Augmented Reality, Otherwise Known as Awe-Inspiring Genius
I hadn’t heard of augmented reality until recently, when my roommate mentioned it in passing. I was so intrigued by what he had to say that I immediately Googled it. What I found was the coolest thing I’ve seen since 3D movies. Check out this video:
In a nutshell, augmented reality combines real and virtual, is interactive in real time, and is registered in 3D. We’re coming closer and closer to making virtual technology actually happen and I can’t wait until it becomes even more of a norm than it already is. It may seem like an alien concept, but augmented reality is actually used far more often than you think.
For example, think of the yellow first down lines in NFL broadcasts. This is an example of augmented reality, the real world elements being the field and players, and the virtual element being the yellow line, which is drawn over the image by computers in real time.
Video games, including first-person shooters and racing games also contain examples of augmented reality, but there is so much more potential for this technology than TV and video games. Wikitude is a company that has recently developed a program where you can point your phone towards anything/anywhere (presumably in the world) and the software will recognize the location. You will be guided anywhere you’d like to go using this location as a base point. Like a GPS, you will be told your distance from your location, the information that’s available about the location, and you can even see a picture of where you want to go from a number of miles away.
There’s even one company using this application to sell real estate. Just point the phone at a building and you know how much it’s worth. This is just the beginning. It’s called augmented reality because you can literally augment your reality.
I will not rest until the day comes when I can say that I was a part of the team that created an augmented reality video game for the iPhone. I want to be able to walk in my backyard and see dinosaurs (albeit only through the screen on my phone). I want to be able to confront an alien or play darts against the wall while sitting at my desk. And the crazy thing is that this is all going to happen in the next few years because we’re lucky enough to live in a world where the technology already exists.
I don’t mean to fill up this blog with videos, but simply put augmented reality is much better shown than described. The following video is an augmented reality first person shooter where you have a physical game board and use your phone to create the virtual world (which includes zombies and helicopters). It’s ridiculous to me the intensity involved in this game, including the fact that skittles act as bombs (real life skittles, not virtual ones) and that it is sensitive to light.
Our kids are going to benefit from the automation we’re creating. They’re not going to need kites to imagine flight because they’ll be able to walk outside with their phones (or maybe ours), point them to the sky, and see the highest clouds and the farthest stars. I continue to imagine my kids spending their school days in digitized classrooms like the one Spock inhabited in the latest Star Trek movie, which scares and excited me all at the same time.
From now on we’ll be able to learn to cook through simulated reality or hop on a treadmill and pretend we’re running a marathon race. Our architects will be able to visualize their buildings in 3D without bothering with clay models. This is the way the world is going and it’s pointless to deny it.
What do you think of the future of the world?
***UPDATE*** Gap has gone back to original logo after social networks went crazy.
Last month I spent the night at my aunt’s house. She let me have the whole basement to myself, which was decked out with a huge wraparound couch, 52 inch TV, Nintendo Wii, and a brand new TiVo. All of this stuff was very cool, but she was most animated when talking about the TiVo’s new features. She went over the whole interface with me, showing me how you could search a program and every playable scenario would come up, including Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, or just regular cable.
She was very clear that it wasn’t just a regular DVR.
Ironically, that’s been TiVo’s recent ad campaign after many companies knocked off their idea of recording television onto a hard drive. I remember asking my dad to TiVo a show for me about five years ago. I said TiVo when we in fact owned a DVR. Fantastic branding.
Now, however, DVR seems to have won the war where they lost so many battles (lost in recognition, probably not financially). TiVo has dropped from the vocabularies of most people in exchange for the much cheaper version of what was, until recently, the same exact thing. Today TiVo is clunkier and more expensive, but is offering new features not available on typical DVRs.
But even this is en route to change. Google has partnered with Sony to make a brand new, easy to use, smaller and presumably cheaper device called Google TV which is sure to compete with TiVo.
TiVo’s had a tough life with it’s DVR troubles and all, but Internet TV is a whole new story. With Apple TV or Roku you can watch Hulu, Megavideo, Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes all right from your TV. This is similar to what TiVo’s new system is doing, but Tivo’s system is still not as cheap and or as convenient (it’s very bulky) as the new Internet TV.
Apple TV and Roku are great, but there is one slight issue with the search. It’s very difficult sometimes to find the program you want because you need to type in exactly what you’re looking for. The episode, the show, the date or the time. It’s a pain.
