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It seems so long ago, and yet we never posted the video to our blog. This story aired in November 2010 as an announcement that the Department of Homeland Security was funding Tanagram to research an Augmented Reality Self-Containted Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) mask as part of a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant. Our solution intuitively combines team location and status awareness, communications, internal and external sensor fusion (ambient room temp, remaining air, …) and life saving features including exit path tracking and rapid temperature change alerting. You can see the video that describes the planned user interface here. We’ll be sharing more soon, I promise.  

Here is the link to the full news story.

Rob and his film crew spent a day with me in July and during that day I got to know Rob very well (stop it!!). All I can say, is WOW.  I’m not going to go on about the “strength of his spirit” and all that fucking self-serving-sympathy love-the-disabled junk. Not for Rob, not for you. Rob is plain-and-simple-punk-rock just a fucking cool guy!  And, by-the-way, he cuts a mean video. His work is GORGEOUS!!

While he was here Rob taught me the phrase “pimp your gimp.” A phrase that is bears strong similarities to the punk-rock-rebellion that first hatched in the 1970′s. Pimping your gimp means not hiding your prosthesis, but instead decorating it and displaying it for all to see. One example is the current trend for veterans to have their prostheses airbrushed and wearing shorts (or t-shirts). There’s no shame here!

In addition to his camera eye, Rob also has a laser-pointer eye and a red LED (like terminator) eye. He told me he wears them to the bar to shock people. Fuck ya!

To get a better sense of Rob as a person and to see his prosthesis in action, take a look at this video. I shot it while Rob and I were playing with his transceiver (during a shooting break) by hooking it to a projector. We’re in a rear-projection/storage room, and Rob is tethered inside by the distance his eye will transmit and a 3ft cord between the receiver and the projector. (You don’t want too strong of a transmitter in your head…). The dialog is hilarious.

The resulting video is hot (below). It’s well edited, gorgeous, educational, inspirational, and exciting. At last glance, it had garnered ~180K views in the two days (including a Sunday) it has been posted on YouTube. The comments are worth browsing! Some great dialogues have been started. Even a few people inspired. Nice work Rob!

Headmounted display (HMD) Augmented Reality (AR) technology is only a few short years away (trust us, we know…) and the Department of Homeland Security is actively exploring methods to help our firefighters benefit from information displays to help them stay alive and help others in the deadly environment that is a building fire.

Tanagram, under a grant provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), developed a phase-zero self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) enhancement that leverages HMD / AR technology to display critical factors all-the-while not obscuring the firefighter’s field of view. Dubbed Helmet with Embedded Active Display for Emergency Responders or HEADER, our concept vision was researched with participation from the Champaign, IL Fire Department. (We even sent a few people to firefighter training!) In our literature review, we found little research has been done with regards to embedded, mixed media (augmented reality) display technology that focuses on unobtrusiveness and consumer acceptance (our fancy word for user friendly). Because of this we are sharing our work with you in hopes that it sparks a conversation that will be very relevant, very soon.

How do we design for an embedded environment?

What is the interaction vocabulary when there is no screen or mice?

What disciplines become relevant in this new medium? Interior design? Architecture? Industrial Design?

This is a first concept. Much work is being done to refine this interface so that it is even more user friendly, relevant, and safe. Please add your feedback below (click here for comments). This is a discussion we hope to promote and grow for the benefit of everyone.

Next week, we’re going to post details on the hardware prototype we developed using Ardiuno gear. Stay tuned!!

Special thanks to http://www.madtownmedia.com/ for their work producing this video.

Greetings friends,

I’m excited to share that the new SBIR topics have been posted! See them here on the shiny-brand-new SBIR.gov website. 

So… WHAT THE HECK IS A SBIR???  It’s an acronym that stands for Small Business Innovative Research grants provided by just about every U.S. public agency there is (Helloooo USDA!). Each agency has funds that are specifically targeted at sponsoring the growth of small businesses in innovative areas that also serve agency needs. In other words, they are trying to create products that don’t exist and will pay you to help them do it. You get money and intellectual property to help differentiate your company. In case you didn’t know, Tanagram has been benefiting from these grants since 2003.

Sometimes I joke and say, “It’s like a tax rebate.” which it is NOT. These grants require a final delivery and real work to execute but as I said above, at the end of the project the researchers get to keep the intellectual property for their own use and growth. HOW AWESOME IS THAT???

Over the past few months I’ve had a number of great discussions with small business/startup owners about grant opportunities and have been surprised by the resistance they’ve expressed when I asked them if they’d considered government funding. I’ve heard responses from “Too much red tape.” and “Oh those are really hard to secure” to “You really think you can fund a business with a government grant?”

The truth is grants alone will not build your business BUT they make an excellent addition to your funding portfolio. SBIR grants are relatively small amounts of money. Phase I grants pay between $75K – $150K for an approximate 6 month effort and Phase II (if you’re invited to submit) grants pay between $750K – $1.5M for one to two years of work. There are also several “wickets” you need to hop through to qualify for the grants too.

