*I've been wondering lately if Augmented Reality might act effectively as a graphic front-end for ubiquitous computing. Here's a scholarly article making much the same point, way back in 1997.
*One scarcely knows what to do with remarkable historical documents of this kind. For instance: there's Vannevar Bush's epic "As We May Think," considered an amazing feat of insight – in retrospect, that is. Douglas Englebart liked it a lot, but it seems that scarcely anyone paid much attention to that now-famous essay during Bush's lifetime, including Bush himself. The, er, atomic bomb rather overshadowed Bush's less strenuous efforts at futurism. The guy basically ended his days as a well-to-do drug executive. If you'd told him he was a prophet of the World Wide Web, he just woulda stared.
*Maybe there should be some kind of family tree of visionary documents about Augmented Reality, but I've read rather a lot of them now, and I'm hard put to believe that they lead toward or away from one another. They don't develop in linear fashion. They're sort of like cyber space-probes. What does one DO with an awesome period concept like "UbiVid?" What does it properly mean in a modern context? It reads like alternative-world cyberpunk.
http://www.billbuxton.com/augmentedReality.html
Buxton, W. (1997). Living in Augmented Reality: Ubiquitous Media and Reactive Environments. In K. Finn, A. Sellen & S. Wilber (Eds.). Video Mediated Communication. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 363-384. An earlier version of this chapter also appears in Proceedings of Imagina '95, 215-229.
Living in Augmented Reality: Ubiquitous Media and Reactive Environments.
William A.S. Buxton
Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Tornonto
&
Alias | Wavefront Inc., Toronto
Abstract
One thread of this chapter presents a particular approach to the design of media. It is based on the notion that media spaces can be thought of as the video counterpart of ubiquitous computing. The combination of the two is what we call Ubiquitous Media. We go on to discuss the synergies that result from approaching these two technologies from a unified perspective.
The second thread is of a practice and experience nature. We discuss Ubiquitous Media from the perspective of having actually "lived the life." By basing our arguments on experience gained as part of the Ontario Telepresence Project, we attempt to anchor our views on practical experience rather than abstract speculation.
Introduction
In 1991, Mark Weiser, of Xerox PARC, published an article that outlined a vision of the next generation of computation (Weiser, 1991). He referred to this model as Ubiquitous Computing, or UbiComp. UbiComp was based on the notion that it is inappropriate to channel all of one's computational activities through a single computer or workstation. Rather, Weiser argued that access to computational services should be delivered through a number of different devices, each of whose design and location was tailored to support a particular task or set of tasks. It is on this notion of delivering computational services throughout our work, play and living spaces, that the ubiquity in the name is based.
In addition to ubiquity, UbiComp assumes that the delivery of computation should be transparent. There is a seeming paradox that arises between the principle of ubiquity and that of transparency. The resolution of this paradox, through the use of examples, will constitute a significant part of what follows.
Around the same time that Weiser and his colleagues were developing the ideas that were to emerge as UbiComp, others down the hall at Xerox PARC were developing video-based extensions to physical architecture, so-called Media Spaces (Bly, Harrison & Irwin, 1993). These were systems through which people in remote offices, buildings, and even cities, could work together as if they were in the same architectural space. While prototypes, these systems enabled one to work side by side at one's desk with someone in a remote location. You could call out of your door and ask "Has anyone seen Sara?" without thinking about whether the answer would come from Portland, Oregon or Palo Alto, California.
Nor did it matter at which of these two centres either you or Sara were at. The technology supported a sense of shared presence and communal social space which was independent of geographical location. The result can perhaps best be described as a social prosthesis that afforded support of the links that hold together a social network - links which are typically only maintainable in same-place activities.
Reading Weiser's paper gives no hint of the activities of the Media Space group, and vice versa. However, I increasingly began to see the two projects as two sides of the same coin.
Consequently, in my work with the Ontario Telepresence Project (at the University of Toronto, partially supported by Xerox PARC), I began to consciously apply the tenets of UbiComp to the media space technology. Thus, just as UbiComp deems it inappropriate to channel all of your computational activity through a single workstation, so in Ubiquitous Video (UbiVid) did we deem it inappropriate to channel all of our communications through a single "video station" (viz., camera, video monitor, microphone, loudspeaker). And as in UbiComp, the location, scale and form of the technology was determined by its intended function. And while ubiquitous, our focus was to render access to the services of these communications technologies transparent....
