Augmented Reality + Location = The Holy Grail for Marketers?

Ogmento on Getting Past the "Wow Factor"

WebProNews recently spoke with Layar’s augmented reality strategist Gene Becker about the present and the future of augmented reality. Layar thinks AR will become essential to consumers' mobile experiences.  

Ogmento is a an augmented reality gaming company that says it’s helping to change the way consumers interact with their smart phones. Ogmento recently released an iPhone game called Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary (based on the popular movie franchise), that combines augmented reality, geo-social elements and user-generated content - an interesting combo. President and co-founder Brian Selzer shared some more insights on the industry with us.

The company says it has created the first game that combines geo-social elements and computer vision augmented reality to physically "check in" to a location. For example, if the GPS is saying that the user is standing near a Starbucks, and the phone’s camera is looking at a Starbucks logo, then a special reward will open for the players. This reward is proof that the player is, indeed, where they say they are, the company explains. 

The user-generated content comes in as users can draw out symbols on a piece of paper and have them come to life on their iPhones.

“The combination of AR (computer vision) with LBS (location-based..) has been called the holy grail by some in marketing,” Selzer tells WebProNews. “Applications like Foursquare and Gowalla currently rely on GPS to verify where a user is. This is not accurate, and users can check in to 100 places from their couch.  People are rewarded for not even going into the actual locations. With AR, it’s an extra verification that a person is actually there, because it’s about vision. The camera can recognize a logo, or a sign, and that along with GPS makes for a much stronger connection. AR also allows users to interact with brands.. mixing real world and virtual world gaming experiences. The engagement is much stronger. So now mobile marketing is about understanding where people are, what they are doing, having them interact with their brands, reward them for these interactions, all in the real world. The dynamic nature of our games allows us to create campaigns on the fly. for locations, time of day, and much more.”

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