LEAVES

The simplest possible AR app?

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,

Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

The idea

The basic concept of AR is to locate digital objects in the physical world. It's often mixed up with VR, which is about being able to visualize digital objects in a space. Most AR apps try to do both: to overlay a VR space onto a view of the real world in order to be able to see and manipulate AR objects.

But I don't think this is necessary, or even all that desirable.

The idea of LEAVES is:

I install LEAVES on my phone and point it at a source of digital objects which have been associated with IRL locations. Let's say it's a set of pages about places of interest in a town I plan to visit.
I forget about LEAVES for a bit.
When I visit the town and come near to the location of one of the objects, I get a notification.
I can select the notification to experience the object.

That's it for now. I thought I would need LEAVES to have a server-side component that stored the objects, but I think I only need a standard for associating Web resources with locations. The mode of interaction should also be as limited as possible: moving about in the real world should be the main interface.

Test resources

CSV linking a set of locations to Web resources

The Web resource in question (a gemtext file referencing an image)

Downloads

See "Next steps".

Next steps

TODO: 9 (3311) Implement the above and test it out.

TODO: 0 (3310) I want LEAVES to work offline, so I can share and experience objects located in remote places. Tech note: this will require objects to be organised into bundles which can be downloaded onto your device, and some form of standard for what objects and bundles are allowed to look like.

TODO: LEAVES needs some form of discovery, showing you where resources can be found. But maybe that can be left to the resource creators. I think a map view is a temptation to be avoided. Tech note: if a resource in a bundle references a resource in another bundle, LEAVES will need to be able to work back to the referenced bundle.