Very short post following my prediction that 2010 will be the inaugural year for augmented reality porn. A couple of days ago, AppScout reported about the latest venture in this area, Pink Visual's AR Porn (NSFW link).
Well, it's porn all-right, but the AR is gimmicky at best. Here's Pink Visual's Amanda Cory explaining the potential of such application -
And here's a close-up video of the application itself, showing how much the potential is left unfulfilled at the moment (sorry, you'll have to follow the link due to some mild nudity). Not to mention the intrinsic problem of flash-based AR porn - porn websites can record everything that is visible by your webcam while using the application. Isn't that exciting?
I'm doing some spring (it's spring time in Australia*) cleaning in my bookmarks, that's what I came with: Genuine Interactive came up with these augmented business cards for its staff, which have been named "the butterfly effect cards". Thomas has dedicated a whole post for their demo.
Visualcard.me on the other hand, lets you create your own AR enabled business cards, that shows your Twitter and Skype accounts.
I'm sure those two companies are not going to be the last ones that come up with this idea, so stay tuned.
Yes, it's not as lame as other cars AR campaigns, with its little racing game. However, it won't be spared from becoming the latest addition to my growing petition to stop using AR to promote cars.
That nice little creative work led Alliban to recently launch Augmatic, a company that provides augmented reality services, and yes, among them is a personalized augmented business card.
Of course, Alliban is not the only one in the augmented business-cards-business. We have previously featured Toxin Labs. This week sees another implementation, by one Burton Posey, which can only be described as cute (of course, you can choose a more menacing avatar):
This is an idea I'd been kicking around in my head since February. I wanted to find a way that a company could deliver a catchy identity for themselves. Avatars, be it the Mii's on the Nintendo Wii, or an Xbox Live Avatar, have become extensions of the people who use them.
You can try his implementation over here. I wonder if any of the guys at ISMAR 09 is going to have augmented business cards.
Obviously the end of the world came, and no one told me. The signs are all here: 1. Canadian based New York Fries is celebrating 25 years of selling, well, fries. 2. To commemorate the occasion, they looked for an eighties icon. 3. They chose Gary Coleman. 4. And made an augmented reality application, on Facebook, were you shake Gary Coleman by shaking a marker, making him drop his fries, and tell you your fortune.
You can try it yourself, here, and find more details at AdFreak, while I'm looking for the nearest nuclear shelter*.
* Yeah, I'm mean, no point commenting about it. I don't have anything against Mr. Coleman, my sarcasm is targeted solely at the novelty AR application.
Yesterday I mentioned Best Buy's AR campaign in the weekly linkfest. The campaign itself is not that exciting, just your typical marker based advertisement. Here's the obligatory video of some guys on Youtube playing around with it:
However, this time around we get to peek behind the scenes of the campaign thanks to Advertising Age, which held an interview with Spencer Knisely, director-brand identity, print and design at Best Buy. It turns out that while the print ad pushing the site had a circulation of about 43 million people, only 6500 of them have tried the AR application on its first day. Surprisingly, that's double the number Best Buy have predicted.
Ad Age: Can you tell what the real business result -- or conversion -- of this was?
Mr. Knisely: We don't know that yet. We saw comparatively high click-through -- 12% -- to other pages: the Twelpforce page, the Next Class computing page or to the dot-com site for the Toshiba computer itself. But aggregated, a 12% click-through on an experience like that is fairly decent.
Well, you knew this day will come sooner or later. As any other media before it, porn was destined to reach augmented reality. But I bet you could never guess that the first semi-erotic application will be created to promote a movie. Apparently, Gamer's last attempt at augmented reality advertisement didn't bring the masses, so they launched this site. All for the better I guess.
The application lets you select between four exotic dancers, and about five dances for each dancer. I would have written about it earlier, but being a thorough journalist as I am, I had to test all the available options. [via akihabaranews.com]
The good guys from UK based creative agency Exposure and the Australian AR wizards from Boffswana show us that using augmented reality in a campaign, doesn't necessarily means having a "look at the novelty" brain dead application (unlike, say, the Always one). For the coming launch of Wrigley's 5 brand of gums in France, they have created an application that lets users mix together club-music via AR markers. There are three markers representing gum flavors, each linked to a certain track, and one master marker to rule them all. The markers' distance from the master marker and their relative angles determine the volume and effects for each track.
