It turns out when you start dealing with AR and VR and all the requests for one or the other, you are quickly pulled down a rabbit hole that would leave Alice bewildered.
As you may know, we have done a lot of web apps involving Google Earth and when Google decided to walk away from Google Earth, we were first concerned and then moved most of our clients over to Google Maps and finally with the partnership?of a crafty client, we developed a replacement.
(I am getting to the VR part) The new environment is easier to manage than Google Earth and since our client loves to work in/on the paradigm of scripting languages, we have been making break neck progress.
In this new environment, we provide the X, Y, Z, R, Y, P, Xn, Yn, Zn and we get to define the position, zoom, roll, yaw and pitch and we can place anything in to the environment.? None of this is newsworthy of course. But (here comes my favorite part), it turns out that in our attempt to make the admin of our ARTdynamix™ CMS easy to use and yet versatile as all get out, we have created a really nice WCM for the VR folks.
We had already been using ARTdynamix™? for augmented reality to talk to various beacons and to provide specific content based on positioning or geo-fencing. We have also been overlaying video, audio, and images on top of triggers of all kind.? (All of this occurs through use of web services and handshakes with various applications )
Here is the newsworthy part:? Imagine any 3D environment that has basic content translation built-in (in this case our client’s amazing work) then you can utilize the admin interface of ARTdynamix™? to enter the time, location, stage size, avatarID (audio, video, construct – still or animated, text …), orientation and zoom.? You can import the sequence from an excel spreadsheet and be on your way to demonstrating a civil war battle on your App/Site with correct date and event sequence and have the content pop up on the side of the screen to support the visual of the story.? The possibilities are difficult to enumerate – but just imagine.
If you want this tomorrow, it is not quite done yet but next week probably. I am happy to say that our good friend and client Ken J. is at the leading edge of VR content development and we are blazing new trails on this bumpy road to VR Nirvana. (But much of this is ready to roll now and already in use.)
P.S.? Between the time I wrote this and tried to post it, I had a very exciting conversation with an amazing engineer that is developing compression algorithms for 3D environments that are really phenomenal so the gap time — and thus the associated sense of nausea — would nearly disappear.? (so maybe VR will mature before 2023 — but that is a conversation for another time, location, stage size and construct. ?
Augment those angry birds
Yeah, yeah … it is not that the new Angry Bird’s movie comes from a game that is compelling about the story. All of that is well known fact.
What is interesting about the Angry Bird movie release is the fact that the marketing of the movie involves augmented reality.
In order to build a buzz around the opening of the movie, Rovio ? the makers of the game ? created a big AR promotional campaign to grab the hearts of the players, and attract new audiences to both the game and the movie.
The campaign introduced the brand new game ? Angry Birds Action! ? in which the famous little birds are main characters of a puzzle set in a top-down 3D world. Next, they introduced a series of QR codes that were added to the movie?s official merchandising, cross promotional campaigns and credits. In order to activate additional features, you will need to scan the code.
The codes have been cross promoted by brands ranging from McDonald?s to Lego.? Once the code has been scanned, then you get to enjoy exclusive content, and activate new features in the game.
Every cross promotion has its own special branded mini-game and to play all the games, it will be necessary to scan the code for every cross promotion which incentivizes the fans to visit the promoter?s location and make a purchase in order to get their hands on new games.
This is a quite sophisticated promotional technique, which for the first time is taking advantage on the wider reaches of AR.? The campaign was made possible by Zapper for Rovio.? A job well done!?If you want to add Augmented Reality to your project, just give us a call. (We already have some great applications in the works that I’ll be telling you more about soon.)
Happy Bird Out.
