I’ve never been particularly fond of the term “killer app,” which has thankfully receded from the lexicon of tech writers—no doubt from heavy overuse.

But during Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference for mobile app developers earlier this month, I was struck by the potential “killerness” of the wireless giant’s initiative in mobile augmented reality, or AR. What initially seemed like an amusing kind of virtual curiosity last year (when Qualcomm and Mattel demonstrated an AR version of the game “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots”) struck me this year as a far more pragmatic and relevant technology—with a broad range of potential applications. What Augmented Reality really represents is a potential revolution in the mobile user interface—by simply aiming a camera-equipped mobile device towards an object (or anything, really) and seeing a layer of relevant data, images, or apps superimposed over the real world.

The combination of AR software and hardware that Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) has developed makes it possible to overlay 3-D virtual images and video content on top of the real world, as viewed through the camera of a smartphone or tablet computer. While there are some AR mapping technologies that use GPS and internal compass inputs to provide virtual labels (visible in the field of view) for shops along a street, say, Qualcomm has focused its R&D efforts on a different approach, called vision-based AR.

Jay Wright

“It’s a different set of technologies that require computer vision technologies that are capable of recognizing things in the field of view,” says Jay Wright, Qualcomm’s senior director for AR business development. While Qualcomm’s technology lies mostly in its proprietary software, Wright says the company is also integrating its AR software closely with its mobile chipsets.

Wright says the AR field traces its roots back to the aircraft maintenance business, as part of an effort to make the complexity of aircraft maintenance and repairs easier for mechanics. The idea was to devise a see-through display that would be head-mounted, so mechanics could superimpose the manufacturer’s schematic for a wiring harness while peering inside a panel at the real thing. “It makes a lot of sense,” Wright says, “because wires need to go in the right place inside of airplanes.”

Qualcomm is now working to make its AR technology the preferred software worldwide, in the tradition of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.  “What we are doing commercially is we are taking this software technology for vision-based augmented reality and we are making it broadly available [for free] to all Android developers, and we also just announced that we’ll be making it available to iOS developers as well,” Wright says.

Because vision-based AR apps are very computationally intensive, Wright says, they take a lot of processing power. So Qualcomm has optimized its AR software to perform especially well on the company’s higher-end Snapdragon chipsets. By making its software widely available to app developers (Wright says more than 7,000 so far), Qualcomm is both driving demand … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

I regret to report that both I and my column are going on a bit of a hiatus, as I’ve been seated as a juror on an extended civil trial in Boston. To fill some airtime, I thought I’d direct you to a few old columns that are special favorites of mine or that have connections to current events.

By the way, if you really have the urge to catch up on all of my past columns, just get a copy of Pixel Nation: 80 Weeks of World Wide Wade, an e-book published by Xconomy last month. You can download a free PDF version here or buy a $4.99 Kindle version at Amazon’s Kindle store. But for today’s installment, I decided to revisit four pieces from the past year or two and offer a few thoughts on each with the benefit of hindsight.

Public Radio for People Without Radios
February 13, 2009

This column was all about the Public Radio Player (then called the Public Radio Tuner), one of my favorite mobile applications. It turns my iPhone into a radio that can pull in a live stream from almost any NPR station in the entire country, not to mention dozens of on-demand shows like Car Talk, Fresh Air, and On Point. The news update is that the fine folks at the Public Radio Exchange (who will be taking part in Xconomy’s Mobile Madness company showcase next week) have recently come out with several great new apps, and are working on more. First, there’s the new, improved 2.1 version of the Public Radio Player itself, which went live in the iTunes App Store last week and has great features such as a sleep timer and a built-in Web browser. Then there’s a dedicated app for This American Life, the cult-favorite documentary radio show from Ira Glass at Chicago Public Radio, which comes with access to the entire 15-year archive of shows. Finally, PRX is working on a dedicated app for my favorite NPR station, Boston’s WBUR. That’s due for release sometime this spring.

