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Last week was the College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA) and National Council for Social Studies (NCSS) in Houston, TX (link). Proposed by Steve Camicia of Utah State, the symposium I was on included Simone Schweberof UW-Madison, Jeremy Stoddard from the College of William and Mary. The Discussant was Diana Hess of UW-Madison.This is a […]

On Friday, November 7, at the Green Charter Schools Conference, I was invited to present on my research on place-based games in the “Outta-The-Box” Schools & Anywhere, Anytime Learning section.
Technological innovations are changing the ways young people learn. In innovative new environment-focused schools, students can attain knowledge and skills through mobile and wireless technology no matter where they […]

The other day I met with Mary Sisock, a doctoral student in Forestry here at UW-Madison. She’d been told to track me down and ask about using AR in her research. My initial thoughts were “how can AR be used in Forestry? — I don’t know…” and I wondered how fictional stories about real land motivating […]

Last Spring, Gwen Drury contacted me about incorporating AR in the planning for a new Union South at the University of Wisconsin Madison.  Problem: The UW is redoing Union South to the tune of a couple million  bucks, and she wanted to know if AR could help them figure out how best to do that.  Solution: Was not available then (Jan. 2008) […]

Apologies to myself and anyone else for the delay in updating this. Facebook now gets the daily status updates, and I’ve been knee-deep at camp all summer.Fall is quickly approaching, and I’m writing up the last bits of my dissertation, tightening up what I’ve already written and prepping a bunch of articles to submit to […]

The biggest announcement at Macworld San Francisco Keynote was not the MacBook Air. It was that the Google Maps “App” on the iPhone is now location-sensitive.
Press the “Location button” to the left of the Search button in the pic, and the map shows you where you are. It’s based on the triangulation of signals (cell […]

Ah, those MIT folks! In eLens they’ve done (and/or “are doing”) what I’ve been pushing for since this October 2005 post. Almost.
Based on visual tag recognition, the ELens application allows to read visual tags, locate them on a map, record and name information, browse and access content, reply to messages, set up groups, and […]

The folks at PARC have got it right, as evidenced in this CNET article, From PARC, the mobile phone as tour guide
Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC–the Xerox subsidiary that was the birthplace of the computer mouse, the graphical user interface and Ethernet–has developed a mobile application that offers up information that would be useful […]

Editor v3.05.05
Note: This is the second AR game for Flying Moose Lodge. It is the first one designed by campers. It was created in July 2006 by Dave, Aaron, Carter, Will, and Peter, who all played the first AR game that John Martin created as a “seed” game for them to start with, to […]

I took the XML file of the augmented reality “seed” game I created for my research at Flying Moose Lodge, and I put it into a more traditional narrative medium. It’s not the same as playing the four-day game, because in the game you actually have to hike the miles of trails between NPCs and […]

Here’s what I see happening:

Global Positioning System devices are flooding the “buzz” of the tech world. MacWorld San Francisco is taking place in the next few days and just about every Apple rumor site mentions the possibility of Apple adding GPS to its computers. It’s not really important that they do, but the fact that […]

Another sign of the impending aplaceolypse (yay! another new word under my belt!) is unveiled today on Ask.com. From the NYTimes article:
AskCity takes content from other companies, including some owned by IAC, and mixes it all into one site. If you search for a French restaurant in San Francisco, for instance, you will see a […]

Title: Place-based Learning with locative technologies: situating learning in the cultures of place.
©2006 John Martin
Abstract: All human activities are constrained by the interconnected and overlapping factors of: biological abilities, time, space, and social narratives. My research focuses on how the interplay between two of these factors, space and narratives, can be mediated with the cultural […]

Pictures, With Map and Pushpin Included
By IAN AUSTEN
Published: November 2, 2006
KATHLEEN BENNETT recently bought a device that keeps track of her location with help from the satellites of the Global Positioning System. But unlike many other people in Seattle, Ms. Bennett is not, by her own description, “an outdoor person” and will not be using […]

