Is the world ready for virtual graffiti? 5
Imagine a world that’s filled with invisible graffiti. Open an app, point your phone at a wall, and blank brick or cement becomes a canvas. Create art with digital spraypaint and stencils, and an augmented reality system will permanently store its location and placement, creating the illusion of real street art. If friends or social media followers have the app, they can find your painting on a map and come see it. You might scrawl an in-joke across the door of a friend’s apartment, or paint a gorgeous mural on the side of a local store.
Now imagine a darker world. Members of hate groups gleefully swap pictures of racist tags on civil rights monuments. Students bully each other by spreading vicious rumors on the walls of a target’s house. Small businesses get mobbed beyond capacity when a big influencer posts a sticker on their window. The developers of Mark AR, an app that’s described as “the world’s first augmented reality social platform,” are trying to create the good version of this system. They’re still figuring out how to avoid the bad one.
At launch, Mark AR is supposed to work a bit like Facebook. Users will log in with real names, probably through Facebook itself. When they create art, they can share the location with a single person, a list of friends and followers, or the members of a group. Google’s ARCore platform stores the location using GPS and computer vision, capturing details in the environment to use them as anchor points. When somebody shares art with you, a thumbnail will appear on a map; if you visit that location and point your phone at the place shown in the thumbnail, you’ll see whatever image they’ve created.
they hope a real-name policy and the friend-based model will limit people making offensive or harassing images. “Because there’s no anonymity, that helps govern what people are doing,” says Sybo CEO Mathias Gredal Norvig. (It’s unclear how true that is — Facebook has faced repeated problems with closed groups devoted to swapping non-consensual pornographyor degrading women or immigrants.)
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/12/20908824/mark-ar-google-cloud-anchors-social-art-platform-harassment-moderation