Augmented Reality

Development

This image represents my starting place in working with Aurasma. I very much wanted the building itself to trigger an overlay. I wasted a bit of time with that and came away disappointed. I tried as well to drop some coordinates in the middle of that concrete in front of the door, alas.

However, working with Aurasma is the assignment. So I turned to what I could get it to do. On the phone app, I noticed a couple featured auras, one for the back of a dollar bill and the other the back of a twenty. Opened my wallet and extracted one of each and fired up the camera in the app. Although, I found the content to be goofy both worked. Lesson learned, the triggers needed to be quickly recognizable by the application so not overly complicated.

Casting about my office, I do a fair bit of marketing here at UAF-BBC, I landed on the tri-fold brochures. I am not a big fan of this promotion format, and I wondered if auras might make them more fun? In part landing on the Sustainable Energy brochures was because I know we have a fair bit of content that works as overlays. Since my initial foray into using Aurasma had been frustrating and ambiguous, I hoped this might give me some success to build on.

Link to Apple Store for Aurasma app download.

Link to Google Play for Android Aurasma app download.

follow rdheath on Aurasma

Sustainable Energy Brochure Aurasma Version

I used my phone camera to capture images from a printed version of the brochure, actually every image because I didn’t know where this was going. My thought was that that camera was going to have to recognize the trigger and perhaps starting with it might streamline things. I cropped and made some minor image adjustments in Adobe Photoshop. I then dropped this picture of the photovoltaic panel installation on the trigger element of Aurasma studio. I grabbed the interview video and compressed it in Camtasia and cut that into the overlay. I felt flummoxed that it worked.

My thought with adding these elements to the print brochures was to enrich them. In my years of making flyers and brochures, I have always encountered the problem of too much content, not enough space. That is compounded now with the lack of interactivity or media one has to read them simply, and nobody reads anymore.

I had no content for the Yup’ik values at least no media. I hit the Alaska Native Knowledge Network website and spent a moderate amount of time spinning my wheels looking for something, anything. In the end, I decided to experiment with a simple image. The first one I made the font is too small, and so I’ll make another with two columns of text so that the values are legible on the phone.

Yup’ik Cultural Values

For us, here at UAF-BBC and Dillingham, Alaska, Dr. Marsik’s world record and President Obama’s visit are points of pride, stories that cannot be overlooked. The actual video of the world record blower door test is nearly 11 minutes long and simply too much for this application. So, I had to edit it. In truth were this a real work assignment I would consider crafting something altogether new for this use. But for this assignment, revised version will have to stand as a placeholder. I again dumped the mp4 into Camtasia knowing that I was cropping it and compressing it. What surprised me in testing once the overlay was added, was the strange aspect ratio change that made the house seem weirdly shaped. I will edit out that opening sequence and only start with Tom and Kristen talking for these purposes that is adequate.

And that is a fundamental element of developing auras, I think, it has to be an iterative task with lots of testing. Yes, I could have watched all the Aurasma tutorial videos to learn how to do it. Indeed, I did look at a couple, and unfortunately, I found them too cheerful and free from the struggles I was encountering. So, instead, I just muddled and satisficed through. Seeing the output of fellow students has inspired me to continue experimenting with the studio mostly out of nerdy curiosity not out of any sense that this app has a significant place in our marketing efforts.

I have an iPhone but were I trying to develop even this type of project I would test early and often on different devices. Too situating the trigger and sizing the overlay to fit a phone display even close to optimally takes iteration. It seems that the Aurasma server updates on a quarter or half-hour and that means waiting impatiently after every change. It meant as well limiting the number of changes so that I could isolate variables.

I think locking the overlay so that once it is triggered it runs no matter what a person does with the trigger is a critical step. Handheld brochure and handheld camera made for really annoying user experience because the app would lose track of the trigger, find it, and then restart the overlay, again, and again.

I found myself switching between several different programs, Camtasia, Movie Maker, and Adobe Photoshop for example to do this work. If I was less facile with software, I suspect this project could be challenging. Despite the clunkiness of the Aurasma studio and app, I find myself intrigued with how to make better overlays. I am wondering as well if PowerPoint might have some functions that could simply contribute to overlay development.

