The
Future is... Augmented
By Malachi McPherson W 16 entrepreneurcountry
e have all heard the old saying “Where consumers go, business follows.” Business owners will often seek to take advantage of platforms popular with their customers, in order to promote their service(s) and/or product(s).
Technologically we’ve seen this phenomenon occur time after time, and web advertising has become a multi-billion pound industry. Internet powerhouses such as Google,
YouTube and Facebook
have utilised this trend with
tremendous results and social and digital marketing has created new job roles and businesses.
Similarly, Augmented Reality (AR), a platform which was developed as a tool and explores the alteration of our sensory environment, is in essence conceptually more Matrix-esque than Dragon’s Den. Defined as “a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data,” AR’s usage has stemmed vastly from gaming or simulation applications.
I was originally introduced to the idea of AR technology approximately three years ago. Working at a media agency, a particularly tech-savvy colleague explained the fundamentals of the technology. “It’s like seeing something there but it isn’t...distorting
vision...creating custom graphic scenes,” I was told. I smiled, I nodded, “I get it,” I chimed. But really this description meant little to me.
Some two years later in November 2011 I attended the Tech World exhibition at the London ExCel Centre. Around 100 exhibitors were present at the show, many with innovative
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