The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859
December 19, 2008

I was never much of a collector until I started buying nineteenth-century stereoscope views a couple of years ago. We’re used to thinking of 3-D as a recent technological advance—the province of high-tech filmmakers like James Cameron—but these old cardboard-mounted image pairs (taken through separate lenses a few inches apart, like our eyes) remind us that the quest to … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

The patent portfolio and other assets of Actuality Systems, a Bedford, MA-based maker of visualization systems for medicine, oil and gas exploration, and other applications, has been acquired by Optics for Hire, the Arlington, MA, company announced December 28. Actuality launched in 1997 after winning the MIT $50K business plan competition; its flagship product, Perspecta, creates hologram-like images from 3-D digital data. As part of the acquisition, Actuality founder Gregg Favalora has taken a full-time position at Optics for Hire, which is a product development house specializing in lens design for lighting and medical devices and video games.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to … Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

This week’s column comes partly in the form of a digital cartoon. Click on the play button below to watch it. (Or if you’re reading this story via an RSS feed or e-mail newsletter, click this link to view the video—then come back here).

Clever, eh? Of course, it’s just fiction. I still have a job here at Xconomy—as far as I know. But if I ever lose it, maybe I’ll hitchhike to Montreal and apply for a position at Xtranormal, the startup that created the Web-based movie maker I used to create the video.

Xtranormal, which is funded by Cambridge’s Fairhaven Capital, was founded in 2006 and emerged from stealth mode about a year ago at the Demo 08 conference in San Diego. (You can watch vice president Paul Nightingale’s six-minute Demo presentation here). The basic idea—automated synchronization of synthesized speech with animated, 3-D avatars—has been around since the early 2000s. If you don’t remember the green-haired virtual newscaster Ananova, here’s a link to some archival video. But Xtranormal’s innovation has been to put the same technology into the hands of average Web users—letting them produce and direct their own little 3-D movies.

It’s a great idea that strikes the same chord as some other new consumer tools for creating and remixing digital media—Animoto, which assembles high-energy animated slide shows with musical backgrounds from your digital photos, being one of my current favorites. Xtranormal’s easy-to-use toolkit of commands and its endearing cartoon people give it the feel of a big Lego set for adults. I made the clip above in an hour or two just by choosing a backdrop, a couple of characters, and some basic camera angles and gestures from Xtranormal’s large menu of options, then writing some dialogue. The script doubles as an interactive storyboard; Xtranormal has developed a clever drag-and-drop interface for inserting pauses, facial expressions, and camera angle changes.

As Xtranormal puts it, “If you can type, you can make movies.” And there are people using Xtranormal in some pretty entertaining ways—for examples, check out Deadpan Inc., Howard and Leslie, and Rejected Jokes. To quote website Lifehacker, it’s “a seriously addictive sandbox for crafting miniature dramas, comedies, or whatever you can tell your little actors to do.”

Although Nightingale talked in his demo about using the tool to build business presentations or daily Web talk shows, I’m not convinced that the service, at least in its current form, has any serious business, educational, or media applications. Those may be coming down the road, as the company gives users access to tools for building customized avatars and laying in their own voice tracks rather than relying on the software’s speech synthesizer.

For now, Xtranormal is simply a heckuva lot of fun, which is enough for me. Better yet, it’s free, at least for now—though there are indications that this won’t last forever, and that Xtranormal plans eventually to sell credits that users can apply toward publishing movies.

Xtranormal’s About page calls the democratization of movie-making “a massive business opportunity,” and Nightingale talked at Demo about additional revenue possibilities for the company, such as interactive marketing—think exclusive worlds where content owners (say, Pepsi or Honda or Universal Studios) give visitors digitized movie characters or branded props from which to build their own movies.

But apparently, these types of marketing deals aren’t materializing quite fast enough. According to this report in the Vancouver, BC-based blog TechVibes, the company was forced to lay off 36 people, or about half of its staff, back in November. There have also been complaints from users about performance issues, including long waits for Xtranormal’s servers to show their previews and finished movies (though I didn’t experience that problem myself). And the downloadable version of the Xtranormal movie generator promised by Nightingtale last January is, so far, nowhere to be seen.

I hope the company gets through its current rough patch, because it’s developed a fun and intuitive tool that, with a few more features, could provide the palette for a new generation of home movies by creative amateurs. Given the graphics-processing power of today’s home computers, you shouldn’t have to be CGI professional or machinima hacker to produce nice-looking animations.

Of course, I’m not about to put down my writer’s pen. At least, not until an avatar pries it out of my cold, dead fingers.

(Addendum, 1/19/09: Talk about coincidences. Last night somebody from Xtranormal left the following comment over on the YouTube page for my Richard & Simon video: “Great stuff. Did you know that Simon & Richard are the product designers/managers for Xtranormal? Nuts. Nice write-up too. We are going through a rough patch, but we’re going to pull out of it and it’s gonna be FUN.”)

For a full list of my columns, check out the World Wide Wade Archive. You can also subscribe to the column via RSS or e-mail.

