Right, hi everyone.
Yeah, my name is Julian, I am from New Zealand, I'm living in Berlin in, in
Deutschland. I'm from New Zealand, this is not an Australian accent you're
hearing, that's that's really important and I think if you understand it's not
an Australian accent then I think this this talk I'm about to give will be a
huge success both for me and my family. It's also important to emphasize that
New Zealand and Australia are actually separate countries, that there is
actually space, sounds wild, there's space in between Australia and New
Zealand. New Zealand is so far away from Australia that if you try to swim from
the very bottom of Australia, say Melbourne, all the way to the to the
North Island of New Zealand, say Auckland, you'd be so tired when you arrived
that you could not fight the giant flightless birds with your fists, let alone
survive the hordes of rugby playing cannibals. So just I wish the rest of my
talk was going to be quite that silly but it's not. Anyway I had, well I've been
asked to come here to talk about augmented reality which is which is a
sort of a difficult term, I mean as the man that introduced me said, it's a
technology that provides add-ons for the real. That all sounds quite
ambiguous, let's just say that augmented reality as it's commonly understood is
any technologically mediated manipulation or modification of reality as
it's experienced. Typically that's done with something like a like a phone, one
holds one's phone up in camera mode and one sees another layer over that
reality as mediated by the phone that ideally is useful. However I do think
that augmented reality as such has become somewhat of a gold rush
especially in the in the dot-com like businesses that are really wanting to
get in there first and make their mark and this I think is something of a
problem. Why is it something of a problem? Because it's one of these examples yet
again of a technology of a tool being mistaken for its purpose. I think
it's always important to not mistake the tool for the purpose, especially as an
engineer and as an artist, this is of great interest to me. The kinds of
examples I'm talking about are augmented reality for windshields and cars, now
certainly that might work, augmented reality in the supermarket, it could be
useful finding out where products really come from etc etc or for instance
augmented reality in the zoo. I'm hippopotamus. Oh yes you are hippo or augmented
reality in your breakfast, for instance your porridge. Look mum my porridge has
got little elves in it playing cricket. That's not necessarily a good
example of augmented reality, necessarily adding so enriching ones
our personal life. Maybe it would be fun to have elves in one's porridge, I'm not
so sure. But I want to talk less about augmented reality so much as
improved reality and this is where I think really a technology like AR can
certainly have quite an application. The kind of reality that I'm
interested in improving is this reality, one that I'm sure you're all
quite familiar with, the saturation or if you want another spin on it, the
infestation of billboard advertisements in our daily life, in our daily
urban life. Now we're so used to these billboards, we're so used to seeing
like this in our cities that we've almost come to accept that it's kind of a
natural state and I think that is certainly something to worry about. We're
so used to living around these that we feel somewhat powerless as to how they
change and when they change and why. We don't feel that we can negotiate with
these images in any way, they simply change on their way to work one day,
they're different on the way back. We don't quite know who's necessarily
in control of this process. Howard Gossage in the 1960s edition of Harper's
magazine, it's a very interesting thing, he said nation-states take the
unintentional violation of the international airspace extraordinarily
seriously yet we as members of the public are intentionally violated by
billboards every day of our lives. Now a Zeitmagazine, a German
newspaper said that this is a new kind of dictatorship, that one cannot
escape and I think that's certainly a little true. Of course some cities have
managed to escape it, they've attempted to escape this. Here's a good example, this
is Sao Paulo in Brazil, the image that we're looking at here is the very heart
of the business and commercial district of Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million
people and it takes a little while but if you do look at this image for long
enough you'll see that it's conspicuous especially because there are simply no
billboards right in the heart of the commercial district. So when I'm seeing
the city in all its structural and architectural reality, it's quite an
uncanny experience if you've ever been to Sao Paulo or a city that
has actually attempted to remove those billboards, instead we're actually
left with these kind of telling remnants. Now of course billboards, rather
than some cities choosing to reject entirely billboard advertisements,
they're more interested in looking at ways in which they can incorporate them
into the identity of the city and this is a good example, this is Times Square
New York and it's almost like the people responsible for putting these billboards
up, the very designers themselves, have actually kind of collaborated to produce
a landmark in and of itself. It's very easy to be black and white about
billboard advertisements but I think one does also need to remember that they do
contribute to very much the identity of a city. In fact this man said that
Piccadilly Circus would just be a London roundabout without its signage and he's
in some ways right. If you imagine, I don't know who of you here have been to
Tokyo but if you go to Akihabara in Tokyo, try and imagine that without all
its neon signs and animated billboards, it would certainly be quite an unusual
experience. We have forgotten a little that I think that that signs however you
used to represent the products and services that were provided by the
building to which they were affixed. At some point those signs have been
multiplied and they've become mobile and now we're reminded of products and
services whether we seek them or not. So this begs the question whose public space
is it really? Is it really our public space as members of the public? What can
