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Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Finding Augmented Reality
Thursday, December 10th, 2009 by Nevin McElwrathAugmented reality. It’s a term that has been popping up in the multimedia field a lot lately. Call it the latest internet meme, call it the next generation of marketing, call it a fad. Whatever you call it, you can’t ignore it’s possibilities.
Simply put, Augmented Reality is technology that merges elements with a view of the physical environment, in this case through a webcam or mobile phone. In relation to interactive media, Augmented Reality is a newborn. It was born with the sudden increase in webcam usage and mobile video cameras over the past several years. With the development of FLARtoolkit, a Flash class library that helps your webcam see and recognize visual markers, developers have been using this technology more than ever. How we use this technology is the make or break point.
It has been noted that AR could be so overused and abused to the point where usability has been sacrificed. This initial “Wow” can only go so far. Marketers need to look further down the road with new utility to keep the users from forgetting about you. Some great utility examples are below.
What is in the future for Augmented Reality? I believe it’s future is bright. Given the adoption of a standardized geographical mapping data, mobile phones will be the tool of choice instead of webcams.Imagine this scenario: You are traveling abroad and would like to know what restaurants are in the area. You take out your mobile phone, type in “Restaurants”, you are presented with a list of nearby restaurants, make your selection, you look through the camera and an arrow appears on the road with directions to the nearest restaurant.
Gartner has an interesting hype timeline for Augmented Reality adoption.
Look for Augmented Reality to take off with mobile adoption. There seems to be more room for utility and innovation in that (so far) untapped realm. As usual, Force 5 will keep all eyes open to make sure we don’t miss a thing.
From Idea to (re)Invention
Friday, April 10th, 2009 by Nevin McElwrathThere are some exciting things happening here at Force 5 Media. One of which, is exciting for me, since it involves self-discovery and insight for the purpose of solely helping our clients realize their goals. There is an old saying, “In order to see where you are going, you must know where you’ve been.” This goes for not only our clients, but ourselves. We have something in common with our clients; our need and want for success. We are on a journey; the more we realize where we have been, the more focused we can become in realizing our goals.
There’s been some reinventing going on at Force 5 Media. This journey is represented in a new page inviting clients to join us on this new journey we are embarking on. Join us on our journey. This was a fun project to work on due to the wide variety of mediums involved as well as the awesome ideas that were generated by the Force 5 team. Sure, there’s been a fair share of Willie Nelson (On the Road Again), Rascal Flatts (Life is a Highway), and B.B. King (Key to the Highway) parodies. Some humorous, some unfortunate. Over all of the tears, we enjoyed the creative brainstorming and coming up with some amazing ideas. On the “tech/creative” side of this project, we played with Flash, 3D, Photoshop, PHP, and Javascript. What’s even more exciting is the direction this project is headed. Over the next few weeks, our journey page will evolve with different messages, animations and hidden treasures – eventually revealing our new destination.
Stay tuned – it’s a wide open road ahead.