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

Gadget lovers and other technology enthusiasts suffer from a curious myopia about the past. The general assumption—fostered by the admittedly blinding pace of progress in computing and software—is that everything really cool must have been invented in the last decade or two. Marvels like wearable virtual-reality displays with force feedback gloves are often described as if they were without precedent.

But past generations were far cleverer than we usually imagine. It may surprise you to learn, for example, that the first three-dimensional (stereo) images were created by British scientist Charles Wheatstone in 1845, just a few years after the emergence of photography itself, and that 3-D photo viewers—called stereoscopes—were common appliances in middle-class living rooms for more than 70 years, from the time of the American Civil War to the Great Depression.

If you came across a stereoscope or a stack of the dual-image “stereograph” cards used in them today, perhaps in an antique store or your grandparents’ attic, you’d probably dismiss them as quaint curiosities or toys. That would be an understandable reaction, given that we can now enjoy computer-animated 3-D movies like The Polar Express and Beowulf at Imax scale. But you’d be missing the fact that for at least three generations, in an era before radio, television, and easy geographic mobility, the stereoscope was many citizens’ most important window on the world outside their hometowns; it was their newsreel and their 3-D National Geographic, functioning as the main medium for what we now call photojournalism.

About 15 years ago, I inherited a stereoscope and a small number of stereograph cards from my grandfather. I treated the device mainly as a knick-knack until a couple of months ago, when I came across a book-fair vendor who was selling a large trove of quality stereo views. I picked through them, bought a dozen, took them home, put them in my stereoscope—and was completely bowled over by the images’ clarity and depth.

The cards I’d purchased were mostly made by the Keystone View Company, the largest and most prosperous of the 19th-century stereograph publishers, and their subject matter, composition, and printing exhibited a refinement that had been missing from the handful of cheaper cards I already owned. It was as if the depth in the cards I’d viewed before was a stage illusion; the people and objects in these more cheaply made images could just as well have been a series of scrims or paper cutouts. But the Keystone images had a continuous, lifelike depth similar to the perspective we enjoy in everyday life.

The revelation sent me off in search of historical information and, inevitably, more stereograph cards. I learned, to my surprise, that the household stereoscope—a simple contraption with a handle, two lenses, a hood to block light, and a sliding card holder— was invented in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the great Bostonian poet and physician. Holmes was enchanted by stereo photography and believed that a simple, affordable, handheld version of the heavy, awkward stereo viewers in use up until that time would give ordinary people access to a universe of marvels.

At the Boston Public Library, I tracked down a copy of a 1949 address given by George E. Hamilton, then president of the Keystone View Company, to the Newcomen Society of England in North America, a club devoted to the history of engineering and technology. Hamilton’s address included quotations from two articles Holmes had written about the stereoscope and stereo views for The Atlantic Monthly in 1859 and 1861. I want to excerpt those quotes here at length, because they convey the rapture Holmes felt toward these “painting[s] not made with hands”:

“The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable.

…Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast features of Rameses, on the face of his rockhewn Nubian temple… and then I dive into some mass of foliage with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf so delicately wrought in the painting not made with hands, that I can almost see its down and the green aphis that sucks its juices.

…If a strange planet should happen to come within hail, and one of its philosophers were to ask us, as it passed, to hand him the most remarkable product of human skill, we should offer him, without a moment’s hesitation, a stereoscope containing an instantaneous double-view of some great thoroughfare.”

It’s worth noting that while Hamilton had an obvious financial interest in promoting the stereoscope, Holmes never did. He gave his design to a Boston merchant named Joseph L. Bates, who manufactured and sold the device from his “fancy goods” shop at 132 Washington Street. (The “Monarch” stereoscope I inherited, made by Keystone, bears a 1904 patent, but its design had not changed in any important way since Holmes’ time.)

By 1890, stereoscopes and stereo views had become a huge industry in the U.S. and Europe, with four companies in the U.S. alone dispatching photographers to every corner of the Earth and competing to sell stereograph cards to the public. Every summer, the companies hired hundreds of college students to fan out across the countryside, hawking the latest series of travel, documentary, educational, comic, burlesque, or “sentimental” views. Weddings and railroad scenes were popular, as were … Next Page »

Comments (17) | Reprints | Share:          

Allegedly, surfing the Web is a leisure activity for a growing number of people. I wouldn’t know—my job as a technology blogger obliges me to surf the Web all day at work, so if I have to use the Web from home, it’s usually because I’m taking care of some task like paying bills, uploading photos, or getting driving directions. But for people who do use the Web as a hangout, there are more and more ways to make it a social experience. And one company, Hamburg, Germany-based Weblin, is optimistic enough about the future of its animated chat service—which gives surfers inch-tall avatars that can communicate directly with the avatars of other Weblin members visiting the same Web pages—that it has expanded to the United States, starting with an office outside Boston.

