Drupa has a page on Augmented Reality and I was wonder what sort of uses (if any) people have come up with for AR based print/marketing.
Is this the sort of thing you were talking about?:
StuPrint.com offers Augmented Reality Print service
We just had a write up about this in
printweek.
(Im sorry for the links straight off- I know its bad form in forums but I think they are actually quite relevant here.)
Emtri, I thought this might be the sort of thing you were referring to. My company has just started packaging up cheap print products with Augmented Reality technology. Essentially, the customer processes his or her order like before, but now has the option to upload or email across a video or 3D model that we can virtually pair with the artwork so that when it is viewed through our free smartphone app, the whole thing comes to life. Behind the scenes, we simply take a section of the artwork and reduce its size so that it contains less than 500k pixels, then use that as the trigger image for the video, i.e. the app/smartphone camera recognises the artwork it is looking and subsequently overlays the video. No need for a QR code or anything else...just a little icon that states that this print work contains AR. The flyer, poster, newspaper, whatever, essentially becomes a real life digital display. Its all very nifty
I personally think this is interesting because my company is primarily aimed at students, small-businesses and amateur dramatics troupes so there tend to not be massive marketing budgets flying around. As it stands, this technology only seems to be used by massive companies (check out the mercedes AR campaign on youtube...v cool). We're now offering it for £39 so making it a really affordable option for pretty much everyone. Our first augmented reality print campaign went out last month with a student drama group from Cambridge University. They sent 10k A6s out with a video from their rehearsals trained to the artwork. The campaign went down really well.
I reckon there is plenty more of this (the pairing of retail printing and affordable AR). It gives people an interesting new way way to communicate with their customer base. I also think this tech is only set to get bigger with further technological advances, especially 4G networks and increasing processing power in smartphones and tablets. As well, the google goggles aspect that gordo mentions is very interesting.
By the way, this is definitely worth a look if you're into this sort of thing. Make sure you watch it to the end!:
The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology
Thanks,
Chris