Augmented Reality | KZERO

Following on from our first post tracking brands using AR, this is an on-going presentation we’ll update each month. We’ve got 2009 pretty much covered and activity is now broken down by major sector, with the Automobile, Apparel, Media/Entertainment and Food/Drink categories broken-out specifically. Here’s the presentation.

Augmented Reality Brand Tracking

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AR + VW = Latest Adidas campaign

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

As our augmented reality brand tracking shows, Adidas has been an early adoper of marker-based initiatives. There first foray into this field was early 2008 with a simple shoe rendering app, shown below (bottom of the article). This was followed-up with their ‘Every team needs a spark’ campaign earlier this year (video also below).

adidas-augmented-reality This time around they’ve juiced up the creativity a little and laid out a virtual world, activated by a marker on the sneaker tongues of a new line of shoes launched this February.

From Wired:

“The foundation of augmented reality lies in adding a layer to the real world,” says Chris Barbour, head of digital marketing for Adidas Originals. “That’s what we have done. We have taken a real world item and added a fantastic virtual world on top of that”

All users have to do is go to the Adidas site and hold up their sneaker, which has a code embedded in its tongue, in front of their computer webcam. A virtual world then pops out in front of them and they can navigate it using their sneaker as a controller.

“We are not trying to mimic a real-world look, we have a more stylized, pop-up book creative approach,” says Barbour. “The neighborhood is displayed on a two dimensional computer screen, but you can use your shoe to control the angle and depth of view and zoom in and out, giving a 3-D sense of perspective.” (more…)

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Automobiles and Augmented Reality. Too fast too curious?

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Car makers have led the way in terms of adopting new marketing channels. First came virtual worlds (with both official and unofficial cars mainly in Second Life) and now it’s the turn of augmented reality and some have been doing it for a little while. Here’s a video round-up to complement the Brand Tracking.

(more…)

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Tracking brands in Augmented Reality

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Back in the day (well, 2007), we used to track brands entering Second Life (and a few other worlds) on a timeline basis vs the SL registered user base. You can see some few, for the Retail, Technology, Media, Automobile and Tourism sectors.

Since those ‘heady days’ we’ve seen companies shift over to a wide range of other virtual worlds and we now track VW brand marketing in this presentation. Continuing this theme, we’ve just released a similar chart, this time monitoring brands dipping their toes into augmented reality. Efforts to date are obviously all marker-based.

And, whilst those in the know are all waiting for markerless AR, it’s interesting to see how brands (and their agencies) attempt to place their products and services into this new platform. Comparing these efforts to the largely ineffective campaigns in Second Life highlights a key creative difference. The vast majority of brand efforts in SL made the key mistake of attempting to think spatially (because it’s inside a virtual w0rld) rather than concentrate on values (both brand and product). This resulted in over 150 brands thinking they had to have a company HQ – a building built.

Even given the limitations of marker-based AR, it’s encouraging to see a little more creativity being used in these early marketing attempts. The graph below shows when brands first launched their campaigns, compared against a Google Trends line for the search term ‘Augmented Reality‘.

Automobile brands once again (as they did with SL marketing) appear to be leading the pack in terms of adopting AR into their marketing arsenals, followed by media/entertainment companies and then food and drink.

This last category always struggled with virtual world marketing – not surprisingly because they are two things avatars do not need, in a basic sense.

As we move into 2010, expect the buzz around AR (and the search volumes) to grow rapidly, with brands not far behind. We’ll be breaking this chart out by sector in the new year.

KZero services:

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