I have always made an effort to help other small businesses get into the SBIR game, but recently it dawned on me that it might be valuable if I published (blogged) a series of tutorials that helped everyone make sense out of the process. What do you think? Are you interested in learning more? Post a comment if you are and I’ll get to it.

While you’re waiting (I don’t type so fast…), wander through the topic listing and see if there is a call that you might be able to provide a unique solution for. It’s one of my favorite things to do.  

Here the link (for the scroll wheel averse) again: Current SBIR topics!!! 

If you have any immediate questions please contact me using the contact form here. I’m also on twitter @juhnke or @tanagram. I look forward to hearing from you!

[NOTE: I inserted a different video player. Video now works on Firefox!]

Last May I had the honor of presenting a Keynote Presentation for the attendees of the Congress on the Future of Engineering (COFES) 2011 conference.

This presentation excellently illustrates our work over the last few years to develop an augmented reality platform and a vision of the opportunities the future presents. It’s an hour long, so grab some popcorn and a beer. I hope you enjoy it. As you’ll see in the beginning of the video, I packed the house. LOL!

I can’t speak highly enough about the caliber of the individuals that attend this conference. Truly brilliant minds that have likely dreamed up and created a product that you rely on every day. I was blown away and am looking forward to attending next year.

You can learn more about CoFES and next year’s CoFES 2012 conference here.

Here’s a description of my presentation:
In 2008 Gartner declared Augmented Reality (AR) one of the Top Ten Disruptive Technologies for 2008 to 2012. While AR has arrived on mobile devices and digital cameras, it remains imprecise and far from disruptive. Are there changes in the wind? During his presentation Mr. Juhnke will review the strengths and weaknesses of various types of Augmented Reality (hardware and software) technologies that exist today, talk about exciting programs being developed by Tanagram and other industry leaders, and then draw together the implications for how businesses can best leverage AR. There will be a specific emphasis on the “practical” opportunities offered via the future of AR including markets most likely to be early adopters and customer acceptance issues.

SortSite, by PowerMapper Software is a very nice web page analysis tool. We’ve been using it’s baby sister (self-titled Powermapper) for many years and are very impressed with the additional analysis features provided by SiteSort on top of the core Powermapper functionality.

In a nutshell this application will crawl your web site and generate a detailed site map based on your linking structure and then it will analyze each page and image for every form of compliance you can imagine that may be keeping your search engine ranking down. How cool is that!?! (err.. not the down part)

From their web site:

One click is all it takes to analyze an entire web site. Each page is checked against 450+ standards based checkpoints.

Accessibility – check against W3C WCAG1, WCAG2 and Section 508 guidelines
Compatibility – check for browser specific code, script and image formats
Compliance – check for compliance with EU and US law
Broken Links – check for broken links and other errors
Search Engine Optimization – check Google, Yahoo and Bing webmaster guidelines
Web Standards – validate HTML, XHTML and CSS
Usability – check against Usability.gov guidelines

Here is an example of an error issues page.

If you’ve got the time and budget we highly recommend integrating this application into your quality assurance (QA) cycles for rapid high-level analysis of your site and its potential deficiencies. They have a free 30-day trial (limited functionality) or you can pop $350.oo for the professional application.

They even have an online tool that works with Macs.

BUT WAIT!

For a limited time we, Tanagram Internet Citizens, are offering to run our licensed professional version of this application on your web site for to anyone who asks! Why would we do such a crazy thing? Well first; we’re pretty sure we can’t sell the reports but even if we could, we like to help out and if more people took a good hard look at their web site code, the internet would be a better place. Perhaps even cats and dogs would get along, but let’s not wish for too much.

Click here to tell us the web site you’d like analyzed.

I WANTS MY REPORT!

(ha it’s the same link, but we figured we’d make it HUGE for our short attention-span friends)

ttfn!

The Arena!

Last Friday I had the honor of attending the FIRST Robotics Competition and was graciously granted access to the behind-the-scenes activities. It is an amazing program celebrating its 20th anniversary and has touched a great number of brilliant minds. I’m excited to share what I learned.

Twenty years ago Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway (and a whole lot of other really cool stuff) realized that the United States, enjoying the riches of generations of hard work, had failed to build programs that captivate and motivate our youth in ways aside from striving to become entertainment celebrities and/or sports heroes. While both are incredible occupations, neither significantly contributes to U.S. knowledge capital. You know, the brains that made us rich in the first place? As an attempt to solve this situation, he created the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Organization and launched the FIRST Robotics Competition. Inquiring minds will want to know that Dean’s father designed the original identity system and it’s still being used today.

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an international high school robotics competition organized by FIRST. Each year, teams of high school students compete to build robots weighing up to 120 pounds that can complete a task, which changes every year. In 2010, the 19th year of competition, 1,808 high school teams with roughly 45,000 students from Brazil, Canada, The Netherlands, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Mexico were involved.[3] In 2011, there will be an estimated 2,080 teams participating.

