Augmented Reality Is An Award Winning Technology

It generated a lot of buzz in the media planning and advertising strategist / planners newswires, but this  thing has not been mentioned in the official “I love shockwave based augmented reality” blog, which you are reading at the moment. The campaign, which used the cover of Popular Science magazine as a stage for GE´s smart grid augmented reality advert, won the “Buzz Award” by the US american “Adweek” in the category Print. Here you can find the ADBUZZ  2009 winners and here you still can check out the most stable, robust and strategically interesting augmented reality print2web campaign of this year.

And because I like to do things very consequent, here´s the rest of the self-adulation programm for today: metaio has also won a “caught their eye” trophy at this year´s IBC and has won the Mobile Startups LaunchPad by GigaOm. I did not know, that we are a still a start-up, but I can use a quote of my mom here: you are always as old as you feel

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

 

 

 

All About Augmented Reality

I´ve just finished a book review about the recently released “All about Augmented Reality”. As it is fully and only in japanese language the review of the pictures was done pretty fast. But for all my japanese readers and fans of AR and typography I can recommend one of the first trivial books about this revolutionary topic. The best way to find it in the net or your local shibuya bookstore might be the ISBN numer – hey, at least I was able to read this: ISBN978-4-8222-1083-0

As far as I understood it the book gives a good wrap-up and components overview about the state of the art in augmented reality. I bet, there are some books to follow in one of the languages I am able to read and write. I will keep you updated.

Daily Mirror

Again, one of those recent augmented reality measures where I have been neither to lazy nor to fine to cover. I just think, every reader has seen plug into the smart grid by Goodby, Silverstein somewhere else. If not, do your homework! But the above “Save the trees reddit” needs a voice. At least mine. Really love the approach and somehow these augmented things tend to be adaptive enough for user genreated content. Isn´t this pre-generation-Y-activist-show-the-kids-how-to-rethink-stuff activist an example of pure involvement? Let me quote: “GE has this spiffy augmented reality site that advocates greener energy. The problem? To experience the spiffiness, they ask you to wastefully print out an image on a piece of paper! Well, in the interest of the trees, here I am accomplishing the same thing with a mirror. Take that GE! ”

Nothing to add.

3D Book Wrap-up

After a prolific discussion over the last weeks about the concept of an augmented reality pop-up book, here´s a little wrap-up of the echo in the bloggosphere. There are some critical voices, but most of the people like the idea of blending print media with 3D content. And it definetely inspires the commentators…

 

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/10/im-in-yur-physi.html

http://www.geek.com/articles/blurb/new-books-will-feature-augmented-reality-20081029/

http://www.genbeta.com/2008/10/29-metaio-trae-la-realidad-aumentada-a-los-libros#to-comments

http://www.ohgizmo.com/2008/10/29/metaios-augmented-reality-books/

http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20081029/augmented-reality-pop-up-books/  

They are out there!

Here´s some breaking news from the Frankfurt Book Fair. The first consumer product with augmented reality features in the publishing domain is ready to market. And for german readers: these pictures were relevant enough for the Tagesschau (right after Orhan Pamuk!). Knowledge Media (Bertelsmann Group) and arsEdition, two renowned german publishing houses use the software of metaio to bring their books to life. The blending of print media with 3D content is a fascinating and very intuitive user experience, giving “readers” the opportunity to flip through an immersive, interactive world map for example. Or showing young explorers, how the future could look like. Hopefully these guys, stay in their own dimension: