I have been researching a lot lately on Augmented Reality and how it is really helping out on social media campaigns for different brands around the world. The latest one in Malaysia that I can actually think of is for the Nissan Car brand where it allows you to see information about the different cars they have, change the colors of the car, tilt it anyway you want and so forth. But the most important way of them engaging the users out there is by letting them choose which car they want to use in order to go around a few obstacles ( as in a game app ).
This is not such a great creative campaign if you would ask me in regards to using Augmented Reality in a social media campaign style. There are multiple other ways which Augmented Reality could be used. I loved the Volkswagen campaign launched overseas using Augmented Reality. This social media campaign was in a style that created billboards all around the town. each and every billboard in that area was having the Volkswagen campaign. All you had to do was use your Smart Phone or like me I used my iPad and I could see the advertisements coming to life. The Volkswagen cars were driven around a course that were interlinking a few of the billboards.
Well Augmented Reality or AR for short is going much further than that now. Every boys dream gadget has come from movies of a time way back. Be it Terminator, Back to the Future or any other movies that had some cool gadgets in them. Not knowingly most of this gadgets those days were not even feasible to be done. Now it is here and still we are looking into the future.
One of this gadgets is the Augmented Reality Contact Lens.
All you would have to do is pop these lens into your eyes and you are able to see the Augmented Reality Campaign straight from your very own eyes. It’s like the video is coming to life. A team of American and Finnish researchers at the University of Washington have been working on augmented reality-enabled contact lenses and have carried out some testing of the contact lenses on rabbits.
The lenses in testing now have a very low resolution of 1 pixel only. The researchers think that the resolution will improve over time and that someday they will become very useful for various applications including navigation, reading news, email and watching video etc.
An image below from Terminator gives you an idea of how this gadget might work. The rest I leave it up to you to imagine till this is made available.
