Mobile AR, OOH and the Mirror World

NOTES

NOTES:Mobile AR, OOH and the Mirror World.I’m going to take these three things:Mobile Augmented RealityOut of Home Media StrategyMirror World or 3D Mapping of the Real World...and bring them all together in a way that hopefully makes sense.

NOTES:And since we’re in the business track...

NOTES:I’m going to start off by talking about the management structure of Advertising Agencies: There it is — five holding companies.

NOTES:Each of these holding companies is structured in a similar way...

NOTES:They acquire ad-agencies to get control of their media dollars.Spin those off from each agency and roll them up into a giant media management arm that controls the media spending across all their agencies.

Think bulk purchasing power and the leverage to push around the television networks.

NOTES:Mobile is developed as a sub-category of digital, within the Direct Marketing silo of the agency side.

NOTES:And then there are these people that actually have decades of experience in geo-targeted and location based media strategy... way over here. And never the twain shall meet.

The reason the industry is structured this way is principally to the advantage of broadcast tv advertising. And as everyone in advertising knows...

What’s good for broadcast is good for everyone! (sarcasm)

NOTES:So these people over here in Mobile...

NOTES:Would benefit greatly from the expertise of these people over here in OOH.And creating campaigns that integrate the two will prove greater than the sum of their parts.

NOTES:There is a place in the world where Out-of-Home and Mobile live in harmony.Where QR Codes (I assume everyone here is familiar?)...have been widely used to tie OOH advertising with mobile strategy for years.

NOTES:Why does this work in Japan, but not the US?

There is a lot of speculation on the subject.

NOTES:Two most common conclusions:Blame it on the psyche of American phone users: It must be a cultural thing.

Or Blame the Carriers for not pre-installing the software...

NOTES:I’m more incline to blame the structure of the advertising industry...

NOTES:If the large agency networks got together and lobbied the carriers to preinstall the software, there is little to say they wouldn’t do so: It’s available in some form, for free, for pretty well every phone that has a camera on it, feature phones and smartphones alike.

NOTES:But the advertising industry in the US has never taken any initiative to do so, perhaps because the is no imperative to, in an industry driven entirely by broadcast.

NOTES:So we have OOH... “Out of Home” advertising...

NOTES:And it’s cousin, Digital Out Of Home.Not only Out of Home, but Digital at that.These are people with a foot in both worlds, who will be most receptive to this convergence.

When most people think of DOOH...

NOTES:They probably think of places like Piccadilly Circus...

NOTES:...or Times Square.

But most D-O-O-H media inventory is much more tactical and perhaps a bit less glamorous.

NOTES:Elevator Video Displays.

NOTES:Gas Station Displays.

NOTES:Checkout-Line Displays.

NOTES:ATM Displays.

All place-based and context driven media... much like mobile.

NOTES:Now let’s have a look at that other component.

Mirror Worlds.

NOTES:In January, Google was awarded a patent to place new ads over the top of existing signage within Street View. The most popular of the Mirror Worlds.

NOTES:Answer:Content for local or map-based search and mobile pull from the same databases.Mapping and wayfinding apps are among ther most popular mobile apps, this is especially true of AR.

Lets have a look at some of the popular mobile AR apps to date.

NOTES:Up to now, mobile AR (speaking of the iPhone, where most of the mobile AR development has thus-far been done) has been confined to using a variety of internal sensors.

I can probably assume this audience is well familiar with this, so I won’t dwell of it.

NOTES:Just the top-line...

GPS

NOTES:Compass

NOTES:Level

NOTES:All let the smartphone know where it is looking...

NOTES:So it can overlay contextual data onto the live video feed.

Examples like:

NOTES:The Layar Mobile AR Borwser.

NOTES:Wikitude

NOTES:Bionic Eye.

You get the idea...If you’re here attending this event, you already know these apps.

NOTES:But because they have no real understanding of their surroundings, they’re very limited in what they can do.

NOTES:

NOTES:With computer vision, the phone can do more than just overlay information onto the live video feed, it can analyze it in real time, and have a true geometric understanding of what is around it.

NOTES:The example most people are familiar with is Google Goggles.Which uses a form of image recognition.

