It seems so long ago, and yet we never posted the video to our blog. This story aired in November 2010 as an announcement that the Department of Homeland Security was funding Tanagram to research an Augmented Reality Self-Containted Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) mask as part of a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant. Our solution intuitively combines team location and status awareness, communications, internal and external sensor fusion (ambient room temp, remaining air, …) and life saving features including exit path tracking and rapid temperature change alerting. You can see the video that describes the planned user interface here. We’ll be sharing more soon, I promise.
Good Monday to you! There always seems to be something exciting happening here and today it’s the unveiling of the Deus Ex: The Eyeborg Documentary. As part of their marketing program Deus Ex – The human revolution, Eidos Montreal contracted Rob Spence, a cyborg and a film-maker, to create a short documentary on the state of technological enhancement today and to compare and contrast those with the Deus Ex vision of 2027.
Rob and his film crew spent a day with me in July and during that day I got to know Rob very well (stop it!!). All I can say, is WOW. I’m not going to go on about the “strength of his spirit” and all that fucking self-serving-sympathy love-the-disabled junk. Not for Rob, not for you. Rob is plain-and-simple-punk-rock just a fucking cool guy! And, by-the-way, he cuts a mean video. His work is GORGEOUS!!
While he was here Rob taught me the phrase “pimp your gimp.” A phrase that is bears strong similarities to the punk-rock-rebellion that first hatched in the 1970′s. Pimping your gimp means not hiding your prosthesis, but instead decorating it and displaying it for all to see. One example is the current trend for veterans to have their prostheses airbrushed and wearing shorts (or t-shirts). There’s no shame here!
In addition to his camera eye, Rob also has a laser-pointer eye and a red LED (like terminator) eye. He told me he wears them to the bar to shock people. Fuck ya!
To get a better sense of Rob as a person and to see his prosthesis in action, take a look at this video. I shot it while Rob and I were playing with his transceiver (during a shooting break) by hooking it to a projector. We’re in a rear-projection/storage room, and Rob is tethered inside by the distance his eye will transmit and a 3ft cord between the receiver and the projector. (You don’t want too strong of a transmitter in your head…). The dialog is hilarious.
The resulting video is hot (below). It’s well edited, gorgeous, educational, inspirational, and exciting. At last glance, it had garnered ~180K views in the two days (including a Sunday) it has been posted on YouTube. The comments are worth browsing! Some great dialogues have been started. Even a few people inspired. Nice work Rob!
So… WHAT THE HECK IS A SBIR??? It’s an acronym that stands for Small Business Innovative Research grants provided by just about every U.S. public agency there is (Helloooo USDA!). Each agency has funds that are specifically targeted at sponsoring the growth of small businesses in innovative areas that also serve agency needs. In other words, they are trying to create products that don’t exist and will pay you to help them do it. You get money and intellectual property to help differentiate your company. In case you didn’t know, Tanagram has been benefiting from these grants since 2003.
Sometimes I joke and say, “It’s like a tax rebate.” which it is NOT. These grants require a final delivery and real work to execute but as I said above, at the end of the project the researchers get to keep the intellectual property for their own use and growth. HOW AWESOME IS THAT???
Over the past few months I’ve had a number of great discussions with small business/startup owners about grant opportunities and have been surprised by the resistance they’ve expressed when I asked them if they’d considered government funding. I’ve heard responses from “Too much red tape.” and “Oh those are really hard to secure” to “You really think you can fund a business with a government grant?”
The truth is grants alone will not build your business BUT they make an excellent addition to your funding portfolio. SBIR grants are relatively small amounts of money. Phase I grants pay between $75K – $150K for an approximate 6 month effort and Phase II (if you’re invited to submit) grants pay between $750K – $1.5M for one to two years of work. There are also several “wickets” you need to hop through to qualify for the grants too.
I have always made an effort to help other small businesses get into the SBIR game, but recently it dawned on me that it might be valuable if I published (blogged) a series of tutorials that helped everyone make sense out of the process. What do you think? Are you interested in learning more? Post a comment if you are and I’ll get to it.
While you’re waiting (I don’t type so fast…), wander through the topic listing and see if there is a call that you might be able to provide a unique solution for. It’s one of my favorite things to do.
If you have any immediate questions please contact me using the contact form here. I’m also on twitter @juhnke or @tanagram. I look forward to hearing from you!
On July 2nd last year Tanagram turned 18 years old. It was a time to reflect and celebrate our “childhood” and look to a future of unlimited possibilities.
One of our many ruminations were on the topic of our brand and our legacy as an interactive design firm. While we’ve been recognized as the first at many great things, we couldn’t help but wonder how we remained relatively invisible in the marketplace today. As a result of our pondering we have realized that the presentation of our brand, as intentional as it is, is too complex. We are too complex. Don’t worry, we’re not going to become less complex, we’re not even sure we could do that if we tried. Instead we are spending some time to help all of you understand what makes Tanagram unique in the interactive development space and there is no better way to get started than to shout it out. So here goes:
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Tanagram is unique in that we design and build software for the digital frontier. Thirty percent of our project portfolio is made up of government funded “advanced” research. We do this specifically so that we can apply our learning to our commercial client projects and our ability to make ideas real to our government projects. We focus on three specific areas:
Complex workflow applications (e.g. a hyper-local enterprise media management tool for Geomentum.com)
In addition we’ve really turned on the PR machine. Above you’ve seen links from the New York Times, Gizmodo, and ABC featuring our work. Here are a couple of other great stories that you might not have seen:
It’s St. Paddy’s day and by the time you read this, we’ll be drunk (maybe we are now??). We are very excitedly working to produce our final concepts and demonstrations so we don’t have a ton of free time, but we had enough to put together a Lego CITY firetruck and enable the men with HEADER (codename for our Firefighter Augmented Reality (AR) platform).