Reflection

With this experience, I am struck by what seems the heavy landing on the side of “push marketing” that Aurasma appears to enforce. “Pull marketing” is more about conversation and co-creation of experiences and a product or service. Social media and our topic of digital storytelling have a play in making this definition meaningful. This ambivalence is a concern I was not expecting to surface at the outset of this assignment. The part of me that is paid to tell the UAF-BBC story is reconciled in some ways to the need to push our story.

If I were still working an academic library, I would try to develop this as a self-guided tour of both services and resources in the library. Librarians are fond of making scavenger hunts as training devices. I think I would avoid that conceit and instead simply have point-of-service types of improved interface. While this class is about digital storytelling, I’m afraid we can take that too far particularly when we are approaching customers.

I have been kind of aggressive in my ignoring QR codes; however, the frustrations with Aurasma have inclined me to reset. I wonder if combining QR and Aura’s might be an interesting approach. I showed this work in progress to Dr. Marsik, he recounted giving Dillingham High School students a tour and watching them recognize and use QR codes that he was oblivious to because he didn’t know what they were. I was questioning the payback of this kind of development for a community like Dillingham. However, hearing Dr. Marsik’s observation leads me to wonder if young people might quickly pick up on using the Aruasma app. Nonetheless, I think I would add a statement to the brochure about downloading the app and using the triggers to learn more about our program rather than assuming the customer recognized the logo.

I think this functionality that adds information (to buildings or skylines, cars, whatever real-world objects) is where I want this technology to go. In reading for this assignment the more recent articles identify the linkages between the internet of things and augmented reality as a critical moment. I particularly resonate with this scenario:

This technology could be used by emergency responders. “Moreover, those same first responders might plug certain variables into an incident as it is unfolding to ‘see’ the prediction of what will happen. They could visualize where the crowds will go, how the flood will expand, where the fire might move and which people and/or facilities would be impacted,” DeLoach says. The technology could also enable first responders to practice how they respond to challenging situations such as interacting with hazardous materials. “This would allow them to manage their response much more effectively as a result—likely saving lives,” DeLoach says. (Buntz, 2016)

I can imagine a contact lens, for example, worn by first-responders for heads-up and hands-free application of such simulation and scenario planning. While some of the information would be trended from databases real-time information might be collected from drones. At the end that is all very game-play and moviesque and probably likely and valuable.

Since some of our aim here is to reinvent ourselves as Instructional Designers, I wondered about real uses of Aurasma style augmented reality in schools. A quick search of YouTube, of course, yielded results.

And, I am left feeling like this is a pivotal moment, and both teachers and students contributed to it. And yet I am not fulfilled. I worry that this video shows just more “push education.” And that seems to be the limit of this technology at the moment. I can push a story, you can push a story, but it is a struggle to pull stories, to co-create them, to have them organically branch and build from data, our interactions, and the narrative.

Above, I mention the role of the internet of things for informing augmented reality. The story the first-responders receive is a push story. We see the purposiveness of storytelling in the initial inquiry, “Where will the flood spread? How best to respond?” It is probably a splendid and useful story, rich with information and prioritized and organized by artificial intelligence. And yet I am uncertain where the human agent comes into play as participant and co-creator of the story rather than a cyborg embodiment of the artificial intelligence. I do not feel paranoia or cynicism but rather a disappointment in this conclusion. Alas, at the point of execution the purposiveness of the story seems to have drained away. If our robotics were sufficient, we could do away with the human first responder altogether.

But, I still want to hold my phone up, here in Dillingham, Alaska, (or insert a contact lens) and scan the panorama for hotspots. I want native place names, historical highlights, information about plants and animals as I look at a moose, or spruce. I want it to be Wikipedia-like so that I can participate in content creation as well. The language, other mnemonic devices, and our imaginations have been our augmented reality for eons. Pictured below are carved maps of the Greenland coastline serving as triggers for our Inuit hunters cultural overlay.

Perhaps this technology-heavy augmented reality can mature into a real thing. Certainly, the quality by which it seems to externalize and give body to imagination is fascinating. And yet, what we are exploring now seems thin and raw and underdeveloped.

