FACE TECH

The 10.000 hours rule may be wrong, but here i am doing some self-prescribed homework, gathering fresh stuff concerning the whole XR topic, while waiting for feedback from Filmuniversity Babelsberg after having sent in an expose for a dissertation project. 

Meanwhile i applied for a session at this years XR for Change Summit which will take place June 17 as part of the G4C Festival in New York. Including a fat typo in the headline and i handed in a very short paper for the poster session at the 5th International AR & VR Conference in Munich. 

So, here i am, sitting in the kitchen on a Saturday evening, listening to the latest episode of the Research VR Podcast - The Science & Design of Virtual Reality - with Tom Emrich talking about Focals, the AR Cloud and other stuff. The Focals look amazing. Would love to test them in Brooklyn. Seems to be a huge leap forward comparing them to Google Glass. Especially if you think about how fast things evolve. 

Two years ago i posted a virtual can of pepsi augmented into the landscape on Instagram and now we are playing around with the – let´s call it – second wave of face filters (the one after silly dog masks) in order to post them to Insta Stories: In April 2017, Instagram Stories incorporated augmented reality stickers, a "clone" of Snapchat's functionality.

Let me just very briefly throw in a bunch of links from the last days that need more attention.

A Quick Guide to Designing for Augmented Reality on Mobile (1,2,3,4,5) – i still have not yet worked my way through this ongoing series of posts by Bushra Mahmood. FUI == Future User Interface. 

Wired Article: At Sundance, VR Filmmakers are evolving beyond VR. Quote "think a Lil Miquela-meets-Alexa sort of entity who "lives" in your house via AR or some similar technology"

Bit more on Google Lens

VR Pioneers at Voices of VR

Where Does XR Go From Here? Forbes

CES 2019 – AR and other Interesting Display Technology Karl Guttag

Stadtgeschichte Hamm. XR (german)

Putting the audience at the center of immersive journalism Thomas Seymat

The city is my homescreen Medium

Alternate Realities Sheffield Doc

ONA Educators Talks: VR/AR in Journalism Education FB

Mapping the Digital Earth Strelka

Yet again, let me quote Benedict Evans because he breaks down AR and 5G quite nicely:"5G seems rather more interesting for AR. To clarify first, ‘AR’ today is used to describe three different things: 1) Waving your phone at something and seeing things on the screen 2) A wearable heads-up display (Google Glass) with no awareness of the world around you 3) An transparent, immersive, fully 3D color display with a sensing suite that allows it to map the room around you and recognise things and people. A bunch of companies (including Magic Leap, in which a16z is an investor) are working on this - it’s still a few years away from being a mass-market consumer product. The third of these seems much the most interesting to me. If you could put on a pair of reading glasses that could look at the world around you and show you things in response, that could be pretty useful, in much the same way that, say, having the internet in your pocket turned out to be useful, and to enable all sorts of new and unpredictable things (imagine pitching Snapchat when our only internet experience was on a PC over dialup)."