insideAR, Oct 1-2 – New Details Announced!

As always we’ve received a nice invitation to the InsideAR event of our business-partner Metaio. This epic event has been around for a few years now and we’ve managed to attend them all. For this year our ambition is to attend once more… if our schedule allows us to take a few days off to recover from their legendary Octoberfest after party. ;D

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Finally the time has come that IKEA is augmenting its Global catalogue. And congratulations to our longtime businesspartner Metaio for being part of the pioneering team that assembled the app. I am really looking forward to receiving my copy of the augmented IKEA catalogue soon!

TAB Worldmedia launches new generation marketing and promotion apps with augmented reality.

Amsterdam based agency TAB Worldmedia, known for their mobile augmented reality productions for Walt Disney, National Geographic, Canon and family park Efteling, launches a new generation of mobile apps aimed at the marketing and communication industry. These new generation apps, standard with integrated augmented reality technique, make them very natural to integrate as part of sales promotions, loyalty programmes and social media in combination with print campaigns.

Sergey Brin shows why augmented reality is THE Social Media tool of tomorrow with Google Glass.

We all know that Sergey Brin loves extreme sports and it is great to see that this particular hobby of his inspires Google to take huge steps in developing their consumer augmented reality Glass product. In one of the most impressive live on stage presentations yet he got a whole team of his buddies to demonstrate Googles’ augmented reality vision in a way to show that AR is not for tech minds only.

One of Google’s big plans for Glass was to help users capture and share the world as they see it, but that’s clearly not all. As we’ve seen in the concept video, it’s also about facilitating communication and putting more information — think navigation information, or a user’s current speed. The possibilities are certainly “incredible,” but why is Google showing it off? According to Brin, it was because of three things — Google thought it was amazing (it is), it’s very visually striking, and because they wanted to appeal to the developer community. As such, U.S. based developers will be able to pre-order a beta build only at I/O, for the low, low price of $1500.

Metaio shows their augmented driver assistance on windshield displays concepts.

On another note… our business partner Metaio shares their skills and future projects through this fantastic video.

Eleven partners from the German automotive industry join forces to explore innovative technologies and concepts for boosting energy efficiency in vehicles. Firstly, cars are to become “intelligent” and, for example, use knowledge of the planned route to develop proactive operating strategies designed to save energy and, based on this, initiate appropriate responses in good time on the part of the car or driver. Secondly, the vehicle power supply and associated components are to be specifically tailored to the possibilities of these intelligent operating strategies. The project is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology (BMBF) and supervised by the VDI TZ.

Layar introduces a powerful easy online tool for creating augmented print magazines.

Today Layar launched the Layar Creator, a self-service web application for activating print pages with digital content. By simplifying and demystifying previously complex AR technology, the Layar Creator makes it quick and easy to bring once static pages to life with videos, links and “Buy” buttons that readers can view with their smartphone.

In a matter of seconds, anyone can upload images or PDFs, drag-and-drop any of a number of digital buttons onto the pages and publish them on the Layar platform. When readers view activated pages with the Layar app, these buttons appear on top of the page.

And here it is: Layar Creator places the power of interactive print at everyone’s fingertips (official press release)

The video below explains it all:

And that it’s really easy proves that I created an augmented item on top of our title bar in just a few minutes.

Check it out by launching layar and aim it at the title bar on top of this page.

Wow that was easy! So… is this the end of Layar creation agencies??????

No it is not… 😉 This is just the 1st step to maturity of mobile augmented reality. This creation tool will help publishers to create the 1st level of editorial augmented layer on their magazines. We expect that this will create a demand for real creative and hyper interactive concepts on top of this service. Just imagine agencies like TAB Worldmedia using their years of experience as Layar augmented creation agency to create environments for gaming concepts, interactive real time connections with other services like the weather, integrating location based augmented reality and so on.

Due to the pre-launch of the layar creation tool at TAB Worldmedia we have seen an increase in requests from publishers to work with them to find the right balance between editorial augmented content, commercial augmented contend and content that has high entertainment value. And create fantastic augmented concepts for the brands that advertise in their magazines!

So Raimo, Claire, Maarten and the rest of the Layar team… congratulations and thanks for this great product that will help our mission to transform Augmented Reality to Augmented Media.

Today Layar will announce its biggest launch yet!

An exiting day for the Layar team today as the company will announce, as they are calling it them selves, its biggest launch yet. Of course insiders to the company already know what’s coming but for the public and the print publishing industry this new product, service or brand is announced to be a business changer. As certified creation and development agency for Layar augmented reality concepts we will be following the media announcements closely.

Update: read our first review here!

Hard case results of 7 creative media campaigns using mobile augmented reality.

I stumbled upon this nice overview of creative media campaigns using augmented reality as an engagement tool. I found this article to be a nice complete overview that needs to be shared with as many people as possible.

