There were some fantastic Christmas campaigns from digital creative agencies this year. Armed with some torches and a huge amount of festive enthusiasm, I persuaded the team to brave the cold of Islington to deliver our own one! Take a look…

campaign, christmas, digital creative agency, islington

It seems that nowadays every new invention or gadget is set to; “change the way we see the world”. Indeed, “changing the way you see the world” has become the tagline for numerous coaching books and novel technologies alike. A simple google search produces thousands of results showing article after article exploring how facebook, twitter, myspace and the numerous other current internet phenomena’s are changing the way we see the world. I do not doubt for a second that these various websites are changing the way we communicate, socialise, do business and essentially live our day-to-day lives. However, when I wake up in the morning, eat my banana and begin my commute, the world still looks the same. In fact it has done for years, the only thing that changes the way I see the world is the weather and the varying condition of my eyes, depending upon alcohol or pollen consumption. Could that all be about to change? Augmented reality really does change the way we see the world.

Augmented reality (AR) is essentially a view of the real world with a virtual overlay. The current rate of research and development devoted to AR suggests it is going to take off in a big way with astonishing potential across all sectors. If this is the case, it is highly likely that AR will become one of the most influential technological shifts yet experienced by our civilisation.

The potential uses of AR are limitless. Developers have already been working on AR based games, whereby users can actively navigate and interact with various scenarios, using their iPhones. The practical uses of AR are equally as revolutionary; wikitude is a piece of software which uses AR as a platform allowing you to browse the world and discover information about places and points of interest. One of the first augmented apps to go live in the iPhone apple store was acrossair, allowing users to see the nearest stations: what direction they are in relation location, how many kilometers and miles away they are and what tube lines they are on, all by simply loading the app and looking through the camera of your iPhone. Thus it appears that AR technology is giving the user powers that were once exclusively reserved for superhero’s. You can start to understand why so many tech buffs are getting excited about AR.

Whilst the entertainment and practical uses of AR are groundbreaking, its potential in education is just beginning to be explored and might well be the most exciting development yet. British schools are constantly being scrutinised and criticised. One of the greatest obstacles impeding learning in the classroom are those disengaged pupils whose behaviour suffer as a result, which in turn hampers everyone’s learning. If AR could be successfully incorporated into the classroom we might have a solution to the vicious cycle which is preventing successful learning in classrooms. Even our most modern, advanced educational institutions (universities) are frustratingly outmoded in terms of teaching students. True learning is experiential. Humans learn best by doing, not by reading or listening to lectures. The more senses are involved (sound, sight, touch, emotions, etc.), the more powerful the learning experience. That’’s why today’’s best teachers are those pioneering individuals who take the effort to engage their students in meaningful activities that reach students at multiple levels. AR has the very real potential to do this.

Imagine if instead of simply reading about the Battle of Hastings in books, pupils were able to interact with the books and watch the battles. Pupils could interact with 3D shapes in maths, take tours through the human body in biology, learn geography by “flying” around the globe, visiting any city they wished, zooming in and out of detailed renderings of geopolitical regions. Students could learn chemistry by observing, at a simulated microscopic level, chemical structures and reactions. These are but a few of the many potential applications. Augmented reality has the potential to be a very powerful educational tool, which might have a radical impact on the classroom.

Despite the clear benefits AR will have on our day to day lives, it is also necessary to approach the technology with some caution.  Augmented reality will essentially mean that the web will become something we carry with us as a constant presence, which is quite a daunting thought. It is almost as though virtual world is being released from its controlled zoo (computers, PDA’s and phones) into the open.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, yet mixing the virtual environment and the real world is something we want to get right. The benefits particularly for the education sector mean that it is a technological advancement certainly worth pursuing but we have to be ready, the question is how prepared can you be when reality is about to change. AR gives the opportunity for commercial organisations to bombard us with advertisements and governments to mould our thinking and actions. If advertisers and governments gain the ability to project anything they want into a person’’s immediate environment and make it seem real, there is no limit to the control that could be exercised over the general public.

Nonetheless it is undoubtedly one of the most exciting technological advancements for decades and it will surely touch all of our lives some way. It may be impossible to prepare for the AR revolution but we should accept that we really are about to see the world in a different way.

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As a facebook devotee, (and moreover one that tries to ignore the adverts) I’m always keen to hear of ideas for making the site financially viable. Therefore, the article, Networking site cashes in on friends, published by the Daily Telegraph (admittedly contested elsewhere) caught my eye as offering an interesting alternative to the traditional marketing/premium services conundrum.

Apparently, Zuckerberg and his team are planning to capitalize on facebook’s massive user-base through polls, and lots of them. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zuckerberg demonstrated the power of facebook as a market research tool by asking 10,000 American users whether they believed that Obama’s fiscal stimulus package would revive the economy, and users in Israel and Palestine about contemporary peace issues. Impressively, he was able to feed the results back to the audience in minutes.

Surely facebook can’t compete with a trusty focus group for in-depth consumer insight, but with a user-base of 150 million and the ability to target users based on the information revealed in their profiles, facebook’s size could offer consumer brands the opportunity to almost instantaneously poll a very large sample of people.

Would I answer a poll that appeared on my minifeed? I’ll be interested to see.

crowdsourcing, facebook, market_research, web_2.0