In case you haven’t noticed, the digital marketing world is in a bit of a tizz about Augmented Reality.
Before you continue I should really point out that I’m not endorsing Augmented Reality. I think it’s interesting but it’s really a solution looking for a problem. I’ve got my eye on it but I think that on the whole it’s pretty useless and a bit annoying at the moment.
Augmented reality is when you superimpose digital stuff onto reality (like magic). It can be done a number of ways including some amazing things that have been released for mobile phones but the one I’m talking about in this article is done using a webcam - and the augmentation is done on the screen of the computer running the application.
The way it works is that the computer looks for a specific shape called a marker that it recognises, calculates the angle and rotation and then superimposes a 3D model onto the shape at the correct angle. It makes it seem like the 3D object is sat on top of the marker.
What makes it really interesting is that the marker can be tilted and rotated to look at the object in detail and the computer adjusts the display of the object accordingly.
Normally the marker is a card square with an asymmetric black and white image printed onto it so the computer can detect the angle and rotation easily.
There’s been some exciting things done this year, like the Toyota IQ thing that was released about 6 months ago.
And this awesome tank thing
They’re good, but they all suffer from the same problem.
They need the marker.
Without the marker the computer has no way of telling what angle or rotation to display the 3D object at, which is why this one completely blew me away.
No marker.
This could be the beginning of something really interesting with augmented reality. I’m not sure what, but it’s got me a bit excited about it again.
Back to markers. I wonder if you could use a QR code as an AR marker and use it to tell a system the location of the 3D model file to download and display. Hrmm.