But now there’s a way around all of these issues. A new company has come up with a way to stream television right to your HDTV from the Internet. This can be done by buying a small box to plug into a TV you already have, or by simply buying a new TV with one installed. This company has partnered with Sony, Logitech, and Intel in order to build the best product possible and revolutionize the market.
Google TV (Cue the ominous music).
With Google TV you can stream any show to your TV through an extremely simple search. The hardware is small or nonexistent, and (I imagine) will be cheaper than TiVo. There’s a media center built in with your favorite channels list. You can update your status or draft fantasy players while watching the game all on the same screen.
This may sound like an advertisement for Google TV, but I like to think of it as more of an info session on something I really want. There’s no doubt in my mind that Google TV is going to take off, all they need is the right platform. Sell it cheap to college kids, who already know how to use the thing and are looking for cheaper alternatives to cable. All Google needs is to find the market and they’ll be selling out left and right. It’s similar to most other technologies, we don’t know we need it until someone tells us so.
Would you buy a Google TV?
Ogilvy’s Confessions Part 2 – The Internet
The Internet- it’s the new “in” thing. If you’re not online it’s probably because you a) don’t have fingers or b) don’t have electricity. I don’t have to tell anyone (especially if you’re reading this) what kind of impact this incredible medium has had on this planet. But what is its impact on advertising?
Obviously there’s a whole new genre of online advertising that has exploded in recent years, but, what I’m curious about is how David Ogilvy would look at the world today. How would he exploit consumerism in a digital landscape filled with new rules and rationales? How would he respond to the daily change of our time, compared to the relative constancy in his own era of snail mail and landlines?
Ogilvy was a man who had so much advertising gusto that his cohorts around the world named an ad technique after him. There’s only a handful of people that can jot that down on their resume. The “Ogilvy” is a basic format for what we’ll call standard ads, meaning anything that doesn’t need the Internet to thrive, such as posters and magazine ads. This format is very simple and looks like this:
- Visual – At the top of the page with the image flush against the background.
- Descriptive Caption – Underneath the photos.
- Headline – Under the caption in large, noticeable text.
- Ad Copy – Drop cap as a lead in will draw reader attention.
- Signature – Contact info in the bottom right hand corner.
This format has become pretty much the standard in advertising today with slight differences depending on the intended message and possible necessary add-ons.
Well – for standard ads anyways.
The big difference? Today, if you see an ad online that interests you, you’re going to click on it and be redirected to the companies website. The amount of people who actually purchase your product when they’re rerouted to your website is the population that very loosely determines your ROI. This is the number you want to raise.
Ever since the Internet boom there have been positions offered at companies whose sole purpose is to garner more website traffic and raise the ROI. It’s not even uncommon for the bigger companies to hire one person to take control of something as trivial as their Facebook accounts.
The world is a very different place than when David Ogilvy sold ads, but the ads themselves still need to exist. I would love to hear his thoughts on all of these new developments…too bad that that’s impossible.
Tell us your ideas in the comments section!
Ogilvy’s Confessions Part 1 – Gap
I just started reading David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. I thought it might shed some light on a lot of ideas that have been bouncing around my noodle recently. The thing is, it’s done nothing but increase my curiosity about the world of advertising. Instead of easing my questions into stagnation, I’ve been completely consumed by everything Ogilvy.
There are several factors that make this book so appealing to me.
- Ogilvy is the de facto father and hero of advertising.
- It’s considered extremely influential to this industry.
- Most of what Ogilvy says has proven to be correct.
- Mad Men is loosely based off of this book.
I consider myself by no means an expert on branding or advertising, but more of a constant student in the art of sales. Because I cannot possibly take everything that Ogilvy discusses and put it in one blog entry, I won’t. Instead, I’m going to begin a series of discussions about Ogilvy’s ideas from 1963 in relation to an ad campaign that is happening right now– 47 years later!
Today’s exploration- Gap’s shocking image change
The Facts:
- In 2002, Gap hired Laird & Partners to help remodel their advertising campaign.
- Laird & Partners began a “back to the roots” campaign for Gap that continues until present day.
- Gap’s online sales steadily rise from 2008 through today, despite a recession that has hit almost the entire country.
- October 2010, Gap releases a new logo to general public outrage (See below).
