Four brilliant augmented reality campaigns

Four brilliant augmented reality campaigns (MIT's sixth sense project)Augmented reality (AR) may sound like something that you get to do in a dark basement with a William Gibson novel and a pair of virtual reality goggles. But the true promise of augmented reality will integrate the digital world into our offline world, and ultimately transform mundane experiences into meaningful, holistic ones. Imagine walking into a supermarket and seeing all of the nutritional and pricing information projected into thin air, or overlaid onto products; touching a logo on a box of cereal would trigger a digital reaction and enable you to use your fingers to scroll through information or content right on the cereal box.

We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than you think.

In the next nine months, mobile applications will make tremendous leaps toward integrating augmented reality into our lives. Today, there are multiple image recognition applications like SnapTell or Barnes & Noble’s Bookstore app that trigger a reaction when you take a picture of an object, logo, or barcode. Instead of pushing you to content on a website, these apps will increasingly pull in information that will be overlaid onto products via the screen’s camera function. Wikitude is an example of an application already doing this — simply hold up your phone and it will tell you what places of interest, restaurants, and shops are in your vicinity, based on the direction you are facing. Overlaying the data onto products (and people!) will be a natural evolution. Pattie Maes of MIT’s Sixth Sense Project describes it as “seamless, easy access to information” using our bodies to navigate the content in intuitive, natural ways. Continue reading “Four brilliant augmented reality campaigns”

Best and worst of CES 2009

Best and worst of CES 2009 (iStock)When exploring a huge show like CES, it’s inevitable that you will discover that not all manufacturers give equal thought to their products.  Some will shine with obvious innovation. A great many will barely register above a yawn.  And some will leave you shaking your head in disbelief.

Here are just a few that fall into these categories…

Continue reading “Best and worst of CES 2009”

CES 2009: Yahoo’s Connected TV

Yahoo announced this week at CES that its content and widgets would be made available across a variety of new internet connected televisions from the likes of Samsung, Sony, LG and Vizio.  Users can enable the widgets by just connecting their TV to the Internet and choose from content providers like Flickr, Showtime, MySpace, eBay and others. See a demo here.