ARIP Meeting Minutes - Jan 28 2016

["Mr. Farhad Patel" <farhad.patel@huawei.com>]

Minutes:
1. Roll Call, announce new members, and regrets.
Attendees:
Sally Martir, Sam Murley, David Filip, Stacey Stevens, Christine Perey, Farhad Patel.

Regrets:
Scott Hudson, Scott Simmons, Clark Dodsworth, Rhonda Truitt.

Meeting minutes: 
Farhad Patel

2. News, stuff to share, questions for the committee, etc.
• Augmented World Expo (AWE) is one of the best conferences to attend for AR. Sam and Stacey may possibly attend this year. AWE website will go live next week per Christine. http://augmentedworldexpo.com/

• PTC recently acquired Vuforia. Christine attended an event about this. http://www.ptc.com/events/thingevent. PTC will integrate Vuforia into its products. It will remain proprietary. The AR browser is called Thing Browser, server is called Thing server and the development kit is called Thing builder. They are all packaged as Think Worx AR Platform. PTC may even develop a proprietary marker. 

• Christine was hoping that PTC may be more open but they are keeping it proprietary similar to what a lot of other AR companies are doing. Ultimately only the customers can force companies to go open source. Another deciding factor will be what Microsoft and Google do. It will be difficult for smaller companies to compete with them. 

• Now you don’t have to download Vuforia multiple times. Vuforia code is embedded into a project or interaction engine. The experience is controlled via an AR Browser or player. All AR companies use their own AR browsers; no one wants to use currently available browsers.

• Vuforia is no longer free to use. It comes with a steep rate plan. There are more Vuforia users in Europe than in US.   

3. Discuss ARIP project plan
• Project plan is good but not detailed enough per Christine. We should try to do less in terms of brain work and more in terms of prototypes and/or projects. We could use existing standards or specifications to do some projects. For example use DITA spec as a baseline and implement a project to extend AR extensions for DITA. DITA is an OASIS standard so that would be a plus for us.
• This TC doesn’t know what problem it is trying to solve. This is a common problem with standards organizations. The closer we get to an actual project the more meaningful the work will be for ARIP. For example, there could be a specification to address the problems of working in using DITA with Vuforia.  
• ARIP TC scope is too big per Christine. The Glossary project is a good start but now we need something more focused. For example, if all my content was in XML then how should I transfer to AR would be a more specific project to tackle. If you don’t know what is broken then you can’t fix it.
• ARML 2.0 will be good http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/arml2.0swg. No need to change the charter but need to change the project plan to make it more specific. It is possible that technical communicators are already using AR but we don’t know about them.

[We ran out of time at this point. Nothing further was discussed after this] 

4. Sub-teams- status, information sharing, requests for assistance:
A. Glossary Sub-Team (Rhonda and Greg)
B. Research Sub-Team (Farhad, Ray, Scott, and Greg)
C. Outreach Sub-Team (Scott)

5. Liaisons- status, information sharing, requests for assistance:
• European Tech Comm / STC (Ray)
• OGC (Scott S.)
• Other AR Groups (Christine)

6. Action status from prior weeks
7. Other business
8. Adjourn
• Next meeting in 2 weeks on February 11 2016.

Thanks and best regards,
Farhad…