The Game That Wasn't There

An epic battle has been waged on the corner of Battery and Embarcadero! No, it wasn't between the police and the left-over “Occupy” types who just migrated back from Burning  Man. It was between the Enlightened and the Resistance, which are the warring factions in INGRESS.  Niantic Labs’ (aka Google) augmented reality game.

Ingress promises to be the cure for the iconic shut-in gamer, by forcing them out into RL (that’s Real Life in case you are over fifty) The objectives in INGRESS - known as portals - are tied to real geographic locations, such as the Donahue Monument. In order to interact with them, the player has to be in physical proximity to the portal.

INGRESS is a capture the flag game: you amass weapons, attack an adversary’s portal , claim the portal for yourself, and establish your defenses. Only, this one has a slightly bigger map than Halo, as in: life sized.

Ingress is also a LBS (Location Based Service), which means specific data objects are opened and closed to the device/user depending on their location. This is one of the largest and fastest growing Application-layer decision framework tools currently being utilized, and these are imbedded in all sorts of applications from Googling Thai noodles to advanced weapons systems.

It would be uncool to talk about INGRESS without mentioning Grey Area’s SHADOW CITIES game, which had the same concept, released for the iphone in 2010. Shadow Cities was much more metaphysical in nature, but having the same core mechanism; go places, do stuff. For whatever reason, Shadow Cities lasted about three years, and closed down in 2013. And for those of you who really want to geek out, there was the other predecessor: Uncle Roy All Around You.

Both Shadow Cities and Ingress augment reality in a rather cerebral way, and by that I mean they don’t; at least, not in a way that you can look at. Unlike the ads, players do not utilize the camera to see the Portal hovering above Donahue’s “Labor” statue, you just know it’s there, and do your thing entirely on your touch screen.

Strange Bedfellows

Reality and gaming have long been at loggerheads when it comes to a gamer’s time and attention. Games that pull the imagination out into the real world are not utterly unique. The LARPING phenomenon has been around for a minute or two. And, in case you don’t know what Larping is, and tend to Google stuff you don’t know about, have a nice night. And, Yes. It’s all real. In the case of Ingress and Shadow Cities, the “what have I become” feeling while getting out of the car is greatly diminished compared to dressing up like Boba Fett while LARPING. In fact, if your boss saw you obliterating someone’s portal or casting a Shadow Cities rune by the deli on Broadway, he would assume that you were just sending a text, or playing Candy Crush.

While we are on the topic, why are titles like Bejeweled or Candy Crush currently crushing games that offer us the chance to make realitymore exciting? King’s Candy Crush title has been number one on both Android and Apple, and has been played 151 billion times in its first year of release. Candy Crush is estimated to take in roughly 140 times the cash that Angry Birds takes in daily (not including licensing income).There is a morbid possibility that augmenting reality just does not do enough for it.

All cell phones have a rough idea of where they are, because they continually survey the cell towers in their area, and select, or are directed to, the tower that is best for them. This doesn’t mean they know how to get to Cleveland from where they are, they just have a feel for the tower infrastructure in the area. This information is communicated back to the towers, so the tower can relate salient information like, directing the handset to boost transmission power, or to hand off to another tower.

By using trilateration an APP can figure out more or less where it is. All cell phone towers in most civilized parts of the world are registered and mapped, so by applying that tower data to a database of possible towers, APPs could figure out how to get to Cleveland from the phone’s current approximate location. But, they don't. They use an LBS. The LBS doesn't need a huge databse, it sends the trilateration data as part of a metaphoric 'key' and the key just unlocks a specific 'box' of information which is sent back to the phone. In that way, massive amounts of data is not stored or transmitted. Currently, most smart phones use GPS trilateration the same way they can utilize the tower data only with much better accuracy. Phone apps then utilize this data to attack imaginary portals with imaginary weapons in order to take over an imaginary world. Shall we play a game?

HOLOGRAMMYS

HOLOGRAPHS are so boring! When Madonna appeared on stage with The Gorrilaz – the unholy cartoon creation of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett - we were all blown away, not just by her comfort with showing so much leg at her age, but also by the powerful illusion created by the Musion Eyeliner system, and most of us wondered if the time for holograms had arrived!

When the dust all settled, it turned out, much like the holograms in Scooby Doo mysteries: it was never there! The Musion Eyeliner uses a very old stage illusion known as “Pepper’s Ghost”. The illusion fundamentally directs the audience to look through glass which is angled at 45 degrees from the audience, then using a projection or reflection illuminates the glass with the “ghost” image. The Musion Eyeliner system uses a  LED projection on a lightweight film, so it can create vivid full color illusions over a very large area. The Gorillaz appeared to be with Madonna so convincingly, because her tandem performance had been pre-recorded, and she was also a digital projection.

One of the most popular and familiar uses of "Pepper's Ghost" is for the ghosts that millions of visitors a year sit next to at the Disney Parks' Haunted Mansion attraction. 

