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.
Here’s the latest AR dish from Ohan Oda and Steve Feiner at Columbia University‘s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab: an augmented reality marble game that uses gravity as a game controller. No iPhone required.
Another week passed by, and I was especially lazy this week. Sorry, but apart from those augmented strippers from Monday, nothing excited me enough (or annoyed me enough) to write a post about. Which means, we have an extra long linkfest today.
However before we start, I would like to learn a thing or two about our dedicated readers. The next poll asks you to define yourself, and you may select more than one answer. Are you more the creative kind of person, or a problem solver? Please vote, and I’ll post the results on next week’s linkfest:
And now, for the links:
Tish Shute’s second interview with Robert Rice really makes you think, with some great quotes talking about Neogence and the AR consortium (see below), and a great comment by our regular patron DarkFlame.
According to Gartner, AR is on its way to the peak of the inflated expectations mountain in their hype cycle model. ReadWriteWeb also takes a look at it, and they link to my strippers post.
AcrossAir is working on an interesting augmented reality game named Virus Killer 360, but it doesn’t really look like augmented reality, even under my low standards.
iPhone ARKit is a new open source augmented reality tool kit for the iPhone (very new, not really useful at the moment). Not many details are known and Thomas reports on those that are.
The quote of the week comes from Tish Shute’s interview with Robert Rice:
This is part of the problem right now though…no one seems to be thinking about the bigger picture much. All of the effort is either on making the next cool ad campaign for a car or a movie, or creating a tool to tell you where the nearest thingamajig is, but in a really cool fashion on a mobile device.
No one is talking much about filtering data, privilege systems, standards, third party tools, interoperability, and so on. There is also little conversation about where hardware is going. Right now everyone is developing software based on what hardware is available. This needs to change where hardware is being developed to take advantage of new software coming out (this happened in the PC industry a while back and growth accelerated dramatically).
And finally, the next video is of GeoBeagle, an application for Android that adds an augmented reality twist to geo-caching (which is an idea I first encountered here). Interestingly, it uses Wikitude’s API, showing off some of the power of that platform.
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
Here are just some of the things that happened this week in the realm of Augmented Reality, which I didn’t have the time to write a whole post about. It’s going to be a long post, you may want to prepare a snack before you go ahead.
On the other hand, this 7-Eleven application from Taiwan is cute. It helps that I don’t understand a word in there.
This week’s video comes from Metaio, which launched an ambitious initiative named “metaio World“. There haven’t given much information about it, but here’s a short quote –
You can view, create, upload, modify, navigate, share, rate or play games with real 3D content anywhere in the real world. Add your 3D and post interactive elements, your favourite photos, twitter messages or anything you can imagine.
An ambitious project deserves an ambitious video, but can they deliver?
Augmented Traffic Views is a pretty cool app that links your Android phone to Toronto’s traffic cameras to help you make better decisions for your daily commute. Alas, I don’t understand what the augmented reality part contributes to the application.
As a matter of fact, it seems to only hurt usability. Would you rather physically turn around yourself every time you want to see the video input coming from some traffic camera, or would you prefer a scrollable list of cameras and their locations? I would go with the second option. Moreover, you can’t really use it in AR mode while driving, unless I’m mistaken and you can do u-turns in the middle of the road in Canada.
Once again, it’s a useful application, and they have done a right choice giving it text to speech capabilities, but having an augmented reality interface seems to me contrived. True, AR has a natural appeal when it comes to house listing, as can be seen by the end of the video, but then again, house listing is not really about traffic views. I hope the guys behind this app (who are you?) will reconsider their use-cases before releasing it to the Android’s app store.
Games Alfresco 