If you belonged to Weblin (I’m guessing the name is a combination of “Web” and “gremlin”) and you had downloaded the company’s Windows-based plugin, your customized avatar or small-w weblin would be standing on the status bar at the bottom of this browser window right now. If another Weblin member happened to be reading this Xconomy article at the same time, their weblin would also appear. You could then chat, joke, or flirt with that person via text balloons that show up above your weblin, the same way avatars communicate in virtual worlds like Second Life.

You can even make your weblin smile, wave, dance, or run. So what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did for horrible B-movies and what Lycos Cinema is doing for online video, Weblin does for the entire Web (although in practice, you’ll only run into other weblins at a small fraction of websites, since there are only about 10,000 to 100,000 Weblin users online at any given time).

“Even with social networking, the Web is not a social place; a typical website doesn’t allow you to chat with other visitors,” says Jan Andresen, Weblin’s co-founder and CEO, who’s based in Hamburg but was traveling on the East Coast when I reached him by phone last week. Yes, Andresen acknowledges, you can leave a text comment at your friend’s blog or their Facebook Super-Wall. But that’s like deciding you’re only going to communicate with your family by leaving sticky notes on the fridge, he says. “Why not interact instantly with other people, make jokes, and see their reactions? It’s so much more normal.”

Well, “normal” if you don’t mind a bunch of cartoon characters sauntering around your Web browser. And the 20- to 35-year-old users who are Weblin’s main target audience probably don’t. (Indeed, the system still bears the stamp of the virtual-classroom application, developed by CTO and co-founder Heiner Wolf, on which it’s based.) But for older or more mission-oriented Web users like me, Andresen agrees, a crowd of weblins might be a distraction. “If you have to book a flight or finish your spreadsheet, you don’t do it in a pub,” he says. “But maybe you’re at home, you’re bored, you have a glass of wine next to you, and you just want to be entertained. We call that moment ‘chilling.’ For that time, Weblin is ideal.”

Andresen and Wolf launched Weblin in 2006 and have raised $1.3 million in funding from a combination of private investors and the High Tech Grunderfonds, a public-private initiative that invests in early-stage technology startups in Germany. The startup’s technology is built atop XMPP, an open-source instant messaging platform formerly known as Jabber. Andresen says that Weblin hit the 1-million-member mark in September, and that about 10,000 people are downloading the Windows plugin every day. (There’s also a purely browser-based version of the system called “Weblin Lite” that works on Mac and Linux computers, but it assigns you a random avatar that does not persist as you travel from Web page to Web page.)

The company hopes to make money in two ways. The first, more predictable revenue stream will come from selling ads, which will pop up in the same transparent layer over the browser window that the weblins themselves inhabit. But while that may sound like another annoying distraction, Andresen says … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

A Boston startup transposing MySpace-style teen social networking into a 3-D virtual environment is one of the companies making its public debut at this week’s TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. Executives from Hangout Industries, which has raised $6 million in venture funding from Polaris Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, went onstage at the conference today to demonstrate their service, Hangout.net, where each user receives a free, private virtual room that can be outfitted with virtual objects bearing real-world brands, such as Skullcandy headphones and Monster Energy drinks.

Hangout is currently in private beta testing, and expects to open to the general public later this fall, according to CEO Pano Anthos. As the name of the service suggests, the rooms are intended to function as impromptu meeting places for young people in the 16-24 age group. Members buy decorations for their spaces using a virtual currency, and designate friends not by linking to their profiles but by handing out the “keys” to their rooms (i.e., permission to enter).

These hangouts aren’t just static spaces—they’re virtual media rooms, with embedded players that link to content from the Web, such as Facebook photo albums, YouTube videos, and songs from music search engine SeeqPod. “On Hangout, teens interact with their friends as they do in the offline world—whether it be watching favorite videos on YouTube, listening to music, sharing Facebook photos, engaging with popular brands and products that they love, playing games or making music, or just chatting ‘in person’,” in the words of a company announcement released today.