So… the Gorillaz and Madonna: not a hologram. So what is? A hologram is a stereoscopic image.  Holograms are recorded using a flash of laser light on the subject, and a simultaneous flash of laser light known as the reference beam is directed at the recording medium. Like so:

Boring, right? The idea is that the light records the three dimensional object, and can then be reconstructed by projecting exactly the same light, but does it happen when we record our message to Obi Wan? No! But, Holograms are everywhere; they are in all of our hip pockets. Hologram security seals are the most prolific use of the hologram, but those are tragically boring.
Never fear! Researchers at AIST have developed a hologram by focusing laser light which produces plasma excitation from the oxygen and nitrogen in the air, and a University of Tokyo research team has added tactile feelings to holograms using what they call “acoustic radiation pressure”. As dramatic as these advancements actually are, holography still slides so easily into side-show slight-of-hand, and ultimately: smoke and mirrors.

Holographs are boring because they are a document rendered completely in the handwriting of the author, so unless you are a reference librarian discovering a lost letter from Benjamin Franklin the whole holograph thing may not be for you. Try holography, which is the method of creating three dimensional images, or holograms which, it turns out, you can fake using stage tricks. Oh! But remember to throw in some acoustic radiation pressure… honestly.

Fight the future

Virtually all sci-fi movies that provide glimpses of our future show us high-reaching cityscapes adorned with massive electronic advertisements. Ironically, the very community producing these overly cyan cinema versions of our future are the very sources of legislative attempts to prevent us from reaching our inevitable urban image.
Here in the recent past, California lawmakers have been grappling with AB109, the bill that would have limited digital sign proliferation throughout California. But they are not alone! As long ago as 2002, Jack "dusty fax machine" Weiss, a LA City Council Member, demanded annual billboard-inspection fees levied against billboard owners. Meanwhile his colleague Cindy "future fighter"Miscikowski attempted to ban all new electronic billboards. Last year Eric Garcetti pushed to get the city to revisit their agreement with Clear Channel that allowed them to supply Los Angeles with future friendly electronic billboards in place of their existing static billboards. Currently the city council is considering limiting these future perfect appliances to specific advertising corridors, which may unfairly provide the future disproportionately to the lucky few in those areas.

But who will watch the Watchmen... Poster?

Digital Signage is inherently connected to the internet, which means it could relate marketing data exceptionally well, and two technology providers, Trumedia, and Quividi are offering very unique products that can can count the number of people who are watching. and even determine some of the specifics of what type of person it is. For all of the Orwellian alarmists out there, both of these systems do not collect images of faces, or any specific personal information, and only transmit marketing data back to the mothership such as total number of viewers, age, gender, and time engaged, which makes the technology less obtrusive than phone id, or the barcode-on-forehead method.

Human eyes are roughly 13cm apart, without that much variation. And, all of our eyes are in pretty much the same place with regard to our noses and mouths, and the shape of our heads. So computers can pretty much see our faces, and in this case, the computer can tell when a face is looking in the desired direction. All of the analysis is done locally, so there is no need to transmit video images beyond the CPU housed in the digital sign, which safeguards privacy concerns, and lightens the networking load for the data collection. The images you see here are proof of concept demonstrations, allowing you to see what the analysis software sees. From there the computer decides, on its own, when and how to best take over the entire human race.

Digital posters on the rise

Alive, part of CBS Outdoor's plan to kick everybody's ass, populates London's already well populated tube escalators with refreshing, and creative visuals. Based on the platform of the Digital Escalator Panels which are now in their fourth year of entertaining commuters.
The most exciting media on the DEPs spans action from panel to panel creating the sensation of the panels actually being windows onto another reality, a reality that is, perhaps, more exciting than Tottenham Court Road station.

The 23” screens made by Zytronic for Esprit communations are designed to deliver an extremely robust, fully laminated, anti-glare coated glass solution that could meet IP65 Section 12 requirements (whatever that is), they are ruggedised, vandal-resistant, sealed enclosures and had to undergo an extremely rigorous testing process which included a dust tunnel and hammer test; burning at 1,000°C for one hour without any emissions, and full submersion under water. So, whether you are drowned, burned, or hammered these screen will deliver entertainment to you, even if you find your self in a dust tunnel.

It's not just for the wall anymore

A new alternative to dimensionality for print media is Augmented Reality. Companies such as Social Animal and Total Immersion are developing products for Themed entertainment, and consumer applications. This technology holds spectacular implications for digital signage.
Signage incorporating AR could encourage users to use their phones to see additional messaging and provide geometrically more engagement per location, as well as even more marketing data, and even expanded commerce.
Augmented Reality is the Eponym for any media that integrates a computer generated image with a user's camera system. Mikko Haapoja is credited for translating the first English language user notes for Saqoosha's Japanese code for the Flash toolkit (which has been called FLART, or also FLIRT) and his blog remains one of the most substantial user bulletin boards for this medium.

The end of the beginning

Sony's salvo of digital signage for T4 Salvation tells a story of destruction, turning an ariel view of Los Angeles into the face of the Terminator complete with smoke and fire.

The digital poster, available with audio - as if you need it - are available on Sony's website.

This digital poster is a movie, but at its heart it's a lenticular*; it's a poster which changes from one image to another, ideally forming a relationship or gesture between the two.

In the case of the T4 Poster, successfully telling the story of the film: war with robots!
http://www.sonypictures.net/movies/terminatorsalvation/poster.html

Lenticular images create the illusion of animation by printing different images beneath a surface that directs the viewer's vision to one image at a time depending on the angle that the surface is viewed from. For more information on linticulars check out IGH, World3d, or Learn About Movie Posters (which is a site, not a catty insult)