

The TED Augmented Reality Hoax - llimllib
http://www.unitzeroone.com/blog/2009/06/23/ideas-worth-taking-credit-for-the-ted-augmented-reality-hoax/

======
swombat
From the TED site, posted by one Matthew Trost:

 _I want to let everyone know that TED is working quickly to fix the missing
acknowledgments._

 _We're speaking on the phone with Chris Hughes, who sends his sincere
apologies for neglecting to mention FLARToolkit and Papervision3D on stage.
When Chris showed us the software off stage at TED, we jumped at the chance to
show it to our audience, and swooped him up to the stage after a very short
prep time! He was also careful to mention that he based his project on the
work of many others in his TED Blog interview._

 _This is such an astonishing development in software, and we want to make
sure those who participated in it do not feel cheated. We're going to add
prominent acknowledgments to the video and our blog posts so our audience is
clear about the work and talent that went into the toolkits that were the
basis for what Chris presented. If you have any questions or further
suggestions, please contact me -- we're listening._

Sounds like a lot of noise about not much.

I'll side with Chris Hughes, against the overly pedantic, on this one. It's
hard enough to say anything in 2 minutes. To say it right and without making
slips is not something I'd expect of anyone other than a PR professional.

Before you say "but he clearly said that..." think of how much pressure you'd
feel standing on the TED stage with just 2 minutes to make everyone go "Wow!".
In those conditions, your brain will naturally be focused on something other
than making sure everyone gets a mention.

Edit: for those pointing at the blog for evidence, I doubt Chris Hughes wrote
that blog post himself. It was probably based on his talk and some quick
chatter with the writer. So it's just an amplification of a slip.

~~~
hmlmz
I usually hate these tempest-in-a-teapot flame wars, but I'll actually have to
disagree here. He gave a whole demo on stage claiming credit a bunch of times.
I went to the FLAR toolkit page and downloaded the demo apps. This is
_exactly_ identical to the demo, just with the logos swapped. There is not one
bit of original work that I can see. I'd like to believe it's an accident, but
it seems like if I demoed Google with my logo slapped on it and accidentally
forgot to mention that someone else wrote the search engine.

Download the toolkit and check--I'd love to be wrong, but I don't see how. And
it would be unfair to pretend this is a slip a steal credit from the people
who clearly spent years actually building it.

~~~
swombat
_I'd like to believe it's an accident, but it seems like if I demoed Google
with my logo slapped on it and accidentally forgot to mention that someone
else wrote the search engine._

Perhaps I'm blind, but I didn't see _his_ logo on there.

What I did see was a TED video being streamed over that square.

So, a more apt analogy would be: it's as if I took a laptop with a wireless
connection to a part of the world that doesn't know about Google (let's call
it Grahamia), and I said, "Look what we can do with this! We just type
'Grahamia' in there, and within seconds we get all these awesome bits of
information about Grahamia. That's great, isn't it? Oh, my 2 minutes are over.
Thanks everyone, hope this helped!"

If you have 2 minutes to get a cool piece of tech across and you decide to
spend it talking about what technologies it relies on, I don't want to see
your demos..

~~~
hmlmz
I see your point and how it's somewhat in-between but would argue that my
metaphor is closer.

The TED stage has a well-known role that's clearly understood by everyone
there. I would never get ask to go up on stage to demo Google. Larry and
Sergey would. If I got asked to demo someone else's work, it wouldn't slip my
mind. While it sounds short, 2 mins is a pretty long time.

As I mentioned, just my opinion. But I do think someone's got to stick up for
the developers who wrote the sw.

------
daveg
I saw this too and was wondering what was new in the talk. It looks like he
downloaded the source, swapped in a TED logo, and took credit. After it came
out that the talk about training crows was faked too, TED is looking pretty
bad IMHO.

~~~
Scriptor
I remember seeing the crows video. Do you have the link to where it was shown
it was fake? Can't seem to find it by googling.

~~~
juanpablo
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-
CORRE...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-
CORRECTIONS-1.html?_r=2)

------
dschobel
Just shows once again that being a good marketeer is often more important than
being a good engineer.

What are the odds that Chris parlays this into a startup or a nice research
position somewhere? Either way, the guy now has a TED presentation on his CV
and the guys who did all the legwork have no legal recourse because I don't
know of any OSI license has a clause about presenting the work as your own for
non-commercial purposes.

The only way Chris will get busted is if TED decides to do so and expose
themselves for their poor background checking which is a crap-shoot at best.

~~~
jganetsk
Code can still be copyrighted under an OSI license.

~~~
dschobel
Sure but I can get up on stage at any conference and talk about copy-righted
work all I like so I don't think it matters.

Copy-rights overwhelmingly are concerned with explicitly commercial uses. If
I'm using copy-righted work to build up my academic reputation, I don't know
if there's anything a copy-right holder can do as the link to money is too
tenuous.

I think all the enforcement has to come from the academic side in cases such
as these where reputation is all that's in play.

------
luigi
The guy posted about it on his blog:

<http://www.spazout.com/holy_smokes_im_on_ted>

Oddly, he coats his statement with the same passive language bullshit that
drove everyone nuts regarding the CouchDB/Porn debacle: "I realize that it
should have" and "it appears that I could have".

What's so hard about saying "I was wrong not to mention the toolkit and I
apologize"?