we do about these billboards? Is there any way in which we can make this
seemingly permanent endless iteration of proprietary imagery in our public
spaces and our exposure to them a little bit more a little bit more
flexible a little bit more negotiable. A good example for instance is buildings
in Europe if you live in an apartment in Europe they're often protected by a
kind of a heritage trust such that one can't paint the balcony of your own
apartment. This is very unusual for me as a New Zealander if you're in New
Zealand you're often living in a house you can modify both the inside and the
outside of your dwelling. You certainly can't do that in Europe yet when the
exterior of an apartment is being refurbished in Europe it's often
covered in scaffolding that is and then rented out to an advertising
agency. There's something a little ironic and about that I think. So I'd like to
draw on the metaphor of readable and writable in the context of the
services of our cities. A good example being in the computer science space
there's a term for read permissions and write permissions of a file on a
computer operating system. Every file is either readable or writable or both. Now
normally the system files on your computer aren't modifiable by the user
of that computer they're modifiable by the administrator so we need to ask who
for whom does the administrator of our cities allow right access to the
services of our cities? Who do they allow to write? What parts of our public
spaces are in fact open for authorship? Let's just ask that question here. The
public space we can author includes ourselves, funny haircuts, big lapels,
bell bottoms. I was born in the 70s. Our front lawns if we have one you can have
a tree shape like I have a bottomless and your neighbor will just nod at you
politely and then never say anything more. Seem like such a lovely man. Our
vehicles you can spray paint your car you can color it pink put big fluffy dice
in the window get a funky number plate but really the battle happens here. The
battle is not on the surfaces of objects themselves it's in the surfaces
in the in the visual cortex. This is the real real estate that a marketeer is
in advertising advertising agents thereafter the visual cortex this is
where they want their mind share. So we can think about cognitive surface area
here. We can think about a surface area in the mind that is in fact targeted
directly. Going back to this early image we can do a simple experiment like this
just to see how much of the cognitive surface area is in fact occupied by
proprietary imagery. A group in Vienna did this very very nice project where
they simply made all the advertisements in a city yellow in order to
exemplify this fact. So let's take our fight if you like to the to the visual
cortex. Back in 2008 I was playing around with image tracking finding a
way to teach a computer to recognize a unique image and then substitute that
image with with any other content. I was very tired but I managed to get it
working so I was pretty psyched. I look like such a Ted fanboy but really this
is actually a it was just happened to be a video I had lying around. So it's just
me playing some video on a postcard I call this a video postcard and can we
move on beyond that. One more click yes okay so this is an example of what we'll
call product replacement instead of product replacement conspicuously
drinking Budweiser in a film. Hey Ted I'll be out the back get the shotguns
ready you know Budweiser you know. I started to realize that that I was on
to something bigger. Advertising the idea of taking advertising intercepting
those advertisements before they hit the visual cortex and and substituting them
for art. So an exhibition platform was evolved the advertiser. The advertiser
simply seeks to teach computers from from phones to to desktop computers
laptops to recognize advertisements and substitute them for art. So an artist
can for instance exhibit on Helmut Lang, Kelvin Klein, Burger King,
East Saint Laurent wherever that advertisement is encountered in the
city whether it be on a car on a t-shirt on a billboard it will be
substituted for their particular art. Now this in order to start with we wanted
to make a very a very powerful device capable of actually representing these
ideas and so I teamed up with a couple of Spanish people Clara Boye and Diego
Diaz to develop a pair of binoculars and I loaded a lot of software that I'd
written and that was significantly improved by a fellow Kiwi Damien
Stewart. You'll see that here in action. This is the billboard interception prototype.
I just love that name. I'm really still a bit proud of it. And here it is in action.
This is in a in a transmediala 2010 in Berlin. A little video of it in action. We
had countless submissions from from people all around the world wanting to
add bust their their favorite ads. This is really this is really simply put the
basic idea of the advertiser in action. That woman used to be about 30 years
younger in the original ad of course. We didn't make these images as I said
they were substituted they were contributed by by other artists.
So, yeah, that's an example of the advertiser in
action. Thanks. So, I've got about a minute and 20 left. I'm just going to quickly go
over the future of this project. We're currently targeting our Android and an
iPhone phones such that we can really roll this out to the public on a very
large scale. We're going to keep going with the binoculars. We're going to get
them smaller. We're going to get them more robust and that's really targeting
museums that for instance might want to take what's inside the museums and just
roll them out to the street. And standalone camera phones just targeting the generic
standard camera phone one could for instance take an image of themselves in
front of a billboard send it to a server and it comes back substituted with
without any art of their choosing. So, they're really the three different shall
we say tiers of this of this project and where it's going. In the interim and
throughout it's entirely a free and open source software project. All the code
will be published very shortly. You're welcome as developers any developers
amongst you or friends of yours to contribute to this project to get on
board and and let's take this project to as many cities as we can around the
world. I'd like to say thank you very much.
