You’ve maybe not yet heard of Augmented Reality, AR, but a simple YouTube search indicates an amazing new frontier everyone can appreciate. AR is best described as the layering of digital elements on to views of the real world, in real time. Honestly, this is not just nerd stuff.
Imagine standing on a street corner, panning the neighbourhood in front of you with your cell phone camera. At once you see your surroundings on the phone screen as usual, and additional information layered on top the live scene showing you real estate opportunities of the very building(s) you are pointing at. How? The software application on the phone uses the physical characteristics of the buildings observed as keys to fetch respective data on the units inside.
The technology is really not the phenomenon. It’s the intuitiveness of the applications. And as video cameras have become part of our daily lives, on our laptop screens, on our cell phones, we suddenly have the ability to see our world, augmented.
USPS – United States Postal Service – shows us a brilliant example of functional AR in its box size selection application. And don’t miss the hair cut simulator.
Advertisers are recognizing the phenomenon. Just as a URL printed on packaging materials invites the customer to go online and engage the company, an AR queue, a recognisable mark, seen through a computer-attached camera of any sort, allows AR software to put digital elements into your world; Augmented Reality.
Tags: augmented reality
