Augmented Reality—Just a Flash in the Pan for Ad Agencies?

Image cour­tesy Nigel Parry

AR some­times even leaves Robert Downey Jr. going in dif­fer­ent directions.

Flash in the pan? Well, prob­a­bly not, although AR as advertising’s fla­vor du jour was just one of the thoughts tossed from pan­elists at the Sobel­Me­dia event held today at the Time Warner Sam­sung expe­ri­ence Cen­ter. (I dis­cussed it in an ear­lier post­ing ear­lier here.)

Actu­ally, it seems AR will be one of the new media mon­ey­mak­ers of 2010 since the tech­nol­ogy builds off the pro­lif­er­a­tion of faster, higher screen rez smart phones. Mean­while, you’ll start to see attempts by print media to rein­vent itself with the new, sexy tech, such as Esquire magazine’s Robert Downey’d Decem­ber issue, which was pre­sented in a lit­tle depth at the event by Esquire’s Cre­ative Direc­tor David Curcurcito.

For a quick, frothy wrap up of the event turn to Kelly Samardak’s post­ing here.

Maybe the cof­fee wore off, but Kelly doesn’t men­tion the one app noted by a pan­elist that just might be imme­di­ately use­ful for any­one in the indus­try who still has to ship video­cas­settes around: none other than the good old USPS offers an AR app that–as long as you have a Webcam–will show you what size box you need to ship that pile on your desk. Click here to see more on that.

With the many ad agen­cies head­quar­tered in New York, expect to see any num­ber of shows, pan­els, and other events dur­ing the year tout­ing this or that approach as the most exploitable angle of the technology.

While there doesn’t seem much of an imme­di­ate play for video cre­ators in AR, the Esquire venture–the first by a major magazine–shows how mov­ing images might still play a part.

And if you’d like use­ful, ongo­ing infor­ma­tion about AR, check out this blog from Tish Shute, founder of Ugo­trade. I spoke with Tish at the event and was impressed by her enthu­si­asm, writ­ing chops, and var­ied back­ground, which includes anthro­pol­ogy and motion con­trol for film production.

Want to see what every­one else in the world is doing with AR in one spot? She spots June’s ARE2010 con­fer­ence in Santa Clara as the one not to miss. It’s the first global con­fer­ence ded­i­cated to “advanc­ing the busi­ness” of aug­mented reality.

If you’d like to meet with other New York­ers try­ing to fig­ure out AR on an ongo­ing basis, you might want to check out ARNY (Aug­mented Real­ity New York), which hosts monthly meet­ings.

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