The Augmented Reality Blog

In France, the 12th International Conference on Virtual Reality has taken off. If you don’t know the conference, please take a look at the video below. The conference shows projects we know already (the Mini case, the whole world knows by now), but mostly focuses on virtual ideas so far off that it will take ages before we will see them on the market place. It’s the place to go to if you want to take a peak into the future of virtual and augmented reality.

One of the products that we haven’t heard of before and that is ready to market is the holocubtile (only French can come up with names like this ;-) ). It is a complete multitouch box that allows people to manipulate a projected 3-D object by sliding their hands across different sides of the cube. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please check out the video of France 2.

At Where 2.0 Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman talks about the company’s launch of Monocle, an augmented-reality application for the iPhone that enables users to combine Yelp reviews (on restaurants, clubs, shops, …) with the physical world. He talks about how they put Monocle in their mobile app as an easter egg, not expecting much of it. The surprising results was a sustained 40-50% increase in mobile traffic.

Don’t they say if Google enters a market, that market has to have a huge potential?
So welcome Google into AR with this Google Goggles app. Only on Android for the moment. Google calls it “visual search” and here is a bit of explanation…

And here is the Google demo:

“Augmented reality still feels like something that exists only because, technologically, it can. But behind the gimmickry, you see the possibility of mobile devices giving you real-time information on your immediate surroundings”.

You could call it the voice of the consumer. Or the voice of reason. BusinessWeek takes a good look at some apps and tells us what is missing: better navigation, less clutter, … . Things we all know. But it is good to be reminded of it.

But the best thing is that this another important voice understanding the potential of AR whilst acknowledging that what we produce now is just the first baby steps. As we did on the web in ‘95.

The guys at Layar are obviously very excited about Augmented Reality. And we have to give it to them, they are putting Mobile AR on the worldwide map.
Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald (co-founder Layar) was interviewed by CNN. It’s in this interview he made the statement that AR will be the second most used mobile application. Voice being number one.
I wish he wouldn’t make statements like that. Remember these: “the internet will kill brick and mortar shops” or “Second Life will become our first life”? Statements like these build huge expectations, create bubbles of hype that eventually burst and make industries suffer for a long time.
However, he might be right. Layar has a chance to become the Internet Explorer of mobile AR. But let’s learn for the past and avoid that our nascent industry suffers from a major setback in a year or two.

In search of the real sustainable business opportunities we understand that things must by tried out. One-off campaigns serve as good test beds. They pave the way, so to speak. So, I Admit, the title’s a bit exaggerated.

However, at the Augmented Reality Blog we strongly believe that AR is here to stay for a while. That it’s more than a gimmick.

And we’re very happy to see that the people over at We Are Organized Chaos think the same way.

They wrote a post about the 3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Using Augmented Reality In Marketing And Advertising.

Here are their questions:

1. Is this something I can already do on my site within a normal browser?
2. What am I trying to communicate or accomplish with AR and what is the experience I’m providing for my consumer?
3. How will Augmented Reality interact with or enhance other aspects of my Integrated Campaign?

I would add two more:

1. Are the consumers in my target audience web cam owners? Are they comfortable using them?
2. Will people go through the trouble of starting up their computer to use the application?

All good questions to avoid using AR for the sake of using it.

Each time you present an Augmented Reality application to an advertiser, the first question you get is: How many people will actually do this? Answering that is of course very difficult. It depends on the penetration of webcams, how you promote the application, how attractive the proposition is, …. in short it is very hard to say anything smart about it.

In time our industry will define a set of benchmarks. For now we need to work with what we get from articles or blogposts. In the November issue of Fast Company some results are mentioned.

In August, Best Buy ran an ad-with-marker in a Sunday newspaper. The offer: use the marker to see a series of Best Buy products in 3D. 6.500 people tried it. However, the total reach of the newspaper was 43 million. Best Buy is said to be happy with the results (what else can they say ;-) )

The results of the Transformer 2 promotion last summer are more impressive. 80.000 visitors spend an average of 3 min interacting with the app. It is easy to understand why this was more successful. The proposition was much more attractive. If you were a fan, you could turn yourself in one of those creatures.

At the start of every new technology that has great potential (i.e. to reach the mainstream consumer), the big guys all want to position themselves on the playground. Nokia tried it with the eye-wear movie. Now it’s Cisco’s turn with this high production video showing how AR can change retail. Enjoy.