3D Adventure

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Caption: Mr. Selick with Coraline in his gifted hands.

To cover one of the recent AR campaigns for movies I want to pick out an example, where I see a very good correlation between the storyline (product promise) and the augmented reality implementation. First of all it´s called the secret garden, where you can discover something hidden behind (or on) the printout. The Wow factor: ticked. Moreover the website is communicating the DVD release, where you can find a 3D version of Coraline on the premium edition. So how do you transport this better, than with AR? Finally the artwork is very nice, thus the 3D real-time content gives you an indication about the overall quality of the movie. And there is some interaction and a movie texture in the 3D object. Nice piece of work! Maybe you want to get your own impression. Or you just grab some popcorn, lean back  and watch this movie by the enthusiasts over at UGO´s movieblog:

http://movieblog.ugo.com/movies/exclusive-first-look-coraline-3d-viral-website-debuts

Functional Augmented Reality – A Classic

Hey, since the AR hype started way after we released this software tool, I wanted to share this classic application with you. As there are more and more augmented reality applications popping up, whith a functional approach (sometimes the execution is a little weak) this viewer should be named. Actually this movie is based on our good old interior design tool, where you can plan your living environment within a simple picture of your real apartment. But with a little effort we created the living movie …

When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro

OK, this blog never has been a good source for the breaking news, latest campaigns or new new new applications. The augmentedblog is more down-tempo. A wise positioning I believe, because otherwise I would have to update my little read-and-write-project twice a day in the meantime. Since I´ve started to blog about augmented reality many things have changed. And the frequency and multitude of stories is overwhelming. Lucky you and me, that there are some enthusiasts, gathering background information, thoughts and up-to-date-stories with journalistic principles and the values of the german soccer national team. So, keep it up Rouli, Ori or Tom!

In so many other AR-is-cool or technology driven advertising blogs, like everywhere else in the bloggosphere, I see the tendency to just forward videos of “campaigns” and produce yet another top-ten-augmented-reality-campaigns-of-all-time-ranking (by the way, this will be interesting in 20 years…). There is no journalistic work (for example do some research on the providers, sources or performance) and most of all, the applications are lumped together. A functional approach for the US postal services is mixed up with a pizza box game, a technologically poor virtual fitting comes together with a groundbreaking feature tracking approach. People keep on the surface and the funny thing is, that the coverage quality of a project becomes more important than the project itself.

Let me give you a concrete example. The campaign for GE was groundbreaking, with nice interaction and good content, well suited to the brand strategy of being an innovation leader. And it was flash-based, thus having the maximum degree of penetration through running on almost every system. Finally the whole microsite has won a Cyberlion. Many campaigns were following, some better than the others, but when you go through most of the wrap-ups you never read something about the deployment, or get a discussion started about pros and cons. Flash is nice, no question. But you are stuck to a piece of paper (or the marker on something – does that come along with a styleguide?) and the demands to the GPU are very high (penetration goes down, because everybody has flash, but not evrebody has a rendering machine at home). Finally it is only somewhat-3D, not offering the best content quality. The other side of the specter is an Active-X Plug-In or stand alone software, with very good options for interaction and content, but with limited access and a hurdle for viral mechanisms. Well, you guess. There is something out there, combining the performance and robustness of the latter with the availability of an Adobe product. But have I read something in the bloggosphere? Although the strategic conclusions could be very important to marketers, almost no blog or magazine has reacted on phase 2 of the GE campaign, performing quite well on the cover of Popular Science magazine. It is Shockwave based! Is there anybody out there not wandering why this old-school-thang-platform is one of the best augmented reality web-viewers recently. Man, I had dogmatic but prolific discussions about that. And at the end, many people said: why not? What do you say? Are you interested in taking the consulting phase of an AR campaign serious and go into detail? Is there anybody out there? There is. So, I have to go back to work now…

The mentioned application I would love to get some feedback / discussion, can be found here: 

 

www.popsci.com/imagination