Augmented Reality [AR] – Tagging the World

I’m sure we’re all familiar with tagging photos. Through the likes of Facebook and Flickr, it’s become something that even the techno-neophyte can master in a matter of seconds. User-generated tagging has become critical to the growth and systematic categorization of the massive amount of content that now makes up our digital world. And crowd sourced tagging goes well beyond social media channels – it’s critical to organizing our entire digital world – from movies to music to shopping to research – keywords have become core to finding the proverbial digital needle in the haystack.

So what does tagging have to do with Augmented Reality or AR? And what the heck is Augmented Reality and why should we care? Both are good questions. Let’s start with the last one first.

If you ever watch sports, you’ve probably seen examples of AR. The yellow "first down" line seen in television broadcasts of American football games shows the line the offensive team must cross to receive a first down. The real-world elements are the football field and players, and the virtual element is the yellow line, which augments the image in real time. For those who aren’t Canadian and trained to follow a tiny black puck on the glaring white surface of the ice in ice hockey, an AR colored trail shows the location and direction of the puck. Similarly, some sports are able to augment broadcasts with digital signage along the playing field, optimizing advertising and sponsorship dollars in the process. So, the digital projection of imagery and information augments what is going on in real-time.

Now the first question – what does tagging have to do with AR? Well if AR leader Layar has anything to say about it – it’s going to change the game in how we access information about the world around us. Layar’s real-world object recognition system leverages the native imaging and GPS functionality of Smart Phones and enables correlated tagging of just about anything. A rather rudimentary example on their website showcases an image of your local city, with the augmented reality component being the weather for that location. So what, right?

Well that might be a rather cursory example of what this technology can do, but think about once it hits critical mass. And we all know how fast that can happen. Once an AR standard ‘brand’ is developed, the ubiquity will grow exponentially. No doubt AR needs that ‘brand’ and icon like the @ sign in email - maybe a combination of that with a stylized ‘r’ that comes to signify an object is tagged. Currently QR codes are coming to be recognized as just that – but they require the code to be generated, there are multiple formats of codes out there, and one needs somewhere to stick the code, like a poster, sticker or other printable surface.

The thing about AR is that once it hits critical mass, and tags in our real-world become part of our everyday reality, there won’t be a need for such designation – cityscapes, tourist areas, shopping malls, hiking trails, posters, ads, lampposts, cars, buildings, t-shirts, landmarks – the world around us – everything becomes interactive. No more scanning codes, typing in URLs, searching via Google or pecking away on our tiny keyboards, our devices recognize the world around us and have a host of crowd-sourced information available to us if we so choose.  

To me, this seems like a scene from Terminator, where our lovable California Governor, as the Terminator himself, had a constant stream of data about the word he was seeing through his robotic vision. AR Glasses? Why not? It’s not far off. And with crowd-sourced tagging, the critical mass comes about with lightning speed, since production becomes unlimited – look at Wikipedia and its exponential acceleration as the definitive source of information about just about anything, for example.

What do you think about Augmented Reality? Are we going too far? Or it this just a natural point of progression in human evolution – augmenting our knowledge and our intelligence about the world around us through systems of our own human invention?

Interesting times…

For more on Layar, please visit: www.layar.com

Guy Borgford, VP Strategy FGI

FGI is a Seattle Interactive Agency - we help brands stay on top of the rapidly-changing interactive world.