MattSnodBlog

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.