Future Rock Band - another example of evolving Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality seems to be moving further and further away from symbols on bits of paper and webcams. Real life applications are making Augmented Reality more interesting, enabling every day items to have additional digital layers attached to them.

Here is a nice example, imagining how interactive music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero could look in the future - effectively digital guides overlaid onto real world instruments:

This execution is clearly based on gaming, but it's not much of a leap to imagine how this could apply in other areas too. AR gets more interesting by the day!

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Roger Federer Gillette Trick Shot - real or fake?

How do you generate Earned Media around a celebrity photoshoot?

If the celebrity in question is Roger Federer, you get him to do a trick shot, film it and distribute it on YouTube..........

The comments have already started filling up with 'is it real?' debate. For example, one user posting: 'It's amazing, I've gone from thinking it's fake, to thinking it might be real, to thinking it's 100% real.'

So is it or isn't it?!

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The real world 'Like' - Coca-Cola village and Facebook

This summer Publicis E-dologic worked with the Coca-Cola village in Israel to produce a real world version of the Facebook Like.

Visitors were given an RFID wristband and exhibits inside the Coca-Cola village were equipped with RFID receivers - if these were touched with a wristband a 'Like' would be displayed on the wearers Facebook profile.

Coca-Cola Village Israel - Real World Like

Furthermore, if photographed by one of the official photographers, the RFID technology would automatically tag everyone in the photo and upload it to the relevant Facebook profiles.

This real world Liking resulted in up to 35,000 posts per cycle, even though the village only holds a maximum of 650 each time - so on average each visitor was posting 54 pieces of Coke branded content to their Facebook profile for their friends to see!

Is the 'real world Like' about to become the new 'Check In'?

[disclaimer - I work at a Publicis Groupe agency, but was not involved in the execution of this campaign]

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The Expendables exploding YouTube channel!

Sylvester Stallone and the rest of the Expendables hit US theatres today - and they have an exploding YouTube channel!

The Expendables exploding YouTube channel

The Expendables YouTube execution is reminiscent of the Nintendo Wario Land YouTube page from a couple of years back, but the Expendables page makes it very easy to share the link - Sly even reminding visitors to do so at the end!

See for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/expendables

Nice example of Owned driving Earned. Furthermore, the Twitter share button posts a tweet with the link, but also includes the hashtag #dont4get2share - easily trackable through Twitter Search. Whilst the use of a bit.ly link enables clicks to be tracked and bit.ly are currently showing that the link has so far been clicked 35,576 times across all the channels it has been distributed on.

Clever stuff!

....and a big hat tip to Nicola for pointing it out :-)

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Brian Blessed SatNav - TomTom new voice thanks to Facebook campaign!

TomTom have recently been adding options for TomTom SatNav users to have celebrity voices directing them - the Simpsons, Mr.T and even Star Wars characters like Darth Vader giving directions. A group of British fans weren't content with this though and launched a Facebook Group called 'Campaign to get Brian Blessed to do a voiceover for my sat nav.'

Brian Blessed is the legendary, loud, shouty thespian who has appeared in, amongst other things, Flash Gordon. Group contributors wanted well known Brian Blessed catchphrases to be adapted to suit the SatNav concept, 'Drive, Hawkmen, Drive', 'Gordon's arrived' and so on.

The campaign appears to have started off slowly in the second half of 2007, picking up interest via the occasional radio plug and then started to build up momentum earlier this year after the B3TA board got involved (not the first time we've seen their power!) Blessed himself embraced the idea and in May even helped make a (low budget) mock up film to show what a good idea a Brian Blessed Sat Nav would be (cameo appearance at the end):

The Brian Blessed SatNav Group continued to gain members and TomTom were Listening. They told the group's founders that if they hit 25,000 members then the Brian Blessed Sat Nav would become a reality. After reaching the 25,000 member target, TomTom have made it happen and as you can see Brian Blessed is quite excited!

A nice example of social media users providing ideas for product (there are a lot of suggestions on the wall of the Group), and then having them embraced, first by the actor in question and then by the company who had the power to make it a reality.

Well done Group founders, well done Brian Blessed and well done TomTom!

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FourSquare - 28% growth in the last month and now 6.5 times larger than GoWalla

The number of FourSquare users has increased significantly in the last month, showing an increase of 28.5% in the number of FourSquare users according to RJ Metrics.

RJ Metrics graph showing number of FourSquare users over the last month

- Total number of FourSquare users: 2,540,800

- Daily increase in number of FourSquare users in last month: 15,188 on 8th July (low), 29,189 on 13th July (high)

- Total number of FourSquare venues (estimated): 6,100,000

The same RJ Metrics data set also shows rival location based service GoWalla's total number of users increasing - but at a slower rate of 13.8% growth.

RJ Metrics graph showing number of GoWalla users over the last month

- Total number of GoWalla users: 390,800

- Daily increase in number of GoWalla users in last month: 1,244 on 21st July (low), 2,104 on 23rd July (high)

- Total number of GoWalla venues (estimated): 1,566,900

RJ Metrics data is produced using a large random sample drawn from the FourSquare and GoWalla APIs. They explain their full methodology in a post on TechCrunch last month here and give some other statistics too.

FourSquare is winning the battle against GoWalla, but, even with 28.5% growth, a user base of 2.5m is still small compared to Facebook's 500m! However, the combination of mobile+GPS+social networking is proving popular with users. A number of other players are also springing up in this space (we reviewed a range of them in our ZenithOptimedia Moxie trends video in May) and 'Location' is going to continue to be a key feature in the evolution of mobile.

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JC Penney Augmented Reality 'virtual dressing room' with built in e-commerce and Facebook sharing too!

JC Penney have partnered with Hearst's Seventeen.com to produce a very cool Augmented Reality 'virtual dressing room!'

The 'virtual dressing room' uses Augmented Reality technology from Metaio, but now shoppers do not need to print out a symbol on a piece of paper or upload a still image - the fitting of the clothing happens automatically and within the live-video stream. Motion capture technology then enables the user to scroll through the JC Penney catalogue and try on different outfits simply by pointing at the screen.

Once a user has found something they like, the virtual dressing room application can be used to share a photo on email / Facebook or go directly to the relevant e-commerce page on the JC Penney website.

Here's a video to show how the virtual dressing room works:

JC Penney / Seventeen.com Augmented Reality virtual dressing room demo

Try the virtual dressing room for yourself at seventeen.com.

There was a lot of hype around AR last year and it then seemed to die down, but markerless AR is way better than the previous efforts that involved printing out strange symbols - and the ability to link directly to an e-commerce page means the hype around AR may be just about to kick in again!

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