Google’s augmented reality platform, Google Lens, is expanding outside of the Google Assistant app to being accessible directly from the camera on some Android devices, as well as in Google Photos and Google Maps. With it only being a matter of time before Apple rolls out ARkit functionalities directly within its cameras too, users are about to have even more avenues for accessing this tech than ever before.
Google Lens enables your smartphone to visually scan your environment and pull up information about items in the real world, anything from buildings, people’s faces and household objects, as well as text from street signs, screens, restaurant menus and books etc. It basically lets you search for info about items in the real world as you’d search for keywords on the web, and call up actionable prompts like purchase links for products and Wikipedia descriptions of famous landmarks etc. The goal is to give users context about their environments and any and all objects within those environments.
Here are 8 ways that this type of technology could work in an advertising capacity:
Scanning billboards or OOH ads, Shazam-style, to find out more information on a brand or apply for an offer. Like with QR codes in magazines etc. but less lame, on a larger scale, and without the need to download / access it through a standalone app.
Scan the outside of a retail location or restaurant to find out its opening hours or offers.
Scan a product in a supermarket to find product info or price comparisons.
Integrating street ads with AR location information on how to get to the store.
Scan an ad or product to access a promotion that can be redeemed online or in-store. Maybe a function that can ‘bookmark’ vouchers or discount codes for example.
Scanning a product to view customer reviews.
Turn empty retail locations into augmented reality storefronts like Net-A-Porter.
I can’t get enough of seeing interesting real-world implementations of consumer AR and this ARKit example that I came across today is no exception. Scanning over a book shelf in a book store and seeing product information, reviews and pricing details is a pretty functional use case. Imagine something like this working in a supermarket price-comparison setting!
A little demo of what’s possible with Image Recognition in ARKit, coming in iOS 11.3 pic.twitter.com/0IVDPkCWi8
This week Snap launched a new feature called Lens Studio that will let third-parties develop their own custom AR lenses for the Snapchat app, opening the floodgates like they did with Geofilters a couple of years ago. Expect a load more stupid little AR cartoons like the dancing hotdog seeing the light of day over the next few months.
Lens Studio is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows with easy to use guides and tools that students, creatives, and developers alike can use to bring their creations to life. Whether you’re just starting to dabble in 2D animation or are a professional artist interested in creating your own experiences, Lens Studio makes sharing your creation with the world fast and fun!
On a side note, I love the short, simple explainer videos that Snap uses to announce each new product update. They’re generally no more than 30 seconds long and show a brief use-case of the product to get the point across. Nice.
I absolutely love this implementation of Apple’s AR kit! Imagine sitting down in a restaurant and being able to physically see your food on your plate before you order? I’ve being thinking of this as a really practical AR use case for a while but I’m seriously impressed at how well this prototype looks.
Apple’s AR kit is MENTAL! Imagine sitting down in a restaurant and being able to physically see your food on your plate before you order?! pic.twitter.com/XDjCfMu9Co
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. And that’s probably never been truer than it is today. It’s no surprise that people are communicating less and less through text these days – and more and more through visual means on mobile messaging apps and social media platforms in particular.
Instagram may have kick-started this trend a few years ago on social media, but Snapchat dragged it into the personal messaging space and other platforms have followed suit, so much so that now, rather than using digital imagery as a way of simply documenting and presenting our lives, we actively use visuals to communicate in the place of text. Snapchat has been the poster child of this movement over the last 3 years or so, tripling its daily active users to over 160 Million. Not content at being left behind, Facebook has copied pretty much every visual messaging feature that Snapchat has popularized on each of its four platforms – Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook itself.
While facial lenses and basic image editing have become a bit of a commodity on social messaging channels though, both platforms are trying to branch out from this to a more ‘augmented reality’-style future where users can actively overlay digital elements onto whatever they are looking at in real-time. Think Pokemon Go, although much more interactive and responsive to your actual surroundings. Snapchat describes it as “painting the world with 3D experiences”.
Snapchat may have been the catalyst for this trend, but it seems that Facebook are innovating at faster speed. At the company’s recent F8 event Mark Zuckerberg launched a host of new 3D camera effects, highlighting a renewed focus on creating a ‘camera platform’, an onus on the camera not simply being a tool used just to capture images, but to communicate too. He even went as far as to say that the camera needs to be more central than the text box in all of their apps.
This is a way for Facebook to fully insert itself into the real world, to become the link between your smartphone and everything you see around you. Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Zuckerberg expanded on this approach, “Facebook is so much about marrying the physical world with online. When you can make it so that you can intermix digital and physical parts of the world, that’s going to make a lot of our experiences better and our lives richer”.
Demoing these new 3D camera effects, one Facebook engineer pointed his phone at a table and a 3D propeller plane appeared on the screen, flying around a water bottle on the table top. Another used his phone’s camera to turn the room into a planetarium, with planets and stars spread out across the ceiling. Another took a normal photo of a face, then manipulated the expressions into a smile and then a frown.
Facebook also showed off various 3D scenes created entirely from a handful of 2D photos. The scenes had real depth to them, allowing viewers to tilt their head to see behind a bed in a room, or peer around a tree in a forest. Users could dim the lights in the image of a room, flood it with water, or even leave a digital object in the room that would still be there for someone else to discover at a later time.
The ultimate idea here is to turn the real world into an extension of Facebook itself. While Zuckerberg highlights examples like using Facebook’s camera to view pieces of digital art affixed to a wall, or to play a digital game overlaid on a table-top, you can see the long game here – dragging elements that would normally appear in your feed, for example, into the real world. But as well as pieces of content from your friends and family, surely this means ads too. As the traditional Facebook Newsfeed takes a back seat to messaging apps, this could be one way of keeping this type of content relevant going into the future, as well as expanding their ad inventory in the process.
But what will this mean for brands when consumers are living in an augmented world, constantly interacting with and visually manipulating their surroundings? And what happens when we are all wearing AR glasses or contact lenses 24/7? Visions of a Minority Report-esque world where ads bombard us at every turn spring to mind, but surely there must be another way. I guess we’ll have to just wait and see.
About Me
I’m a Digital Strategist passionate about the intersection between technology and creative marketing. Last year I moved to London after 11 years living in Dubai.
