While I was in Boston for this year’s Ajaxian conference, I was wondering around the main shopping area on Sunday when all the shops were closed, when I came across this installation for EA games.
It immediately caught my attention and watching people play it reaffirmed in my mind, what an incredibly positive effect this had on their brand perception. Interactive freebies like this, cost little to install, have no maintenance overheads and have a massive pay back. It’s just a shame more companies aren’t willing to invest in them, and agencies aren’t pushing them more strongly.
Augmented reality has had a big buzz around it recently. With video’s like this coming to the floor:
But I think this misses the point, as although it’s very technically clever, the point of augmented reality is being able to affect reality of the user, this is just a video of some-one’s affected reality which has no more impact than a normal video, he might as well just have done the work in post production with aftereffects and it would have looked a lot better. A much better example of the future of AR can be seen here:
Having said that though, there are a lot of promising things coming out that are different and are allowing everyday users to feel the power of AR.
AR’s modern roots lie in the software we saw emerge years back that allowed you to use your webcam to play poor quality interactive games mapped onto your surrounds. It has recently come to prominence with some easy to use flash libraries and interesting alternative applications. So I thought I’d delve into the reality of what this means for the general populace.
Firstly, there are some really great implications for digital art, that have already surfaced, for example, the tagged in motion demo of artist DAIM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4WZpYFRhg4&feature=related are really interesting and begin to give an idea of the scope of AR and what the future might hold. The idea of one using the real world as a kind of canvas to add virtual elements is certainly not new and as well as being a bit of eye candy from sci-fi films seems quite close to an idea promoted on TED a few months ago, where product information is projected onto items you are looking at. One can almost envisage a Twitter style world where you subscribe to peoples augmentation feeds and as you wander round the globe you run across virtual graffiti and artifacts that your peers have scattered around.
The second obvious application is for games and real world simulations that allow people to interact with both each other and a real and virtual world as shown in this HP advert:
although I’m slightly skeptical, what happens if the game happens to decide to take your child into a notoriously dangerous neighbourhood littered with hookers, gangs and crack dens? - Then the game’s stakes become slightly higher…
Finally there are the straight up commercial applications. I’m sure the notorious media ad merchants who delight in nothing less than forcing their ads into every available orifice conceivable are drooling at the ability to insert their adverts into yet another layer of virtual reality - creating a minority report style world where a virtual Jamie Oliver is following you around the supermarket espousing nuggets of cheeky cockney cooking wisdom.
So what holds us back from this wave of new content delivery? Practically & technologically speaking, the idea of wearing an enormous computer and a giant headset while wandering around seems a little far fetched, but with screens implanted in contact lenses http://www.physorg.com/news119797260.html and the processing power of mobile phones advancing at an unstoppable rate, maybe it’s not that far off.
On a social level I wonder how people will take to integrating with a new virtual layer of reality, do we already have enough to deal with in the one reality we can see is is there scope for an ever expanding number of layers where augmentation provides an experience the world we could never have achieved before?