Aston’s Pecha Kucha AR slides are situated along the famous Avenyn street in Gothenburg, Sweden.

If you’re not familiar with Pecha Kucha, it’s a kind of show-and-tell for grownups that began in Tokyo circa 2003 that facilitates learning and networking among creative types.

The phrase “Pecha Kucha” comes from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat,” which captures the event’s informal, fast-paced agenda in which speakers from various disciplines within the creative field (from architecture to graphic design to performance art) present 20 slides for 20 seconds each on a topic they feel passionate about.

Artist turned mobile developer Paul Aston (a Brit living in Sweden) created a Pecha Kucha layer in order to better illustrate his presentation on Augmented Reality at Pecha Kucha Gothenburg. The presentation layer displays Aston’s 20 slides floating along the side of the road, each with a corresponding 20-second audio file launched from within the layer. It begins with an introduction to Augmented Reality, then progresses into numerous examples and use cases, as well as his own inspiration (The book Spook Country by William Gibson), then ends with a confident prediction for the future of AR and a call-to-action for the listener to get involved.

The giant squid that inspired Aston to get into AR.

Encouraging non-developers to get into AR makes a lot of sense for Aston, considering his own recent transition from “non-techie” to Layar developer. Aston began by using the layer creation tool Hoppala, then immersed himself in tutorials until he felt more confident in his development skills.

The folks behind Pecha Kucha liked Aston’s presentation method so much that they asked to him to create a similar layer in the same location to explain Pecha Kucha to newcomers.

Currently the only way to view Aston’s presentation is from Gothenburg, but we’re twisting his arm to make it visible internationally!

Aston recently accepted our invitation to join the Layar Partner Network as a Pioneer and plans to create more awesome AR content for clients with his company Different Signal; you can contact him at paul@differentsignal.com for business inquiries.