This weekend, a group of adventurers in London will take part in AdventureRace.London, a multi-team scavenger hunt contest to benefit charity. But this hunt will be much more unique than any other, as contestants will need to unlock some clues with the help of the Layar App and augmented reality.
London-based design and communications agency Magnetic London, a member of the Layar Partner Network, has seen a recent flurry of activity with Augmented Reality. The agency has helped numerous companies from various parts of the world discover how Layar can help bring print and digital together, so here’s an overview of some of their most recent projects.
Khan Academy Turkce
Working together with STFA Holding, one of the largest Turkish conglomerates, and its corporate social responsibility project Khan Academy Turkce, Magnetic London created the first book cover with AR in Turkey. Together they added interactive AR content to the recently published Turkish translation of Salman Khan’s education reform manifesto, “The One World Schoolhouse.”
Scanning the cover with the Layar App reveals videos about the academy in Turkish, as well as links to the Khan Academy Turkce website and social media pages. Magnetic London designed custom calls-to-action which were printed on the inside jacket flaps of the book.
“Readers who downloaded the app and scanned the cover were impressed with how easy it was to use the app,” said Kaan Aydogmus, Creative Director of Magnetic London. “They said such an innovative technology fits very well with this book of Salman Khan. Readers were excited about the AR technology and curious about how it could be used in other areas.”
New Economics Foundation
Magnetic London also recently worked with the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the UK’s leading think tank for promoting social, economic and environmental justice. Together they produced interactive Community Currencies in Action flyers to excite policy makers and academics about local currencies with Augmented Reality.
“The interactive element serves as a great talking point to start up conversations with people we want to collaborate with,” the NEF said. “We are glad we used AR. It takes some explaining to get people to download the app, but this can serve as a useful way to get people to really look at the flyer.”
British Tech Summit
The agency also recently attended the one-day British Tech Summit in Istanbul, which convenes high profile British and Turkish technology and telecom businesses. Magnetic London had it’s own stand at the event to showcase its business, and even Blippar founder and CEO Ambarish Mitra showed up to say hello!
“People were queueing in front of our augmented exhibition stands to experience this technology with our Discover London in 360 campaign,” said Aydogmus. “We had three panoramic photo spheres of Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and St.Paul’s Cathedral. People who scanned our stands were taken into these spheres where they had to move and turn around themselves with their phones in the air to look up and down to discover those places. We had the most attention at the event.”
BakuTel
Magnetic London even made a trip to Baku, Azerbaijan to participate in the BakuTel exhibition, one of the largest design, technology and telecommunications expos in the region. The agency was excited to show off Layar’s Augmented Reality technology to many of the event’s high-profile attendees, and even made the evening news.
“We had a chance to present all of our design services including Augmented Reality to the President of Azerbaijan, Mr. Ilham Aliyev, to the British Ambassador Mr. Irfan Siddiq, and the UK’s Trade Envoy Mr. Charles Hendry,” said Aydogmus. “The president experienced Augmented Reality himself, and he was amazed with it.”
AR in Travel and Hospitality
And finally, similar to our own series of webinars and overview documents, Magnetic London has been creating animated slideshow videos detailing the benefits of Augmented Reality for specific industries. The latest animation is about the Travel and Hospitality Business, we’ve embedded it below!
One of our favorite use cases for Augmented Reality is artistic expression and the ability to make digital statements on top of places and things in the real world.
Gilt City is artist John Goto’s response to the ongoing global financial crisis expressed in Augmented Reality around London’s Bank of England.
In his latest collaboration with developer Matthew Leach, Goto uses montaging techniques to show “marginal characters isolated in the bustling commercial centre” to draw attention to the widening income gap between the rich and poor.
If you launch the Gilt City layer near the statue of Wellington outside the Bank of England, you’ll see a motley cast of characters including a banker, a naked man, a bullfighter, a drug dealer and several other men of varying occupations asking for money.
As the user, you decide who to give money to and who to zap! If you choose to give money to the person, the black-and-white figure regains its color. If you choose to zap the person, the figure explodes, never to pander to you again (well, until you relaunch the layer, anyway).
Our friends at BERG London have just launched SVK, a special limited-run graphic novella (yes, a comic book) penned by the redoubtable Warren Ellis and illustrated by the equally formidable artist Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker.
“First and foremost SVK is a modern detective story, one that Ellis describes as ‘Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity’. It’s a story about cities, technology and surveillance, mixed with human themes of the power, corruption and lies that lurk in the data-smog of our near-future.”
Through its protagonist Thomas Woodwind, SVK weaves a tale of two realities — the black-and-white, here-and-now surface of the world, and the unspoken thoughts that exist in the ur-space between the story’s characters. The interplay of direct perception and intraception are cleverly exposed through the book’s use of a special UV printing ink that only becomes visible under ultraviolet light, for which BERG have supplied a small UV torch. In SVK, there’s the world apparent to the naked eye, and then there’s the unseen layer of meaning all around, waiting to be discovered by the well-prepared reader.
Which is where we come in: Layar has sponsored it’s first ever print ad in the pages of SVK! Given the themes of cities, technology and hidden layers of reality, and the chance to work closely on creative with the amazing BERG team, it was a natural fit. And of course, the ad itself consists of multiple layers of reality…so order your copy of SVK, fire up your UV-spectrum Special Viewing Kit, and trawl through the corruption and lies to discover the Secret Visual Knowledge within.
Augmented reality is gaining popularity in the corporate promotion and advertising space, and Layar is a common solution for many companies. One such example which just launched this week is that of Enel, Italy’s largest energy provider, and the second largest in all of Europe.
The company’s vision for 2011 is to inspire “a future built on sustainable well-being” - a dream they say has persisted throughout the years. A TV ad shows a boy in the past tossing a paper airplane into the air and through time as it eventually lands at the feet of a boy in present day.
To help with the campaign, Enel is enhancing their billboard advertisements in airports across Europe with an augmented reality experience built on Layar. The billboards feature a marker which encourages viewers to download Layar and launch the Enel layer for additional information.
You can see the same paper airplane from the ads floating around you, and can click it to watch the video on your phone. Other 3D models include videos and information about electric vehicles and the smart grid.
You can view some of the videos at Enel’s website, and the billboard ads can be found in airports in London, Pairs, Madrid, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Brussels, Bucharest and Moscow.
On your mobile device? Click here to launch the Enel layer now!
