It often makes me wonder, is there a set of rules we can use to foster innovation? I stumbled on this article at McKinsey Quarterly (Registration required) – Brad Bird is interviewed and talks about nine rules for fostering innovation. The article is a couple of years old and dated, but offers timeless insights into the management of the creative process. When I drew comparisons with what we do as a practice of innovation at Upside, I was thrilled to see we are doing some things right. On the other hand, there are some things we can do better and some we can change.

Lesson One: Herd Your Black Sheep – “I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to”

Lesson Two: Perfect is the Enemy of Innovation – Sometimes good enough is, well, good enough.

Lesson Three: Look for Intensity – “Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between-what they have in common is a restless, probing nature”

Lesson Four: Innovation Doesn’t happen in a Vacuum – “If we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth.”

Lesson Five: High Morale Makes Creativity Cheap – “If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. “

Lesson Six: Dont Try To “Protect your success” – “… don’t play it safe—… do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail.”

Lesson Seven: Steve Jobs Says ‘Interaction = Innovation’- Encourage people to come into contact with each other.

Lesson Eight: Encourage Inter-disciplinary Learning – “Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. [and more creative].”

Lesson Nine: Get Rid of Weak Links – “Passive-aggressive people—people who don’t show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away—are poisonous. I can usually spot those people fairly soon and I weed them out.”

Lesson Ten: Making $ Can’t Be Your Focus – “It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.”

Especially loved how he talks about pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent and building morale. This is a must-read.

Another article talks about another interesting iPhone (and Droid) app – PerfectSight or NETRA (Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment) – that helps you self-administer an eye exam on your phone. There are more than a dozen such apps out there. The Guardian article lists another 5 such interesting apps.

Inspiration from Healthcare Sector

If you are looking for ideas to get started with mobile learning, Healthcare is the sector to look for inspiration. Few months back at mLearnCon Tyson Greer, CEO, Ambient Insight talked about how Healthcare is leading the way when it comes to mLearning Innovation. Here’s the presentation from that session and a previously recorded webinar.

I’m reproducing some of the interesting slides from the presentation. Some contain examples of mlearning solutions.

The video below shows Flash content running on iPad Safari browser using Frash –

The development of Frash is still in progress. The keyboard input and video playback are yet to be supported. Also at present it’s only available for the iPad it would soon be available for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. This is what the developer has to say about it –

“…Frash currently only runs on the iPad, but support for other devices (3GS+ only due to technical restrictions) is planned, as well as support for iOS 4….

…Video and keyboard input are currently not supported. The former will require major reverse engineering of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone, but the latter should be reasonably easy to implement.”

At this time it’s difficult to comment on the performance and battery life while running Frash on iOS device but from the video demo above its evident that Flash runs pretty well on them.

Here is a video demonstration of a Flash ad running on an iPad using Smokescreen –

Primarily, it reads the binary SWF file and renders its animation and audio content to standard web compliant format. The Smokescreen project demos are available at this the smokescreen’s website , these demos will work on the HTML5 compatible browsers Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, Safari 4 and Opera 10.53.

Here’s is what Simon Willison has to say about Smokescreen:

Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen, “a Flash player written in JavaScript”, is an incredible piece of work. It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

This is just a beginning and there are several benefits for mLearning developers as with Smokescreen they will be able develop content using existing Flash skills and run it across all the mobile device browsers. Although the project is still in the initial stages and for now is targeted only at advertisers. I feel it has potential to improve over time and allow complex animations and interactions developed in Flash to work on Flash disabled mobile platforms.   Apple’s blocking Flash has actually pushed the developers to innovate and essentially develop the Flash player in HTML5 and JavaScript. I wouldn’t be surprised to see future releases of Adobe’s Flash Professional publishing HTML5 compatible output.

Their technology claims to “translate natural body motion into seamless 3D movement onscreen”.

The technology is claimed to be ground-breaking; you can judge from yourself; take a look at the videos.

Their product data sheet is an interesting read in itself – http://www.omekinteractive.com/docs/shadow_datasheet.pdf It’s quite evident that they’re trying to be platform agnostic and open, which is very different from Microsoft. (while I’ve still not seen any specifications for using Natal yet) It’s also interesting that Omek seems to be closer to market than Natal. This space of gestural interfaces just got more interesting.

