NOTES

NOTES:Hi. I’m Chris Grayson, Director of Digital at Humble.That’s Humble dot “TV.“Humble is a Pre-to-Post Production and Special Effects Boutique Agency.We are content creators.

And I am here to talk about Augmented Reality.AR and Mobile and Digital Out of Home.

NOTES:... and the definition of Augmented Reality that I prefer is:“Special effects, in real time, over real life.”

From a content creation perspective, Augmented Reality is not all that different from what we do for broadcast special effects.

NOTES:Where does Augmented Reality intersect with Digital Out of Home?

NOTES:One subject I’ve been talking about a lot lately is Face Tracking, mostly focusing on the mobile space, though I’ll focus now on Digital Out of Home, and circle back to some mobile in a moment.

Most of us, when we think about AR (those of us who actually do think about AR),think about user-side AR. But the example we’re going to look at first is actually marketer facing.

NOTES:Quividi is a French company that makes analytics software for the Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) market. In this view, the media analyst’s dashboard shows the pedestrian traffic passing a digital sign. It tracks media impressions, as people look up at the sign. Quividi says the software is able to predict gender with 90% accuracy, placing an AR overlay of blue for men or pink for women. It can also estimate age within 10 years, and count each viewer’s length of attention.

NOTES:This backend analytics use of AR already becoming a crowed field. There are other play-ers in the space, including TruMedia and CognoVision, recently acquired by Intel.

NOTES:SeeingMachines of Australia is a company whose technology we’re experimenting with over at Humble.

Not only can they tracking faces, but full facilal expressions. This can be used for both backend media metrics purposes to track uses emotional response from the reaction to the content via facial features, as well as a form of user input that then be responded to.

NOTES:While it hasn’t really made it onto the radar of the mass media, consumer facial recognition on mobile really heating up. By last fall many of the companies in this space had either been snatched up in acquisitions or taken on major investments.

NOTES:Viewdle (launched in Kiev, Ukraine) This video was made at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, back in January. There are already several players in this space, but what is unique to Viewdle’s technology is that it all runs client side (without the need to reference a server-side image database). This is technology that his here and now.

And as of late there has been a lot of investment and acquisition activity.

NOTES:Qualcomm recently led a group of investors that took a US$10M stake in Viewdle, and moving their headquarters to Silicon Valley.

NOTES:Around that time Polar Rose, a facial recognition company that colaborate on a similar mobile app, was acquired by Apple (price rumored to be US$29M).

NOTES:... and their colaborator, The Astonishing Tribe, was acquired by Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry.

NOTES:Last year an investment group, led by Russian search engine Яндекс (Yandex), took a US$4.3M stake in Israeli face recognition software company, Face.com.

NOTES:And in January, Face.com rebuffed an acquisition offer by Facebook.

NOTES:You may be familiar with Google Goggles — Google’s mobile image recognition software for Android. Now, technically Google Goggles doesn’t do facial recognition, but … this is only because Google has disabled the ability. Those on the Google Goggles team profess that this is actually something the app does best, but out of concern for privacy issues, have chosen to disable that feature … for now.

NOTES:Here’s something to check out: There is a hidden feature in Google Image search. If you add the character string: “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL of any Google Image search, it will return only results that include pictures of faces. If a vanity search turns up a photo of you, there’s a good chance Google Goggles would be able to identify you, should the face recognition feature ever be implimented.

NOTES:In an interview with the Financial Times, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, explained that their facial recognition technology has been deliberately held back, due to privacy concerns, but that Google must continue to innovate.

In short, facial recognition technology is coming to the consumer mobile space in 2011 and will be a huge opportunity for marketers. It will also pose serious privacy concerns for society, beyond the scope of this presentation.

NOTES:I call this my Venn Diagram of the Completely Obvious — Mobile and Out of Home are fast converging.

NOTES:Last year Google was awarded a patent to place new ads over the top of existing signage within Street View. The most popular of the Mirror Worlds. Any doubts about the impact of Augmented Reality on Out of Home Advertising should end here. While this is in Google Maps’ Street View, Google uses this same data for their location based mobile services. Street View is what is known as a Mirror World...

NOTES:A Mirror World is a form of 3D Virtual World that is based on the real world, but mirrored as a digital replica. Example would be Google Maps’ Street View, Google Earth, Bing Maps’ Street Side View, etc.

NOTES:GPS can place your position in the real world, and consequently in the Mirror World ...

NOTES:... so if your GPS says you’re here ...

NOTES:... then the you’re here in the model ...

NOTES:... generally speaking ...

NOTES:(zooming in)

NOTES:So if the GPS places you here ...

NOTES:... your mobile device can reference the Mirror World model from the cloud, and download only the model data from your immediate area ...

NOTES:... to use as a reference ...

NOTES:... and the camera on your mobile device can then contruct a rough 3D model on the fly using computer vision techniques.

NOTES:Then it can compare what the camera actually sees to the data from the cloud the tells it what it expects to see ...

NOTES:By comparing one model against the other ...

NOTES:... it can correct for the inaccuracies of GPS, creating a tight registration between the Real World and the Mirror World ...

NOTES:(crossfade)

NOTES:And then virtual content can be tightly registered against the real world, creating a visually believable Augmented Reality experience.

NOTES:Chris Grayson is Director of Digital at Humble. Visit them at Humble.tv

Chris blogs at GigantiCo.tv

He can be followed on Twitter at: chrisgrayson

Chris is available to speak on augmented reality and emerging platforms.