Deployed on-site, the ladder crew ingress is underway.
Last Thursday evening we filled the office with chemical smoke. We were shooting footage for a video demonstration of the augmented reality system aimed at firefighters. The shoot was a lot of fun, and we can’t wait to show you the results. We should have the final video done in a few weeks. In the meantime here are a couple photos and a short video of Matt from Mad Town Media playing the part of an extra firefighter.
Motion tracking dots in the hallway
Our office is ON FIRE!!!
no really FIRE!!!
Paul and Mark from Madtown Media setting up the smoke machine.
A little over a month ago we announced our work developing an Augmented Reality Platform for the U.S. Government. While we can’t talk about contract negotiations as they are lengthy, sensitive, and tricky, we CAN share that our Bloom server is currently in an Alpha state and is already doing some amazing things. We are modeling, modeling, modeling from video and still photography and the output is amazing. The video above is a model of the front of my home. The video above represents only a single (but very important) step in the Bloom “Gathering Process.”
We are also in the process of optimizing the code to further improve efficiencies. As our effort continues we will be entering the second phase of our program that will include the development of the user interface for the iARM platform. That user interface will be a multichannel input / output leveraging gesture (hands/hand symbols), speech, and context. Our first evaluation will be the gesture based system. There are a number of open-source and closed platforms (this, and all of these…) that will likely play a part in this system but we are always looking for experts.
Please take the time to share if you have ideas you think would benefit this vision.
ARE2010 did a lot of things for Tanagram. First and foremost it taught us that we aren’t the only crazy people out there. There were many hundred equally passionate (and equally insane) individuals working diligently to realize a vision that has been foretold for many many years. Attending were 400 enthusiasts, 90 speakers, and 40 sponsors.
The conference also re-affirmed that Augmented Reality (AR) is a new frontier. The discussions were widely diverse from immediate implementations of marketing gimmicks to future visions of integrated experiences and super-powered humans. Keynote speakers, Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and Jesse Schell were all brilliant. They taught us to be humble, focused, human-centered, and reminded us that this isn’t the first new frontier and to remember (and reuse) the past. Jesse Schell presented a humorous and sobering view of privacy and what AR could mean for it (his point was it was already too late…).
I personally had an opportunity to meet and discuss ideas with some of my all-time hero’s including Bruce Sterling and Blaise Agüera y Arcas.
On the technology front I can share that there is a definite future for head mounted display technology. We saw proposals for 150deg. FOV systems. It’s going to be a very exciting decade!
As soon as the ARE folks post the videos I encourage you to browse the sessions. I didn’t attend one that was not fascinating. The ARE event will be held next year in Santa Clara and we will definitely be there.
P.S. Through this experience I was introduced to Bruce Sterling’s Wired Blog – Beyond the Beyond. Bruce admits it is eclectic as hell and is really anything that interests him. He saw that as a weakness, but I see it as a strength. I really look forward to the “random” posts. They are always head-stretching. I also encourage you to review the twitter feed for the conference. Great stuff in there!
This is an exciting illustration of the power of “collective memory” a concept we use to describe the knowledge management-like capabilities presented by spatialized AR data. Depending on the amount of stored detail one could rewind a specific view through multitudes of perspectives of a single area to see information from yesterday or a few centuries ago. This concept is a key component in the architecture of our iARM ecology.
Because our system is vision based, we have an extensive amount historical footage for areas of interest and the daily use of our system continuously adds to our model making for an amazingly powerful captured dimensional recording of our world.
If we caught your attention with our last post but you’re having a difficult time understanding what’s so exciting about a little research and some images narrating a potential future rest assured we have a lot to talk about.
The first thing we need to address is one of the “Hows” of the visualization technology. Even though we have several patents pending, we are still too sensitive to expose the ‘whole tomato’ to the masses, but suffice it to say we have cracked the Augmented Reality visual registration nut. The following is our first delving into the details that are under development.
What is this nut? Let me explain…
If you’ve ever used the current lineup of “AR Apps” available on Android or iPhone platform you’ve seen a neat portal into the world of Augmented Reality. You typically see a camera view of the world around you presented on a hardware screen with digital information presented (most often clumsily) on top of the view. As you move the phone around you see that information move accordingly as if it’s locked to some physical location. Sometimes you see that information move or ‘drift’ for unknown reasons and that is really the problem with current tech AR.
Registration is the accuracy by which the computing platform can “lock” the digital world onto the physical world and up to today, that technology has been susceptible to all sorts of errors and interference. One of the reasons registration is still immature is because developers are relying on hardware improvements to solve their problems. We believe that while hardware, especially heavily funded hardware (thank you Apple), may eventually get accurate enough to solve the registration problem we don’t have the time or patience to wait. We instead spent our time researching and testing an elegant and simple solution that would work with today’s hardware capabilities.
If you look at the narrative slides below you can see our User Experience Model relies heavily on pixel-accurate digital registration. We can “paint” anything including highlighting objects, manually marking the environment and even embedded three-dimensional models. I can assure you these aren’t the crazy vision of a designer with no insight as to how the technology works but are based on our registration system (U.S. Patent Pending).
Our system is primarily vision-based, but leverages gross measurements (with error detection) of GPS, Cell/WIFI triangulation, and digital compass hardware. That means that it uses cameras, models, and some other fancy wizardry to rapidly identify the observed view and paint objects within that domain accordingly.
That’s all for now but we’ll be presenting some more details on the system at ARE2010 and are excited to continue this discussion.
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