[I’ve been trip-blogging this past week but haven’t had convenient net access, so I’m afraid the real-time aspects of blogging are lacking… now that I’m hooked into the wireless at DEAF04 here’s some of my backlog.]

Bill Buxton’s ISWC keynote made a lot of points, but the one that struck me most was derived from three basic laws:

1. Moore’s Law: the number of transistors that can fit in a given area will double approximately every 18 months.
2. God’s Law (aka the complexity barrier): the number of brain cells we have to work with remains constant.
3. Buxton’s Law: technology designers will continue to promise functionality proportional to Moore’s Law.

The problem then is how to deliver more functionality without making the interface so unwieldy as to be completely unusable. Buxton went on to talk about the trade-off between generality and ease-of-use: the more specifically-designed an interface the easier it is to use but the more limited its scope.

The key, he argues, is to make lots of specific applications with interfaces well-suited for their particular niche. Then you don’t need a single general interface, but instead can concentrate on the seamlessness and transparency of transitions between interfaces.

It’s a nice way of thinking about things, especially when thinking about the combination of wearables and ubicomp (see next post).

Like in previous years, the big theme here at ISMAR (the International Symposium of Augmented and Mediated Reality) seems to be registration and tracking — how to detect where objects and people are in the physical world so you can overlay graphics as accurately as possible. AR isn’t my main field, but I’ve had a couple of conversations so far about how we’re really reaching a point of diminishing returns. It’s great that we’re seeing minor incremental improvements in this area, but what we’re really lacking are new, innovative uses of AR to push the field further. Unfortunately, it sounds like at least in part a lot of these new innovations didn’t make the cut for the conference because they lacked in strong evaluation or quantifiable contribution to the field — it’s much easier to judge the quality of a new camera-based image-registration method than it is to judge the usefulness of a brand new application.

The Software Agents field was a response to a similar stagnation in Artificial Intelligence. AI researchers had a lot of good but imperfect tools that had been developed over the years, but kept trying to solve the really hard general problems. Software Agents grew out of the idea that it was OK if your algorithm wasn’t perfect in every condition so long as you cleverly constrained your application domain and designed your user interface to cover for those imperfections. It was a struggle to get acceptance of the idea at first, and in the end a few of the big players in the new domain went and founded their own conference rather than try to fit their own work to the evaluation metrics used for more traditional AI papers. Hopefully it won’t take such a dramatic move on the part of AR researchers to breath new life into this field.

Dr. Dylan Schmorrow, program manager (and thus manager of research funding) for DARPA just hinted that there will be some funding for research in augmented reality for military training becoming available in about six months (esp. ramping up 2006 financial year). No details yet as to whether it’ll be a new Broad Agency Announcement or part of existing long-term funding, but sounds like it’s coming down the pike.

Makes sense — it’s one of the most immediately-promising applications for AR that’s out there.

Over the next two weeks I’ll be blogging from the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality and the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (busy couple weeks!).

I’ve already run into one other blogger here, Kerry Bodine at StyleBorg — she’ll be blogging over the next couple days as well.