Long story short, Laird & Partners is doing an excellent job with Gap. Sales are up and the ad campaign they run is one of the premiere in the fashion world. For the last eight years customers have been berated with images of beautiful models wearing items from Gap with a rustic, antiquated feel to them. It creates a very homey sense when you’re in the store or online, and throwing celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, Missy Elliott, Audrey Hepburn and — most recently — Claire Danes in the spotlight doesn’t hurt either.
However, on Monday Gap released a new logo that got rid of the blue box with white text it’s so well known for and replaced it with fairly blockish black text with a progressively blue box in the upper right hand corner. Now that I’ve demonstrated my lack of design vocabulary, here are images of the old and new logo:
All you have to do is visit an article (any article) about the logo change and read the comments to realize that this stunt was an epic failure. This is where Ogilvy comes into play. In his book, he makes it a point to bring in the old adage (get it?) that if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. He said that many ad initiatives need to be garnered before they grow to their full potential, which is what Gap had accomplished with their old logo. I challenge you to show it to 100 people and find me 2 that don’t know what Gap is.
Ogilvy tells us in his book that it is the mark of a bad agency when they change something that is already working well to begin with. You do not want to jolt a client when they are sitting easy on top of a good income. Any friction is bad friction when it comes to a well oiled machine, which Gap was and will almost surely still be in the future.
However, another thing Ogilvy mentions is that it’s always good to have a backup campaign at the ready in case the account wants a change. This could very well be what Laird & Partners are up to right now, trying to rebrand Gap with a new image that fits better with modern times. It has details from the old Gap logo mixed with the new, showing the changing times ahead.
I’d love to hear your position on Ogilvy’s ideas and whether or not Gap is changing for the better or the worse here at Verbslap. Just comment below.
Top Ten Jobs of the Future
When I read this article from Popular Science I immediately thought of every science fiction movie I’ve ever seen. Space pilots, fusion engineers and fetus healers are all ridiculously cool jobs that have been made even cooler by the movies that advertise them. I couldn’t let this article make its way into the Internet’s abyss just yet, so I decided to write a small commentary on the ideas it presented me with. Here’s a list of the top ten jobs of the future:
1. Space Pilot
Job: Riding the cosmic waves
Hiring: 2020
Trend: Virgin galactic plans to launch the first commercial suborbital spaceflights by 2012 for about $200,000 a seat.
Wait, what!? Today on Sportscenter they showed a family that made a balloon travel past the earth’s atmosphere with products they found at home. That is some profit margin Richard Branson! Anyway, the pilots of these flights are not only bound to make a fortune, but will definitely gain international notoriety just like the original astronauts of the 1960’s.
2. Animal-Migration Engineer
Job: Create new habitats for critters
Hiring: 2030
Trend: This job is to account for the inevitable decline in habitats around the world. We need people to make sure non-people continue to flourish.
How terrible that this is what we have come to? People are going to be spending their days working for the protection of animals whose lives we destroyed in the first place. If only it had never gone this far. It’s a bit ironic that the only movie even close to dealing with this issue was Jurassic Park.
3. Fetus Healer
Job: Cure Health problems before birth
Hiring: 2020
Trend: Operating on a fetus, though once unimaginable, is now the wave of the future. Solve problems before they occur, just imagine.
This is a job I can deal with! Forget about curing autism and separating twins before they come out Siamese, just imagine what could be done with the gene pool. I want an athlete: done! I want a politician: done! I want a scientist: done! This is a wave the future we’re talking about my friends, just hop on board! (Oh, and I really do care about curing the problems of our unborn brethren).
4. Forecaster of Everything
Job: Analyze data to predict the future
Hiring: 2015
Trend: statistics
I’m sorry, but Disney came up with this job years ago. Imagineers have had the life for a while now. They get paid for their ideas, but hey, so do creatives!
5. Organ Designer
Job: Make organs from scratch
Hiring: 2020
Trend: Every 90 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies waiting for a transplant. With the senior population doubling by 2050, expect more internal plumbing problems.
Where have I seen this go terribly wrong, oh yeah: RepoMen. This job could be a hit or a miss. Fossil fuels were a fantastic idea a hundred years ago and now look at us. We’ve destroyed our planet, or at least we’re trying hard to. Jonathan Franzen’s new book Freedom takes on the huge issue of overpopulation. Call me crazy, but I think this new technology might lend a bit to this phenomenon. I feel bad for the ad agency that lands this account.
