Quædam cuiusdam

Which makes sense, because I put it there. The giant floating gold-foil-wrapped Easter bunnies, on the other hand, make no sense at all.

Augmented reality is very weird.

I’ve been playing with Layar‘s Hoppala Augmentation service (with a hat tip to Fiacre O’Duinn at Library Bazaar). Via the web interface I placed an object in an augmented reality layer: an Easter egg in the demo “Hoppala goes Easter” layer. Then I installed the iPhone app, found the right layer (search “Easter”), and strolled through the Quad on my way to the LRT. It looked like this:

It was distinctly bizarre to look through the little window into an alternate world where this huge red egg floated along the path beside me. Freaksville. And people give you odd looks when you walk around the Quad holding your phone out at eye level. When you explain, though, that you’re watching the giant floating Easter egg, and that the floating chocolate bunnies aren’t your fault, people leave you alone.

This was my first experience using an augmented reality app with live GPS positioning. I must say, it’s disappointing in an entirely predictable way. GPS on a phone is rough, and the accuracy of your position changes from moment to moment. That means the egg moves around a lot as you walk, and its position in the middle of the Quad is only approximate, because the app’s sense of your position is only approximate. When building an augmented reality application, you’ll have to take into account that your users may not see your stuff exactly where you want them to, and your stuff might shift unexpectedly instead of smoothly panning and zooming to match the viewer’s movements. I’ll have to give up my fantasy of neatly overlaying an historical image over the corresponding contemporary view, like this set from the National Library of Ireland, where the juxtaposition of past and present is so immediate it makes your heart ache. Or maybe there are ways for the app to work around the limitations of a phone’s GPS.

Anyway, if you’re around U of A and you have an iPhone or Android phone, go to the Quad and check out the egg. And the bunnies. Maybe they do something if you click them. Do you think I should click one? Maybe I should go back and click one.

Got me one of those Menotek floppy bluetooth keyboards, now that the iPhone supports it (in iOS4; kitteh not included). It takes some getting used to: I keep doubling letters. The iPhone’s autocorrection helps. We’ll see if this can be as useful as the old Palm folding keyboard, which was a wonderful keyboard; I could have transcribed War and Peace on it.

The University of Alberta added WorldCat Local to its web offerings a while ago, but for my own library use I’ve gone on using our old OPAC by default, for no other reasons than familiarity and inertia. Now, though, I’ve found a solid advantage that WorldCat Local offers to my personal workflow: fixed record-level URLs.

I was trying to solve the age-old problem of capturing a call number so that it will be easy to consult when I get to the stacks to pick up the book. The OPAC record is on the screen of my workstation, my iPhone is on my belt: how to bridge the gap? Emailing it to myself is tedious, copying and pasting into a note and then syncing even more so. Taking a picture with the iPhone’s camera may get the call number but it’s hard to include enough of the citation to show which item this is, if I’m fetching more than one.

The solution I want, which was inspired by a tweet by Lorcan Dempsey, is a QR code that gives me the URL of the record. That way when I need it I’ll have the full citation, the call number, everything. QR codes don’t appear in WorldCat Local or in the OPAC (like Huddersfield), but there’s Greasemonkey for that, specifically the “QR Code for Everything!” script (and probably others, I didn’t explore). I can pop up a QR code for any page I visit in Firefox on my workstation, grab it into the iPhone using the free i-nigma app (or one of the other QR-reading apps) to snap a picture of the QR code, and then easily consult the full record in the stacks.

The only problem with my default behavior is that the OPAC uses a session URL, which is meaningless once the session expires or when accessed from another device, so capturing it does me no good. WorldCat Local gives me a URL that doesn’t depend on the current session. That’s what I need: a cool URI that doesn’t change, at least across two devices and within the time-frame of my interest in a given book. I suppose I could customize the Greasemonkey script to use the OPAC’s permalink service before it generates the QR code, or we could enhance our unAPI service to provide a QR code as one of the options, but hell, WorldCat Local just works for this.