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?

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…

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