One of the buzzwords floating around the fringes of bleeding edge mobile technology is Augmented Reality (AR). But what does it mean and what are the practical applications for marketers today and in the immediate future?
In order to understand the impact of AR, maybe it's best to back up and look at the big picture of where mobile is going in the next 10 years. Someone asked me that recently and this was my (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek reponse:
In 10 years, we’ll be well into the post PC era and laptops will seem as quaint and nostalgic as the ginormous brick phones of the 80s. We may even have blown ourselves up, been decimated by a new virus (manmade or otherwise) or even be in a post-Singularity world, in which case, all bets are off.
But assuming that the world progresses without a major Black Swan event (big assumption!), mobiles as visible, handheld devices will have disappeared. They’ll be replaced by a tiny ear piece, an equally tiny hand controller (let’s visualize that as a ring, for the sake of illustration) and a set of contact lenses or glasses, which will allow us to see three views, by simply changing our eyes’ focus; the web, the web overlayed onto the real world and the real world if anyone ever wants to go au naturel for some quirky reason.
Controlling these virtual mobiles will be by a mix of gestures and haptics, with a voice option for those of you reading this who never got the hang of fluent gesturespeak. A common sight will be middle aged people wondering around twitching, waving their arms around and bumping into things as they try to make a phone call. The froody 20 year olds will be in total command without apparently moving a muscle.
By that time, it’ll be impossible to live any kind of mainstream life without a mobile. Banking, payments, shopping, access to your house and car – all will be via your virtual mobile. All interfacing with Government will be done via mobile too, including daily mandatory voting on key issues of the day as representative democracy is replaced by Direct Democracy – a result of the repeated parliamentary scandals of the Blair and succeeding Governments.
Over 50’s mainly opt to live in sheltered accommodation, which offer largely tech free environments, where they can be seen hunched over old-style netbooks playing Solitaire and wondering why the kids of today never reply to their emails.
Where I was writing about being able to see the combination of the virtual world overlaid upon the real world, is basically the AR concept in a nutshell. AR could be used to check out restaurant reviews, for example, by waving your mobile at a restaurant, check out film start times and reviews in a cinema, or help you find diverse hyper-local content like jobs, houses for sale and driving directions. Indeed, at this early stage in the game, it's hard to say what will be most useful for people and I'm sure we'll see examples emerge that we just haven't thought of yet.
One of the leading players in AR is Layar, who are attracting a lot of attention and have already started to use their AR Browser on Android phones (iPhone will follow) to experiment with some marketing mashups. In the video below, the scenario is that someone sees an ad for a Mazda car, takes a photo of the 2D barcode printed in the ad, which opens up his browser to the Mazda landing page. The mobile then takes him to his nearest dealer for a test drive.
The video, created by Lemonade Animation and JWT international, is really only a demo today, but certainly gives a hint of what's round the corner. And let's be clear, the tech is already to go, it's just a few visionary advertisers that need to step up and make this happen.
