augmented reality: sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

the dea skinny on what’s happening:

reality is bad enough at times without bloody augmenting it, you say. agreed. now get over it. we get you don’t need more stuff to follow in this digitally cluttered world. but suddenly there is a rash of new augmented reality (AR) mobile applications on the street which actually work. these aren’t science experiments nor expensive either. most are offered on a lite/freemium software download biz model basis for mobile apps from the apps stores out there at apple and google as well as the vendor’s own sites. there’s an avalanche of them… with a zillion of cool to gimmicky potential ways to use it them all. it is early days yet on great uses for this but it’s here to stay so get with the program. we will only discuss a few here. that’s why god invented google… you can track the others… unless you are clever. if you are “clever”,  you probably also walked out on minority report.

mobile AR apps work by recognizing a pre-established pattern you design or select using your mobile, tablet or laptop camera and “trigger” what we have termed a rich media “overlay.” it can augment the image you are pointing your camera at in ‘real time’ through your mobile camera with a video clip, a 3d image, animation, or architectural model  etc. on the scene on which you are focusing  your mobile or tablet or laptop camera. point, click and augment it… snap! you have mobile AR!

the stakes:

the future of the human/machine interface is changing very quickly whether it’s apple’s siri voice app or microsoft’s kinect gesture metaphor. now comes mobile AR for mobile & tablet apps. this new mobile AR stuff lends itself to a wide range of mobile and geodetic advertising/marketing and business applications to entertainment, gaming, interactive, mobile-specific, education, and government and military mobile applications. one of the coolest entertainment apps is action movie from bad robot which allows you to overlay special effects from mission impossible onto your relatively boring life to blow things up, crash cars and helicopters and place tornados on, well, anything. on the geek front, you already know that Google’s project glass is playing with an AR glasses prototype so we can all possibly become uber-geeksters. (remember, “can’t hit a kid with glasses!”)  Google‘s goggles are not commercially  available however. sighs. 

one small company doing interesting AR overlays is total immersion who did rayban’s virtual mirror site where you can try on cool rayban shades with AR using your laptop, tablet or mobile phone camera. this is great for lots of cool game apps and marketing brand applications. we also like one of the newest yet most well-backed kids on the block for advertising applications – aurasma. they debuted at sxsw a few weeks ago and are owned by autonomy who, in turn, are owned by hewlett packard.  there is new york city-based goldrun which develop rich media overlays for marketing and other promotional campaigns. one of the coolest companies we have found is metaio, a german company who has built stuff for mercedes benz and others. metaio seems to be trying to position themselves as the apple of AR and have a wide range of applications from marketing to architecture and industrial applications which you need to see on their site where you can download the software SDK for free.

the dea takeaway:

in a mobile world of apps vying for attention, AR promises to provide a huge range of useful and fun applications across an entire spectrum of uses where a visual real world environment can be augmented with a rich media overlay. and isn’t that, in the end, all we are all really looking for in life? stay bewildered… it is early days on all this. if not excited by it, listen to france’s magician version of david copperfield, marco tempest at TED this last month.

full disclosure: we have no business or economic interests in any of these companies.

for more information, please contact us at 512.825.6866 to discuss the issues more fully and the specific impact & implications to your business. it’s free!