GE Energy has come out with a unique online ad, to promote its Smart Grid windmill technology.
A video of how the ad works (via Today’s Big Thing) is above:
When you log onto GE’s site, you can do this yourself pretty easily. Basically, you print out a special marker that looks like a solar panel, activate your computer’s webcam, and then point the marker so it faces your webcam. The smart grid should automatically open up on your screen, and you can even blow into your computer’s microphone to make the turbines spin faster. The Augmented Reality ad also has a solar energy option.
So who helped GE make this ad? The site says that the Augmented Reality ad is powered by FLARToolKit’s open source code, using Flash. We’ve reported on this digital hologram technology being used in the gaming and toy world. But it also makes for really engaging online ads. We just hope the folks at Crispin Porter + Bogusky don’t use it for a creepy Burger King ad.
yeah i seen that awhile back on twitter in my feeds and watch it. pretty impressive stuff
Augmented reality is awesome, its amazing what you can pull off with it. Check out how its being used around the world: http://www.edop...gmented_Reality
advertize?
Very cool.
Check out this series of augmented reality technologies:
http://singular...awesome-videos/
That is very cool.
(useful comment, i know)
damn that’s cool
OK, because someone has to say it first, but, the porn app is pretty obvious (between hologram and using microphone to get results).
Sorry.
Dude. you are weird. For that to be the first application of this technology that comes into your head.
We have an entire blog entry outlining some of the better Augmented Reality examples here:
http://weareorg...mented-reality/
Wow. An ad I not only like, but love. Amazing
I really loved this ad. It was so cool.
Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
they’re doing that with baseball cards now. hold up a card and it recognizes the mark and does a 3D figure of the player.
pretty old tech but they’re just now using it commercially. dunno why
Nice post! Also check out my blog/podcast at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
So Amazing!
Is that the tool to making ads?
I really want to try.
Does no one else find it ironic that GM is getting thousands of people to waste paper so they can show off their green tech?
I saw something similar ages ago but with a skull. I think it was done by Yahoo. It’s not that impressive when you consider how old the technology is.
I’ve been covering a few of these augmented reality ads on The Future of Ads and looking at how augmented reality is changing the face of online advertising, and I think this GE effort is one of the best to date. Not only does it put the ad in the hands of the people, but it encourages them to play with it by using things like the microphone to create an interactive experience. Very cool!
http://thefutur...mented-reality/
Fascinating. For all I know, it’s been Goodby, Silverstein & Partners teaming up with North Kingdom creating this ad.
Mini is using this too.
http://www.mini...ebcam/index.jsp
Are there any developers out there who could design a similar application? Would love to meet you…
http://twitter.com/cjyu
Sleek and cool. Will definitely try it.
It’s very cool, but isn’t it a little strange to produce an environmental ad that forces you to print?
True, printing/wasting paper in the name of ‘greening’ seems hypocritical, at the very least. But this is the tip of the toe – the ’strictly for demo’ purposes – the wonky sterogram glasses that are about to usher in a new interactive age of ‘augmented reality’. Right now you’ve got to print a special image so you can play with and experience this fun new concept – and new it is, no matter how old the technology – but when marketers seize upon this chance to embed images in existing advertising…..?
Let us imagine instead that you have, say, bought a cooking magazine off the shelf. Flip to a certain advertising page which invites you to ‘hold the page up to your webcam’ and the visual code is immediately read and transformed into a short 3-D video presentation – perhaps the blue cylinder of ‘Fillsbelly Buns’ popping open, the dough inside whirling and twirling itself into beautiful shapes, the extra ingredients (sliced, diced, grated) falling from the virtual sky into the dough, all to the sultry voice-over of a well-known chef telling you how to create this recipe at home… then the baking buns, with their wafts of steam rising inches away from your nose… you can practically smell it. Lower the page of your magazine, and move the mouse over the blue package that has reappeared. Oh, look, you can add a cylinder of ‘Fillsbelly Buns’ to your E-Groceries shopping cart, which is waiting patiently in the background!
Or perhaps you bought a baseball cap to wear to the next Blue Jays game (yeah, I’m Canadian…). The logo on the front has been encoded with a webcam-readable marking. Show that to your camera, and deals on that ‘next Blue Jays game’ pop up from Ticketmaster – perhaps even a 5% discount.
Oh, you subscribed to that magazine? That means it can have a unique barcode on it which targets your address – your city, your neighborhood, perhaps your very door. You can show the application the picture of the ‘Big Tomato Pizza Special’ and a map will pop up to give you directions to the nearest Big Tomato’s restaurant, a menu of possible choices will rotate slowly past your face, and your printer will spew out a coupon for the Special itself.
You’ve signed up for a year’s worth of Augmented Avs, have you? So when you hold that ‘Kary May’ cosmetic ad up to your webcam, it pops up your 3-D avatar, with your skin colour, hair colour and style, eye hue, and all, and you don’t even have to type in a name or password. You can try on virtual makeup and view yourself from all angles before hitting the Order Now button. (And yes, this tech isn’t even dull-edge anymore – preteens are playing around with it in Flash games and virtual pet sites – but link that to actual products and three-dimensional realistic simulations and you’ll have a lot of advertising dollars to commit…)
Paper and advertising is all around us already. Start embedding COMPUTER-readable images, like visual hyperlinks, in what is currently only human-readable, two-dimensional text, and who knows where it will wind up? (Side note: Oh, sweetly naive Roger, porn is only the beginning. Sex and violence are generally the first applications any new technology gets to experience, and marketing not far behind… I’m sure there are possibilities for children to tear off their chocolate bar wrappers, webcam them and be drawn into a marvelous fantasy world that teaches them about how chocolate is made, or similar ‘edutainment’ applications, but they will be low priority!)
Hope you’ve enjoyed my speculations…
Great respect to whoever wrote this very clever bit of flash, it’s very clever.
However, I can’t help thinking the marketing people at GE have missed the point; they are advertising an environment saving product, by asking their customers to print something out.
Does anyone else see why this is a little irresponsible?
This is truly amazing! Does anyone know how I can get this to work on my MAC? I’d love to show my kids. Please be kind, I’m not young anymore and not too terribly computer literate. MAC 10.4.11
The tech stuff is really cool…and an appropriate diversion….but the big picture is …I don’t want GE (now owned by the government) controling anything…with the smart power …..eventually controlling the temperature in my home. Wake up folks……….Call me stupid…I dont care…but remember what I said……….remember
Hey is it just me or is the same thing they used on assasins creed 2 website ……. yep it totaly is
So we need to print a page to waste electricity and paper and ink to view an ad about renewable energy??
wooow technology has gone a looooooong way forward
hell ya