Four Augmented Reality Applications You Might (Gasp) Actually Care About
Posted by Michael_Byrne on Friday, Mar 19, 2010
The question posed was “Gimmicky Trend or Market-Ready Technology?” and SXSWi panelist Richard Lent immediately punted, explaining that two are hardly mutually exclusive. People buy into gimmicky trends with the fervency of the sick buying antibiotics. The so-called augmented reality concept struggles, more accurately, under the question of whether or not it exists for its own sake, or if it can add something practical and meaningful to user’s lives. A poll of the standing-room only ballroom crowd seemed to be pretty evenly split between the two.
Lent, a marketer who founded AgencyNet, paraded out a few examples of iPhone AR applications that he argued, with some success, were real-life useful tools, and not timesuck toys:
Lego Digital Box Kiosks
Some retailers are now stocked with these yellow boxes where you can hold up a box of Legos and, on the screen, see a pretty cool 3D digital representation appear on it. Like, you move the box and the thing rolls or slides around with it.
Verdict: I had no idea that they stopped putting pictures of what you’re building on Lego boxes, but putting them back on seems like a more cost-effective solution. This is a gimmick, but I guess because it might move some more Legos, it’s something more? Frankly, the stages of SXSWi were jam-packed full of marketers, and Lent was no exception.
United States Postal Service Box Emulator
You have something you want to ship—brick of weed, Lego pirate ship, weapons of mass destruction, whatever—so you point your smart-phone at said something and, hey, the program shows you what box you need in a pretty cool graphical way.
Verdict: As someone above a certain age and without a smart-phone, my first thought was measuring tape? But, no, this makes sense and it strikes that this is really the perfect sort of AR technology: potentially everyday-useful, time-saving, and useful to a relatively high percentage of smart-phone users. (I’m imagining this being used in a more commercial sense.) Now, if only your iPhone could weigh things, too.
That John Mayer video
From the way Lent was talking about it, I got the feeling I should have known about this, Mayer’s super-high-tech AR video for Heartbreak Warfare But, he sort of explained it anyway—via a web cam or smart-phone, the AR program puts your face on a digital extra in the background—though I’m still a little hazy.
Verdict: Why in the hell would I want to be in the same room as John Mayer?
The Zugara virtual dressing room/“social shopper”
This must be pretty new because not only can’t I find the virtual dressing room online (searching “virtual dressing room”), the ballroom audience audibly gasped when it was unveiled on-stage. Using motion-sensing technology combined with video conferencing tech combined with regular ol’ on-line shopping, Zugara allows the user to “try on” clothes, virtually. That is, it takes a product and does a sort of “best guess” as how it will look on a shopper—and more than one person can do this at the same time via a sort of video chat room.
Verdict: I’ve bought the same pair of jeans now once a year for three years, to give some idea about how little I care about this—but, certainly one of the last barriers to online shopping is the touching and trying on of things, and this seems a sizable step over that wall.
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Michael covers physics, climate science, the future of music, and assorted things fallen through cracks at Motherboard. A native of Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon, he currently resides in Baltimore...
