TAB Worldmedia wows Dutch celebrity with Aurasma augmented reality cases.

Dutch celebrity Froukje de Both came by our office because she is making an educational program on how to go digital. This weeks episode was about Mobile web and apps and she asked us if we wanted to explain it to her audience on camera. For those of you who don’t speak Dutch I will explain briefly what you can see in the filmclip below.

Froukje de Both explains that nowadays you can do anything with apps. Book a restaurant, shopping etc. but now there is something new that is game changing… augmented reality. Then she walks up to me and I explain to her that by using augmented reality you could for example just point the camera of your phone at a house that is for sale and you can identify that house, see what it costs, see what it looks like on the inside etc. (example on Layar) Then she asks how augmented reality can help her and her website etc. Then I causally suggests that she can come with me to the office to view an example that we’ve prepared for her… (please don’t judge me by my acting skills). At the TAB Worldmedia office I show Froukje an example of how we can magically make a billboard interactive with augmented reality (examples on Aurasma).

After our explanation of mobile augmented reality the program continues with visits to SAMSUNG Netherlands and ICE Mobile. If you speak Dutch please view these interviews as they are very interesting.

All of this was created and produced for Argeweb

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Can augmented reality bridge the gap between traditional media and mobile?

Just last week another Dutch newspaper (Wegener) has declared that they are going to stop publishing one of their newspapers. People tend to turn to mobile media for their daily news instead of their trusted traditional media. However… it is not said that traditional media will lose their right of existence in future but the mobile threat is there.

In my view publishers of traditional media can do two things to save their business:
1. Revisite their business model, kill the traditional media and turn to mobile.
2. Find a way to let both media co-exist and use mobile as a second screen to the traditional media.

There are several news media that are already advancing on this part. Take CNN as an example, but for TV news the threat is less urgent then for printed media. Mobile augmented reality could be one of the tools that can help bridge the gap between traditional media and the mobile second screen because it allows people to functionally use their mobile-device to almost fiscally interact with the traditional media. Dutch newspaper de Telegraaf is already experimenting with redactional content by using augmented realty as a tool to enhance their news. (ref. article 24/12/2011)

Dutch magazine Linda took their first step by experimenting with augmented reality to enhance a full edition of their magazine.

(Video is in Dutch)

Also the German publishing industry is taking augmented reality as a new commercial tool very seriously. For example magazine “Welt der Wunder” (World of Wonders) is using augmented reality to enhance their commercial ads. And yes I know… enhancing ads is one thing, enhancing editorial content is another but it is a start.

View this youtube video.

There are more initiatives out there so I am very curious to learn about them and start an overview including your thoughts on this subject. The augmented reality platforms that are used in the examples I am using above are.

Telegraaf: Aurasma

Linda: Layar

Welt der Wunder: Metaio/Junaio

Please feel free to share them with us below in the comments, via email or on Quora.

What’s next for Augmented Reality: the MWC keynote by Eric Schmidt

An excellent keynote speech on the second day of Mobile World Congress by Eric Schmidt is now up on YouTube. Below an interpretation what this all means for the development of Augmented Media and a few notes I took which may help you as a viewing guide.

In general, Schmidt didn’t refer too much to our area of interest which is all about Augmented Media in a mobile setting. Nevertheless his keynote is very relevant for the mobile future.

It is all about ubiquity and better performance at the tech side, and openness and willingness to cooperate at the governmental side and regulatory side.

As a matter of fact, performance will double roughly every year and half, a fairly autonomous process according to Moore’s law – this is where the Google engineers are working on to make it happen, especially where it concerns improvements which will be visible to end users.

For Augmented Reality applications this means that we will see the more than welcome improvement in responsiveness and accuracy. A sneak preview exists today: the continuous scanning mode in Google Goggles is in fact a sandbox application of Point and Know, a strong viual approach to search and discovery which will dramatically change the way we will interact with our environment in the future.

Imagine what real-time visual discovery can mean for illiterate people for instance, or to enable the so often cited “Terminator View” to overlay products and locations with background information. New Input/Ouput devices will definitely accelerate this development further (apparently it was too early for an official announcement of the highly anticipated Google Glasses right now).

With all this in mind it is really important to see that Google takes responsibility to make this kind of mobile distributed computing power really universally accessible and conquer the digital divide by working on other means of distributed connectivity besides our traditional cellular networks (using peer-to-peer, mesh networks for example).

Eric shortly mentions connected sensors but doesn’t go in much detail. In fact this very interesting area is slightly under exposed on the whole MWC event this year. We will write a separate post on this subject later.

For those of us who continually pay attention to the mobile developments Eric Schmidt’s talk does not reveal very new insights, rather confirms a very consistent and directed vision of Google how the connected future will look. Not surprisingly this is very much dominated by bringing the results of all this computing and technology as close to the end user as possible, by going mobile. And the best part is that all of this computing power will become invisible in the process, just like the electricity power grid is an invisible resource, a given which empowers us to focus on our real needs. Very well said, and something to be proud of as a front-runner to make this happen for Augmented Media.

On to the notes…