by Jonathan Marshall
Tali Krakowsky from Creativity Online wrote an unbelievable blog about augmented reality and how it is helping to blend our physical and digital environments. Augmented reality will quickly become a very effective tool in digital and interactive strategies for many advertising campaigns in the near future. In today’s digital world- any new, fun and shiny toy like this quickly gets stripped down and exhausted by techies in marketing and advertising agencies everywhere. The best part about new technology is discovering all the different settings that you can apply it in. Tali goes on to discuss and show the different ways augmented reality is already being used right now.
Adding a virtual dimension into our physical environments is not a trivial matter. Introducing digital bytes into our building materials is a revolution that is even more significant than fabrication and construction developments in glass, steel and concrete. As the distance between the virtual and physical world collapses, our relationship to our spaces, information and each other changes.
Here’s a fascinating example of how the physical enters the virtual. This augmented reality iPhone App, currently pending Apple’s approval, maps infinitely valuable New York and London Subway information directly into real spaces.
This in no way compares to hanging a subway map on your wall or even carrying one in your pocket. It also transcends anything that you could experience through Google Maps on a mobile device. This application is much, much smarter and more seamless. It thinks and extrapolates data. It delivers highly-curated information and places it directly into our living environments.
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Where it goes from here is so exciting to think about that I have to stop myself from typing. How rich, interesting, intelligent, entertaining, informative and personalized our experiences can be through these digital lenses remains for us to invent and create. (For more on this technology, augmented reality, and how it’s being used on mobile devices and in gaming, check out this Creativity feature.)
Inversely, here’s a stunning project that blends the virtual into the physical. This facade projection project by urbanscreen transforms a two-dimensional surface into a multi-dimensional space by adding depth, time and sound.
555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen on Vimeo.
Don’t think you’ve seen this done before just because you’re familiar with the idea of architectural projections. What’s most compelling about creating interfaces that mix media is that the content and the way in which it is applied becomes the innovation.
We are all familiar with the iPhone screen and an architectural facade as interfaces. What’s infinitely fascinating to me is how conceiving of content that is intimately linked to its virtual and physical interfaces (the screen and its surrounding architecture) can change the way we live.
Overstatement? Maybe. Maybe not.