Augmented Planet » General

Augmented Reality Advertising – A Possible Future

lester — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:49:19 +0000

Last week we had a couple of students visit us to finalise their dissertation which is based around augmented reality, cheers to Bradley and Kieran for dropping by our office. One of the topics we discussed was how augmented reality will change advertising and will it change advertising for the good.

I’m not convinced that advertisers fully understand the potential yet, but nether the less there are a few good examples of augmented reality campaigns that enable a user to interact with products before they commit to buy. Everything from trying on sunglasses, clothes, watches or even seeing how furniture will fit in the home.

For a long time now we have heard about advertisers wanting to give us geo-targeted promotions, its not fantasy, there are many companies that offer Bluetooth Marketing solutions which have a proximity range of around 100m and can beam out offers to any mobile user foolish enough to leave Bluetooth enabled. You know the kind of thing where you are out shopping and your mobile receives special offers from stores as you walk past. If I’m out shopping, I could be tempted to receive targeted messages about that single specific item I am looking to buy. But if I am looking to buy a TV I don’t want my phone filled up with discount vouchers for pizzas, baby food, new suits or teeth whiting products as I make my way to the electrical store.

With augmented reality companies are looking at how they can build targeted campaigns to get the best return on their investment, and this means understanding their customer. The technology already exists where digital signage is able to recognise if the person passing is a male or female, young or old, happy or sad, and then choose what advertisement it should display. Someone who is sad could be targeted with an advertisement for a holiday in the sun, where as a young guy would see the latest pair of Adidas trainers. I have no problem with that, it’s an example of non intrusive targeted marketing. But what happens when digital signage evolves to the point where it recognises you and gives you a custom advertisement based on your buying habits, or worse yet your Google browsing history?

I have a supermarket loyalty card which we use every time we go shopping, occasionally when our discount vouchers arrive we’ll get offers for obscure products that have been recommended to us based on a single random purchase we made in the past. I think the last example was we had purchased something and shortly after discount vouchers arrived for male incontinence pads, no worries, no harm done, the vouchers go in the bin.

Let’s jump forward now to a short time in the future when digital signage has evolved to the point where it can recognise individuals and offer you targeted advertisements based on your previous buying habits. Since digital signage is not private, anyone close by will see/hear your ‘targeted message’ (as well as their own), how do you feel about being offered incontinence pads while riding the escalator on the way to work?

Even further in the future when augmented reality glasses are common place, are we looking at a world where advertisers will combine augmented reality with the real world to such an extent that just by looking at a product will kick start an advertisement?

For an example of a nightmare futuristic scenario take a look at the following video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSfKlCmYcLc

So far developers and advertisers have been responsible (or just slow) to exploit mobile augmented reality as a geo-targeted advertising platform and have avoided spamming the user with unnecessary advertisements by pointing out the nearest Mcdonalds, Burger King, Starbucks etc while you are looking for a train station. Let’s hope that it stays that way.

The Case Against Augmented Reality

lester — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:22:34 +0000

Gianmarco at the University of Computer Science in Bologna (Italy) asked an interesting question a few days ago on the cons of augmented reality. When talking about AR we are always looking on the positive side so in response to Gianmarco’s question I was thinking about the negatives.

Privacy: We discussed before about user being able to geotag your content without you having control. For example your mother comes over to your house and tweets about your priceless collection of Ming dynasty vases. Your home location is geotagged and out there for all to see along with details of your most valued possession. An enterprising thief using the latest version of BurglAR would be able to see high value items worth stealing in the local area. While geotagging is a concern it’s not really a problem caused by augmented reality, your mother may choose to upload a geotagged picture of your Ming vases to Facebook or Flickr so the same data would be available in Google maps.

Location: There are numerous applications to share you location data, Google Latitude, Ping, Hayway to name just a few. Location data is not live, an application has to request your location or you have to update it periodically so people are unable to see your movements in real time. Can anything negative come from people knowing your presence? Possibly a thief could see when you are out and come can take your Ming collection but again it’s not augmented reality making it possible.

3rd Party Data: Layar are doing really well in getting developers to build 3rd party layers so I took a look through the list of the 300 or so to see if there is anything there that could be construed as potentially evil. If we are playing the role of criminal mastermind then we’d be disappointed to learn that Layar isn’t going to help us with our quest for world domination. There are interesting layers that will tell me what products have been sold in an area so I could have my band of henchmen patrolling the streets trying to track down high value items that have just been sold. But I’m sure the data is not live and any would be master criminal would do better sitting outside a local electronics’s store and following someone home.

Users: Users are at risk from augmented reality but mostly though stupidity rather than the technology. For example, driving while messing around with the phone or falling down a manhole because they are not looking where they are going, but the same goes for twittering while driving or walking.

Hollywood: There is a very real risk of crappy AR themed movies. Remember Lawnmower man for virtual reality?

It’s difficult to see any negative in the current implementation of mobile augmented reality as it’s really about taking data from other sources and presenting them in a new view. The data is freely available from other sources and just presented differently.

Is there no potential for evil with augmented reality?

Face recognition: When augmented reality technology becomes powerful enough and we can recognise individuals just by point a phone at them (or through AR glasses) then I think we’ll see some negative. Lets imaging someone builds an application that scans the police crime database. You might happen to share similar features as a known criminal and find yourself banned from stores, worse you could falsely be recognised as a sex offender and have your life ruined.

Advertising: Love it or hate it it’s everywhere. Location aware advertising has been in the works for a while with the promise/threat of offers being sent directly to our mobile devices as we are walking down the highstreet. Depending on your point of view, intrusive advertising could be a negative feature.

Porn: Considering the porn industry is usually the first to adopt new technology it has been remarkably slow to exploit virtual reality or augmented reality. Negative? definitely if you’re the wrong end of the business and being exploited.

I failed to find any immediate negative issues, so let me ask you. If you were planning on becoming a master criminal hell bent on either taking over the world or planning the crime of the century, how would augmented reality help you achieve your goal?

Ultimate Guide To iPhone Augmented Reality Part I

lester — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:20:28 +0000

All the apps from the appstore

The number of augmented reality applications for the iPhone has grown significantly since I started this blog. The guys over at TechCrunchies say that in 2009 there were over 1 million augmented reality applications downloaded. By 2014 that figure is expected to rise to a staggering 400 million. 30% of that is expected to be generated by downloads of augmented reality games. Check out the TechCrunchies website for more interesting data.

With those numbers now is a good time to be thinking about releasing an augmented reality application, but what’s out there in the appstore already? Searching the appstore for ‘augmented reality’ used to produce a single page of results, these days there are hundreds of apps all fighting for your attention and hard earned pennies. We thought we would take a look and see what applications are available. Welcome to part one of the ultimate guide to iPhone augmented reality applications.

We ignored the official appstore categories, some developers listed their applications in the strangest categories in an attempt to find consumers. To make it more of a level playing field we have done a bit of rejigging.

Eduction
There are quite a few apps that call themselves augmented reality educational apps, but when you dig deeper some are little more than utilities. For example there is an app that tells you what is on the opposite side of the planet from your current location. Interesting yes, educational no.

After arranging the categories somewhat we found very few ‘real’ educational augmented reality applications.

Pocket Universe
Star Chart

Both applications are astronomy applications that show the constellations and locations of the planets, both cost $2.99. My personal favourite here is Pocket Universe. Pocket Universe has a cool feature that uses augmented reality and the compass to help you find your target. If you’re interested in finding Jupiter and you need help, just select the relevant option and you’ll be guided to the target by arrows. It works well for bright objects but for objects that are either really dim or where you’ll need a telescope it’s not very useful as it can be a few feet off.

Learn about the cosmos with augmented reality star finders

Utilities
I always wanted an application to see where the satellites are, not for any particular reason just out of curiosity. If you install satellites for a living then you have a few apps available but they are expensive (as much as $19.99). Given the accuracy of Pocket Universe and its ability to pinpoint an object I’m not sure that I would rely on an application to complete an installation. They will help point you in the right direction but you’ll still need a sat bleeper to complete the install and tweak the signal.

DishPointer
DishPointer AR Pro
Satellite Augmented Reality
Satellite Sliderule Pro

: Find a satellite

If you have problems remembering where you left your car then there are a couple of apps that can help you.
iParking find my car (free)
Car Finder
cARLocator
iFindit AR
icar Augmented reality

Dude Where's My Car?

It’s worth pointing out that the acrossair augmented reality browser has the ability to locate your car as well.

A couple of misc utilities:

AugMeasure
If you’re stuck without a tape measure then AugMeasure will give you a virtual measure. It’s free so good for estimates but don’t go out and by new carpet based on it’s measurements.

Color i
Interesting application that will give you the hex/rgb color value of objects you point the camera at.

It's Orange but what shade?

C2 YouTube
GeoTag your YouTube videos

Music
Someone will need to educate me on augmented music, I’m not convinced. Light Squares puts squares you can press into the real world view, and that’s about it.

Trippy
RjDj
Kids on DSP
Little Boots
Light Squares
That’s it for part one, still plenty of more apps to come.

Happy Christmas To All Our Readers

lester — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:13:41 +0000

Just a quick happy Christmas post today as I know many of you are finishing work for the holiday. I’m behind with blogging, emails, and twitter as I am on holiday in Brazil and getting online isn’t always easy. There is something strange about Christmas in the sun, it doesn’t feel real.

Whatever you are doing I hope you have a great one and I’ll be back with you in a few days.

Happy Christmas

Layar & Wikitude come to the iPhone

lester — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:47:42 +0000

Somewhat of a reluctant blog today. I’m at my brother-in-laws house doing a bit of cat sitting. His laptop has taken 20 minutes to boot and a further 10 just to open Firefox. He has a habit of installing all sorts of crap so it’s not pleasant to use.

Aside from laptop woes, a reminder about the Augmented Planet even in London next month (11th November), details on the right. Feel free to register or to email me for a 10 minute demo pitch, your chance to show an augmented reality demo of something you have been working on just just find really cool.

New phone for AR browsers

I’m in the market for a new phone. Currently I have a Nokia E71 and let’s say the choice of augmented reality applications is less than optimal. I’m thinking of either an iPhone or Android HTC Hero. The Hero has been my phone of choice until now since it’s the only platform that has both Wikitude and Layar available. However Mobilizy have silently launched the Wikitude browser to the iPhone appstore, and it’s reported that Layar have recently submitted the Layar browser to the iPhone store as well, so the exclusivity of the Android device is looking a bit limited.

Both Layar and Wikitude are the premier browsers right now but remember Metaio will be a launching their new browser called Junaio next month which will shake up the market a bit. As for other applications available, while the applications directory is by no means complete, currently the augmented reality iPhone apps out number Android apps by 2-1.

Ah decisions decisions.

Augmented Reality Business Directory Now Live

lester — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:59:34 +0000

Business Directory
I found a wordpress plug-in to use as the business directory and spent a bit of time trying to get it to work, the good news is after a bit of effort I have managed to get the dam thing working and I have started adding a few entries. There is still more to add but feel free to add yourself in the meantime. The display however is not very nice but formatting goes beyond my knowledge of PHP/CSS. If someone has a spare 30 minutes and wants to have a go at turning it in to something presentable your help would be most appreciated. The relevant files can be found here. (the relevant files are the main.css and functions.php files)

Take a look and if you come up with something send them to me at: lester @ lestermadden.com and I will be eternally grateful.

Something that looks like this example would be nice but anything will be better.

Calling AR Developers/Tools Providers

lester — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:13:21 +0000

From time to time I receive emails asking ‘do you know a developer familiar with developing augmented reality applications for ‘iPhone/Android/Symbian/Desktop/Web/etc’.

If you develop augmented reality applications and are interested in refrals (I’m not looking for money) send me your details:

* Name
* Email address
* Expertise
* Location
* Details of an AR project(s) you completed (links useful)

Closely following that question is what tools do I need to build AR applications for iPhone/Android/Symbian/Desktop/Web/etc. So if you have tools/sdks etc please let me know:

* Website/download
* Description of tool
* Builds AR apps for what platform(s)
* Programming skills required (eg C++/Java)
* Cost

And then the next time these questions come up I’ll have somewhere to refer them. If I get enough responses I’ll put a company directory together.

There that’s my bit to help the community.

You can email me here.

Wearable Augmented RealityTech And Feeling Low

lester — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:33:07 +0000

I met up last night with a buddy of mine who is doing his MBA. I’ve had a burning idea for mobile a augmented reality application for awhile now and wanted to run it past him. Trouble is having a good idea is not enough. Yes the technology is cool, but how will you educate people to use the camera on their smartphones as a way to retrieve information? It’s not just about killer services, it’s also about what do I really need to know right now and how will my smartphone help me.

A lot of the demos we see today involve markers and displaying an image when they are view through a device. The Mini demo is a classic example (see here) But do you really see a world where people are taking out their smartphones on the train to work, just to look at feature rich advertisements in the magazine they are reading?, and if they are is that a sustainable business or will it become a fad? (that wasn’t my idea by the way)

I left my buddy feeling somewhat dejected but at the same time I had a lot of food for thought on what consumers really want and why augmented reality would be useful.

It would be cool to meet up with other augmented reality enthusiasts in London sometime. As the blog gets more established (we are 3 days old at the moment) we’ll sort out an augmented reality fest in a bar one evening for a night of cool demos, development, industry thoughts and what not. I’ll even try to get some industry experts along.

In the meantime, drool over what life would be like if we had wearable augmented reality technology.