Once you have become experienced in the ways of the augmented DJ, you can record your own mix, upload it to the site's gallery, and even embed it in your blog. Now, since I'm tone-deaf, and my laptop is not strong enough to register four markers at once, I'm going to embed a creation by some other guy (sorry Games Alfresco and RSS readers, no embedding for you):
Now, I'm well aware that the idea of an augmented reality DJ set is not a new one. As a matter of fact, just a few weeks ago we've learned about the ARDJ art project. And this application is not perfect, as it requires a good computer and setting to work, and the embedding issue could be solved if videos were hosted on Youtube. Nevertheless, we should recommend Exposure and Boffswana for not going with the easy solution, and creating a very interactive experience (only Living Sasquatch is in this league, also done by Boffswana). Now, lets see more campaigns of this kind instead of the other "novelty" kind.
Proctor & Gamble has launched a new AR campaign to promote some kind of Always "Infinity Pads".
Since I've offended to many people in the last few weeks I'll keep mum this time. However, the kind people at AgencySpy, who are also responsible for uploading the above video to Youtube, had this to say:
This campaign is complete crap. ... P&G pitched the AR piece to you ladies as magic, which of course it isn't. This is the kind of advertising that reiterates how ineffective "look at me" work truly is. It's also annoying and dilutes the power of this new tool for those who have salient ideas for how to use it.
For some reason, one of my most successful posts, was the one about Total Immersion's promotion for Transformers 2, where everyone had the chance to virtually try an Optimus Prime mask. Now, a bunch of nerds (no other word to describe them, sorry), have taken their Transformers fandom to a whole new level. If you are a pregnant woman, younger than 15 or suffer from heart arrhythmia, please don't push the play button. You see, AR entering the mainstream is not always a good thing:
Another lazy summer week has passed by (unless you live below the equator), bringing us some more augmented reality news:
I'm not sure what exactly does it mean, but it was all over the blogosphere - Apple will allow augmented reality applications in its iPhone OS 3.1 release. I suspect it only applies to AR applications of the Wikitude-Layar-TubeFinder kind, that don't have image recognition capabilities.
And here's OneZeroThrice's implementation of AR business cards (sorry ...). OneZeroThrice are the creators of ARtisan which aims to provide a simple frontend to FLARToolKit.
Brian Selzer has this review of Comic Con from the AR perspective.
While the whole web is gushing over James Alliban's augmented business card, I find the next implementation even more exciting. Don't get me wrong, Alliban's card is cool, but this one is a bit more useful:
It was created by Jonas Jäger, and more importantly, he doesn't plan to keep the technology to himself. Jäger plans to release a front-end application that will let you create your own "presentation" that will be displayed when your business card is flashed in front of a web camera. It uses a QR code to identify your card from others, and an AR marker to have FLARToolKit something to get a fix on. All in all, it answers Thomas Carpenter's call to create a service for these kind of augmented business cards, and really looks good.
No better way to relax from a week of covering the battle between augmented reality browsers (the fight continues, more updates later on), like playing an exciting game of ARhero™:
This fun little game, called DaftMania, comes to us from three guys based in the Netherlands. It is one of the finalists in a competition named "Are you better than Microsoft?", set to find the most valuable useless application. Try it online over here (disclaimer - I did not try it myself due to a current lack of a web camera, so it may not be functional at all).
Doritos had several augmented reality campaigns we previously covered (here and here). Now, they let Blink-182 fans watch a virtual concert by the band using a bag of Doritos, a Webcam, and setting their web browswers to this site.
“An online 3-D performance was something we just had to be a part of,” Hoppus said in a press release. “As big technology guys, we’re pumped that people can now experience a little bit of our summer tour through something as accessible as [a] bag of Doritos and a computer.”
