As a kid, I used to love to race people during recess. In spite of my awesome speed, whenever we played “Top Gun” – our favorite racing game – I was always the cargo plane. Children can be so cruel in their clique politics.
But anyway, my unappreciated awesomeness as a kid is an issue for another post. I’m talking about racing. There is something very exhilarating about such a direct sort of competition that doesn’t require any rules, any equipment, nothing except two people and a destination. First one there wins.
But grown-ups don’t race. Why is this? Is it because it’s seen as childish? Does that sort of weirdly direct personal competition freak people out? Americans today generally just aren’t that athletic, but when they are it’s usually in the context of an organized sport or a row of ellipticals at the gym. This makes me sort of sad.
Granted, there are huge road races – we just had one in Atlanta last month. But these are huge organized events with sponsors and pre-determined routes, registration fees and strict regulations. What I’m wistful for is that impromptu “hey, I’ll race you to the car” or “I bet I can beat you to the other side of the block”. It’s dumb, it’s fun, and what’s wrong with that?
I think what’s wrong with this idea is that it’s too simple. We want to go, “why?” or “and then what?” So to this end, I’m thinking we should make it more complicated and structure it into more of a game. I got this idea after signing up for FourSquare a few days ago and sort of falling in love. (I’m the mayor of the Equitable building starbucks! Free coffee pls.)
You’ll remember the post on augmented reality a while back featuring the video of the NY subway stations AR app on the iPhone 3gS. It pulled waypoint information from google maps to overlay it on your camera screen along with estimated distance. And it looked amazing.
Well, it’s extremely easy to add waypoints into google maps. So why not make a race app? Here’s how it would work. You can either set a destination on the fly in the wild or set up a route online. Then get to your starting point and hit go – and you’ll get your target destination overlaid on the display as well as estimated distance and estimated time of arrival, calculated by tracking how fast the GPS has you moving. Better, it could even track the location of other players so you could “see” their location even outside of your field of vision.
This is more attuned to a sprawling back-and-forth city-wide race than a simple point-a to point-b sprint. But doesn’t it sound fun? There are certainly some issues you’d need to work out. Whipping out your phone and glancing at the screen while running is probably a pretty good way to drop it, or crack your skull against a lamppost. It might be better suited to a team-based game in cars, with a navigator and a driver—although that sort of removes the active, physical element to it which was the whole point. But these are little details.
I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there for augmented reality apps to provide some useful, entertaining service. It’s not just for marketers! Although after a race, if the winner got a coupon for a local cafe or a free week pass to a gym… well, I think it could be monetized pretty intelligently. Hopefully we’ll see more apps like this in the future … and fewer giant floating red bull cans. And even if AR doesn’t take off… well, you can still just get a friend and race them down the block the old-fashioned way.
Is there anything you’d like to see added? Any features you think would make this cooler? Or do you think this is a retarded idea that would never work? Say it loud + proud in the comments.
Books, books, I buy too many books. I have a strange relationship with books where I appreciate them so much as objects that I am often content to merely own them. Sure I’d like to read them, but there are so many and I really struggle to maintain the patience required to read every night. Plus, when you consider the logical end of obtaining so many books, it’s not rewarding. Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have to have huge book sell-offs annually in order to not die under the crushing pressure of paper and ink. Owning books is sadly a losing proposition in the long run.
But I mean to say that the book I have stalled out on, Salt, is great, but I maybe only read 100 pages of it before life interfered and threw my pattern off. Like Mad Men (at least for me), Salt is the sort of thing you have a hard time getting back into if you take a break, specifically because nothing ever really happens. Sorry, Mad Men, your period detail is amazing but please can Don Draper do something interesting?
