Perceptoscope

As our world has become more connected, we've increasingly disconnected from our immediate surroundings and local communities. We live through our devices and social networks, rather than our neighbors and neighborhoods.

Perceptoscope is an interactive public arts initiative devoted to engaging people with the places around them through shared mixed reality experiences.  It's an open-source movement for bridging the digital and physical worlds, as well a social practice that brings together a diverse coalition of neighbors, artists, and storytellers.

We do this through the deployment of Perceptoscopes. Similar in form to the coin-operated binoculars that we’re accustomed, Perceptoscopes add objects and information to a view of a space in stereoscopic 3D. They can reveal the hidden past, highlight present points of interest, or speculate into the future.

By scaling Perceptoscope globally, we'll create an distributed immersive media ecosystem where communities can gather to share their stories.

Global connectedness and technological advances have allowed for all the world’s knowledge to be carried with us in our pockets. However, by having everything everywhere all the time, we’ve become more disconnected to the immediate world around us. Our focus has drifted from our surroundings and our communities to float atop the cloud of major global events and lost acquaintances. It’s a problem, first and foremost, of distractedness. 

With this disembodiment of the mind came a rise of placelessness. Town squares became digital rather than physical, and though these platforms offered immensely powerful tools for like-minded communities to gather, they also created echo chambers likely to reinforce our preexisting biases. This lack of physical interaction created a new type of disconnect between people different from one another.

People in public places have brownian motion. We bump shoulders, share reactions, and interact with strangers that we may or may not ever see again. We expose ourselves to one another through this randomness, and through that exposure gain insight.  However, nowadays even when we’re next to each other, our minds mostly live elsewhere.

Creating technologies which catalyze connections between people at human scale is essential to confronting the challenges before us.

Our mission at Perceptoscope is to create a more informed and engaged citizenry, with particular focus on bringing a broader understanding of how our environment and the communities which inhabit it change over time. 

Our end-users are the everyday visitors of a given location, and we see significant opportunity in places of natural wonder, historical significance, or future potential. These could include locations like national parks, museums, and historical sites. Perceptoscope deployments can also be used as a way to envision the changes happening to the built environment during critical planning decisions and allow for the collection of community feedback.

As an act of social practice art, Perceptoscope deployments create an opportunity to gather together a broad coalition of stakeholders and community members to examine how and where stories should unfold. It opens interdisciplinary opportunities for artists, scientists, and historians to contribute. 

As an open source project, Perceptoscope has been engaging with a global community of makers, technologists, and storytellers. By continuing to grow an open and distributed community, the project can act as a facilitator that groups can circle around to explore their local communities. 

Perceptoscope creates a portal between a physical place and its digital immersive potentials through the deployment of mixed reality binocular stations. Inspired by analog coin-operated viewing scopes, they introduce everyday people to the emerging medium of mixed reality in a way that’s familiar and with an imposing physical presence that’s impossible to ignore.

Perceptoscope uses a unique combination of optics and sensors to create a full field of view see-through stereoscopic augmented reality experience. Physical orientation is interpreted by measurement along the rotational axes through the use of high-resolution rotary encoders, and fused with a combination of additional sensors to understand absolute pose and positioning in the world. 

The software stack is written end-to-end on open web technologies, allowing content to be generated and modified with the same level of fluidity as a website. This web-based approach also allows for the viewing scope to act a local server that can wirelessly share a living web of rich media content to nearby devices, serving as a potential trojan horse to a more distributed internet.   

More important than the technology is our community driven approach. We partner with place-based organizations, local governments, and community groups to discover and share their stories. Public media in public spaces requires stakeholder support and a bottom-up approach. Our preproduction process utilizes techniques borrowed from fields like design-thinking and creative placemaking to ensure everyone has a voice along the way.  

This new type of public novelty engages citizens with the stories of the places around them, incites conversation amongst strangers, and brings together a broad coalition to design, implement, and deploy at a chosen location. Perceptoscope isn’t about sharing a singular story, but rather creating a catalytic object where a new type of storytelling can take place.

Rather than augmented reality being a personal enhancement made possible by a mobile phone or wearable, Perceptoscope creates way for a space to speak for itself without any technological requirements from the end user.

This introduces the emerging medium of augmented reality to everyday people in an accessible way, from curious kids in elementary school to elderly couples on a walk through the park. 

As a trojan horse to a more distributed and spatial web, Perceptoscope explores the relationship between information and infrastructure. It's a physical device with direct impact as interactive object, but secondary potentials as a distributed network of fixed sensors with environmental awareness. 

Deployments across a coastline could give daily reports on the impacts of sea level rise. In conservation environments, computer vision on each unit could monitor the status of protected wildlife throughout an area. 

Perceptoscope takes a unique approach to augmented reality. Combining a full field-of-view optical stereoscopic display with a orchestra of physical sensors, the device has a continuous fixed and solid understanding of its position and orientation in a space. High resolution optical encoders on the pitch and yaw axes measure absolute position, locking the digital content firmly and avoiding the drift and jitter commonly seen in other augmented reality devices. Input from additional sensors including accelerometers, gyros, barometers, magnetometers and GPS provide accuracy to the initial orientation. Computer vision completes the calibration routine, engaging in a series of mechanical robotic exercises to align the various sensors and onboard cameras.