~~~
cmiles74
I'm starting to wonder if this is a just a problem with the writing skills of
the people involved. Maybe this guy simply does not know what an apology looks
like or who to go about writing an effective one. Reading this blog post, it
seems like the bones are there and he stops just short of _actually_
apologizing.

~~~
_pius
I'd love to believe that, but ultimately I can't. The most naive writer who
seeks to apologize simply says "I'm sorry."

~~~
scott_s
That's an earnest apology, not a naive one. Even those who feel they did
something wrong, desperately want others to understand their side. I think the
problems comes from people mixing in the explanation for why they did what
they did with the apology.

I think it takes some sophistication to realize that if you explain yourself,
there must also be an unequivocal apology separate from that explanation. See
Richard Clark's "I failed you" testimony.

~~~
_pius
_Even those who feel they did something wrong, desperately want others to
understand their side. I think the problems comes from people mixing in the
explanation for why they did what they did with the apology._

Good point. I hope it's earnest and I'm inclined to take it at face value.
That being said, going out of his way to minimize all the outrage at him
misrepresenting thousands of man-hours of work as his own will probably cause
his apology to fail for many.

------
aik
If you read his earlier blog posts about his talk at TED, he mentions it was
his life dream to be/speak at TED with HIS creation. He doesn't mention
anywhere that what he showed wasn't his technology - he very much makes it
sound like it was his own. He tricked them.

TED should have done some research.

------
spoondan
It looks like the talk
([http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_hughes_demos_easy_augmented_r...](http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_hughes_demos_easy_augmented_reality.html))
has been removed from TED's website. It's advertised on the front page, but
goes to a 404. I think its removal is a good decision, although I wish TED had
replaced it with an explanation and apology instead of merely disappearing it.

~~~
aditya
Explanation here: <http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/a_note_on_today.php>

~~~
spoondan
The note doesn't do it for me. The issue is not just Hughes's lack of proper
attribution on stage, but his _assumption_ of credit. The interview doesn't
absolve him, it implicates him, when he says _ARToolkit_ is unbelievably
awesome and then, "Folks ported it from C, which is what it's written on, onto
Java. And then we took the Java port and made it work in Flash." Isn't he
saying that he was integral to the port from Java?

Later in the interview, he says that making AR easy was "all we were looking
to do." He calls himself a researcher and says, "It's open source. Everything
I do is about being very open." On the stage he says he "wrote a bunch of
code". I can't come to any other conclusion than that he misrepresented his
contribution throughout. But neither he nor TED has acknowledged that fact or
apologized for it.

I'm not saying we need to string him up for it, but both he and TED need to
stop making excuses and start making a sincere apology.

~~~
Devilboy
They changed it - I think it's better now.

------
xinsight
Clearly, TED needs to vet their presenters a bit more. If a guy has no
connection to the tech that he's presenting (other than he's played with a
demo), then he should never have been invited.

~~~
sketerpot
Or we need to accept this sort of thing as a tradeoff, the price we pay for a
fairly lightweight TED system. Heavy vetting has a cost, too.

~~~
xinsight
Perhaps just add another commandment about giving attribution and credit (and
not representing others work as your own) to the existing TED commandments:

<http://www.swiss-miss.com/2009/05/the-ted-commandments.html>

------
TrevorJ
From a broader view, Papervision would be impossible without the thousands of
hours of work other people did to create the technology it is built on, and
that tech would not be possible without the work of the people who developed
the tools that made _those_ tools possible and so on and so forth back and
back and back. I'm not saying it isn't a nice gesture to let people know who's
hard work enabled you to combine different technologies in a new and exciting
way, but lets have a little grace here becasue everything any one of us does
it built on somebody else's hard work. Even if you code everything you do in
assembly you are still "standing on the shoulders of giants". (Quote courtesy
of Sir Isaac Newton)

~~~
_pius
I hear you, but that'd really be applicable only if the presenter actually
added a material contribution or at least a novel recombination of his own. He
literally just followed someone's tutorial and presented that.

------
car
I find this behavior quite appalling. Not giving credit is not only dishonest,
but shows complete lack of character. The fact that Chris Hughes runs his blog
under spazout.com is just another sign of his moral stance.

Edit: to clarify why I take offense with 'spaz out', I consider it a slur
towards people with cerebral palsy. See also
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spastic> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasticus_(Autisticus)>

~~~
csbrooks
I can see why you would feel that way about the phrase "spaz out", but just to
be clear: I don't think that's a common view. Saying "spaz out" is not
commonly considered politically incorrect, at least as far as I know; I've
literally never heard that argument before.

(I'm fairly neutral on the issue at hand, btw; I didn't know of Chris Hughes
or the software he used before this incident.)

------
marcusbooster
I'm all for giving credit where it's due and I think he could have mentioned
the libraries he was using in passing, but.. you don't have much time in a 2
minute tech demo to capture the audience, and I don't think this audience
particularly cared what api's he used. He did post links to Papervision3D and
FlarToolkit on his blog.

~~~
brown9-2
If he indeed was just demo-ing something he built using existing libraries and
a simple tutorial he found online ... that is a far cry from being able to
claim he was demo-ing a piece of software he "wrote".

~~~
PebblesRox
This is like claiming credit for a LEGO kit that you built by following the
intructions. You end up with something really cool, but you had no creative
input. It's much more admirable to take the pieces and turn them into
something new that no one has ever thought of.

