Four Mobile Applications That Peer Into an Augmented Spiritual World
Japanese video game Fatal Frame spun a narrative around the capturing of spirits using a camera obscura, viewing a spiritual world through man-made lens. Sure it's a little eerie, but the hype-machine that is augmented reality builds off a similar concept, allowing us to peer into the digital realm. Developers have played with this idea, creating mobile applications that imitate Japanese folklore.
Ghostwire for the Nintendo DSi uses the embedded microphone and camera to allow users to scan the room for ghosts and then bribe them away.
GhostCam for the iPhone gives the ability to haunt any captured image, making for a fun scare. Ghost Radar detects nearby spirits and provides a flux readout alongside any words spoken. Finally, Mobilizy released an augmented reality app that gives users a disturbing view of the lost Twin Towers. All of these add to the mystery of the unknown. Happy (belated) Halloween.
3D virtual pets to hold in your hand and interact with, software that turns drawn objects into movable 3D objects subject to the laws of physics and a Microsoft hiring-coup. Those are the stories behind the hottest videos from the eye and brain-candy world of Augmented Reality, as seen at last week's International Symposium on Augmented and Extended Reality in Orlando, Florida.
Who says the web is all about pages that you view in a browser? Check out these three visions of a fast-approaching future where data is drawn from and overlaid on top of the real world around us.
Kid Stuff: Eye Pet
The Eye Pet is a virtual critter that you can interact with through a webcam on your computer. Check out this demo where the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe pets the animal and spins through a 3D menu of toys to play use in playing with it. It's pretty awesome. The Eye Pet is expected to be released for the PS3 game system as early as next month.
That looks like a lot of fun for kids (who knows about the psychological impact) but imagine other interactive 3D objects with menus of options like this. Occupational training possibilities? Sports practice? There seems to be a lot of possibilities.
Thanks to Canadian PhD student Gail Carmichael for shooting that video.
AR Sketch takes drawn images, processes live video capture of the drawings and turns them into 3D image overlays. Then it subjects them to a physics simulation. The team behind it just happened to hack into the private API for live video processing on the iPhone and make it available to developers around the world, too.
Popular AR apps like Yelp or Layar on mobile phones don't actually know what they are looking at, they just know where you are and which direction you're facing. Thus they can tell you what they believe you're looking at. Marker-based AR apps know only to look for one thing - a printed marker with a pattern on it that triggers display of an overlay. Sketch AR needs neither guesses nor markers - it processes and augments what you're actually looking at.
It's nuts. As Ori Inbar wrote about the Sketch AR team in an overview of ISMAR, "Their work is revolutionizing the AR world by avoiding the need to print markers - or any images whatsoever."
Here Comes Microsoft AR!
Oxford's Georg Klein, whom Inbar calls "the smartest Computer Vision guy on the block," just joined Microsoft this month, conference-goers learned. Is Microsoft going to make a major Augmented Reality play? They'd be fools not to explore the possibility. They don't want to be left out in the cold if AR does become the next version of the web. Here's what their new man's been working on.
These exciting examples of Augmented Reality have little to do with mobile location awareness, a nice reminder that there's a whole lot more to the field. Mobile AR browsers are the best known commercial services so far, but academic research on other forms of AR has been going on for years.
Ready to browse and interact with data on top of the physical world, through webcams, mobile phones and increasingly svelte AR glasses? A future when such experiences are mainstream may be fast approaching.
Thanks mobile behaviour for this look at the rise of the app as an ad channel. Personally i think it's just the latest bandwagon for an approach that I support but has been long touted - less advertising and more delivering services that people find useful. Mobile and online apps provide handy ways to do this, but at the end of the day it’s common sense that being useful is better way to get people to favour you than yelling at them is.
As Attention Swings Towards Mobile, The Rise of "App-vertising"
Every week we see dozens of new applications released, with a few which manage to improve our lives in some shape or form. It's clear that developers are keen on creating the next big thing and user attention is obviously on the app store. Earlier this month USA Today even declared the existence of so-called app addiction, with possible health issues tied to excessive mobile app use. While the iPhone app store is still young, many marketers have noticed the number of eyeballs checking in during this shifting attention economy. Welcome to an age of "app-vertising."
Last week Volkswagen took a unique and cost-efficient approach to advertising its new GTI using just an iPhone app. Their reasoning included a comparison between a prime-time audience for a television show like NCIS (21 million), and reported iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide (over 50 million). With a lower cost and an additional PR value, Volkswagen took the ladder, receiving both increased engagement and more for their money.
For musicians Alice in Chains, the app store was attractive in a slightly different fashion. To push their new album they are releasing an app, with videos, photos, news, and entire audio track-list included. If brands can advertise using apps, why not musicians? No matter what the product, marketers are being drawn to where the consumer user is, the app-store. This new destination is ripe with opportunity for those who are able to create a niche utility for enhancing our daily routine.
