Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Augmented reality (AR) has been around for some time now, yet, commercial implementations have been few and far between. Earlier this week, General Electric launched its "Plug Into the Smart Grid" campaign aimed at promoting its green home technologies. The campaign is unremarkable except for a smart little augmented reality tactic. Truly, if you take the time to print out the glyph and setup your webcam to work with Flash, the end result is a kind of 'wow' moment that brings me back to a time when I was more easily impressed by things I did and found online. The work offers little in the way of utility, so it's the novelty that makes it work as advertising. GE is a brand synonymous with innovation, so It makes sense to seize the opportunity to surprise people with something digital.

Soon it won't be so easy, and as the wow factor wears off, people will begin to want to see some value from the technology. Luckily enough, there's a lot of utility to be had from AR. Lego recently used the technology in retail locations to display 3D models of, well, models, unassembled in the box. Shoppers were encouraged to hold the boxes in front of a kiosk where a camera paired with custom software, by recognizing the packaging, would display a virtual rendering of the fully assembled model on a nearby monitor.

The technology is slowly making its way to mobile devices where it promises to reveal all kinds of virtual content by recognizing physical cues in the 'real world.' The connection of mobile AR software to the physical world has already inspired a slew of startups and partnership demos that do everything from layering Wikipedia and Panoramio content on cityscapes to real-time street sign translation. From where I sit, it seems that many of the more useful implementations of this technology will be delivered through mobile phones, so broad adoption is up to mobile processor power and accessible video APIs.

Dan Neumann