While Hangout.net might sound similar on the surface to other online virtual worlds such as Second Life, There, and Google’s widely panned Lively, Anthos argues that it’s very different in scope and intent. “The model is not a world where you go out and explore,” he told Xconomy last week. “It’s about creating your space, expressing who you are physically through the kinds of objects and activities that surround your room, and engaging with your friends.”

It’s also about advertising through branded merchandise. And in that respect as well, Hangout.net is much more similar to MySpace—which offers members a range of brand-driven materials, including badges, background images, songs, videos, with which to personalize their profiles—than it is to other virtual worlds, which typically generate revenue through subscription fees. “Kids hate banner ads—they ignore them,” says Anthos. “Cool brands really love this idea of ‘emergent exposure’….Advertisers can’t wait to put their products in. But at the same time we’re careful to let the kids be the shoppers. This is entirely about an opt-in model where you decide what products, services, and media you want in your space.” For example, members can decorate their walls with a selection of posters from Art.com and Allposters.com, and dress their avatars in T-shirts based on designs from Threadless, a hip online clothes store.

But while all the marketing and branding going on inside Hangout may be reminiscent of MySpace, the new service has one big advantage over its 2-D predecessor: … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Every week I come across news items, tech trends, and useful gadgets and services that I know Xconomy’s readers would find interesting, but that don’t fit with our usual lineup of hyperlocal news stories about Boston’s innovation scene. To create an outlet for such random finds—and, frankly, to get me off Bob and Rebecca’s backs about all the cool stories we’re missing—we’ve decided to carve out a bit of space for articles that don’t necessarily relate to New England. And here it is: my new weekly column, World Wide Wade. (Please pardon the goofy title, but it fits with my intentions, which are that the column take a very wide, occasionally offbeat view of the technology world.)

On my first couple of outings I’m going to try to tie together a few projects and products relating to the reinvention of the visual Internet. I think we’re in the early stages of a radical shift in the types of imagery and image-related tasks that are supported by the Web and software connected to the Web. Anyone who uses a digital camera or even a camera phone ought to be excited about this shift, which is going to make it possible to share, explore, and possibly even inhabit the digital images that we’re all capturing in increasing numbers and at increasing resolution. In today’s column, I’m going to talk mainly about tools for organizing and viewing still 2-D photographs. In a future column, I’ll look at 3-D—and later on, perhaps, at video and animation, which are obviously undergoing their own revolutions.

Finding fun, convenient ways to organize and share our digital photos is a challenge that’s been around since the advent of consumer-level digital photography a decade ago. This technology took a big step forward around 2004 with the emergence of Picasa, a snazzy and flexible photo album organizer, and Flickr, a photo sharing service that introduced great social features like photo annotation and tagging. (Picasa eventually became a Google product and Flickr was snatched up by Yahoo.) After that, the new ideas seemed to peter out for a few years. But finally we’re starting to see some innovation again.

In fact, I saw some Wednesday night at the Web Innovators Group meeting in Cambridge, where one of the presentations was from Brookline, MA-based Raizlabs, maker of a handsome—indeed, almost too pretty for Windows—PC photo organizing application called PicMe. The freely downloadable software has too many features to list here, so I’ll only describe two. First is its beautifully intuitive method of organizing your photos into 3-D stacks, with each stack representing a folder on your hard drive. You can flip through the photos in a given stack using forward and backward arrows, or inspect rows of stacks by scrolling past them in 3-D, as if you were flying over skyscrapers in Manhattan. It’s a very nice way to browse through a big photo collection, and is a bit reminiscent of other recent interface innovations such as the Cover Flow feature on iPods and iPhones.

The other nice thing about PicMe is its drag-and-drop method for sharing photos: if you want to e-mail a photo to your mom, just drag it off a stack and drop it on her entry in the contact list on the PicMe screen’s left side. If you want to upload a photo (or a whole stack) to your Flickr, Facebook, or MySpace account, just drop it on that entry.

What PicMe demonstrates is that the interface makes all the difference. If you usually upload photos straight from your digital camera into folders on Windows, chances are slim that you’re going to go back and … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

The “Cyber Monday” phenomenon is a baseless piece of marketing fluff crafted by the National Retail Federation—the biggest online shopping day of the holiday season actually falls somewhere between December 5 and 15 every year. But if virtual shopping floats your boat, today is a good day for it anyway: the novelty retailer Brookstone, based in Merrimack, NH, has chosen Cyber Monday to open its first 3-D online store using technology created by Marlborough, MA, startup Kinset.