References

Buntz, B. (2016, July 1) 10 Killer Applications of the IoT and Augmented Reality. Retrieved March 25, 2017 from http://www.ioti.com/iot-trends-and-analysis/10-killer-applications-iot-and-augmented-reality

Charles Cooper [Charles Cooper] (2016, Nov 7). Teaching with Aurasma. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/wolsdGbNEC

Inuit Cartography. (2016). [Graph illustration]. The Decolonial Atlas. Retrieved from https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/inuit-cartography/

Initial Exploration of Structures and Boundaries in Creating a Web Presence

In which, a doddering old guy takes insight from a couple of young men. And, in which we explore dualisms and speculate on more fruitful x-y-z coordinates.

Rather than seek out pre-existing definitions I would like to struggle a bit in order to formulate, abductively, my own definitions. In order to establish a point of reference, first I want to develop a couple of case examples. Perhaps these represent fully developed web presences. Accordingly, I offer Jon B., at Fishing the Midwest on YouTube and Brennan (several YouTube channels actually) at GoldGloveTV and on Twitch. These two are not alone, nor are they the most successful; however, they offer good cases. We are broadly familiar with YouTube. Twitch, however, is more of a niche social media, and bears some additional introduction. Twitch is a platform that allows computer gamers to broadcast live and real-time their game-play. Frequently there is a social component to the game-play, either through the game being a massive-multiplayer-online (MMO) or through a co-op element to otherwise single player games. Twitch facilitates the creation of online communities and potentially a revenue stream for successful “hosts.” Content creators can monetize their accounts by permitting advertising, and promoting subscriptions.

The two young men I have chosen to review as case examples here are self-employed, full-time, by and through their content creation. They have created recognizable personal brands, defined business models, and are executing on their plans. Their participation in social media also intentionally blurs boundaries of identities – this blurring is seen clearly in “vlogging” content offered by both. “Vlogging” is a “journalistic documentation of a person’s life, thoughts, opinions, and interests” (ZMD, 2005).

Jon B. is in his early 20’s. He recently dropped out of college in order to work full-time on his YouTube content. He has been creating YouTube content since 2009; he was 12-13 years old at that time. He participates in several additional social media, such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Jon B. is attentive to the details of his camera, audio work, and editing and he seems as passionate about them as his fishing. Recently Jon B. has traveled, fished, and created content with a cohort of YouTube channel hosts. These people might be seen as competitors; however, they are working as collaborators driving traffic to each others’ sites and appearing in each others’ videos.

Jon B, Logo

Brennan O’Neill is 25 and has likewise been on YouTube since 2009. Among gamers, he is well known and widely subscribed as well. He and his personal information are more indiscriminately available online. In addition, he is well known for his drunken live streaming and for his unfiltered, sometimes inappropriate, game commentary. His social media includes Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and a number of game related sites. Brennan employs a Video Editor to assist with the creation of videos. He likewise has a cohort of friends with whom he games and creates content.

GolgGloveTV Logo

In the language of this assignment, we encounter several classic binaries. For example, public: private, personal: professional, and active: passive. The “passive” and “active” aspects of online activity reinforce the definition (Christenson, 2014) stipulated in this assignment “the intentional and unintentional traces left when participating online.” Of the active and passive traces, we tend to fear the passive, the notion of big data, and the Orwellian or Kafkaesque paranoia that comes with it, haunts us. Wikipedia (Digital footprint, 2016) offers examples of privacy issues that do raise serious concerns. Interestingly, I served on a jury that examined a child pornography case. The evidence showed a huge library of video and imagery. However, what trapped the defendant was not the collection of the images (abhorrent but a relatively passive set of traces was left by that activity) rather it was setting up a file sharing system and making some of the collection available for download. The transition to “content creation” or “distribution” was a movement towards an “active” digital footprint, as it were, that tripped up the defendant. A tiny bit of “passive” evidence was used in court; however, the telling evidence was the “active” footprint.