I say this because you should read Salt, by Mark Kurlansky—bestselling author of (wait for it) Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World. I’m something of a neophyte in the non-fiction world, and practically everything I’ve read is about food in some way or another. But in spite of my poor attention span I can recommend this book because, uh, it’s fascinating. It’s not just sodium chloride, table salt—it’s all sort of chemical salts, including, for instance, gunpowder. People used to kill each other to get a little salt, and now people kill themselves by consuming too much salt. I can’t say much more about it other than that a whole chapter describes olives, my favorite food, so I love it, but I’ll just leave with Kurlansky’s opening line, which just accentuates the romantic aura this surprisingly non-dorky book entertains:
“The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.”
But I am trudging forward with another book I started a few months back – Bruce Sterling’sThe Caryatids. Hey look, that’s the cover right up there. I had heard some pretty rave things about this when it first came out, but a cursory glance at Amazon makes it appear like people mostly want to shit on it. Which I sort of understand, even if I don’t agree. Some of the main critiques levied against it are that there’s a lack of characterization, a lack of plot, it’s too preachy, and that perspective shifts around too frequently to get a handle on what Sterling is even trying to say. Well, slow down, mister, I’m only one hundred pages in. But it definitely possesses the distinct reek of a work produced by a technofetishist. In this way, it reminds me of Charles Stross’ Accelerando, which was bursting with cool ideas but swept plot under the rug, or most of what I’ve read from Cory Doctorow.
I love this stuff. It’s popcorn, but it’s smart popcorn, and it’s undeniably a product of our specific era in a way other sci-fi isn’t. Near-future sci-fi has never been as close to the present day as it is now, and god, I could come up with a better way to say it but there it is. I actually got back into The Caryatids after thinking all week about augmented reality, and I wasn’t really surprised when it turns out to potentially be a major plot point in the story.
Like I said, I’m only 100 pages in, thus far. But with the disclosure that I love some good technoporn (and what nerd doesn’t?), you have another recommendation based on the strength of Sterling’s ideas here (and some pretty entertaining dialogue) and his surprisingly rewarding refusal to have people blow shit up to make things more exciting. Yeah, that’s right – there haven’t been any explosions yet. So you decide.
Well, any posting is better than no posting! So here’s an awesome link for today. I’ve seen a handful of amazing Augmented Reality (AR) videos online this week that are giving me serious reason to drop everything and pursue AR with my whole heart even though I’ve no idea where to start. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve dreamed about having a heads-up display projected onto my glasses [and if you're being honest with yourself you know you've probably dreamed of it too]. So watching this video may make a little part of your brain squeal with glee:
I can’t tell if I’m more excited about the social or technological innovations Augmented Reality technology is going to inspire. It’s too easy to see marketing campaigns taking advantage of this in a GE Smart Grid / William Gibson Spook Country GPS Art installation way, city-wide promotions with special hidden symbols that reveal prize codes, et cetera. It’s also easy to see Starbucks and other brick and mortar retail stores unveiling their own apps that’ll tether personal purchasing habits, store accounts, estimated wait times, pastry availability data, et cetera together so you’ll know how far and how long till the next caffeine boost. That’s all obvious, if depressing, but that’s just the field I work in. I imagine the utilities for doctors and medical professionals will be stunning and much more useful, and you know the military has already been working on this technology for years for combat purposes.
But I’m interested in the visuals, for better or worse. And I’m curious if the extremely cluttered visual environments we’re used to navigating every day are going to begin to gradually simplify as more of the data marketers would have us absorb migrates into the ether. Or what the social consequences will be if the privileged elite are actually privy to a whole other world of interactive information, a common marker of class division made concrete through technology. You can talk about how the internet is already fulfilling such a role, and people do, but bringing it into the physical world is unquestionably – well, a little bit spooky.
If you’re interested in pursuing AR development (and you know Actionscript 3), you can check out this link for a Flash CS3 toolkit that should get you started. Of course, I’m no coder – but you might find it useful. Developed in conjunction with the Seattle, Washington based AR Toolworks. I’m still looking around for more information on AR development, educational programs, and just cool-ass videos. So if you find any, send them in! Besides Parson’s program in Design+Technology, which, basically, I’m already going to go to. It has been decided.
