Tautachrome

AR FOR THE MASSES AND THE AR GRAND APPROXIMATE

We are striving mightily in Tautachrome to create an easy and universal way for ordinary people to stick virtual objects into their real physical environment, as easily and quickly as posting a flyer on a wall. And we’ve come a long way with our Arknet platform in that direction.

In a nutshell, the Tautachrome vision is "AR for the masses," that is Augmented reality for everybody. We want people to be able to stick reminders for themselves or others, just like yellow stickies, anyplace they want, so they can see them again whenever they need to. Today we’d view such a sticky through our ubiquitous mobile phones; in some future tomorrow, we’ll view it with our AR glasses. Unlike stickies, AR remainders are invisible to anybody except you or your select others, and they can’t blow away.

And AR is a heck of a lot bigger than virtual stickies. AR virtual objects can be anything you want: 3D objects not just flat stickies, or pictures not just notes. Even live videos. Being virtual, you can interact with them: touch, open, and/or change them. In the biggest sense, we think of the AR objects that people place into their environments as containers of stuff they care about. And we refer to these virtual containers as ARks. (Think of a virtual Noah’s Ark.)

Sure, posted on a wall, an ARk may be just a virtual sticky. But posted above a gravestone an ARk could contain videos and pictures and information that carry a story of a loved one’s life. And posted outside your home an ARk could advertise your piano for sale; and maybe accomplish the sale as well.

I have no doubt that achieving our vision of giving everybody a way to stick interactive virtual objects into their real physical environment, as easily and quickly as posting a flyer on a wall, will change the world enormously. Though I’ve not mentioned it in this article, I’m certain that the immediate fallout of this one achievement will bring virtual transactions between consumers and providers directly into a significant part of commerce.

But there is a fly in the ointment. If it were easy to achieve our vision, we -and maybe others too- would have done it already. It turns out that it is not easy is to produce AR objects that properly stay where they are put in the visual environment when that environment is viewed by the mobile phones of random others.

Yes, geolocating AR objects is easy. For example, this link, Good Morning Arknet, by Jeff Palumbo, shows an Ark as a short, animated video message to me, geo placed in front of his home.

What is not easy, and I’ll repeat myself for emphasis, is to produce AR objects that properly stay where they are put in the visual environment when that environment is viewed by the mobile phones of random others.

At the most fundamental level, for the big vision of Arknet to work, users and the AR objects they view, must both be tied precisely to the physical world. In the most general case, this is a very, very difficult problem, referred to as the "Grand Challenge" of augmented reality. Niantic CEO John Hanke says here that he believes the solution of the AR Grand Challenge wilk have to evolve, requiring "the work of big companies, startups, and individuals around the world."

While I agree that that the Grand Challenge in the general case is very difficult, I also believe that there is a fast approximate solution to the AR Grand Challenge that will perfectly achieve Tautachrome’s vision of AR for the masses. In the Company, we refer to this approximate solution as our "AR Grand Approximate."

We have patents in work right now that will enable the achievement of our AR Grand Approximate. You dear reader, will be the first to know how our AR Grand Approximate works, after our patent work is done.

Dr. Jon N Leonard is the CEO of Tautachrome Inc. (OTC: TTCM)