BRANDING UNBOUND

Business Week: Mobile Augmented Reality To Be One Of Top 10 Disruptive Technologies Through 2012

Well make that augmented reality in general, but as Business Week points out today, much of that will be in mobile.

The downside: Only 3% of mobile subscribers will use augmented reality apps by 2012 (and let's face it, the technology needs to come a long way).

The upside: Young people love this stuff, and brands are racing to create immersive experiences to engage them.

Lego Group, for one, has created stand alone store kiosks kids can use to hold up packages in-store to engage with AR experiences at the point of persuasion. No mobile phone required here. In other experiences, from Burger King and Ray-Ban to Doritos and Esquire magazine, a PC is used.

But in Europe, mobile AR is all the rage, as evidenced by efforts for Ford Ka and the Coca-Cola sub-brand Fanta, which has, among other things, a mobile AR game of tennis (shown above, and explained more fully here), in which players connect via Bluetooth to compete in a real world-virtual world game of tennis.

As Prinz Pinakatt, head of interactive marketing for Coca-Cola Europe tells me in my new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND (Spring 2010, AMACOM/McGraw-Hill), the lure for marketers seeking to create blockbuster brand experiences will be unprecedented. He says every major consumer brand will have created an AR experience for consumers over the next few years.

How many of those experiences will be mobile? We'll see how the predictions live up to, well, reality. 

Read the Business Week article (which is more about the technology, less about marketing opportunities), here.

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Disney To Let Fans Unlock Exclusive Content Via iPhone-Based Augmented Reality

The Mouse House is going mobile in an all new way - one that could have augmented reality written all over it.

Reuters is reporting that Disney is launching free iPhone and iPod touch apps that could one day, for example, enable someone to snap a photo of a movie poster to access video content related to the film on their iPhone, similar to the early example of Tim Burton's movie 9.

This comes on top of several paid apps such as Toy Story Mania, The Nightmare Before Christmas and more. 

Add in the ability to snap photos with friends and family interacting with Disney characters, digitally inserted and even posed within the scene, and fans might start to warm up a lot more, beyond movie-poster marketing.

Disney's long been a mobile innovator. Looks like they might just do it again.

Read more, here.

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Video: Nokia's Vision For Augmented Reality Beyond Mobile Phones

In my book BRANDING UNBOUND, I write about how the late Michael Dertouzos, head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Sciences, once explained to me that the future of mobile will very likely evolve to augmented or mixed reality experienced through tricked-out glasses.

We'll check email and exchange personal contact information and even multimedia with our friends and colleagues while on the go, locate friends in relation to our physical location, place transactions without ever reaching for a wallet or purse, and more, he told me.

At the time, it seemed far fetched that mobile would move from a handset to a headset, so to speak.

But Nokia released a video today that shows its vision for mixed reality is a lot like Dertouzos's. At least, the parts that don't remind some YouTube commentators of stalkers and sound effects from "Resident Evil."

What it all means to media and marketing remains to be seen. Hopefully it won't mean ads popping up based on our location, but rather, the ability to respond to commercial messages we see in other media, right at the point of impression. My new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, takes it all a step further with new forms of mixed reality like this one.

One thing's for sure. Things are going to change over the next few years - at least if Nokia has anything to say about it.

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Yelp iPhone App Has Hidden Augmented Reality Feature

With all the news breaking about new augmented reality apps for the iPhone - including augmented reality driving directions, tips on the nearest subway station and even an AR version of Google Street View, I think the more interesting news has been about this hidden augmented reality feature in Yelp's iPhone app.

Called Monocle, it essentially provides visual pointers to, say, nearby restaurants, with reviews floating in air in front of you.

I think retailers of all sorts need to pay attention to this. Not only does it potentially trump the usefulness of many Yelp desktop searches, but for retailers, it means reputation now travels - for better and worse.

Read more, here.

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Apple To Unleash Augmented Reality Apps for iPhone

Augmented reality? There's an app for that - or at least there will be many such apps, starting this September.

Adweek says augmented reality will be bigger than Twitter, YouTube and Second Life - combined.

And Coca-Cola's Prinz Pinakatt tells me that within a year, every major brand will have an augmented reality campaign.

And beginning next month, Apple will supercharge the trend by enabling developers to start creating iPhone AR apps that make it so consumers can point their camera phone at a QR code or other symbol to engage in a 3D, holographic interaction with your brand.

In my new book THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, I look at the trend, and how companies like Coca-Cola, BMW, Doritos and many others are already capitalizing on AR to astonishing effect.

Whether AR lives up to the hype remains to be seen (as an aside, I just wish many of these cool AR experiences worked on Apple computers, let alone iPhones). But it's clear that it will be Topic A in 2010.

Apple, for one, is counting on it.

Read more about Apple's AR moves, here.

Read more about THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, here.

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New York Times: Mobile Augmented Reality To Impact Gaming First?

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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IBM's Mobile Augmented Reality App for Wimbledon: Grand Slam, Or Junk Ball?

IBM is hoping attendees at Wimbledon will be staring into their camera phones instead of at the court.

TechCrunch is reporting that the official technology partner for Wimbledon is serving up an augmented reality app that will give fans the ability to hold their camera phone up and access player stats along with information on the nearest restroom, food concession stands and more, layered atop whatever it is they see through the phone screen. GPS helps the app, built using Android Seer, anchors information to physical objects and locations. 

Which is all very cool, but the sight of people doing what the guy in this video is doing seems like stretching it a bit. Seems like far too much effort - and really, how hard is it to find the concession stand?

Frankly, IBM would have achieved more user interest if it had created an augmented reality game like Fanta's, which enables you to play 3D holographic tennis using your phone as your racket, ala a real-world/virtual world version of Wii. You can even connect with an opponent via Bluetooth.

By comparison, it seems like advantage: Fanta.

But it's not too late for IBM to get into the game.

Read more here.

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New Mobile Augmented Reality Game Arms You With Skittles To Kill Zombies

I'm as much of a zombie freak as anyone (I just read director Guillermo Del Toro's ("Pans Labyrinth") new novel "The Strain," which is essentially "I Am Legend" meets "Dracula."

But for crud's sake, does every mobile/real world game have to be centered on these undead ne'r do wells?

Back in 2005 I posted about MobZombies, which is a location-based mobile game funded by Annenberg School of Communication at USC that pits players against virtual the living dead. The conceit is that the movement of your onscreen avatar correlates with that of yours in the physical world. If flesh eating zombies corner your avatar, the only way to escape may be for you to physically run in the opposite direction. Which means you're hosed if running away means jutting across a lake or crossing the street on a red light.

Now, in the age of augmented reality, Georgia Tech is going one better with "Aarrrgh," which does look cool, if it's really just a 3D shooter game that's more "augmented" than "reality" - the game fails to use the real world except in one fun little, cleverly branded twist.

You can use real life Skittles candies as bombs to kill zombies. Which means shouting "Taste this rainbow mother f*$3r" can help build some cred for the brand with teens and twenty somethings (it's unclear if the company had anything to do with this project).

Either way: Please, somebody. Zombies are so been there, killed that. Let's move on.

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BRANDING UNBOUND WAS JUST THE BEGINNING:

THE ON-DEMAND BRAND: THE New Book By Rick Mathieson - Details Coming Soon

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BRANDING UNBOUND The Book
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