That distinction brings us back around to the case examples above. These two young men really vex a traditional notion of these categories — public: private, personal: professional, and active: passive. Brennan, for example, clearly drinks on the job. Moreover, both Jon B. and Brennan appear to be role models since their primary market segment is 13-17-year-olds. Both employ vlogging sometimes discretely and sometimes woven into their specific content. It is a challenge to speculate on their concerns about the passive elements of their digital footprint; however, their active content creation is plainly visible. Jon B. challenges the boundaries include the virtual: real boundary. He maintains a post office box and takes fan mail there and then videos the unboxing as channel content. Going the other direction he takes fans fishing or attends real world “meet ups.”

I have really only ever worked with post-secondary young people. Our two case examples fit this demographic as well, perhaps revealing my affinity for them and selection of them as case examples. Nonetheless, it seems that many Millennials are self-conscious of both their web presence and their digital footprint (Eddy, 2015). I have heard colleagues in higher education speak poorly of these young people’s judgment and attitudes, broadly, but also specifically regarding their online sophistication. Given the two case examples, I suspect this reflects a superficiality in my colleagues thinking. One frequently touted truism is that Millennials learn first from each other. Given the case examples participation in a cohort of channel hosts and their apparent status as role models, we see some evidence for this truism. I also suspect these two case examples are acutely aware of both their active and passive footprints. Hence, I wonder precisely what I might “teach” their cohort about this topic. Brennan and Jon B. are living it in full color and at top speed and certainly, have more credibility than I. Instead, I might offer examples, open a discussion, and facilitate the conversation along the lines of the tensions we are exploring here — risk: reward, personal: professional, public: private and active: passive.

It is precisely through the introduction of the risk: reward binary that my thinking became more complicated and richer. This sparked my recollection of White, & Le Cornu, (2011) who offer a criticism of the binary digital native: digital immigrant. However, they do not stop there but rather they develop a theory of visitor: resident as a continuum of participation in their article Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement.

In this video, White complicates our thinking in several key ways; first, he calls into question the importance of “generation” in our thinking about web presence. In this essay, I persist in using the demographics of “Millennial” and “Gen X” and this is predominately a contrivance of convenience – but it is not without self-consciousness. White’s video further complicates our thinking by introducing the model of continua in contrast to binaries. White also introduces the importance of motivation in propelling a persons’ relative residency or visitor status. Taking these notions together allows me to sketch a framework to review our case examples and to reflect on my own web presence.

There is a lot of money to be made by enterprising content creators. Obviously, in the cases here revenue comes directly from online enterprises. However, I have observed young people working to develop their LinkedIn personas, for example, in order to facilitate their more traditional job search, hence to generate revenue just as real as our two content creators make. So, can we say that the reward, or potential reward, outweighs the risk? Conversely, perhaps not participating, not creating, and not managing a web presence is a greater risk? Therefore, if the simple binaries do not adequately open the conversation, what other possible models do we have at hand? Perhaps instead if we imagine the binaries as the ends of ranges and we imagine a node at which these several spectrum intersect, then we can plot our “location” or comfort in the online environment — a multidimensional map. White indeed has mapping one’s participation as a goal of his method. I mention above risk: reward, and White talks about motivation in relative participation as a key element. Yet “participation” calls into question “presence” too. “Presence” suggests a product, perhaps, whereas “participation” suggests a process.

It seems that our content creators actually create drama around these boundaries and along these continua in order to increase traffic. Interestingly, both of these content creators have crossed the boundaries of public versus private. We followed Brennan’s relationship with a young woman, also a content creator. First, as they became housemates, and then later when they broke up. Jon B. has engaged his critical commenters directly calling out boundary violations, almost as though he was taking on the role of an etiquette coach. These two seem to set public: private on a continuum rather than a dualism and they slide back and forth on that continuum to manage their traffic and personas. They are gauging this based on some risk: reward calculation that they instinctively or consciously invoke. It seems that they navigate these issues — risk: reward, personal: professional, public: private and active: passive — self-consciously and with a keen eye toward maximizing their profits.

Copyright and intellectual property are intensely important issues to these two YouTube entrepreneurs. They are acutely aware of copyright as their channels and hence livelihoods can be shut down due to copyright claims. This and the fact that most serious YouTubers routinely mention this threat in their commentary starts to put the lie to the claim that “kids these days” are pirates. Moreover, as these two make their living from their content creation, their understanding of intellectual property is key to the enterprise. I am inclined to think that some young people are more sophisticated regarding these matters than some of us older folks.

Certainly, in the case of our young men, they are their employer, at least for now, and their web presence is their business. Jon B. has moved back and forth between his full-time content creation and working for Mystery Tackle Box.

Mystery Tackle Box Logo

I interpret that to mean he is mindful that he may not always be self-employed. His web presence, while youthful and exuberant, reflects a more conservative approach. Brennan, on the other hand, seems fully committed to his enterprise and his style. In addition, his style does blur the boundaries. The traces he is leaving may well influence his future employability if he chooses to seek work that is more traditional.

So, based on that, it is time for me to become self-reflective and to consider my own engagement with risk: reward, personal: professional, public: private and active: passive online activity. I need to address the questions from our assignment:

Can you effectively manage your web presence? Can you maintain both a private and a public web presence? Is it necessary to separate your public and private web presence? How might your employer’s interests or policies affect your personal web presence?

I am personally less comfortable on the private-public continuum and more comfortable on the professional-personal continuum, hence, my choices in social media. I am moderately active on LinkedIn but not Facebook. Moreover, this reflects my choices around content creation. I am inclined to be more deeply cautious about what content I actively create. This caution is reflected in my participation in LinkedIn, or Twitter. I am content to share, like and retweet. I tightly manage my rendering of opinion in these venues. This caution slices the definition in a different direction. It is increasingly challenging to make sense of “public” and “private” in the online environment. Rather, I make more sense of the “personal” and “professional” distinction. For myself, I am and have been acutely aware of not violating these kinds of boundaries. In part, this is a personal value, but it also derives from the fact that my employers have always been intensely brand-conscious and protective. Trashing them either directly or indirectly through inappropriate boundaries seemed too risky for my taste.

I have maintained a blog logging my exercise for many years, though using a pseudonym. I have not promoted it and, as such, it has no traffic. Rather it served me as a journal and a way to be accountable. However, my thinking about it and my relationship to the hundreds of workouts logged there is more in line with notions of an open web. My thinking was indifferent and vaguely generous regarding the content. This indifference towards “property” and “copyright” differentiates me (and probably many) from the two case examples. I lacked the vision that personal branding and content creation could open a door to the fitness industry for me. In contrast, these young men clearly grasped their opportunities.

I have observed of late a blurring of my boundaries and a willingness to own my authorship. This in part inspired by these two young men who are passionate about both the form and content of their online creations. I find Jon B.’s excitement split equally between photography, video editing, and fishing to be rejuvenating and motivational. There is much for me to learn.

Therefore, yes I do think it is possible to manage my web presence but the calculations need to be more complex than simple binaries. I find the notions of “visitor” and “resident” valuable constructs for thinking about web presence (White, & Le Cornu, 2011) and yet I felt discomforted by these concepts, too. I am not certain that I ever will be a resident, and at home in the same way that Brennan and Jon B. appear to be. Though I wonder if that has anything to do with the internet at all, perhaps that reflects myself in any social situation, introverted, and intently observing from the margins. Nevertheless, such calculations do include a risk: reward calculation. At this time, for me, the reward is less about revenue and more about audience; in truth I suspect many content creators start with that goal.

References

Christensson, P. (2014, May 26). Digital Footprint Definition. Retrieved 2016, Sep 29, from http://techterms.com/definition/digital_footprint

Digital footprint. (2016, Sept. 22). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_footprint

Eddy, N., (2015, December 23). Millennials Worry About Their Digital Footprints. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://www.eweek.com/it-management/millennials-worry-about-their-digital-footprint.html

White, D. [jiscnetskills]. (2014, March 10). Visitors and Residents. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/sPOG3iThmRI.

White, D., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). Retrieved October 4, 2016, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049

ZMD, (2005, January 6). Vlogging. In Urban Dictionary. Retrieved September 29, 2016, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vlog