Mobile World Congress 2012: Redefining mobile with Augmented Reality

With just one week to go to the Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona we at TAB Worldmedia have already drawn up our schedules for Monday, planned a “secret” meeting on Tuesday and are still contemplating if we have time to add just a extra day on Wednesday. 

Last year we were approached by GSMA, the company behind the Mobile World Congress, to participate in a creative pitch for the sponsor contract of the MWC 2012 augmented marketing campaign. The campaign theme “Redefining Mobile” immediately caught our attention and put our creative brains to work. The concept that we came up with was to inspire people about what redefining mobile, and especially mobile browsing, could have installed in near future.

We presented a strategic approach to use a mobile website that would launch two types of augmented browsing experiences. However… as we all know at this point augmented reality is not yet integrated in mobile browsers so we asked junaio to team up with us and use their advanced platform to jumpstart the augmented reality experiences from the mobile website, like you would use Flash for interacting with a rich media website.

1. For the first experience we created a multi interactive 360 degree world that allows you to stroll around and explore what the MWC 2012 conference by looking through your smartphone as if it was a virtual lens.

When you open the 360 browser you will find yourself at the entrence right outside the Mobile World Conference area. When looking around you can see the different pavilions and zones that you can attend. For example: App Planet, mPowered Brands, the exhibition area or the Conference hall. When entering the conference hall you will find the speakers on stage and we’ve used our Tweeps Around service to project live Twitter messages from all over the World that use the #MWC2012 and #MWC12 in their messages.

2. For the second experience we’ve collaborated with junaio and their fantastic team to create a fully animated and interactive augmented 3D model of the campaign visual. When visitors point the viewer of their junaio app at the print advertisement that was featured in TIME Magazine or at the conference brochure they will experience the 3D EYE come to life and they can navigate by clicking on the augmented buttons that will appear.

I’ve posted the demo video of the augmented print experience below so you can see it if you don’t have your phone and the print ad ready.

Exclusive Demo Video

Instructions to launch ether or both experiences can be found on the MWC campaign website or on the Mobile MWC campaign website. (m.mobileworldcongress.com)

Credits

As a last word I would like to thank junaio for collaborating with us to create this fantastic augmented experience. With couldn’t have done it without your help. We also like to thank the GSMA team for believing in our concept and especially ^MH for the fantastic job in co-creating this unique experience with us.

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MWC 2012 AR Experience provided by Junaio and Tab Worldmedia.

Read all about the companies and the Mobile World Congress here.

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Augmented Reality for real estate brings back the maquette new-school style.

Ever since we started out in creating mobile concepts using mobile augmented reality real estate agencies have been asking us to augment buildings into landscapes to give future buyers the opportunity to fantasize about their investment. Visualizing massive buildings into 3 dimensional landscapes is  a pretty harsh task for the current state of techniques and smartphones. But, things will soon change since the software is getting better and quad core processor smartphones are ramping up for market launch over the coming year.

However, the current state is that everyone with a common smartphone like an iPhone or Android can use augmented reality to visualize their future home in the form of lets call it an “augmented maquette”. We’ve been showing this demonstration model that we made at Metaio’s Inside AR event and to many real estate agents in the time after that with the purpose to further develop the product and I find that we’re almost ready to transform it into a module that can be easily integrated in existing mobile apps of real estate agents.

Have a look at the video of the demonstration model that we made and share your thoughts with us.

TAB Worldmedia

New mobile augmented reality education program for marketing brands.

The Augmented Media Experience

Exactly one year ago in February and March of 2011 mobile augmented reality agency TAB Worldmedia continued its consumer research in their own Augmented Media Experience center. (See article 1 here and article 2 here) The center was situated in a progressive mainstream shopping center owned by Unibail Rodamco, Europe’s leading listed commercial property company specialized in shopping centers in European capital cities.

The Augmented Media Experience is a unique temporary pop-up store concept that first opened its doors in 2011 in Citymall Almere. Shoppers/Consumers and Marketing organizations were welcome to experience and learn about this new form of media using augmented reality. Seven days a week in a time frame of almost 2 Months, TAB Worldmedia researched the impact of augmented media and consumer response to this powerful new media phenomenon. During this time Major brands like IKEA, Philips, GSK, Accenture, Centraal Beheer Achmea and many retail organizations visited the Experience Center for a workshop. The TAB Worldmedia team conducted qualitative research 7 days a week for a period of 6 weeks during retail opening hours and also collaborated with Phlips to do targeted consumer research.

Below you will see a unique registration of The Augmented Media Experience Center that has not been published before.

During the rest of 2011 TAB Worldmedia used the results and insights that were drawn from this unique experience to benefit their production for clients like National Geographic, The Effie Awards, Heineken Music Hall and many others. The second half of 2011 the Augmented Media Experience was taken on roadshow, in a much smaller form, to help International and National brands to get up to speed with mobile augmented reality and augmented media in general. During a full week in May, TAB Worldmedia visited the National Geographic offices in Washington DC and several other companies in New York who were interested in learning all about Mobile Augmented Reality and Augmented Media. At this point TAB Worldmedia has expanded to developing strategic mobile B2B marketing tools using augmented reality to benefit business processes and improve effectiveness of sales forces.

New mobile augmented reality education program for marketing brands.

Currently TAB Worldmedia is working on an education program with the purpose of helping marketing, communication and media companies to get up to speed with mobile augmented reality as a high impact and effective mobile marketing tool. The education program will be available as an exclusive training on senior marketing level and as a practical usage guide showing successful marketing mechanisms for mobile augmented reality.

For more information please contact TAB Worldmedia via  info@TABworldmedia.com

Junaio goes outdoors with super accurate augmented reality.

Click on the image to view the video.

We always get a lot of requests from engineering companies, real estate agents etc. to realistically augment buildings, apartments offices etc. Of course this is possible but not yet with the current publicly available techniques. So it would always be a high tech, high prized demo model. BUT NOW Junaio is showing us that super accurate 3D feature tracking for public use is on the way. Of course we’ve already seen the progression of this techniques from the Junaio lab a few years back, to the Augmented City demo last year. But now they can project this onto real buildings and other large scale 3D environments.

Needles to say that this again is a super strong breakthrough for the public lightweight augmented reality features that truly helps to transform Augmented Reality to Augmented Media. I’m going to make sure that TAB Worldmedia is going to be one of the first  creation agencies for augmented content that will produce a mobile tool for you to use.