i make experiences.: Let's Augment Our Reality

For those of you in the know about augmented reality, skip right on down to the videos. For everyone else, let me give you some context. Augmented reality is a technique that combines information from the real world and enhances it with computer-generated data in real time. The computer (or mobile phone)'s camera registers a specially printed code called a glyph and overlays basically anything you can imagine.

While AR is not a new technology, a rash of cool projects have come out that show off what it can do. (Check out the list of projects below the post.) Using AR for marketing or advertising is going to be an interesting trend to watch. Right now, people are enjoying the whiz bang cool factor but in many cases the AR does not really augment an experience, it just augments an image.

I've been tracking the twitter conversation between two friends (@pheezy & @dneumann) at Organic's Emerging Platforms team who have been passing all these cool projects back and forth. They argue that utility is the key factor and I wholeheartedly agree. Utility plus entertainment would be even better. The Topps baseball cards and the Eye of Judgement PS3 game examples do this best.

Final Thought: As the graphics and concepts improve, I expect to see some pretty amazing things. Can we move beyond whiz bang?

Topps Baseball Cards