Got a webcam? Here’s four fun websites, each offering a special picture for you to download and print off. When you hold the picture up to your webcam you’ll discover a hidden 3D animation, one that forms in the palms of your hands and that you can interact with and explore. It’s all part of a developing technology called Augmented Reality that is quickly becoming a hot online trend and one that big name companies like General Electric and Volvo are using to grab attention to their marketing messages.
What Is Augmented Reality?
It is a developing technology, one that chases a futuristic dream where all cameras have the power to recognize the world around us and are capable of giving us information about what we see through them. Today’s cameras can tell us both the time and date that a photo was taken, with advanced features detect when a face is in front of the lens or even if someone is smiling. With GPS, they can even pinpoint where a picture was taken on Google Maps, but imagine if a camera could do more. Imagine a camera that is smart enough to recognize the C.N. Tower when you photograph it. That can call up detailed information about the C.N. Tower instantly, not just text or statistics, when the C.N. Tower was built or how tall it is, but full 3D maps and models, animations that show how the tower was built or deliver detailed layouts of its many floors. Imagine your view of the world enhanced by computers.
Augmented Reality Today
We’re not quite there yet, but today’s industry is taking baby steps towards this futuristic vision. Today we have software that can train a simple webcam to recognize basic, black-and-white pictures. Large, bold images, not dissimilar from those used in children’s flash cards, these glyphs or codes can trigger a computer to generate very detailed, three-dimensional animations that appear to exist in our own world and, thanks to the tracking capabilities of today’s webcams, can move, shift, and turn, as if they are real-world objects.
Although basic in form, many companies see the marketing potential of these baby steps. A paper brochure of a magazine ad with one of these glyphs on it could be held up to a webcam to deliver a 3D model of a product, allowing consumers to see if from all angles, or simply exist as a fun trick to convince consumers to visit their website in the first place.
GE EcoImagination
http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality
To draw attention to their environmental commitments GE’s SmartGrid microsite includes a special glyph, silhouette of a solar panel for you to download and print off. When you hold the printed image up in front of your camera, you can choose to activate a virtual diorama of your choice of either a wind turbine or a solar energy installation. These are very detailed models that demonstrate the basic operations of these two utilities. Turn the paper in your hands around to see the models from all side and in the case of the solar panels, watch as they tilt and turn to always catch the moving sun. With the wind turbine, blow on your webcam’s microphone to add a wind effect and set the propellers spinning.
Living Sasquatch
http://www.livingsasquatch.com/
An ad for Jack Link’s Beef Jerky, this fun site offers a footprint for you to download and print off. Naturally, when you hold the footprint up in front of your webcam, Big Foot himself comes for a visit. Once you have him on-camera, you can use your mouse to hover your cursor over a selection of animation tiles to make him perform different emotions, actions, and attacks, all with appropriate grunts, growls, and roars. If you drag the tiles onto the timeline interface, you can create your own Big Foot movie, complete with your own text bubbles, to share with your friends.
Papervision’s Three-Eyed Monster
http://www.boffswana.com/news/?p=392
Before creating the sasquatch for Jack Link’s, Boffswana created this proof-of-concept character, a three-eyed monster who appears when you hold up a simple image in front of your webcam. Make sure to turn him around from all angles and see the different things he can do.
Volvo Ocean Race
http://www.vcc.com.my/oceanrace/
For the 2008-2009 season of the Volvo Ocean Race, fans were given the chance to play with their own virtual yacht using Augmented Reality. Once you register for a free account at the race's official website, you'll be sent a promotional e-mail with both a password and a glyph with the word "Ahoy" on it to print off and hold up to your webcam to see a detailed model of one of the yacht's appear within the palm of your hand. Hold the glyph closer to your webcam for a more detailed view of the ship's surface.
Topps 3D Live Baseball Cards
http://www.toppstown.com/UserSite/TotalImmersion/Info.aspx
Trading card manufacturer Topps has adopted the technology for this year's baseball season. In every pack of Topps Series 1 2009 Baseball or Topps Attax cards you'll find one 3D Live card that you can take to their website and hold in front of your webcam. With each 3D Live card, your webcam will react by creating an animated model, complete with stadium sounds, of the player featured on the card. Topps says that should the 3D Live cards and their augmented reality feature prove to be a hit amongst fans, they will invest the money to have software created that will allow webcams to recognize all of their cards, including all past Topps cards already in existence so that fans can go back into their collections and experience them again with new animations.