Enjoy this overview and many thanks to the reporter David Moth for writing it.

Augmented reality ads are slowly making their way into the mainstream, with more and more brands using the technology to engage consumers with hidden digital content. We’ve reported on several major brands using AR for marketing campaigns, including Waitrose, Nestle, and Tesco. However, while marketers are all too keen to trumpet their AR trials, stats around consumer engagement are like hens’ teeth. But following on from our post highlighting six successful uses of QR codes, we have found one or two examples of successful AR campaigns.

Kia

This campaign dates back to last year’s Australian Open. Kia has sponsored the tournament for the past eight years and noted that 32% of the Australian TV audience used their smartphone while watching the broadcast. During the matches viewers were encouraged to download Kia’s bespoke AR app that linked them to digital content about the Aussie Open and the Kia Optima.

The AR app recorded 12,630 downloads and there was an increase in Optima searches of 58%. The largest recorded search volume for the Optima was January 22, the day app went live. As a result, Kia said that it achieved 57% more sales than expected of the new Optima in January.

Nuts Magazine

In a January edition of the weekly lads mag Nuts, readers could scan over 20 pieces of editorial content using Blippar. Publisher IPC Media said that more than 15,000 unique users generated more than 200,000 interactions on their smartphones.Without anything to benchmark against it is difficult to say if this warrants a successful trial, however Blippar heralded it as an unprecedented level of interaction for a single campaign using its app.

Volvo

In order to promote its new S60 model Volvo created an AR experience that allowed users to drive a virtual car. It was activated by scanning a YouTube video, and the user could then drive the car round a track by tilting their smartphone left and right.

Volvo said the results were “outstanding”, with a 9.6% interaction rate, 192,319 clicks on the masthead ad and a traffic increase of 293% to volvocars.com.

Top Gear Magazine

Readers could access a range of digital content in the December edition of Top Gear Magazine using Aurasma’s AR app. It included videos of the presenters embedded in the editorial content and a highlights reel of 2011 best cars on the front cover.

The tie in resulted in tens of thousands of video views and Top Gear Magazine has integrated AR into subsequent editions.

Lacta

Greek chocolate brand Lacta ran this neat AR campaign in December. Following on from an existing marketing campaign that encouraged consumers to write love messages on Lacta chocolate bar wrappers, the AR app brought to life virtual love notes. Consumers were able to write a love message on a wrapper within the app and then forward it onto a loved one who could only read it by scanning a Lacta bar.

The campaign was a clever way to introduce a digital element to existing offline marketing and engage consumers with the brand.

It would be interesting to see Nestle to run a similar campaign with Rolos in the UK, as we have already seen them use Blippar with a number of their products.

ASOS

Clothing e-tailer ASOS used Blippar to bring its consumer magazine to life.

The AR presented readers with click-to-buy icons so they could purchase the items straight off the page through their smartphone.

The use of AR fits perfectly with ASOS’s brand image and caters to its target demographic of 18-25 year olds.

We don’t have stats on how many people ‘blipped’ the magazine, but from a strategic point of view this would appear to be the perfect place to trial AR.

Volkswagen

VW used AR to launch the new 2012 Beetle in Canada – the idea was to make the advertising “as impressive as the car”.

By scanning posters on bus shelters and billboards users could access fun digital content of cars bursting out from the wall and doing tricks off ramps.

This is definitely an impressive use of AR, however it used a bespoke AR app called VWJuicedUp that was only available on iOS. The use of custom made AR apps is potentially the only thing preventing the technology from really catching on with consumers.

QR code scanners are universal so consumers need only download one version, however AR campaigns often require the user to download a new app every time which doesn’t offer a great user experience.

(Original article by David Moth Reporter at Econsultancy. You can follow him on Twitter or Google+)

Efteling & Rabobank nominated for “Mobile Media & Marketing Awards”.

Today you will find the TAB Worldmedia peeps walking around the office with a huge smile on their faces. One of our Augmented Media cases got nominated at the Mobile Marketing & Media Awards in the category: “Best Mobile Advertising Campaign”.

The description is in Dutch but here’s the official link.

An agency approach: From augmented reality to augmented media.

This week we hosted a special interest evening for agencies, publishers, marketeers and developers who are interested in getting into creating augmented reality apps and concepts.

Especially for this event we created a presentation that is a bit different from the presentations that we normally give during our keynote speeches and workshops. Below you will find the short version of the presentation deck that we used and we hope that it is helpful for those of you who are interested in creating augmented reality or as we like to call it “augmented media” experiences.

Please understand that we can not share actual figurs in the case results but we’ve tried to formulate relevant conclusions for you.

We want to give a special thanks to our friends and clients who support us in our journey to turn technique into media and marketing tools. Hence the title: “From augmented reality to augmented media”.

Enjoy and feel free to share your comments and remarks with us.