That’s the familiar mobile example, but I’m not as interested in Google Goggles...

NOTES:...I’m more interested in a technology called PTAM.

NOTES:Parallel Tracking And Mapping.

NOTES:Developed by Georg Klein at Oxford University.It generates POIs or points-of-interest based on edges and contrast. You can see how, by simply looking around the room with its camera, it can model a three dimensional understanding of its own surroundings.

And on the left, we see the software running on an iPhone.

NOTES:Oxford makes it available under a non-exclusive license, and has already been shown to run on many of the major smartphones.

NOTES:When you combine Computer Vision AR with Mirror Worldsthings start to get interesting.

NOTES:Current leaders in the Mirror World space include, obviously, Google Street View, and Google Earth, Microsoft Bing Maps Street-Side View, and a few independent players like EveryScape and Earthmine.

NOTES:This shows a Mirror World Point Cloud Model created at the University of Washington (Research lead by Noah Snavely and financed principally by Microsoft). This research was the foundation for what ultimately became Photosynth.

NOTES:With a Mirror World of major urban areas...

NOTES:GPS can place your position in the real world, and consequently in the Mirror World...

NOTES:If the GPS says you’re here...

NOTES:Then the you’re here in the model.

NOTES:Generally speaking...

NOTES:

NOTES:So if the GPS places you here...

NOTES:...your smartphone can download...

NOTES:...download a model of your general area...

NOTES:...while the camera, using PTAM or similar software generates a real time model of your actual suroundings, based on its actual view...

NOTES:...and by comparing one against the other...

NOTES:...it can get an accurate registration...

NOTES:...and a complex understand of where you are...

NOTES:

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NOTES:Which will allow for the accurate registration of virtual content into the real world, instead of the loose approximation of the apps we have now. And in the case of Apple, iPhone SDK4 allows analysis of the live video feed, making computer vision technically possible on iPhones within the month, so we can expect to see apps coming out later this year.

The convergence of OOH and Mobile already exists, but computer vision mobile AR will accelerate this, as the illustration makes obvious.

NOTES:So let’s look at some numbers.

NOTES:In a paper recently published by Juniper Research, they project revenue specifically from “Mobile” Augmented Reality to reach over $700MM in the next three-and-a-half years...

Starting from practically zero today.

How could they come to these numbers?

NOTES:Five years ago, there were twice as many mobile phones in the world as computers.Today there are almost four-times as many.

Some might be asking if these numbers include basic features phones.Yes, in fact, they do. So let’s take a look at just the smartphone market.

NOTES:By 2011, less than a year, Smartphones alone will have a larger market share than all personal computers — both desktops and laptops combined.

NOTES:I had a difficult time finding good examples (any examples) of convergence between OOH and the Mobile AR space. I managed to find one, and an interesting example of non-AR mobile-plus-DOOH that went beyond QRCodes and Couponing. But first, I’m going to show an unexpected DOOH and AR convergence...

NOTES:This is on the analytics side, with a hat-tip to Bejamin Thomas who demoed this for me at the Echangeur showroom.

Quividi makes software that analyzes the live video feed from a camera placed above a video-display-ad, tracks every face that looks up at it, counting media impressions, and even indentifies male and female faces with some degree of accuracy, overlaying them with blue or pink circles, respectively.

NOTES:This next example is from a company called LocaModa.Using the FourSquare API, they stream comments and check-ins to a digital display within a restaurant, bar or business establishment. Amplifying the game-element, and tying the business to its social graph.

NOTES:And just over a week-ago I learned about a campaign by TAB World Media for Disney’s Prince of Persia, that incorporates both OOH and Mobile AR components. I downloaded the Layar, and played around with it, but the Out-of-Home component of the campaign was not running in my area, so I was not able to get the full experience. My understanding is that there is a game element that combines the app with the billboards, identified by location on the phone, with some reward system built in for finding them. So, kudos to TAB World Media.

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NOTES:And I’ll close with one more related food-for-thought...

NOTES:Microsoft currently has the superior component technologies, but is weakest in the device category. Google has momentum across the board. Apple, with their iPhone’s large market share, has bought itself a little breathing room, but lacks key technologies.

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