioned it because it’s more-or-less the same device that was used for the inertial portion of this project, and I can’t wait to build them into something.

I also loved reading Mark Livingston’s paper on stereoscopy.

Incidentally, all of the papers, and video of all the sessions, should be getting posted soon to ISMARSociety.org. Serious props to the student volunteers who appeared to really keep things running smoothly, and who performed the awesome task of capturing all of the content on video. This, the first year of AR as a popular buzzword, is the time to share with the rest of the world just how much scientific effort is going into making real progress.

I’ve got lots to say about the HMDs, including Nokia Reasearch Center’s cool eye-tracking see-through display sunglasses prototype, but I’m going to save it for tomorrow, or perhaps for another forum. For the moment, just enjoy this photograph of Dr. Feiner stylishly rockin’ the Nokia prototype.

Hell yeah, dude.

Stars of the AR Blogosphere

Though we were still notably lacking Tish Shute and Rouli, this pic has a pretty stacked roster of AR blogosphere heavy-hitters in it. And speaking of Tish, I think she may be onto something with the AR Wave initiative. The diagram in her most recent post makes a great deal of sense.

And sorry to flake on the daily updates. I did end up demoing some glove stuff, and I was just generally pretty wiped out by the time I got back to my hotel each evening. ISMAR was terribly exciting for me, and have a ton more to recount.

Anyhow, I tried to use my free time to work on the project, but things just didn’t really come together without being in my lab at home.

So I’m off to ISMAR without my project in the shape that I’d intended, but I’m actually thinking that that’s just as well. What I do have is a press badge, and rather than trying to impress the guys with the big brains with my little DIY VR project, I’m going to try to learn and see as much as I can this week, and blog about it every chance I get.

As always, if you want to hear the latest and greatest news in the field, head over Ori Inbar’s blog at www.gamesalfresco.com. The big news right now is that the private API code for accessing the iPhone camera frame buffer is now being freely distributed, and Ori and company are the ones giving it out!

Starting tomorrow, you might want to begin checking back here daily to find out what I’m seeing at ISMAR, and what I make of it all. And if you’re at the conference, drop me an email if you’re interested in meeting up or have something you want me to see.

And if you want to try your code on an ION-powered netbook, I’ll be driving my VR920 and CamAR with my shiny new HP Mini 311

Paul explained several things to me, including that it was a mistake on their part to keep a name so similar to the AV920 Wrap when creating the Wrap 920. The Wrap product line is distinct from those previously shown, including the AV920 Wrap. There is no denying that the pictures of the Wrap series now posted on the Vuzix website do suggest that, when it is released, it will be far and away the most attractive looking “video eyewear” device to be brought to market. Paul also confirmed that there will be a stereo camera pair, as well as other accessories, for the Wrap series devices. I’ve seen a picture, and I don’t think people will be disappointed with the approach that they’ve taken for attaching cameras to the device.

The most important part of the conversation was that in which Paul assured me that Vuzix will not be abandoning the optically transparent see-through display market, and that we have a great deal to look forward to. He reaffirmed their commitment to the Augmented Reality market, and told me that he was confident that their products would continue to be well ahead of the curve and offer features unheard of at their price point. Confirming what I’d heard from people like Joe Ludwig, Robert Rice and Ori Inbar, he told me that the AV920 Wrap was an imperfect device, and that he thought it better not to release a product that didn’t meet his company’s own high standards, rather than releasing something which he thinks would have let people down. He reiterated that it had been a mistake to keep a name so similar to that of the AV920 Wrap, said that he regretted having left the AV920 Wrap up on their website for as long as they did after having decided not to release it, and also admitted that there should have been more clarification when the Wrap line was re-envisioned as it was. Yes, it would’ve been nice to have been told.

Having had this reassuring conversation with Paul, I can tell you that I still expect to see great things come out of Vuzix (if anything, my expectation are now higher). Though I’m still quite disappointed by having to continue waiting for a true consumer-oriented see-through HMD, and though I do feel a little led-on, I expect that when we do see one from Vuzix, it will far exceed the expectations initially set by the AV920 Wrap prototype shown at the last CES. More than anything, I was reassured by the frankness with which Paul admitted the unintentional mistakes that had been made in handling the separation of the Wrap line from their ongoing optically transparent display research and development. They’ve been at this for a long time, and I’m convinced that Vuzix would never squander their hard-earned credibility by deliberately deceiving their customers.

Today we have received confirmation from Vuzix CEO Paul Travers that the highly anticipated Vuzix Wrap 920, previously known as the AV920 Wrap, will not, in fact, be a see-through head-mounted display (HMD). It will instead be a “see-around” model. This means that the LCD viewing elements will be opaque, as in previous models, but will be suspended behind a sunglasses-style lens without obstructing the peripheral view around the display. In previous HMD devices this wasn’t generally the case because one doesn’t view the LCD panel and light source directly as one does a typical computer or television monitor. Put simply, an HMD requires focal optics so that your eyes can focus on something so close without giving you a headache.

(See this previous post where I reported on being told by Robert Rice, and then Vuzix, that the AV920 Wrap would, in fact, be a true optical see-through HMD.)

Presumably Vuzix will still be offering a stereo pair camera accessory for the Wrap 920, as was supposed to be produced for the original AV920 Wrap, but it’s hard to know what to expect at this point.

So while this does represent an incremental step forward in Vuzix’s offerings, it isn’t the one we were promised. More importantly, it isn’t the one we’ve all been waiting for.

I am, of course, disappointed by this news. After Lumus Optical went back to the drawing board, as they told Ori Inbar they had done in this interview on his his blog, Vuzix was the only company still promising a see-through head-mounted display for consumers any time soon.

Now? Well, we’re left waiting for:

1. Somebody to get serious and invest some real VC money in Lumus
2. Sony to produce something using using their holographic waveguide technology
3. Konica Minolta to further develop their Holographic Optical Element technology
4. Microvision to show that they’re serious by showing something other than a Photoshopped concept illustration (Microvision has been subcontracted to develop a new see-through HMD for the military under the ULTRA-Vis program, but who knows when that might lead to development of a civilian device)
   or
5. something unexpected to show up.

I had been hoping to be able to use a see-through HMD in the ISMAR demo presentation on which I’m working with Seac02 using their awesome LinceoVR software. It looks like we’ll have to make do with the conventional HMDs already at our disposal.

Maybe we’ll still see released products using Vuzix’s touted “Quantum Optics” before we get our quantum computers.