In my last post I lamented that Panoramio and GeoTagger did not *seem* to play together. I was very wrong. GeoTagger does indeed add GPS coordinates to the EXIF jpegs, and Panoramio does indeed read that EXIF info and map the jpegs appropriately. It all works like butter.
Here’s where “user error” (my bad) came into […]

**neither work in WordPress!!** (This is a serious limitation of WP, methinks)Trippermap might be cool. Let’s see…
Get your own Trippermap!
vs. Panoramio
Okay, Tripper Map has potential, but the free version is not detailed enough for us; we’d need the “$10/year” version that incorporates the Google Map API. So, the question is, do we […]

(this doesn’t seem to work…)
Test 1 (HTML code):
Test 2 (HTML for blogs):
Get your own Trippermap!
(It strikes me as not working for me…)

From OgleEarth, of course, comes a post of a brilliant person with ideas.This one is much easier than the Flickr Geotagging process I mentioned on 8/22/06, and more fun because you get to mess around in Google Earth (which recently got updated to v4, by the way).
Here’s how it works: Geotagger prepares images by […]

There’s a not-too-complicated web app to manually generate geotags for your Flickr! photos at beeloop.com. Just

drag and zoom the map center to the location that the pic was taken,
copy and paste info generated in the first field into your Flickr! tags for the pic,
copy and paste info generated in the second field into your Flickr! […]

If you’re interested in place-based stuff, and haven’t already been accessing the Ogle Earth site, you should start now. Their list of links has a lot of cool things like Panoramio, and Mappr!, etc. And the blog itself highlights some of the sorts of things potentially of interest to place-based game developers — for example, […]

It may be that I’m overlooking something obvious, but if my experience is typical, I’m at a loss to understand why anyone keeps using this platform. Here’s my question: “If the battery is completely discharged, do I lose everything on it?”
It seems as though, on my 3 day drive back to Wisconsin, where my […]

I meant to post this before I took off for Maine. Alas, plans…
It may be a helpful design step (as far as envisioning and sharing visions) to use Panoramio.com to geolocate pics and descriptions. I’ve started doing this with the Greenbush game stories here:
Panoramio
Note that it only supports JPEGs, so it may not be useful […]

In the Greenbush AR game that Mingfong and I are doing, one of the ways we are getting the content into “game form” is by giving the students these sheets to fill out. They’ve done so much research on the neighborhood that they have too much info to put into the game. So we came […]

I think this is the largest map area we can effectively use in the game. If you click on it, it will come up at the 600×600 pixel resolution I pulled it off of Google Earth at, but this displayed 200×200 pixel size is what the players will have to follow on screen, so I […]

Sound + Place = Freesound’s Geotags. check out this article on Creative Digital Music
Rather than dig through samples by abstract categories, you can use Freesound’s geotags to pull the exact ambience of certain parts of the world. It gives you the power to soak up the vibe of the beach at Playa del Medio without […]

Two projects currently underway at the Handheld Augmented Reality Project.

Mr. Virtuoso Teaches Art History with Augmented Reality (2005)
Virtuoso is a collaborative educational game designed to showcase the possibilities of the Handheld Augmented Reality (AR) framework. The game’s objective is to sort a collection of artworks according to their date of creation along a timeline drawn […]

Mingfong and I did a presentation on the Greenbush AR game at the”The Greenbush: Past, Present, Future” conference at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, May 2, at the Italian Workmen’s Club, 914 Regent St.
I’ve got the slideshow posted on my website here.
Mark says it looks like we might be able to get Mayor Dave to do […]

Here are our notes from Tuesday’s GLS AR game meeting.
We’ve recruited David Deal (from Constance’s Thursday night class), and Andy Dayton (not sure where Matt got him, but we’re glad to have him), and Matt and myself (John Martin). We went over a brief history of the game, what it can and can’t do […]

It’s here. It’s cool. Soon it will be on your GPS phone — mark my words.
I suppose we need to wait for a better text-entry system. I can’t see thumb-typing as a long term solution.