Teams are given a standard set of parts and the game details at the beginning of January and are given six weeks to construct a competitive robot, that can operate autonomously as well as when guided by wireless controls, to accomplish the game’s tasks.[4]

As I toured the “pit” (the area where the crews prepare, maintain, and repair their robots) I had the opportunity to meet some really amazing people. I met an electrical engineer from Arkansas who is employed by Baxter Pharmaceuticals and donating his time, resources, and mentor-ship to the program and teens. This was a very consistent theme. I was overwhelmed by the amount of good will and support within this community. Competitors like to think of themselves as “frenemies.” The tech they were bringing to the competition was nothing to sniff at either. I was impressed by the level of technical sophistication and engineering applied to the competing robots (vision-based autonomous task completion anyone??).

An electrical engineer from Arkansas donating expertise and mentorship

Competition is fierce. I found the focus on a competitive edge akin to something I’d imagine at a NASCAR event (F1 for our European readers). There was a deep understanding of the rules and the opportunities afforded by them. Teams were passionate for the win and the celebrity (mostly within the community) afforded the winners.

Stewardship was also a big deal. The image below is of the team that graciously lent me one of their own (Jack) as a tour guide. In this photo they are all frantically preparing for the next round of competition. I’ll pretend the blur is caused by their pace and not my lacking photographic skills.  

Go! Go! GO!

Here is a video of an early bracket (like The Final Four) competition. BombSquad (one of the Baxter funded robots) is dominating this round and wins by a very nice margin.

So what about us? Are we ready to start Olympic Robotics Competitions? We’ve seen robotic death matches on popular television for nearly a decade now and the “nerd” continues to build status (Bill Gates poster child) within our culture. Dean Kamen, during a VIP luncheon spoke about the “tipping point” of this program and it’s acceptance within our culture.

Dean Kamen = awesome!

He believes that point is very near and I couldn’t agree more. I’m inspired by Dean and his dedication to this program (20 years!!) and I am proud to say that Tanagram will be getting involved in next year’s competitions. We’ll keep you posted as that develops.

Here is the competition schedule for 2011 with the Championship Games happening at the end of April.

Good luck to everyone!

One of our many ruminations were on the topic of our brand and our legacy as an interactive design firm. While we’ve been recognized as the first at many great things, we couldn’t help but wonder how we remained relatively invisible in the marketplace today. As a result of our pondering we have realized that the presentation of our brand, as intentional as it is, is too complex. We are too complex. Don’t worry, we’re not going to become less complex, we’re not even sure we could do that if we tried. Instead we are spending some time to help all of you understand what makes Tanagram unique in the interactive development space and there is no better way to get started than to shout it out. So here goes:

———————

Tanagram is unique in that we design and build software for the digital frontier. Thirty percent of our project portfolio is made up of government funded “advanced” research. We do this specifically so that we can apply our learning to our commercial client projects and our ability to make ideas real to our government projects. We focus on three specific areas:

1. Complex workflow applications (e.g. a hyper-local enterprise media management tool for Geomentum.com)
2. Innovative web sites that change the way the Internet is used (e.g. http://www.skybeautiful.com and http://universityofchicagopress.com)
3. Mobile applications that bring data to users in contextually relevant ways (like our Augmented Reality Platform).

———————

Here are links that might better illustrate Tanagram’s niche in the interactive design marketplace:

Complex Application:

• Nielsen: Digital Decision-Making at Work
• DARPA: Augmented Cognition in Complex Environments
• Geomentum instant drive-time analysis demo

Innovative Web:

• SkyBeautiful
• Hi Beautiful! – Tanagram Proudly Announces SkyBeautiful.com
• University of Chicago Press

Mobile / Augmented Reality:

• ABC7: The Future of Firefighting
• NY Times: Military-Grade Augmented Reality Could Redefine Modern Warfare
• Gizmodo: The Goggles That Will Transform Soldiers Into Terminators
• DARPA: Aiding Complex Decision Making in the Military Through Augmented Reality

In addition we’ve really turned on the PR machine. Above you’ve seen links from the New York Times, Gizmodo, and ABC featuring our work. Here are a couple of other great stories that you might not have seen:

• IE9 Launch Keynote Introduction Video featuring Joseph Juhnke
• Microsoft Channel 9 Interview featuring our multi-touch behaviors for WPF 3.5 and Silverlight 3/4
• A slightly angry, pro-webGL article from CNET referencing SkyBeautiful
• Our feature page on “The Beauty of the Web”

If we haven’t lost you yet, here’s a Google Blog Search with the infinite number of posts about us.  YAY VANITY SEARCH!

Deployed on-site, the ladder crew ingress is underway.

HEADER's powerful informatics inform and protect!

Firefighter demonstrating "handsome" off-axis profile.

We hope you have a happy St. Patrick’s day! Don’t let the Blarney Stone hit you in the arse.