Mobile tagging and mixed reality: a 2009 workshop by Martha Gabriel

Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel gave the presentation at a workshop on November 17, 2009. Its goal was to show how mobile tagging can widen and spread the effects of mixed realities. She first introduced mixed reality and its examples, then mobile tagging and its examples, and showed how each can benefit the other.

The mixed reality examples ranged across arts, entertainment, assisted maintenance, medicine, advertising and marketing. BMW was working on augmented reality maintenance tutorials that service technicians would see through goggles, with narration. MINI ran an augmented reality campaign for the Cabrio. Layar, built by SPRXMobile in the Netherlands, was presented as the first mobile augmented reality browser: a user pans a phone camera and sees nearby buildings and spaces tagged with information from the web.

Mobile tagging provides data to a mobile device, usually through a URL encoded in a two-dimensional barcode that a camera phone reads. Reading it needs a reader program installed on the phone. About 70 barcode types exist, mostly used in logistics, but mobile tagging relies on only around a dozen. Microsoft introduced its Tag format in 2009, built on colored triangles instead of the black-and-white squares of most 2D codes. The presentation placed the strongest use of tagging in Asia, especially Japan, with Europe catching up.

Three kinds of use were named: commercial tagging for advertising and mobile marketing, public tagging, where a code on a public information carrier links to more detail, and private tagging, where people attach codes to blogs or profiles. The presentation expected the larger business value to come from customized commercial uses, such as tourism, supply chain management, brand protection, ticketing and cross-media campaigns.

The last part looked ahead to the Bokode, a data tag from the MIT Media Lab that holds thousands of times more information than a barcode. Prototypes were being developed that could be read from 20 meters or more. Sketched uses included shops tagging their fronts for street-mapping vehicles, classroom participants interacting with a large display, and crowd gaming in public spaces, where players steer characters on a shared screen from a distance.

Her conclusion: a tag is a physical link to the online world, so tagging adds a digital data layer to reality.

The presentation was posted on SlideShare, and that page now reports that the presentation was made private. It cannot be opened, and no other copy was found. The topic does not involve a playable game, so there is no game status to report.