[4eyes] FW: Featured ACM Member: Blair MacIntyre

Tue Mar 21 15:10:04 PDT 2017

Here's an interview you might be interested in reading, with Blair
MacIntyre, an AR guy from Georgia Tech who we know well. He's moderating a
panel about AR at the ACM 50 Years of the Turing Award Celebration in June.

                Matthew

From: ACM Bulletin [mailto:acmbulletin at acm.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 6:54 AM
To: Matthew A Turk <mturk at CS.UCSB.EDU>
Subject: Featured ACM Member: Blair MacIntyre

People of ACM Archives
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March 21, 2017

<http://www.acm.org/binaries/content/gallery/acm/newsletters/people_of_acm.j
pg> 

Featured ACM Member: 

<http://www.acm.org/binaries/content/gallery/acm/ctas/people/blair_macintyre
.jpg> Blair MacIntyre is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing
and founder of the Augmented Environments Lab at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. His research focuses on the design and implementation of
interactive mixed-reality (MR) and augmented-reality (AR) technologies and
experiences. He has collaborated on a variety of AR gaming and entertainment
projects, including serving as co-director of the Georgia Tech Game Studio
and the Qualcomm Augmented Reality Game Studio. Recently, he has been
working to add AR technologies to web-based mobile applications through the
Argon web-browser projects, and is on leave from Georgia Tech at Mozilla to
continue working to add AR technologies to the web.

MacIntyre's honors include receiving a National Science Foundation (NSF)
Career Award. At ACM's 50 Years of the Turing Award Celebration
<http://www.acm.org/awards/turing-award-50-conference>  in June, he will be
moderating a panel titled "Augmented Reality: From Gaming to Cognitive Aids
and Beyond."

You have been working in the augmented reality field since 1991, and you
have said you are interested in "understanding the fundamental (and often
subtle) problems that have made augmented reality (AR) systems difficult to
design, deploy and use." What key technological advances have come about in
the past five years that have resulted in AR and virtual reality (VR)
technologies being more widely introduced to the market?

The fundamental advances that have brought VR and AR out of the labs are
rapid improvement of the components in modern smartphones. At their core,
the affordable and high-quality modern VR displays are built around displays
created for these phones; certainly, other technologies are necessary, as
well, but the availability of cheap, fast, high-resolution and high-quality
displays drove this current round of consumer-oriented VR.

The phones themselves have provided a platform for AR experiences, which are
inherently mobile, and while a phone is not the ideal platform for AR,
modern smartphones have enabled AR experiences to be created and delivered
to millions of people using technology they already have. The
miniaturization that leads to fast, smaller, cheaper and more powerful
phones allowed displays like Google Glass to be created. Both of these
platforms-the smartphone and Glass's "heads- up display"-allow simple AR
experiences, but still fall short of the vision people have for AR, that of
being immersed in a mixed reality that blends 3D graphics with the world
around you.

The next wave of AR technology, exemplified by displays such as Microsoft's
Hololens, will finally be able to deliver these kinds of experiences. For
these displays, the driving technology is advanced spatial mapping and
sensor fusion, allowing them to precisely locate the display within a space.
With Hololens, we can place graphics in a room with the user so that it is
stable and feels more like a part of the world; with more common
smartphone-based AR or 2D heads-up displays, the media is either fixed to
the 2D screen or appears to be floating near the user, detached from the
world.

The Argon web browser, which you developed at Georgia Tech, exposes AR
technology in the web, allowing people to overlay 3D web content on the
video from their phone's camera, combining geospatial data and computer
vision tracking technologies. For example, a publisher or bookstore owner
could enhance their website with AR capabilities. Someone looking at a book
on their phone might be able to use AR to help find it in the store, or they
might look at a book they were interested in and have interesting
information from that publisher's website appear around the book. Why do you
think Argon will be a model for the use of AR on mobile devices in the
future?

The vision most people have about AR is that "relevant information" will
appear in the world around them, but that vision ignores the practical issue
of content creation: where does this information come from, how does the AR
system know what to display, and how do developers create rich, interactive
content that provides real value? Content developers must be able to create
content that provides value-of the sort we see in applications or
websites-beyond just "3D content elements in the world." And users must have
ways of choosing what sources to interact with. When we look at the web, we
see a model that can naturally be applied to this problem: the browser's
notion of search can be extended from text and location-based queries to
include sensors, images and objects the user is looking at (such as the book
above), with the user controlling what search engines are used and when and
where they search. The content units are not "3D objects" but rather
coordinated content (akin to web applications) that leverage what they know
about the user and their context to select and display relevant content
elements (such as the information about the book). Because this content is
displayed by an application running in a general-purpose engine (the
browser), developers can create whatever interactions they desire across all
the content displayed.

The missing piece, which has driven our work on Argon, is giving the user
the ability to display multiple AR web applications at once, and exercise
control over the representation of reality the applications are rendered
over. If a user wants to simultaneously display two or more applications to
provide repair instructions for their car, or tourism information for a
museum, that should be up to them. If they want to view the tourist
information for a city from the comfort of their home, by overlaying it on a
3D model of the city or Google Streetview images, they should be able to.
This ability to control what content to display, and over which
representation of reality, will only be possible through a general
infrastructure such as the web. The application sandboxes being created by
AR and VR companies are currently giving complete control to the developers
and are structured to coerce users into selecting a specific set of hardware
of software components.

My longer-term goal, however, is not to position the web against these
native ecosystems. Rather, I hope to demonstrate the power of decoupling
content from platform, and encourage companies like Microsoft, Google and
Apple to adopt similar abstractions that give users the ability to display
many AR and VR applications at once, choose what displays and interaction
approaches they want, and control what information these applications
receive about them. In that way, the web also serves as a platform to
demonstrate a user-centered approach to creating and delivering AR and VR
content and applications.

Do you think semi-transparent glasses using AR, such as Google Glass or
Microsoft Hololens, will eventually become more widely adopted? What
technical challenges need to be overcome for this kind of wearable
technology to become popular with consumers?

Yes, they will become widely adopted, although it will take some time before
people use AR displays on a regular basis. Some people talk about finding
the killer application for AR, but the biggest challenge with wearable AR
displays is not finding compelling applications, but getting the technology
to the point where it no longer gets in the way. On one hand, the displays
need to get small and powerful enough that they are no more obtrusive than a
pair of glasses, have a wide field of view, can be interacted with through
voice and gesture, and can run all day without needing to be recharged.
These are the obvious technical and engineering challenges that many
companies are trying to tackle.

On the other hand, the content that is displayed must not interfere with
what a user is doing in their life. When you talk to someone, 3D graphics
probably shouldn't occlude your view of them (even though it might occlude
other things in the world). If you focus on something near to you,
augmentations that are closer or further away should fade out of focus, just
as the physical world does. And when you walk down the street, content must
not be distracting; it needs to blend as seamlessly with the world as the
superimposed graphics we see on sports broadcasts on TV. These kinds of
problems require sophisticated sensing, modeling, display and semantic
understanding of the world and are, together, quite difficult.

The good thing, however, is that we don't need get to the point of having
displays people can wear all the time to have real impact in the world.
Current displays, like Glass and Hololens, can solve real problems in
enterprise and vertical markets, like logistics, medicine and education,
without satisfying the needs of consumers. These sorts of applications will
arrive quite soon, and hopefully they will be successful enough to support
the continued development of these technologies until they are ready for
consumer use.

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