Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

Press release (part of it) on the Mobilizy website:

Lonely Planet, the world’s favorite travel company, has teamed up with mobile augmented reality pioneer Mobilizy to bring a world-class mobile AR experience to their renowned travel guides. Whether you are a seasoned traveller or fledgling explorer, Lonely Planet Compass guides provide expert recommendation and useful information to help you navigate city locations.

Lonely Planet Compass guides offer a unique augmented reality experience to extend your travel adventure with useful information about your surroundings, nearby landmarks, and other points of interest by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of your Android phone.

Looking for the ultimate guidebook? One you can slip in your pocket? Lonely Planet’s Compass Guides for Android give you interactive, personalized and fully searchable mobile access to Lonely Planet’s best-selling travel content .

Currently there are 10 Lonely Planet Compass Guides enhanced with Wikitude AR available for the Android market in the US: Boston, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle and Washington D.C. More titles are coming soon.

Features of the Lonely Planet guides enhanced with augmented reality include:

• Enabled with GPS so you can see your current location and plot itineraries on dynamic maps;

• Augmented reality camera-view to visualize data overlays of Lonely Planet recommended points of interest;
• Hundreds of listings for places of interest – bars, clubs, restaurants and more – search by category, distance, or by address and
• Helpful information on the city, its history and events and more.

Visit the website for more screenshots of the application.
Good to see an application by a brand like Lonely Planet. Their books can be augmented as well to make an offline-online connection and intertwine their channels and business models.
The content was already available by Lonely Planet, thus extending this information to the mobile digital realm was a logical move which responds to the rise of Augmented Reality.

For travelers it’s a new and interactive experience to discover their travel destinations and address to the vast amount of information digitally to enhance their knowledge.
Who knows the Lonely Planet Guides will become 2.0 due to collaborative efforts by users, and what the effect will be for the product and information quality.

What is your top 3 with regard to Marketing, Internet, eCommerce etc, which we need to look out for next year, or where you think emphasis will be put on?

My personal top 3 is:

* Mobile marketing/applications (Social & Augmented Reality)
* Social TV, with a focus on concepts to further develop convergence of the TV, Mobile and Computer screen (“whatever screen works”)
* Further diffusion and software development for social media purposes

Do discuss in Google Wave as well, below.

Google wouldn’t be Google if it wouldn’t search for opportunities within the mobile realm, which already it was in with Android and the acquisition of AdMob.
Their ‘Augmented Reality’ solution is called Visual Mobile Search (VMS) which was revealed at CNBC’s “Inside the Mind of Google” on 3 December.

Google Product Manager Hartmut Neven said:

“Imagine you’re a tourist and you arrive at this place and you would like to know more about it, all you will have to do is take a shot of the [Santa Monica pier] sign and you see we recognized this as the Santa Monica pier”

With the Visual Mobile Search service you’ll be able to take a picture with your smartphone and the technology will use visual recognition engines to understand what the object(s) is/are and return search results.
In relation to the example of the Santa Monica pier you can think of search results which return you pure informational content or commercial content, be it from dining to sales to public transport and so on.
VMS is a great opportunity for industries like Travel, Retail, Real Estate and more which are location focused, a new wave of Location Based Services will be created based upon location-centric searches.

From Google’s point of perspective, a new stream of local ad revenue arises which is relevant to both parties: the user searches for that specific object and thus of better quality for the companies who wish to be visible or to advertise on that specific object.
Google has the advantage of its immense database to return results, which gives them a headstart over other companies who develop or wish to develop this sort of Augmented Reality applications.

Eager to see where this is heading to, what about you?

The application Twitter 360 makes quickly use of the geotagging ability offered by the Twitter Geotagging API, which was released officially on the 19th of November.
If you want to enable the Geotagging setting for your tweets, you need to go to Settings and click Enable Geotagging.

Below you can view the video which will show the application Twitter 360:

Twitter 360 is an application which basically visualize and locate your Twitter friends by making use of GPS data through the iPhone camera.

The cool features of Twitter 360 can be summarized as following (visit the website of Twitter 360 to read indepth what the features are and the possibility to download the application) :
- Twitter 360 annotates your tweets with GPS location information.
- “Latest Tweets” mode. See the latest tweets of your friends (iPhone horizontal position), and the location from where they were posted (iPhone vertical position) using the Augmented Reality functionality.
- Touch the Star to add your best Twitter friends in your favourites.
- “Locate my Friends” mode. List of all your best friends. Twitter 360 lets you track geographic movements of your friends, you can now see where are located your nearby friends via Augmented Reality.
- When you launch Twitter 350, a small bird will localize your exact position and update the “location” field data on your Twitter account with the coordinates, only if you want.
- The application is fully compatible with Google Map.
- Switch off the geolocalization option in the setting to be in “invisible” mode.

I do wonder how useful this is on the long run, of course it’s a fun new way to experience Twitter, but ge0tagged tweets as deployed in Twitter 360 is only the first step and hopefully useful Location Based Services will be developed which will combine real-time and location into new tools which will enrich the mobile social experience.

