DIGITAL MARKETING
Technology and us regular mortals still struggle to make meaningful connections between real world experiences and the rich digital world we’re evolving into. Augmented Reality, computer vision, mobile hardware, wearables are the next waves driving techno-evolution. If we’re intuitive, we also see they hold potential to change the very way human beings experience their surroundings – for better or for worse. Have I gone mental? A bit too much lead
in the pipes here in London? Nope. When Google alludes to ‘augmenting humanity’ in such a sexy, mysterious way (not to mention establish a university dedicated to it) you had better sit up and listen! In fact, in a recent augmented reality week-long series, many of the world’s top augmented reality experts spilled these juicy nuggets about future bio-tech and AR chimera.
“The day I have a pair of funky sunglasses and walk around with non-obnoxious advertising, news, social networking, totally immersed in the world, then AR will really have arrived.”
PROF. BLAIR MACINTYRE DIRECTOR OF AUGMENTED ENVIRONMENTS LAB,
GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (PROJECT GOOGLE GLASSES WAS LAUNCHED IN APRIL 2012)
So, you have the necessary hardware, but
your software, your database, your processing power, and your neural networks aren’t yet up to scratch. They can’t take meaning of what is in the line of sight. Nor can the brain just make it up. But inside of two mere months, you begin to respond to complex signals and develop the neural processing skills required to truly see. Biological vision, in its purest form. Visual acuity. Your vision at birth is an analogy for the current state of visual search. So let’s start at the beginning.
THE INFANT STATE OF AUGMENTED REALITY AND VISUAL SEARCH The gap between the physical world and digital is immense. Despite significant pedigree and influence, the Church of Holy
“And AR contact lenses, yes, they’ll happen but my question to you is this – why have it washing around on the surface of your eye when you can have it implanted inside your head? Sure there are social and ethical issues but these things will change with each generation as it becomes more acceptable.”
PROF. STEVE FEINER HEAD OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
“The Horror. The Horror,” I hear you
shriek. “Human beings would never allow this to happen!” or “Only with medical need!” But please. Think about it. Why wouldn’t you? That phone that you carry in your bag or your pocket, that you see first thing morning and night, that sleeps next to your bed… it contains the same chip. So do some of the American soldiers in the Middle East. Mobiles and wearables are merely the transition devices. You are the next carrier. Let’s keep it real here: people exchange freedom for stability and convenience every day (from Facebook
privacy/image recognition to our Net Neutrality – severely threatened by the Patriot Act).
ENOUGH OF THE HIGHBROW STUFF – SHOW ME THE MONEY What the hell am I talking about here? Imagine people being able to access your individual property details from your sale boards – no logo, no QR code. Imagine footfall/walk by customers using their mobiles to ‘capture’ property details – using the property detail images to lead them directly to this property online or phones your office immediately. Imagine each of your expensive newspaper advertisements allowing users to explore a property – straight from the pages of a paper. For those involved in New Homes and housing developments, or house builders, imagine showing investors or future owners being able to hold up their device and see a full 3D model of the outside and inside of the building yet to come! Augmented Reality is the bridge between
the print and digital world. It’s trackable, traceable, and allows customers to access your property details in a way that makes so much more sense than a standard web property portal. With Google going quiet on augmented
reality for way too long to be comfortable, followed by their acquisition of facial recognition startup PittPatt, and the launch of Google+ and Google Glasses, we’re not very far off of this very cool, ‘opt-in’ iteration of augmented reality.
HOW DOES IT WORK? AUGMENTED REALITY’S CURRENT GUISE You have devices which see (mobiles, web cams, wearables, and motion sensor devices like Kinect). Then there’s the retina, which processes (computer vision technologies, GPS hardware, the sensors) and the brain (augmented reality and visual search). However, we’re still lacking the physiological practice of biological vision, the physics and machine vision required to help our ‘database’ of experiences evolve. We don’t even have a database, or the neural networks required to make the invisible world around us a universal, homogenous experience, nor a context for how to respond (or serve back the correct information to the user) or true visual search. Augmented reality can be experienced
with mobile devices and tablets to launch a range of digital content experiences (sound, pictures, web pages, video, 2D or 3D animations, and haptic response).
PROPERTYdrum JUNE 2012 35
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