The Metaio Augmented Reality Conference (Inside AR 2011) in Munich has become the world’s largest Augmented Reality event and took place earlier this week, making claims that by 2014, augmented reality will be used on every smartphone in the world.
Mobile computing is currently the fastest growing IT market, with mobile information retrieval ranging among the foremost activities of smartphone users. Marketers and global companies are excited at the prospect that it will soon be common place for their users to point their mobile device camera at anything in the real world and create contextual information/visuals.
There were a few major announcements at this year’s event; including the fact that metaio will be releasing a free version of its Mobile SDK to bring latest AR features to a broad developer community. It will also be publishing a tool called ‘junaio Creator’ to allow virtually anybody to create AR content for junaio. This information is of particular interest as it will become increasingly easier for creatives to enrich the user experience and extend the story we take them on.
Thomas Alt, CEO of Metaio, commented:
“We predict AR to become a common feature on every smartphone and tablet. Of course we are pleased that our solutions have emerged as benchmarks for advanced technology and excellence in our industry, used by developers’ worldwide.”
Software from companies such as Metaio and Layar now makes it possible for social networking to become a real world live experience – when at a bar, shopping or at a gig:
Here’s another example of what can be achieved at the moment with augmented reality: Rofo on junaio
A great brand example is Lynx, who extended their campaign to Victoria train station in London, asking passers-by to look up at a giant screen where they saw, not only themselves, but fallen angels alongside them:
Services such as Google Goggles – a visual search tool, which in basic terms helps define what you see in the real world and wants to monetise the process. Once the public gets used to navigating their environment with tools like Goggles, everything we see and share will become searchable data. Combining environments with predictive technology, Google will be able to serve visual experiences that benefit both the consumer and advertiser.
Although consumers have been confronted with advertising messages for decades and the future could see a positive change of more targeted and relevant messages in our environment, I do worry that this real world product placement could also have a negative impact, for example, instead of someone looking for an item in a shop, people will become reliant on using an app to scan a room for it – almost like putting on your glasses to see. If this was the case, would we lose part of our real-world connections and daily communication with others.
Questions to ponder on… Who owns the advertising space in an augmented world and has the rights to the GPS coordinates? At the moment, anyone can create a message and attach it to specific coordinates. What will stop brands’ realities overlapping, and will this be a movement not just for entertainment and advertising purposes, but for how we see the world in the future? Will the divide between virtual and physical realities become blurred?
Other food for thought is whether ads in the virtual world have to match ads in reality. For example, brands could take over competitors’ outdoor press – presenting an alternative virtual world. Although treading on potential dangerous ground, there is nothing currently in place to stop such a thing.
I find this whole area of our industry fascinating. There is so much opportunity for virtual advertising, projection mapping and Kinect. This mix of augmented reality, social data and interactivity is a real game-changer. My only worry is that without structure and processes in place, the market and our everyday environments will become over-saturated and eventually lose value, becoming a lonely virtual world that no one wants to visit anymore. But, let’s make sure this doesn’t happen by working out rights ownership and allowing virtual ads to evolve into content that users can choose to experience on their own terms.