Interesting vision and good to see an event is organized in an unconference style:

Taken from the AR DevCamp site, check de website for signing up and additional information:
The first Augmented Reality Development Camp (AR DevCamp) will be held in the SF Bay Area December 5, 2009.

After nearly 20 years in the research labs, Augmented Reality is taking shape as one of the next major waves of Internet innovation, overlaying and infusing the physical world with digital media, information and experiences. We believe AR must be fundamentally open, interoperable, extensible, and accessible to all, so that it can create the kinds of opportunities for expressiveness, communication, business and social good that we enjoy on the web and Internet today. As one step toward this goal of an Open AR web, we are organizing AR DevCamp 1.0, a full day of technical sessions and hacking opportunities in an open format, unconference style.

AR DevCamp: a gathering of the mobile AR, 3D graphics and geospatial web tribes; an unconference.
Among other topics, we’ll discuss are implications of how the various layers of an open augmented reality stack will fit together to support the following straw man requirements:

• support for both fundamental kinds of AR requiring semantic frameworks be harmonized: 1. Image Triggered and 2. Location Based. support for many image trigger types, and many coordinate systems.
• a description of what happens on the focal plane of the view, including user interface conventions, and rendering rules.
• a description of the properties of a specific object or place, including data type, decoding and rendering requirements and resources
• support for local media types produced by many applications domains including 2D Web, 3D web, web maps, GIS, CAD, BIM, 3D game and virtual worlds
• support for local rendering rules and coordinate systems for specific places and objects e.g. html, CAD objects and spaces, video, rendered graphics game objects, etc.
• harmonization and interoperable semantic framework with adjacent semantic domains within overlapping computing and media domains, e.g. web, CAD, mapping, games, virtual worlds, etc.
• support for secure transactions and data exchange
• support for sensors and sensor networks
• social network interoperability, managing groups, permissions, and privacy
• messaging, communication, and collaboration

Too many standards is disastrous for the adaption and extensibility, an Open AR Web can be the solution so that indeed, creation of business opportunities and social good can be enjoyed and deployed.
What do you think of their vision, an open all accessible Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality 3.0 is a blog developed by Sean Lee, which created the conceptual framework AR3.0

Watch the video and read up the framework below:

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Next week the new Eligo platform by Seac02 will be released, and I definately am looking forward to it.

Eligo provides a painless Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technology in order to keep and stay focused on your vertical business instead of the underlying enabling technology. Eligo runs on Seac02′s own technology LinceoVR.
In a few clicks you’ll be able to develop custom Virtual and Augmented Reality vertical solutions: from web viral marketing, to stand-alone applications and from e-commerce to mobile applications.

Some of the interesting features of Eligo are the following:
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Junaio, the 3D Mobile Augmented Reality platform by Metaio will be launched next week!
Eager to see its capabilities by my own, for now check out their video:

As a user you will be able to augment your world around you with 3D objects. When altered reality the way you desire you can share this information with your friends across social networks, these sort of technologies will ensure that Augmented Reality will be adopted by more and more users.
It’s a playful way to get acquainted with the technology and its possibilities. Aside the 3D capabilities, junaio also offers the ‘standard’ Augmented Reality browsing tools to scan and learn your surroundings.

Will junaio be real competition to Layar’s 3D platform? I do hope so, competition is good for creativeness, let’s see what both companies will bring forth in the near future.

More news during the coming week when junaio will be launched!

I came across this announcement by Esquire, november the 9th they will be featuring an Augmented Reality page which can be viewed by webcam.

The announcement and the frontcover:

It’s good to see that Esquire, GE and others are experimenting with the AR technology in order to bridge offline and online content, in order to create cross-channel campaigns which will trigger people to consume both offline print and online -complementary- content which put together creates an integral package of information.

Cross-channeling through QR codes happens already extensively in Asia, where people can access information with a QR code which is being displayed on billboards, print media, cards and so on.

Not only is Augmented Reality ‘science fictional’ and innovative, it can also attract people to stay longer and explore other content on a particular website, where offline/print-media was the initiator of the act.
As long as Augmented Reality is not mass adopted, companies should experiment with (mobile) Augmented Reality and QR codes and learn how they can benefit in the long run from it, when it’s widely used, the short term advantages would be that a company will be perceived as creative and willing to entertain their customer base in a different way.
More and more Augmented Reality platforms are being developed which means in time prices will decrease, when Augmented Reality could be relevant to your business, start you research today.

What other applications do you see for Augmented Reality in relation to print media?

That is the clear way ABI Research announces its press release on her Augmented Reality research.
Interesting to read the predictions and have confirmation from a company such as ABI Research which forecasts emerging trends in global connectivity.

Besides the growth of Augmented Reality, attention must be given to the cause of this: smartphones.
Again the mobile device has influence and an important role on how a technology can go mainstream very fast, before the adoption of smartphones (in particular iPhone and Android-enabled mobiles) the awareness on Augmented Reality technology was limited. The technology does exist already for 15 years.
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