If you’ve ever visited the virtual worlds Second Life or There, you’ll feel right at home inside the virtual Brookstone store. It’s a rough 3-D mockup of a real Brookstone retail outlet, fully stocked with the chain’s trademark so-cool-you-gotta-have-one gadgets, like the $70 iHome Shower Dock for your iPod or $30 White Microbeam keychain flashlight. You can saunter through the store using your computer’s mouse or arrow keys. If you see something you like, you can zoom in on it, pull up a text window for more information, and then add it to your shopping cart, just as if you were shopping at Amazon. (In fact, when you’re done, Kinset’s software sends you to Amazon to complete the purchase, which is then fulfilled by Brookstone.)

The Brookstone store is one of three adjacent stores inside Kinset’s 3-D shopping world, which was launched in beta form on October 22 and is accessible via a small Windows program that you download to your PC. Brookstone was attracted to Kinset’s 3-D retailing platform because it makes online shopping into “a deeper, more robust and interactive journey of discovery,” akin to visiting a bricks-and-mortar store, said vice president and general manager of direct marketing Greg Sweeney in a statement about the opening.

That may be taking things a bit far. My own visit to the virtual Brookstone store—and to the demonstration bookstore and electronics store Kinset has built next door to it—didn’t feel terribly deep. It could be that I’m jaded, having spent more hours than I care to admit exploring Second Life and building virtual objects using that world’s extensive modeling tools. But I’d say that Kinset’s Brookstone store is a first, tentative step toward retailing’s 3-D future—a serviceable but not-fully-baked melding of 3-D modeling and navigation techniques with older e-commerce tools.

For one thing, Kinset’s default mechanism for moving around—using the mouse to jump from point to point—is awkward and disorienting; you really have to turn it off and use the arrow keys to understand where you’re going. And in the biggest departure from the Second Life model, you don’t have a personal avatar in Kinset’s world—the screen simply shows the first-person point of view from where your avatar would be standing, if you had one. That’s an understandable technical choice, since you don’t really need an elaborate Second-Life-style avatar to go on a shopping expedition. But the main benefit of an avatar is to orient you inside a virtual space, and without one I felt somewhat lost and, er, disembodied.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Brookstone store doesn’t contain any Brookstone gadgets—it’s a room full of boxes with photographs of the products pasted to the outsides. If you’ve been to Second Life, you know that it’s possible to build exquisitely detailed 3-D replicas of objects as small as flowers and teapots. That, frankly, is what I was expecting to see inside Kinset’s Brookstone store—not stacks of cubes covered with flat, 2-D pictures that I could just as easily have found in a Brookstone catalog or at the Brookstone website.

Even without avatars and detailed 3-D objects, however, there is still value to the concept of arranging products in a three-dimensional space. For example, spreading products out the way they’re arranged in a real store and allowing the shopper to walk down virtual aisles makes browsing—and serendipitous discoveries—much easier and more natural than on a traditional e-retailing site.

There are other advantages as well. I wasn’t able to speak with Kinset executives for this story, but the company’s FAQ points out that many well-known retail chains—think Best Buy, for example—have spent lots of money honing the look and layout of their physical stores. Kinset’s tools make it easy to re-create the experience of being inside one of those stores more faithfully than any flat website could hope to do. The Web, as Kinset’s FAQ puts it, “introduced an alien visual vocabulary to merchandising;” Kinset’s 3-D spaces restore the more familiar vocabulary of bricks-and-mortar stores.

At the same time, transposing retailing to virtual worlds allows new kinds of interactions that aren’t possible in the physical world. Without having to leaving home, for example, shoppers in Kinset’s world can ask questions of virtual clerks. In the future, they’ll be able to rendezvous inside the world with friends who are also connected from their home computers, or attach notes for their friends to specific items.

I’ve talked with lots of people about the evolution of virtual worlds, which range today from social worlds like Second Life to gaming worlds like World of Warcraft and practical map-based worlds like Google Earth. It’s not clear whether there’s a demand for a dedicated Shopping World, or whether retailing will simply be a component of other types of worlds—but all of the experts agree that social shopping experiences will be one of the 3-D universe’s key pastimes and moneymakers. Providing the infrastructure to make that happen is where Kinset is carving out a lead. “If, in the future, you find a store via Google Earth, that’s fine,” the company’s FAQ. “When you want to go inside that virtual store and buy things, we will be about rendering the inside experience.”

Comments | Reprints | Share: