information ecologist

Jose David Cuartas Correa is a hacker / technologist from Columbia.

Last night I attended his talk at the Centre for Internet & Society
.
(A pretty awesome group).

He was introducing a new piece of open source Augmented Reality software designed for use in Art, Design and Eduction called Automic.

Before I describe the talk, I should tell you how a Columbian hacker ended up in Bangalore:

Apparently, he wanted to study abroad for a semester, and had heard good things about MIT Media lab. He googled the same, and the 5th hit was our lab: CEMA the Center for Experimental Media Arts. He clicked on that one first and read this line that I had wrote in a moment of giddy optimism when told they can start a graduate program and make it whatever they want: “The Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) is an innovative lab where artists, hackers, engineers, and scientists come together to develop new tools and methodologies for investigating and acting in the world.” Jose never went back to click on the Media Lab link. A few weeks later his ticket was booked and he was in Bangalore.

When Jose tells this story it feels like fate intervened. When you google MIT Media lab, the CEMA link only came up for a few days, and is not there anymore. I am very excited that Jose could join the lab, and made a significant achievement in creating an intuitive Augmented Reality tool, that is open source and will be very useful for Artists and Designers. It sounds like Jose joins the ranks of CEMA artists-out-of-residence. People who may not be there physically but retain the values and keep the network alive, and stop back in at the physical space every year or two.

Now on to the talk.

I was very excited to hear about Jose’s commitment to FLOSS, and particularly his work in Columbia with an NGO (Sologicolibre) that tries to make FLOSS accessible for Art, Design and Entertainment, because too often these tools can be designed primarily by and for engineers. I was heartened to hear that ATOMIC has been written in what an engineer might call “ugly” code. It has very methodical and transparent patterns so that anyone with interest can make modifications to the code without having to unravel twisted, but elegant logic. Also, it was authored in PROCESSING which is the language that is the most used and understood by the artists that I am friends with. Finally, Jose used his time in Bangalore to make the software cross-platform, so now it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.

The first half of the talk seemed to repeat the some of the same tropes about “revolution” and “utopia” of the VR movement from the early 90s. For example Jose showed a rather silly Discovery Channel short from New Zealand that said that Augmented Reality books are the most revolutionary communications revolution since the printed press.

One of the reasons VR (and AR in its early stages) failed was because it didn’t take into account human participants’ materiality: people got dizzy / sick from wearing headsets, looking out into virtual space. So I was surprised when Jose presented AR technologies with same utopic language that had previously been used with the advent of VR. In particular always having to look through a screen T2 style does not seem very appealing or good for my body.

As humans, our senses have evolved to filter out many types of information, and process or understand some types. No one was thinking about the inner ear when dreaming up VR, Computer graphics was a gravity-less virtual space, but it turns out that our meat bodies still have preferences and restrictions back in the real world. I think second life is uninteresting because it requires me to sit uncomfortably in chair and look through a screen, and not move. I find SMS, GPS and embedded computing because it allows me to be an active participant in the material and social world, while possibly (but only possibly) extending my reach / understanding / ability to connect.

I prefer my Techno Utopic manifesto’s both Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, as well as embedded, sensitive, situated and contextual.

However, unlike some other AR enthusiasts I have seen, Jose seems to realize that AR is most interesting when it disappears into our daily lives. He talked about how in the AR community there is a split between those that see AR as a reality or an interface. He seems to see it more as an interface. Jose used a nice example when saying that anyone with a small digital camera or mobile phone camera is always already using AR technology. I think this is true and a better starting point for a discussion of the potential uses of AR, because these are small, mobile and used intermittently, instead of the headmounted or even desktop AR which is always there and requires constant filtering through machine vision. I like to take my cyborg self in doses. When I think of successful forms of Mixed reality, I think of architecture, and books, and text messaging. It seems to me that more big screens is the last thing that is needed in the world. The ambient and calming potential of putting information in the periphery would seem to require an engagement with the senses of hearing, touch and possibly smell. (More on Srishti undergrads who are making stinky synthetic biology art in a future post).

As Jose’s talk continued he showed more examples of Augmented reality that was designed primarily as an interface. In one case a machine vision program recognized the color red, so when a user wore red gloves they could play air guitar that made sounds, without holding a material artifact. And then there is the use of QRcode in Japan, which is an interesting example of embedded computing.

Again the camera acts as an eye, but the output could be a song, or a link, or point to anything really.

RFID is over there doing it’s thing, and no one quite knows how that will shake out, with issues of privacy being weighed against the Bright Green Future of Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things.

Finally, the power went out, as often happens in Bangalore. But Jose was quick on his feet, and still performed the demo of his software using his laptop running off batteries, the imageCode that was saved on his cell phone, and webcam. (Clearly this event is a either a metaphor for the robustness of the software, or a demonstration of the folly or relying on always-on electronic environments as a planetary people, when we can not create enough / enough clean energy to power a city).

I have to say: the demo was quite awesome! It’s a drag and drop - plug and play software, that is intuitive and has very cool results.

I look forward to using ATOMIC in future classes at PNCA and CEMA, and I encourage you to check it out: