RSS FeedAugmented Reality, the Next Big Thing
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 5:21PM Last year, GE ever-so-quietly unveiled their Smart Grid campaign, which included an innocuous little link to their augmented reality demo of the smart grid. I must admit, at the time, I didn't give it a second thought. But then a really creative guy at Calliope Studios pointed it out to me, and I was thoroughly impressed.
Augmented reality, as it's been called, is a new virtualization technology that will be huge for marketing consumer products. Basically, you hold up a unique image icon in front of your Web camera, and the resulting image shows a three-dimensional Flash animation emerging from the hard-copy image. The image is typically a simple, 2D shape that's printed out and held up to the camera. If you have a Web camera, I encourage you to check out GE's example of it here. You can also see a not-so-hot implementation of it from P&G.
Believe me, it's going to be the big thing that all the kids will be talking about.
augmented reality, ge, mattsnod in Digital Marketing 
Reader Comments (2)
This is really super cool.
Here's a free home run idea for anyone out there in the retail space. During the holiday season, print these kinds of icons on your store's shopping bags. Put huge video displays in your store front with attached Hi-Def cameras pointing out to the shoppers. When someone passes with an icon shopping bag, all sorts of fun holiday cheer can pour out of the icons. If two or more icons are on the screen at the same time, have the animations interact with one another.
Great idea. The possibilities are endless. Imagine having an iPhone app that looks at these icons on items in a store, and then it tells you about the product in all its 3D glory or offers special sales.
Someone's going to have to create a registry of these icons, though. Any takers?