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Last week, a person jumped out of a bottle of Pepsi and performed a magic trick for me.
No, I wasn’t hallucinating within the New York City heat wave. I used to be using an augmented-reality app on my iPhone that makes 3-D images and videos appear, through the phone’s camera, as if they’re on top of physical objects or environments.
Augmented reality isn’t latest in consumer apps. You might recall the excitement a couple of years ago around Yelp’s Monocle feature, or possibly you’ve heard of apps like Spyglass, which mix AR tech with the built-in GPS of a smartphone to supply interactive displays for outdoorsy types.
But AR still hasn’t really had its “moment.” Now, with the introduction of Google Glass, which shows computational information on the lens in front of your eye, there’s an increasing interest in AR.
This week, I’ve been using three different AR apps for mobile: Blippar, Zappar and Snaps. They’re all free to download, and can be found on iOS and Android devices. Blippar can also be available on BlackBerry.
Blippar and Zappar are similar: With the app open, you point your smartphone at an AR-friendly ad, and a bit of video will appear in front of you. Snaps, however, layers fun images or text on top of smartphone photos as you’re taking them.
I used to be curious whether apps like these could be stickier, or less gimmicky, than AR apps of the past.
These apps are okay. They work as promised. They’re even fun. But they’re not apps I’d use frequently.
Right now, they’re centered mostly around promoting for large brands, moderately than using AR to offer useful or contextual information resembling search results, maps or local business information. And to get two of those three apps to work, you’ll have to seek out their logos within the wild, in places like magazine pages or in-store aisle promotions, which wasn’t all the time easy for me.
When I scanned this image of an Asda floormat using the Zappar app, a cartoon bunny rabbit appeared on my smartphone’s screen
When I scanned this image of an Asda floormat using the Zappar app, a cartoon bunny rabbit appeared on my smartphone’s screen[/caption]
That’s not something the app-makers themselves are necessarily accountable for: Big brands and firms control their digital ad campaigns, and determine what appears for the patron when she or he scans an AR-friendly item.
Let’s have a look at the Blippar AR app first. Blippar has been around for a pair years, but has only been within the U.S. for a few 12 months. It’s pretty straightforward: When the app first opens, it’s in scan mode. You find an object, like a poster or soda bottle, with a Blippar “B” on it. You hold your phone over the “B,” and the app works to scan the thing. (Little orange bubbles appear to let that it’s working.)
Several seconds later, a digital “B” appears in your phone’s screen. You tap that, and also you’ve unlocked the interactive display.
I scanned a bottle of Pepsi, a Heinz ketchup bottle and a Maybelline ad. Two of those had the Blippar “B” on them; the Heinz bottle didn’t, leading me to wonder how on earth someone would know to “blip” the bottle if the corporate hadn’t told them to.
Through the “lens” of my iPhone, a video of a magic trick appeared on the Pepsi bottle. The Maybelline ad let me try on digital fingernail polish in several colours, by holding my very own hand out and seeing how various colours would look on my fingernails. A digital recipe book appeared in front of the physical Heinz bottle, with the choice to download recipes.
This “B” signals that the thing could be scanned using the Blippar AR app.
About 25 percent of Blippar ads result in some form of e-commerce opportunity, in response to the corporate’s founder. I experienced this with some fashion magazines, like Harper’s Bazaar. A handbag would have a bit of “B” next to it, and, once I beamed it with my smartphone, I used to be taken to a store page on the mobile Web.
While I wouldn’t — or couldn’t — buy a $1,000 purse, I could not less than appreciate that this “B” result in an motion, moderately than simply an animated purse dancing in front of me.
Zappar and Blippar are similar in some ways: Zappar is used to scan physical objects with a bit of “Z,” which prompts an interactive experience in your phone. Zappar shows digital laser beams while it’s scanning the thing, versus the Blippar bubbles.
With Zappar, I had a tougher time getting my hands on objects that I could check out, so the corporate sent me PDFs of posters and pictures of Zappar-friendly products.
Two of the posters were for boy bands. I had never even heard of one in all them, called Blue. (Maybe I’m too old for these apps.) In either case, once I scanned these static images using Zappar, virtual heartthrobs appeared on my phone, crooning one in all their songs.
A boy band I used to be too old to acknowledge popped up on my smartphone and sang to me once I scanned this poster with the Zappar app.
I scanned a picture of a floor mat that, presumably, could be on the shelf of a home-goods store or big-box retailer. A digital bunny rabbit jumped out on my phone’s screen and encouraged me to seek out six Easter eggs across the store, which I imagine would make “running errands with mom” a fun experience for youths.
Lastly, there’s Snaps. Unlike the opposite two, Snaps doesn’t “scan” images to create the interactive experience. Instead, it provides overlays that you just slap in your photos for fun.
These may very well be generic — stars in an evening sky, or thick black mustaches — but many are also created by brands: TV shows like “The Voice,” “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy,” the brand new movies “Man of Steel” and “Despicable Me 2,” and even sports teams — the Knicks, the Red Sox — have branded overlays.
After you’ve snapped a photograph, it appears in an Instagram-like feed, and you possibly can share it to your social networks. My favorite was a “Shark Week” overlay, pegged to the Discovery Channel’s week-long programming about sharks. I snapped an image of a busy New York City street with an indignant shark emerging from the pavement.
With the Snaps app, I could put a virtual shark, or other objects, into photos I used to be capturing with my smartphone.
There are opportunities for coupons and discounts through Snaps — for instance, you might receive a two-dollar coupon if you happen to share a photograph with an AR version of a Nestle product in it. And a current Blippar campaign with pop artist Ke$ha is teasing users with a possible pair of concert tickets in the event that they “blipp” her logo or album cover.
Zappar said that in a couple of weeks it’s launching a product that may allow consumers so as to add AR tags to a mess of objects — like a greeting card, to make use of one example — in order that the user could have more control over what appears on their AR object.
But these three apps are only a small sample of the numerous AR apps on the market for mobile. Some AR tech is making its way into games, for a more immersive experience. Eventually, AR could also be used for more utility-based applications — one AR developer told me that it could, possibly, create three-dimensional projections of objects, or replace the monitor in your desk by making a computing experience on a glass plane. And Google Glass is only one example of how AR can work in technology that we wear on our bodies.
Sure, snap an image with Snaps if you would like to take a fun photo, or use Blippar to see a cool video or interactive ad. But just be forewarned that of their augmented world, it means more ads popping up in front of you — even greater than they do now.
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