The AR applications can be divided into two categories –

1. Marker based/Image recognition – using a camera these applications recognize a marker or an image in the real world, calculate its position & orientation to augment the reality. In simple words they overlay the marker/image with some content or information. Here are videos demonstrating the image and marker based AR applications
   1. Marker based AR application demo
   2. Image based AR application demo

   List of development tools and SDKs for developing these applications –
   1. ARToolKit
   2. FLARToolKit and FLARManager for Adobe Flash
   3. SLARToolkit
   4. AR-media™ Plugin for Google™ SketchUp™
   5. NyARToolkit
   6. LinceoVR
   7. HandyAR
   8. Total Immersion – D’Fusion Studio
   9. Unifeye Mobile

2. GPS based – these applications take advantages of Global Positioning System [GPS] tools in your phone. The applications use the ‘position’ of your phone to find landmarks and any other point of interests [POI]. Once the POI or landmark is revealed the user can get additional information about it or get directions to reach there. These applications can help the learners to get real time learning using their mobile phones about various places. Here are some videos showing the working of these applications –

List of development tools and SDKs for developing these applications –
1. Layar
2. Wikitude
3. Junaio

We would be interested in hearing your comments or if you have used any other toolkit for AR development.

Below I share my development experience of creating the Pune Layar.

Prerequisites:

• Layar developer account: Go here and request for a developer account. In couple of days you will get approval from Layar team.
• A Gmail account
• Server with public IP/domain where you will store actual layer content. The server can be shared one or completely owned by you.
• Mobile device having Layar browser support. Currently Android 1.5+ and IPhone 3GS supports it.
• Familiarity with Basic layar functioning. This and this video can help you to get familiar with layar.
• And some development experience in JSON programming

Development:

The development occurs at two ends:

At Layer site:

• Login to layar developer site
• Click on create layer
• Fill the necessary information
  • Here you will need to provide URL of server where the actual contents reside.
  • Difference between Name and Title field:
    • Title appears in actual layer on mobile device
    • Name is for reference purpose and doesn’t appear anywhere in your layer on mobile device.
  • Click on save button.
  • Click on edit button. In edit mode there are different tabs like:
    • AR view: Here you can set color scheme for your layer
    • POI Icons: Here you can upload icons for you POIs. POI can have four different icons for four states.
    • Filters: Here you can define search filters for your layer. The search filter can be textbox, radio button, checkbox, or slider.

At your server:

• The layar server sends http request to URL you have provided while defining the layer in layar developer site and it expects a JSON response containing POI details. You can find more information about JSON response format here with examples.
• You can use jsp/servlets/php/.net or any server side programming language to output JSON response. It totally depends on how dynamic your data is. You can even use simple html page having static JSON response.
• This site has good example of JSON response. It uses PHP and MySQL.

Note: The sample images of Layar browser on Layar developer site depicts old Layar browser. Latest Layar 3.0 browser has different layout.

Testing:

• Layar team has provided page where you can do basic testing of your layer. You can find it under layer listing page by clicking “your layers” link at top. The basic testing includes:
  • Receiving request from layar site.
  • Validating the JSON response.
  • Validating POI with images and information.

• Once you are done with it, the actual testing will happen on your device. As your layer is not published yet you will need to download developer APK of Layar browser from here on your mobile device.
• Once installed, launched it and under settings you will need to click on “Use developer settings”. Get the required developer id and developer key from Layar developer site (by clicking on profile link).
• You may like to use fixed location (GPS) settings.
  • The required latitude and longitude format is: Decimal Degrees like 18.497916.
  • This link will help you in converting to required format.
• Once you are done with above steps you should see your layer appearing in featured tab in Layar browser.

Publishing:

• After testing the layer you will need to send it for approval process. Under layer listing you will find “Request publication” button.
• The approval process may take up to five working days.
• Once approved you can then publish it whenever you want, may be coinciding with some event.

That’s it. Quite simple – isn’t it?. Your layer is now available for public.

It gives us immense pleasure to share our first real sample in AR Street Racing. Street Racing is a simple car controller ‘game’ (well, the game part is still under development) where you have to control the marker like a car steering to steer the car and avoid hitting obstacles. The idea of developing this game came from this YouTube video of similar AR application. While that was built using D-fusion platform, ours is built in Flash using AS3.0 classes – FLARToolKit and FLARManager. Both the AS3.0 classes are free to use for non-commercial projects under GNU General Public License, Version 3. FLARToolKit is the main AR class that identifies the marker and determines its position and orientation in real world while FLARManager is a plugin that makes it easy to develop the AR application using FLARToolKit. Note: FLARManager has good tutorials, documentation and also it’s very easy to use.

Here is a short video to demonstrating its working:

Instructions to play the game –
1. Click ALLOW on “Flash Player settings” popup
2. Download and print the marker using DOWNLOAD MARKER
3. Click START. The START button would be activated after successful camera detection. Make sure that the camera is not being used by any other application.
4. Use the marker to play the game. Your aim is to avoid as many obstacles as possible.
5. Scoring : -5 points for ever obstacle you hit and +10 points for every obstacle you avoid.

Enjoy the game and please share your suggestions in the comments section on what we should do in the next stage of development to make it better.