Dutch website (what's with all those Dutch companies lately?) YouTellMe.com, which specializes in social shopping online (e.g. recommendation engines) has just launched a new augmented reality application, letting you see how your favorite electronic products look like in the palm of your hand (or in your living room). By harnessing the power of your webcam, Flash, and probably FlarToolKit (though, I failed to prove it), you can now try the new iPhone, or that Canon camera you always coveted:
Actually, since style and appearance play a big part these days when we are out to buy a new gadget, I can imagine such an application would have a market (much like those magic mirrors that let you try on jewelery and accessories). Though, IMHO, it could be much improve if instead of simply printing a marker, you would be able to print a simple paper-craft box with markers on its sides, that although will require some folding, will give you some more "hands on" experience.
It was bound to happen. As augmented reality becomes more and more prevalent, it was all a matter of time till someone took credit for something he is probably not entitled for. Enter Chris Hughes best known for jailbreaking the first iPhone. Last February, at TED palmsprings, Hughes briefly showcased his work that "makes creating 'augmented reality' a cinch".
If this demo looks familiar to you, you are not alone. Ralph Hauwert, a Papervision3d developer, took offence at Hughes talk, and subsequent interview. According to Hauwert, Huges is taking credit for porting ARToolKit to flash, while he only took FLARToolKit and "followed a tutorial like this one from the FlashBlog, then gathered all his courage and energy to work with 2 opensource projects and take credit for it" (source).
Apparently, TED folks are working to fix things up. Till then, you can find more details over Hauwert's blog.
Last month, this student's project, using AR to advertise IKEA, got me excited. Now, Brazilian furniture retailer Tok&Stok is letting consumers arrange rooms and place furniture using augmented reality. To do so, clients can use AR kiosks placed in stores, as seen in the video below, or try a web-cam based application online.
I guess, augmented reality is only used as a gimmick here, since you could arrange the same furniture using a simple 3d application (after all, it doesn't virtually place the furniture in your room, like the IKEA campaign did). However, the video claims that sells are higher thanks to this application, so who am I to argue.
Do you want to play with AR, but too afraid you don't have the required programming knowledge needed? Now you have two applications to play with from the comfort of your own home.
First is Metaio Unifeye Design. Available freely in an (almost fully featured) demo version, this tool is far from being a toy. You can create elaborate scenarios of marker based and marker-less image based augmented reality without writing a single line of code. You can test your creations with your web-camera or using a prerecorded video clip of a marker. There's even a tool for creating new markers.
However, such flexibility does come with a price. I had a hard time working with the user interface beyond the basic functions, and I'm quite sure I only scratched the surface of what's possible with this tool. That's why I had this application installed for about a month now, but I was hesitant about writing anything about it. Metaio claims that video tutorials are coming shortly, and I think they are very much needed (and I'm a programmer in my spare time :). In more somber news, you can't use your own 3d models, or export your scenarios as a stand alone application. You probably have to pay for those features.
Now, if Metaio Unifeye Design was a bit too complex for you, the next application is truly augmented reality for beginners. It's called Atomic, and it wraps ARToolKit to give you the basic functionality of augmenting markers with VRML 3d objects when you examine them using your webcam. The application source is available to download as well, so eager programmers may add more features to it in the future. Another advantage of this tool is that it allows you to import and use your own models. However, don't expect to amaze any AR veteran using it.
Or rather, wack a Portuguese advertisement monster. I'm not quite sure what's this thing all about (since I don't read Portuguese), but judging from the Google translation of this page, this is some kind of kit sent by a Brazilian media company to teach its clients about the four monsters of bad advertisement. Again, this is an educated guess, if any one of my readers can help out with explaining what's going on, please leave a comment.
You can try it yourself, here. Don't worry, they let you print out the markers if you don't have the kit, so you only need to find a hammer. It seems fun, so I give it "thumbs up".
We, at Augmented Times, believe that augmented reality (AR) is the next big paradigm shift. Connecting the world wide web with the physical world and the many objects, places and humans it contains, AR is both a disruptive technology and an exciting vision of the future.
This blog's goal is to document AR taking over our lives, but it needs your help. Have an augmented reality related news or story? Published an interesting paper about AR? Have something to say about this site or the AR community in genereal? Tell us about it, at rouli.net ~at~ gmail.com
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