What?
'Augmented Reality' apps link the online and offline worlds, and take a variety of forms. From 3D overlays on mobile phone screens, the creative re-use of paper, (multi-touch) tables and other household objects, face and objection recognition - AR techniques can bring the Web into our lives in unexpected ways.
But for AR to break through into everyday life and reach its full potential, we need more than innovative user interfaces. We also need information and services to populate those interfaces; information that is universally accessible in vendor-neutral formats, and that can flow from provider to consumer regardless of the particular device or service in use.
AR interfaces can be seen as the tip of an iceberg: they can provide views into terrabytes of data relevant to our lives: government statistics, reports on schools, house prices or crime, cultural heritage treasures from centuries past or the latest posts from friends, colleagues or traffic and weather reports - the challenge of AR is to filter, manage and present this information unubtrusively, as and when it is needed.
AR therefore needs to bring together expertise from the information and computer sciences, from (amongst others) policy and data management bodies, user interaction, mobile computing, social Web, gaming and Web search fields.
The goal of this AR Dev Camp is to contribute to the growing series of ARDev events by bringing together experts from all relevant fields, regardless of their perceived levels of 'AR expertise', so that the practicalities of real world AR can be explored in a friendly, collaborative setting.
We invite short talks, hands-on demos, 'BarCamp'-style adhoc initiatives and an open, inclusive perspective on what Augmented Reality can do for society, business, culture and politics.
Who?
With our friends at ARdevcamp.org we share a believe that AR must be fundamentally open, interoperable, extensible, and accessible to all, so that it can create the kinds of opportunities for expressiveness, communication, business and social good that we enjoy on the web and Internet today.
In this light, we would in particular like to invite attendees to focus on scenarios in which information flows between systems, and in which groups of friends can make collaborative use of AR even while using different software, hardware or online services.
We also encourage custodians of data to participate - whether e-government and digital city, event guides, 'point of interest' descriptions, cultural heritage datasets or social Web annotations. We will measure the success of this event by the number of collaborations it gives rise to, and encourage all those with an interest in the state of the AR art to come along on April 17th and share what you know.
Set-up / location and times
The AR Dev Camp takes place at Mediamatic Bank, Vijzelstraat 68 on Saturday April 17. Doors open from 09.30, we start at 10.00.
More information about the schedule in the AR Dev Camp wiki.
Participating and skills
If you are interested please reserve a spot by clicking the magenta RSVP button.
The event is very interdisciplinary, and nobody will know everything about all topics. The main talks will not be deeply technical, but some of the breakout sessions and collaborative discussions may go into technical details. We will try to be inclusive, but please expect detailed discussion of various new technologies and their real-world impact.
Information
Participation is free!
If you need to know more about the content of the camp you can contact co-organizers Dan Brickley or Zoja Bajbutovic. There is an International AR Dev Camp wiki. For practical questions you can contact Deborah Meibergen.
