Augmenting the power of mobile
By Simon Fuller. Mobile reality. Augmented reality is turning up simply everywhere, and those at the forefront of AR reckon the smartphone is just the place for the tech to eally hit its stride. And that thanks to the fact that mobiles tend to GPS, cameras and image recognition – all of which really help the experience along.
And Nintendo showed just what could be done this summer, creating a spooky viral video to promo Ghostwire, a game enabling players to use their mobile phones ‘to communicate with ghosts’. The idea was to capture ghosts on the phone’s screen using augmented reality, tocollect them and then ‘solve their puzzles.’
“Mobile augmented reality has the potential to completely revolutionize marketing and advertising in terms of creating engaging experiences for the target market, as well as extending the brand relationship with users,” says Robert Rice, CEO of US-based AR developer Neogence Enterprises. “Time and place will become factors for the creation of marketing, beyond simple printed static advertising.”
There are a raft of things that mobile users will be able to do with AR, like peeking at the world through their smartphone camera and getting added data relevant to whatever they’re seeing, something Brian Selzer, co-founder of mobile AR outfit Ogmento, calls Terminator Vision (after the Arnie film, of course).
“The data a user sees over the person, place or thing they are looking at can be a text overlay, an RSS feed, a video [or] a holographic-like animation,” explains Selzer. “From a marketing standpoint, the actual product or packaging, a retail store, posters, clothing… whatever you can think of, become triggers for marketing. If I am looking at a cereal box at my local market, I might see a commercial for that product, or find out more about the ingredients and how it was made. Or perhaps unlock a special coupon right there on the spot.”
Some of this technology has been deployed by brands like Lego to advertise products in-store. The toy brand uses its Digital Box to illustrate to customers just what potential purchases would look like fully built – right on top of the product’s box itself. And this tech could easily make the leap to mobile.
“All [of] the cases which are web-based or at kiosks… these can be transferred to mobile AR marketing,” says Jan Schlink, a marketer for AR outfit Metaio. “Print products, ads, billboards or even product packages can
And don’t forget geo-tagging – that’s to say, adding geographical data to various media, which could give marketers the opportunity to engage with consumers wherever they are.
“Locations – with geo-tagged data – can be enriched with services, promotional content [such as] scavenger hunts or games, or user-generated augmented reality scenes,” says Schlink. “That´s why we call it bringing the Internet to the real world.”
“Augmented reality changes everything when it comes to mobile marketing, and the opportunities are limitless really,” says Selzer. “Mobile AR will become as necessary a marketing tool as social networks have become over the next few years.”
