Will Corke's digital gallimaufry

Augmented Reality; a marketing tool, or just for tools?

I’ve had an entertaining half-hour this morning playing around with the Augmented Reality (awful term, but it kind of does what the tin says) experience offered by GE of all people, marketing their Ecological credentials.

Here I am moving my sheet of paper around while GE’s windmills turn, and the sun shines on the screen and also seems (worryingly, given that it’s a hologram) to be reflecting off my head;

There’s no doubt that as a toy, there’s a good deal of ‘wow-factor’ around this technology - which as far as I can see consists of overlaying some flash animation onto a webcam stream, and ‘keying’ the animation to a visual reference which can be moved around by the user (in this case the key is a pdf downloadable from the GE site).

It’s interesting to see that the GE webpage for this project has a link to the open source code that’s been used to build the AR experience.  Not what I would have expected from GE, but definitely a positive in my eyes, so their marketing programme is working to that extent.

Wikipedia’s entry on AR (I guess if it really takes off we’ll all move to the acronym) has a long list of applications, but only one under the heading ‘Advertising’ : “promoting a new product by providing impressive and interactive AR application on Internet”.

Hmm, very enlightening that.  But seriously, there must be a huge number of potential applications for AR in creating engaging experiences in many different ways.

Will AR in some form become an everyday part of people’s online usage?  In various forms it’s been around for a long time, but wider ownership of webcams and mobile phones with camera and video capability will allow much greater reach than previously.  So perhaps 2010 will be the year of AR.  Gaming and Porn seem the industries most likely to be able to monetise the business potential (am I allowed to say that?).

Update 11th June:

News on Brand Republic today of an AR campaign from Glasses Direct; nice idea, and appropriate to the product.  Clearly I was wrong in my prediction for which business sectors would be next to market with AR apps…

Here’s a link to the Glasses Direct AR page.  I tried downloading the app, but sadly could get no further than the error message below, so I can’t report on how well it works.  A shame to launch the PR coverage in the circumstances; frankly, FAIL.