6. Human/Robot Interaction Specialist
Job: Help people and robots to get along.
Hiring: 2030
Trend: We need people to make sure bots can operate seamlessly in our world.
IRobot, AI, need I say more? Anyone that can prevent that kind of world from actually happening is OK in my book.
7. World Watcher
Job: See it all with satellites
Hiring: 2030
Trend: Multispectral satellites can already spot buried ancient cities and track how temperature, population and ground cover help spread disease. As imaging improves, more reverse-astronomers will look down at our own planet with something like a super-powered, time-lapse Google Earth.
I can get down with this job if it helps us find Atlantis.
8. Galactic Architect
Job: Build Cosmic Outposts
Hiring: 2025
Trend: Mining precious metals from asteroids and pit stops to the moon.
Sam Rockwell’s The Moon without being so twisted. Can someone find us Howard Roark?
9. Fusions Worker
Jobs: Manage fusion reactors
Hiring: 2025
Trend: When ITER starts up in France in 2019, it will be the first thermonuclear reactor with a chance of fusing nuclei together to yield net power. If it works (and that’s a big “if”), about five fusion plants could generate enough gigawatts to power New York City at its peak usage.
If you’re interested, just check out Wall Street Money Never Sleeps. Shiah was on point.
10. Thought Hacker
Jobs: Read Thoughts
Hiring: 2030
Last year, U.S. lawyers made the first request to introduce a “lie-detecting” functional-MRI scan as evidence.
Inception made into reality, but not as visually pleasing. This could be cool but my mind keeps on going back to Veritaserum from Harry Potter.
No matter what happens in the future, it’s sure to be crazy. Even if only half of these jobs come to light, I would be a happy man.
Are Books Finally Selling Out?
Each day it seems like someone has found a new medium to sell advertising space from, which is a beautiful thing to think about. When ad space is sold it generally means a significant amount of traffic is present to advertise towards. More advertising equates to cross-traffic which equates to spurs in business for someone, somewhere, which is one step closer to a successful economy in these troubling times.
As I was reading this short article about emerging advertising in eBooks, I got to thinking. What hasn’t advertising got their hands in nowadays? Ad Agency’s have done an incredible job convincing people where advertising should appear, which I guess is what they do best. Ads appear everywhere now: buildings, billboards, TV, the Internet, magazines, apps, movies, the Subway, and now, apparently, in books.
“I think I may need a new SD card.”
With the Kindle, Nook, iPad, and the Sony Reader becoming must-have items, eBooks are the next logical step for a heavy advertising campaign. Not only can they advertise to people for longer periods of time than Internet ads (because people spend days reading books and usually mere minutes on websites), but there seems to be an infinite market. Do you realize how many books are published each year? Even now publishers are shelling out the bucks to print more books than ever, hoping to find the next J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown and mostly coming up empty-handed.
Just as Facebook advertises directly to each of it’s users based on their perceived interests, eBooks could advertise towards their readers based on the books they purchase and browse, and they could do it ad infinitum. Though I consider myself a book purist, I’m still very intrigued by the possibilities available in this new generation of literature.
“What? Martin Luther did it!?”
There are a lot of different ways people are experimenting with eBook ads, but I don’t think any of them will take off until the bigger reading devices begin their own campaigns. Though eBooks are selling better every day, the market is still minimal compared to potential ad-space in a company like Facebook, but ads are beginning to appear in the literary world.
Google has begun displaying advertisements next to the search results on itsmassive book archive, which currently has approximately 10 million books (making it the world’s largest library). Kindle and the iPad have already begun researching ways to place ads within their eBook readers, but as of yet have not committed themselves to anything past exploration.
In the past, publishers have stayed away from advertising in books simply because it wasn’t practical. In my opinion publishers need to throw away everything they think they know and learn how to survive in the world of technology. They offer a great product, but they offer that product to a new generation that progressively neglects it because it doesn’t fit into their lives like it did their parents.
If only she knew…
Today, things are different and inserting an ad is easy and relatively cheap. No matter what happens I’ll be watching intently and trying to decide if I’m enjoying the changes being made in a stagnant industry. Have at it ad agencies!
