⊕I decided to deal with it for a practical reason: I have been giving presentation about our WebAR work using the web, combining the reveal.js web presentation package with our argon.js AR web framework, and running the presentation (with embedded AR demos) in our Argon4 AR-capable mobile web browser. When presenting, it’s best to run the server locally, to avoid being at the mercy of whatever net connection is available at a conference, but to access the web location API, websites must be hosted securely. And, while invalid certficate warnings are annoying, Argon4 currently does not work with invalid certficates at all. After running into problems with a very slow conference network last week, I decided to fix this. In the category of “technical things that are mildly annoying, but I never get around to fixing”, the inability to use https:// with a valid SSL certficate when doing local webdev on my laptop is way up there. Or, was.

As part of GoogleIO this past week, Google released some sample code on github for a little demo that exposes Tango’s sensing into Chromium.

Amid the rumors of Apple working on an AR gadget, I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to see. Now, it seems clear that a full-blown, standalone immersive 3D AR display isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but given their assets and what’s been happening in the AR/VR tech world, here’s one possibility I find interesting.

Getting blogging again. Found a great article on posting to my Jekyll blog from iOS that works great!

A little crafting can go a long way, it turns out. Here’s a story of how we raised some money for Planned Parenthood by 3D printing Pussy Hats for Lego Minifigs.

Today I am excited to start a new job, while on leave from Georgia Tech, as a Principal Research Scientist at Mozilla⊕
Blair MacIntyre
Principal Research Scientist. I’ll be working for Sean White in the Emerging Technologies Group, looking at adding AR capabilities to the web.

Over the past week, I’ve finished cleaning up the blog on my personal website, which I started moving from Wordpress to Jekyll earlier this year. As I was going through the posts, I ran across a lot of old content I want to revisit, but was especially pleased to see an old post from back in 2008 about the architectural projective AR art of Pablo Valbuena. He’s continued making really interesting pieces, here are a few of the newer ones.

I recently gave a talk (with my colleage Maribeth) at Moxie’s FutureXLive event.

Earlier this year, I decided to move my personal website and blog out of Wordpress on onto Jekyll. There were many reasons for this; partly I was tired of dealine with Wordpress (yet again, and update to Wordpress and the plugins I was using caused me to have to spend time just getting things working again), but mostly I wanted more control over the blog so that I could start integrating more interesting content into it (this still hasn’t happened, but it’s “in progress”). I’m planning to add some AR content to the site, soon.

I’ve been a fan of animated interfaces for years, going back to the amazing work that Sun’s Self team did on the Self user interface. The MorphicMaloney, J. H., & Smith, R. B. (1995). Directness and Liveness in the Morphic User Interface Construction Environment. In Proceedings of the 8th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface and Software Technology (pp. 21–28). New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/215585.215636user interface used in Self was interesting in a lot of ways, especially how it bent over backwards to make the interface feel alive and like you were truly directly manipulating the objects you were creating and working with, both as you programmed and as you used it. I particularly like how the team adapted traditional animation techniques for the UI, building off the years of experience traditional animators had in making cartoon animations feel “real”Chang, B.-W., & Ungar, D. (1993). Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (pp. 45–55). New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/168642.168647.

⊕
Our old laptop, freshly awoken from 2007. In a few weeks, my colleague Maribeth Gandy and I will be presenting a paper at UIST 2014 (ACM’s User Interface Software and Technology conference), reflecting back on what we learned from our DART system (The Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit, the first paper on DART was published at UIST 2004!).