An array of lenses and prisms combine digital imagery with an optical pathway to the outside world, giving the user a stereoscopic and three dimensional point of view of both the space and its layer of content. Electronic shutter control allows both manual and automatic transition between virtual and augmented reality content. Because our technology is a public kiosk, rather than a wearable, we can be focused on providing the optimal experience with fewer concerns about size, weight and battery life.

Our web based software stack is built on common open source immersive media standards like WebVR/WebXR, allowing for content on our devices to be viewed on mobile devices, personal computers and future headsets on the horizon. As an anchor for the digital information to a location, Perceptoscopes indicate there’s something there to be seen.

US Utility Patent #9989762B2

As a physical object fixed to the built environment telling a site-specific stories, Perceptoscope deployments become part of a bigger process of community engagement. Every step of bringing a deployment to life involves multiple stakeholders from across sectors. 

Once deployed, Perceptoscopes act as a catalytic object, encouraging people to take a look and share what they see with those around them. When partnered with mission driven organizations, this natural user behavior can lead to a better understanding and awareness of our immediate world. 

The Perceptoscope business model also hopes to provide a way for place-based non-profits to open up a new type of revenue stream and public engagement system. Our hope is to both inform visitors while also increasing visitation at a location.

We're currently in the process of piloting Perceptoscope at La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. Over the course of the next year, we'll be serving the 400,000 annual visitors of the museum there, as well as the even larger number of visitors to the surrounding park. 

In five years, we intend to be deployed across a variety of locations across the country and the world. Visitation to parks and museums in the United States is close to a billion people annually, and we see a huge amount of potential for impact with a relatively small number of strategically placed units. 

We've had interest in the project from organizations around the world, and intend to start expanding our collection of partnerships as our manufacturing capacity can meet demand. 

In the next year, we intend to grow a our showing of support by partnering for deployments across Los Angeles and a handful of other trusted partners around the country. 

In five years, we hope to have deployed tens of thousands of units around the world, establishing regional hubs for the project with their own independent media ecosystems and communities of stakeholders.

As a bootstrapped and grant driven start-up, Perceptoscope has significantly fewer financial resources than a typical organization working in the space. To truly make this a global project, we'll need to likely bring in additional funding from mission-aligned funders, expanding our experiments in revenue generation, and exploring other ways license our technology.

We have additional challenges as a manufacturing project in that our unit cost is relatively high and our production volume is low. However, this cost is quickly amortized over the lifetime of a unit deployed in the field.

We'll also need to ensure that we keep the power of this technology working for the public good. With the rise of spatial computing, it's essential that this technology provides value in a way that's thoughtful and transparent.

We currently have two co-founders, and a handful of contracted firms assisting us on various aspects of our electrical engineering, software development, and manufacturing.

With support from a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Phase I grant, Perceptoscope is currently partnered with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to conduct a research study on the project's effectiveness as a means of activating La Brea Tar Pits, the most active ice age fossil site in the world right in the center of Los Angeles.

Throughout the summer, we'll be engaging in pop-ups with prototypes around the site and collecting engagement and survey data to better prepare the project to scale. 

Perceptoscope takes tried-and-true business model of the traditional coin-operated binocular business, and updates it for the 21st century. 

Typically units are leased to a location for a fixed cost, and revenues generated on the units are shared between Perceptoscope and our partner location. 

We see ourselves as B2B2C. We provide a new way for a place-based organization to connect with its visitors. 

After much R&D, we'll be doing our first experiments in revenue generation directly on the units during our upcoming research study. This will help us understand our most effective pricing strategies, and explore how Perceptoscope can be better integrated into the general pricing strategies of a partner organization.

In addition to the deployments themselves, we also provide services to help create the content for the experiences on each device, including software engineering, location scouting, and media production. 

We'll also continue to apply for grants, including NSF SBIR Phase II later this summer.

Our ultimately goal is to be completely sustainable through a combination of client work, backend revenue, and the occasional grant to cover deeper R&D sprints.

AI and Computer Vision are essential components to give a Perceptoscope an enhanced ability to understand the world around it. Our systems already use incredibly powerful GPUs for edge computing. By further developing a Perceptoscope's ability to identify, classify, and report the status of wildlife and environmental conditions, huge impacts could be made in our fights against climate change and species extinction. 

With support from the AI Innovations Prize, we would focus our team on developing new open-source AI tools for capturing and processing point-cloud data, creating and utilizing animal datasets, and monitoring health of the environment visually.

In addition to the AI goals mentioned above, how we capture, store, and utilize this location specific information is challenge many spatial computing technologies face. 

Funding from Innospark Ventures would help us focus on developing new compression and encryption technologies for volumetric data, as well as further research into peer-to-peer localized mesh networking. 

The best way to ensure the responsible use of this data is to focus on keeping processing and the edge, and only sharing the information that's absolutely needed back to Internet. 

Funding from the Morgridge Family Foundation would help support Perceptoscope's partnerships and workshops with smaller education organizations, such as libraries, public schools, and science museums.