Yelp AR

OK, catching up with stuff, so apologies if this is a little old. Still, nice move by Yelp towards making AR something useful for the real world. Thanks Contagious.

Yelp AR

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01/09/2009

Oh, but the barriers, they just keep crashing down. Augmented reality has had something of a bad press recently, when a spate of largely pointless branded applications served only to reveal that 1) most people do their research in the same places, hence the coincidence of timing and 2) the novelty of technology for technology’s sake is shortlived. The potential for AR apps on mobile, where the practical benefits become obvious, were hampered by Apple’s insistence that we would have to wait for the iPhone OS 3.1 update, and low user numbers for the few handsets compatible with Google’s Android platform.

(All this is said with a nod to the innovators over at Dutch financial institution ING, whose AR app for the Android platform was released in January and allows users to locate their nearest cashpoint. http://tiny.cc/ING784)

However, user review hub Yelp’s new application for the iPhone has managed to combine the powerful tenets of purpose, functionality and technology in order to create an augmented reality app indicative of the future we were promised when the technology was first unveiled. Not only does it offer news and reviews on restaurants etc. in the area, when you shake your iPhone three times to wake the inbuilt accelerometer you can activate a feature they call Monocle. Monocle then allows you to use your iPhone camera viewfinder to layer augmented reality information over the objects in the window, in real time. There’s a demo here that explains it fully, courtesy of Mashable: http://tiny.cc/mashAR

Obviously this is a cunning use of the technology, and ideally matched to Yelp’s raison d’être. What we find fascinating is the way in which this application was created, discovered, and seeded, almost with a buzz mechanism built in to the product.

he Monocle window, once you get it working, says: ‘The Monocle is activated. Yelp thought reality was boring, so we augmented it’. Blogosphere hero Robert Scoble was the first to uncover the ‘easter egg’ functionality, and then spread the word to iPhone enthusiasts eager to share the ‘secret’, particularly as it seemed to have been constructed in direct breach of Apple’s own mandate concerning AR.

This is the stuff of which PR ripples are made - a secret functionality, a useful application of a prevalent technology, and a targeted launch designed for online chatter. We hope that this smart thinking from Yelp is indicative of AR’s evolution into a valid medium for information delivery and branding.