Brooklyn Book Festival hits the streets: Part One
Brooklyn turned “Book Land” Sunday as the Brooklyn Book Festival commenced for the fifth time.
The streets were full of bright blue tents as publishers, authors, writers, readers, and all people that love all things books gathered to show off their adorations. I woke up thinking that I would be one of a few seldom guests in a gymnasium resembling some kind of career fair, but oh how wrong I was. Upon arrival, I immediately knew something was out of the ordinary. It seemed that every person who had ever holed themselves up with a book had come out for the occasion. There were lines everywhere and only the truly book savvy know how weird that is.
Burough Hall was packed. I spent two hours just perusing the sidewalks, avoiding the handbags of young hipsters, and looking in the tents. Some of the more interesting things I saw included:
1. George Jack, an unknown aspiring author, took out his own tent for the sole purpose of publicizing his one book, The Chip. Though I’m broke enough that I couldn’t spare the ten dollars, I have to say that the cover alone caught my attention.
2. I discovered One Story, a small magazine that publishes an individual short story every three weeks in a small booklet similar to a playbill. I bought two of the stories, “Muscle Memory” by Katherine Karlin and “The Husband” by T Cooper, and discovered that both of them were as good, if not better, than the fiction in The New Yorker (who to my chagrin hasn’t sent me an issue in five weeks).
3. I received a free paperback called The Wraith from, you guessed it, The Free Press. They’re a small publisher committed to bringing free books to anyone who wants to read. I give it about a year before they lose whatever funding they’ve managed to collect.
4. I read an interview from Goosebumps author R.L. Stein in the new issue of Slice Magazine. It wasn’t serialized.
5. A conversation between the winner of every literary award ever Salman Rushdie and an emerging Indian novelist Tishani Doshi – but more to come about this in the next blog.
The one thing that really put a yank on my short and curlies was that not a single one of the big publishers, or bookstores for that matter, represented themselves at the event. Out of over two hundred tents, Random House, Macmillan, Penguin, Hachette, Scholastic, Barnes and Nobles (who literally had a store a block away), Borders, or Macnally jackson couldn’t attend an event devoted to literature. When you think that 80% (probably more) of the literary world goes through one or more of those venues it seems like a slap in the face that they couldn’t send an intern or two to run a tent, give back to the community that supports them a bit. This may be why most of them are having troubles. Just a thought though, I am the one blogging here.
*It has come to my attention that Simon & Schuster had author representatives in attendance, and possibly some of the other big boys. If I’m right, shame on you- but if I’m wrong, I apologize.
Books 2
But it’s just plain filth
It amazes me what some people are capable of in a world as accessible as the one we live in. We have hundreds of thousands of our own citizens halfway across the world fighting in wars so that political organizations carved from the stone age don’t take over and give women 90 lashes for exposing their ankles, yet in some parts of the country people are still trying to ban books for the sole reason that they provide outlets for children to mould their own opinions.
The Huffington Post recently published a list of the eleven most surprising banned books, which by the way included the dictionary because it gave a definition of oral sex (who would have guessed?). Now it would be one thing if this censorship was surprising, but books have been banned for centuries for reasons just as stupid and simple as this. Anti-war novels, political propaganda and essays have all been banned for disagreeing with the status quo. The Diary of Anne Frank has been banned in some schools for showing homosexual themes and zionist empathy. You have to be kidding me that their are still people in the wold that can disdain books like this and still look at themselves in the morning.
Look through this list of the 50 most banned books in the United States and tell me that you haven’t read at least a handful of them and loved every second of it. For every one ignorant person in this world there are ten thousand that are open to new experiences, which is the point of most of these books in the first place. Each one is attempting to expand the mind of it’s reader by illustrating a certain issue of the time period. Do you think Mark Twain used the N-word so often because he was a terrible bigot? No, he used it to show how his characters would have spoken in that region and time. He wouldn’t even utter the word aloud because he though it so offensive.
In America we have the first amendment to protect us against books being banned, but so often bureaucracy ignores the laws we put in place so that they can cater to their own wishes. However, in light of some of these blatant constitutional affronts there are many glaringly ironic outcomes. For example, this website lists the prominent reasons for many books being banned, but gives links to websites where you can purchase them for the cheapest price available.
In lieu of the small portion of ridiculous people in this country, there are so many more that see things for what they are and attempt to right the wrongs through capitalism.
Long live America.
