With large numbers of people now owning smart phones with built in cameras, there has been a great amount of press regarding the new spate of augmented reality adverts, where one can simply point their smartphone at something, and a virtual layer can be superimposed over the real world. Today I decided to visit the world of augmented reality.


I had not stumbled across the augmented reality adverts in real life before, I had just seen them discussed in news articles etc, but while in a camera shop, I came across a number of advertising postcards for Panasonic‘s new G3 camera. The cards stated ‘To bring this card to life, download Aurasma Lite from the App Store. Point your smart phone/device at the image to access special, extra content.’

It was almost something out of Harry Potter, especially with the instructions on how to ‘bring things to life’. So naturally I took a couple of the postcards, downloaded the app for my iPhone 4, and set out to explore the augmented world.

As you can see from the video above the results are quite impressive. Panasonic and Aurasma managed to get me to spend a good few minutes setting the whole thing up, purely out of curiosity, and my awareness of the Lumix G3 has certainly increased. Unfortunately it seems that not all cutting edge technology works. I could not get the second advert to work (and did spend several minutes trying), so while they gain points for being innovative and exciting, they lose them again for sending out augmented reality adverts that do not seem to work. They managed to delight me with one advert (the one that worked), and then frustrate me with the other. I think I will contact them, just to let them know they may have sent out thousands of postcards that do not augment reality at all! Life in the real world is hard enough, there is no need to travel to the world of augmented reality to suffer frustration there too!

~ Post by Winkypedia in-house geek