Expert Review Bruno Uzzan : “Augmented Reality Boosts Printing”

Linked to print, it makes an immediate impression, with visits that can be documented.

By Bruno Uzzan CEO of Total Immersion — Graphic Arts Online

Augmented reality (AR) has been in the consumer mainstream for less than a year, but the technology has been around for considerably longer. Enabling Web-based AR has quickly opened up an enormous array of digital marketing applications. Digital marketing is the very visible tip of the iceberg, but below that water line, there’s a vast array of applications—many of them transformative—that are poised for development, tied closely to printing.

AR is a trend, not a gimmick. As some forward-looking brands have demonstrated, it’s nothing less than a new human interface, a new paradigm that encompasses anything digital or virtual that “crosses over” into your real environment. As such, this begins to define a new type of interactive, sensory engagement.

Analyst Christine Perey, principal of Perey Research & Consulting, recently described the trend in this way: “Augmented reality is a way of mixing digital information and the real world in a highly interactive manner and, though in its infancy, it is already proving to be useful.” more