Future Lions is a yearly competition that allows student to show off innovative concepts in the world of advertisement. Winners are honored at the Cannes Festival but all participants get free exposure to leading agencies. This year’s concept was to “develop an idea for advertising a global brand in a way that would not have been possible five years ago”. Naturally, many students picked augmented reality. Here’s a quick scan of some of them (as surely more will surface in the coming days). You do have to remember that all videos featured below are just concepts, and no “real” augmented reality was involved. It does show how young advertisers (or at least some of them) are trying to go beyond Novelty-AR, and look for true ways to complement their campaigns via augmented reality (unlike say, the guys behind the Papa Johns campaign).
Geepseed – an augmented reality Tamaguchi for Greenpeace
It’s like int13’s Kweekies with an environmental saying behind it.
Try out IKEA furniture before you buy
When Meaio created their iLiving application, I was a bit skeptical, but somehow this next clip makes me see what a great idea this is after all, especially for a company like IKEA. If I were IKEA, investing in such technology would be the first item on my schedule. Update: There’s a live demo for you to play with, here.
Gatorade virtual coaches
I had a similar idea once, it looked better in my imagination :)
Yo!Sushi Augmented Menus
This falls in the novelty category. Why would anyone want to see sushi in 3d?
Augmented tee-shirts for United Colors of Benton
We’ve seen a similar (working) demo from Squidder, and it better suits Threadless anyway.
Disney’s Up characters come to life
What Topp’s augmented baseball cards should have been.
Facebook world
We all had that idea sometime, now Alex Hachey shows us how it would look (you should not use AR when crossing a road)
Honorable mentions:
- An iPhone application for the Food Network that scans product barcodes to identify ingredients and recipes.
- A magic mirror for Victoria Secret.
- Sony Courtvision has augmented tickets.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Futuristic Visions, Marketing and Advertisement |
Games Alfresco 
Lots of interesting stuff here.
The IKEA one especialy, allthough it does highlight a big flaw in current use of AR;
The need for so many different markers, each printed, used once, and chucked away.
Aside from wasteing ink, in this case it wastes ad-space too.
Having standard markers which can be *assigned* to specific models is a much better way to go, then 1 marker patern = 1 model we have today.
Actually, for IKEA that’s not a problem, since they already publish and send hefty catalogs to potential buyers (i.e. everyone). They can simply change the catalogs so each page will have a standard picture of a product on one side, and a marker for it on the other.
Wouldnt that still make the catalog twice as big?