In a push for the motion picture, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Disney has employed the augmented reality app Layar to produce the World’s first AR outdoor advertizing campaign. The promotional film posters seen below feature instructions for Android and iPhone users: launch the app when near a poster with GPS on. The user’s location is then compared with a database of ad locations. If the person is in close proximity to a poster, a character from the movie named Tamina will appear on the phone, offering up an orientation. Play the game, answer three questions correctly, and you’ll get 50 movie points that can be redeemed at movieminutes.com. Pretty cool, eh?
Maybe some of the early concerns about location-based marketing – calls being interrupted with a BOGO offer on a Big Mac at the Micky D’s you’re walking past, or your web browser being obscured by a virtual coupon pop-up discounting the gum sitting next to you in line while you’re waiting to pay for groceries – are a bit extreme. Perhaps we’ll see tamer, slightly less invasive versions of those scenarios. But for the moment it looks like we’re entering into a very interesting period with Augmented reality. This seems to me like a nice way to kill time while waiting for the bus.
How much would you pay for a pair of Adidas sneakers that could be acknowledged by your webcam and then used to control a special 3D world created just for those sneakers? About as much as you would pay for any ol’ pair or Adidas? Good, because that’s what Adidas plans on doing with a upcoming line of at least 5 men’s sneakers to be released in 2010.
Head of digital marketing for Adidas Originals Chris Barbour has been quoted saying:
“The foundation of augmented reality lies in adding a layer to the real world… That’s what we have done. We have taken a real world item and added a fantastic virtual world on top of that… We are not trying to mimic a real-world look, we have a more stylized, pop-up book creative approach… The neighborhood is displayed on a two dimensional computer screen, but you can use your shoe to control the angle and depth of view and zoom in and out, giving a 3-D sense of perspective.”
Certainly one of the coolest augmented reality apps out there, Layar, is about to go 3D. As gimmicky as this may first seem upon first viewing of the inevitably popular Pac Man video, the venue labeling demo below shows that the tech has practical applications. It will be dropping this November with Layar 3.o.
I don’t want to type too much here because I don’t think anything should be added to – or taken away from – what Thomas Ricker wrote over at Engadget. I think that this was filmed in his city and that he knows what’s being said.
