The Gray Lady is looking a little hipper these days.
The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about mobile augmented reality and touches on some of the exciting applications I talk about in BRANDING UNBOUND the book.
The piece looks at wearable computing (for what I call "Body Nets" in the book), automobile-based geo-tagged information, physical world annotation and gaming. The article fails to point at some of the cooler early AR games out there, and how they combine the physical and virtual worlds in fun new ways.
“The real world is way too boring for many people,” Daniel Sánchez-Crespo, a project leader at Novarama, a game developer based in Barcelona, tells the Times. “By making the real world a playground for the virtual world, we can make the real world much more interesting.”
The one arena the Times doesn't address much is how augmented reality will effect marketing and branding. It does mention branded applications such as ING's augmented reality ATM finder and possible ad-supported solutions such as Layer.
But it's important to note that many marketers are using augmented reality for promotional purposes - most notably, perhaps, BMW, Doritos and Papa John's on the old school Internet, and Ford Ka and Fanta in the mobile space. My new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND (out next spring) takes a look at how marketers - perhaps as much as gaming companies, will lead in the adoption of these kinds of experiences. To be fair, many AR marketing initiatives are based on games, but with a specific purpose - to pitch products - in mind. But many are not based on games, and are definitely ready for the spotlight.
Read the Times piece here.
And learn more about THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, here.
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