Noticin.gs

There is a new game I started playing recently - Noticin.gs. The rules are simple - when you NOTICE something interesting in your environment, you make a photo, and then you upload it to Flicker, with geotag for the location where you captured the photo. The other rules are:

• People aren't noticings,
• You can only submit one photo of each 'thing',
• Each player is limited to three noticings per day,
• It must be clear to other players what the noticing in the photo is, using the title of the photo if it's unclear in the picture.

After each day you photos get scored and you are earning the points. That's it.

Why is it interesting?

For the same reason as the reactive music I described here - this is a trick that makes you connect and attend to reality, rather then isolate and disconnect from it. When I am searching for the thing to capture I am more aware of everything around me. Speaking simply, noticin.gs makes you NOTICE things more.

So get your mobile phone set up with Flicker and start playing, and you will notice a lot of cool things surrounding you...

Geolocated Augmented Reality

Is it possible to have Terminator-like augmented vision on our mobiles?

I mean, yeah, we have some basic augmented reality apps and I already spoke about them in one of my previous posts. However they all suffer from obvious problem - the mobile GPS location is accurate ONLY down to about 8-12 meters or even more. The consequence of this is that the augmented reality data floats all over your screen and it's not accurate enough.

I want to look at my phone and have a nice icons, descriptions, clips and images overlying on the surrounding reality in the right places without the irritating floating effect. I want to be able to pick an object in city space and label it in a way that will effectively display for other users. I want it to be like in a science-fiction movies.

But how to achieve that?

One company thought about interesting way to solve the floating and accuracy problem. Earthmine has adapted a 3-D space mapping technology used in Mars rovers to capture the city street and create a detailed, 3D representation of space. At first it sounds just like a sophisticated Google Street View. However, Earthmine vision is to merge 3D maps they capture with location capacities of mobile phones and create a fully interactive, and stable geolocation engine. So inaccurate GPS signal from the phone will be combined with the recognition of the surroundings you are standing in, which will allow you to get a precise augmented reality display.

I just hope that Google have a plan like this, and can use that in their Street View to apply such technology, because it would really be... the quickest solution, considering how much of the world they have already mapped....

[photo credit: Earthmine]