Marco Tempest's Augmented Reality Card Trick
Here's a trick you can't do at home. Magician Marco Tempest uses a set of display glasses with a mounted webcam in order to access Augmented Reality techniques to perform a card trick. This is an excellent example of some of the principles of Augmented Reality, where our world is enhanced by looking at it through a camera connected to a computer designed to understand what it sees. Enjoy.
Magic Symbol is a new technology that brings to life real world items by turning them into 3D digital images. Consumers take a pre-printed card to a scanning point and see it turn into a pre-selected 'Magic Symbol' image on screen. This extends the engagement of printed material and gives opportunities to develop unique marketing messages.
The Magic Symbol technology has been developed by Inition (www.inition.co.uk) and has been used for a variety of clients and events. The following image gives more insight into how Magic Symbol technology works:
The Magic Symbol website has a video showcasing some of the promotions that they have run at www.magicsymbol.com - seeing Magic Symbol working in real life is the only way to explain it properly!
Magic Symbol technology gives an interesting opportunity to integrate offline / digital whilst spreading word of mouth - I think this sort of joined up approach (with one medium stimulating response in another) can only become more important as time and technology move on.
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How Will "Augmented Reality" Affect Your Business؟
augmented reality is going to be a big deal for businesses. What is it? It is the idea that locations, devices, even the human body will be "augmented" by linking and overlaying additional information on top of "regular" reality.
For example, this month's Esquire will have visual codes embedded in the text — even on the cover — which you can hold up to your computer's camera. The computer will read the codes, and take you to a video or other information linked to that magazine "location." Is this just a gimmick? After all, the physical magazine is a great way to create a link to more comprehensive content. The magazine cannot afford to put too much information between its covers, but it can put as many pointers as it wants to more content. This basic notion is very, very powerful. (See the great post on this topic by Gary Hayes
Anand and I think augmented reality will change at least the following five things:
1. The nature of advertising. We know that if you're an advertiser, you want to allow people to transact while their attention has been caught by your product or service. The beauty of augmented reality is that it allows any advertiser to bring the possibility to purchase much closer to the advertising stimulus. So, if I'm reading an interesting article in a magazine and there is an add with a visual code on it, I can then scan it with my BlackBerry or my iPhone and order it immediately.
2. The nature of location. The GPS revolution in cars has already created a low fidelity version of augmented reality by enabling maps in any car that wants them. You are already starting to see applications available on advanced phones that allow an individual to hold their phone up to a location so that the information about the location is overlayed on the screen:
Right now these are focused on tourism, but it does not take a lot of imagination to see that any sales or service force would love to be able to walk up to a building and understand the nature of the potential customers inside, or installed products to be serviced.
3. The nature of healthcare. One of the great problems with healthcare is the lack of information at the point of service. It is only a matter of time before you will have the option to link your medical information to you. There is cheap, available bio recognition technology which will allow someone to swipe their finger, or speak into their phone to identify themselves, and then to allow the doctor to have information available to them — just like Esquire allowed for the ads to be tagged to a page.
4. The nature of relationships. The next natural extension of Salesforce.com would be to have a person be able to either scan in a face (face recognition software is standard issue now with many photo products, including Apple's iPhoto) and then provide the salesperson with the best available background search on the individual whose information may be out on Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks. Also, if you are like my friend and Diamond Fellow Gordon Bell, who has taken his whole life digital (documented in his book Total Recall, which just came out), you can link any face to all you know about that person.
5. The nature of knowledge. Much of the knowledge we need to do our jobs is not available because we have a hard time getting access to it at the right time. BMW did a concept piece on augmented reality where a mechanic is replacing a fan while wearing special glasses which project the instructions onto the car as he looks at the engine compartment. Our understanding is that this is not operational, but something like it will come.
Why are we so bullish? The military has been augmenting the battlefield for some time, and now with advanced GPS devices, better telecommunications and hand-held devices that have enough display and computing power to make things interesting, we think we are at the beginning of a boom market in augmented reality. So the question becomes, is your firm thinking about how advertising, selling, products and service will change when you can overlay the right information, at the right time and in the right form — everywhere?
What do you think? Are we at the beginning of a revolution — or is augmented reality an idea that will always be in the near future, but never here?
Don’t underestimate the sophistication of children’s taste 
Make traditionally boring purchases child friendly
Use children’s marketing techniques to explain very adult issues
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