Amy Blankenship (http://twitter.com/amyblankenship) replied to our AR post “@UpsideLearning I’m confused…how is this Augmented Reality?” She’s got a point, its confusing because the application is somewhere between Augmented Reality and Augmented Virtuality. It’s not truly AR because the application does not superimpose any sort of data on a view of reality. We keep calling it an augmented reality application because it uses the FLARManager and FLARTtoolkit, and these are augmented reality libraries. Lesson learned, from this point on, we’ll be careful about what we call stuff released into the wild. On another note, we are actually experimenting with true augmented reality applications as well. We’re building a local layer for our city that’ll run in the Layar AR browser, and some other neat stuff.

I was looking forward to the Apple iPad even more so as we have been doing good stuff on mobile learning and putting up applications and tools on iPhone as pilots and on a trial basis. The iPad was supposed to be better and bigger than the iPhone, closer to a computer and much more than just a phone.

However, from whatever I have been able to gather about it so far, including Apple’s own website I think the iPad is a big miss. To me it is just a big (physically speaking) iPhone clone (that too with something like a camera missing! Whoops!). Just this morning Amit Garg asked me about the iPad being a great tool for our sales meetings and I was excited too. However now I feel that’s not going to happen. Some reasons:

1. What would I carry an iPad for? I need to connect to my family back home, talk to my team and do video calls regularly – with the iPad there is just no way to do that. If I have to carry my iPhone and a laptop anyway; why would I carry another device?

2. How do I store regular files in it? Again, it is not meant for that. Without support for MS Office – I can’t even deliver good presentations. While I haven’t seen much about this; my experience with iPhone is a great indicator.

3. The missing camera. While demonstrating our Innovation and new projects team’s work on Augmented Reality the iPad is useless without the electronic eye.

4. And most importantly – Flash support (rather the absolute lack of it). The eLearning industry thrives on Flash and without it how do I even present the great stuff we create to prospects. I have failed to understand reasons behind Apple’s continued ignorance of Flash. I am sure it is not technically challenging to build support for Flash in an iPhone or an iPad but then what is it that is keeping Apple from supporting Flash?

I’d best not make any big statements against or for Apple or any other company. Personally I was really disappointed to read about iPad. I hope Apple is not being blinded by the iPhone’s success. To me it looks like that somewhere Apple lost its customer focus while building the iPad. And as a result, it looks like I just saved a few hundred dollars. And as with all things Apple, there isn’t going to be iPad V2 with the missing elements being built in any time soon.

I would love to hear comments from peers in eLearning industry on the iPad and what it could have been for the industry. Microsoft, HP, IBM – where are your tablets? We’re waiting…

2. Captivate Integrates Twitter
Shameer Ayyappan, Captivate Product Manager, posted a Connect recording of his very cool Captivate Twitter Widget presentation to the Captivate Blog. We think there is potential for this sort of Twitter widget to be integrated into all sorts of learning content, keeping it alive and relevant.

3. Video Trace – Rapid Interactive Scene Modeling
VideoTrace is a modeling software from Australian Center that uses objects from video to create realistic 3D models. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over a number of frames in the video. The software then interprets the sketch drawn and generates a realistic 3D model. These models then can be inserted into a game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. Very cool, we think it’ll help the coming 3D web by making modeling easy.

4. Telstra’s 3Rs of Social Media Engagement
Telstra recently released an interactive ebook including Avatar videos and comic style stories to list the rules of Social Media Engagement for their employees. Definitely worth a look!

5. Polarbit brings cross-platform multiplayer 3D games to Android Market
For the first time ever, iPhone, Android and Nokia Ovi Store device users from all corners of the globe can challenge each other in cross-platform multiplayer games. Finally mobile multimplayer gaming across platforms, eLearning could do with just such a solution for its needs.

Fusion API:
Yesterday Google released the Fusion API which will help to update and query the dataset programmatically, without ever logging in to the Fusion Tables website. The API means you can import data from whatever data source you may have, whether a text file, spreadsheets, CSV or a full-powered data base. Currently due to labs release, it supports up to 100MB per table, and up to 250MB per user. You can export your data as csv too. Once you viewed your data in desired visualization form you can integrate it in your website, blog or any web page.

Collaboration:
You can also merge your data with other datasets uploaded by users to get whole new meaning to your data. There is a provision of embedded comments to discuss about data with other users. Fusion Tables keeps track of who contributed each part of the data and who has permission to edit.

An Example
ODK Collect
Open Data Kit uses Google App Engine and the Fusion Tables API to instantly map locations of survey results. It is use for collecting data via survey software on GPS-enabled cell phones. Collect is built on the Android platform and can collect a variety of form data types: text, location, photos, video, audio, and barcodes.

Take a look here: