It takes a lot to get the techy crowd  to go anywhere north of Union Square, let alone Columbus Circle, before 8 a.m. Usually bribery with French pastries and cool gadgets. But Adam Broitman, Founder and Ring Leader of Circ.us, did just that this morning. He threw in a dose of Robert Downey Jr. and Augmented Reality at a location that makes any tech geek drool – the Samsung store in the Time Warner Center.

Broitman was one of the panelists at Sobel Media’s latest Augmented Reality gathering, along with Esquire Magazine’s David Curcurito, Creative Bubble’s Doug Dimon, and ‘innovation catalyst’ David Polinchock – THE thought leaders of the emerging media space. Moderator Richard Carey led the quartet in a discussion of Augmented Reality – a topic everyone has heard of at least in passing but can’t quite define beyond “that stuff with Tom Cruise in Minority Report.”

Unless, of course, they read the December’09 issue of Esquire magazine, the one with Downey Jr. on the cover, pointing at a weird-looking black and white graphic. That graphic is called a “marker” and it is the key to interacting with the actor on the Esquire site after a quick software download and turning on your webcam. Wave the marker in front of the webcam, and Downey jumps off the page and keeps the reader company during the visit while casually promoting Sherlock Holmes.About 45,000 people were intrigued enough to download the software, according to Curcurcito, who described his first experience with Augmented Reality as “a caveman seeing fire for the first time.”

Broitman kicked off the discussion by explaining that Augmented Reality (AR) has really been around since 1990 when Thomas Caudell, an employee of Boeing, came up with the Heads Up Display (HUD), where digital information – time, speed, altitude - is overlaid on a piece of glass/windshieldso the pilot can see it without having to look down at his watchmid-flight.Twenty years later, as Creative Bubble’s Dimon added, AR is inching into our everyday lives with the proliferation of cool executions that inform and entertain, such as mobile and GPS-based apps. This year’s BMW 5 series is rumored to be comingout with a more robust HUD but no one has seen it yet.

In the Esquire case, Curcurito explained, it’s a “really cool user interactive brand extension for the magazine that gave us the wow factor for our brand and added value and content. It wasn’t just a gimmick. It was more content for us in a different kind of medium.”

As a print magazine art director, Curcurito said he’s limited by the number of pages, quipping that editors insist on “putting words around graphics.” With AR, he said, “I’m able to expand on a number of images that a viewer is able to see. It’s added value to what you’re already getting. It expands on what you’re reading. Expands on the content. Not just a gimmick of what you can find on the web. It’s more.”

For the other end of the “cool and fun” spectrum, Dimon gave an example of a recent USPS execution that allowed users to find an appropriately sized shipping box. He said was “totally unsexy, but really helpful,” so AR is not just for those looking for the wow factor.

For those of us who’ve been around since before the Cue Cat, cool as AR is, it brings up the question of why has it taken so long to reach the public market and where will it go from here? Is it a gimmick?

Polinchock, who thinks the technology is here to stay “until there’s an apocalypse and we lose all power and go back to the dark ages,” said that while we have more laptops with webcams on them than ever before, to the advertising industry AR will probably end up being just a fad, “because everything we do is a fad. We drop it like a hot potato once the newer cool thing comes along.”

The main question advertisers and marketers should ask themselves is how AR will add value to the consumer experience. In the example of the recent Mini Cooper AR execution, consumers were asked to perform a number of tasks, Polinchick said, but as a result were simply offered an ad.  “If I’m going to spend 5 minutes downloading software and all I get is a commercial that I can watch on TV, I’m [not pleased]. It has to be more valuable than that and I’ll spend the time.”

Nevertheless, the increasing interest in AR, Broitman said, is in large part thanks to the increasing availability of tools that allow anyone with skills to create AR. “The barriers to entry have been brought down to a level where every digital agency can work with it …with their current skill sets.”

Still, there are hurdles to overcome, such as bad webcams, slow connections, slow processor and such, but “We’re all figuring it out together.”

Should everyone be doing AR? The panel agreed that everyone should pay attention, but as Polinchock warned, the question to ask yourself is “What’s the story you want to tell and what’s the best way to tell that story today? Then people like us can tell you if AR will help or hurt.”

With all the challenges and hurdles that accompany emerging technologies, the bottom line is marketers and publishers (online or off) can’t afford not to pay attention. Not to mention that, as Broitman put it, “in five years, the way we search the world around us will be visual and we will laugh that we used to have to go to Google and type things in.”

Dimon agreed, saying “’What can I do now?’ is not that exciting. ‘What can I do tomorrow?’ is where you want to be.”

Links:
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/augmented-reality
http://www.sobelmedia.com

SIDEBAR:
Wikipedia defines AR as “a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality. The augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally usable. Artificial information about the environment and the objects in it can be stored and retrieved as an information layer on top of the real world view. The term augmented reality is believed to have been coined in 1990 by Thomas Caudell, an employee of Boeing at the time.”