To fear or embrace

Augmented reality, in any of a number of thinly watered down applications, is a here and now reality. As for applications that genuinely deliver the one-hundred proof experience, which the technology’s own imagination-fuelled promotion promises, they are much harder to find outside the realm of the genuinely exotic or the darker shades of the top secret.

For those who do not know or who have never experienced it, augmented reality (AR) superimposes on the real environment around us a digitally generated layer. At its very most basic, wearing a pair of earbuds just about qualifies and meets the accepted definition. With buds plugged in, you hear things that are not actually present in the environment around you. The difference that full strength AR introduces is that you see rather than hear things in or upon the real landscape that are not really there.

A pilot with a head up display (HUD) sees ‘printed’ upon the view in front of him, instrument readings that are not, of course, actually part of the landscape. Some pretty basic cars can do substantially the same thing with a much more limited implementation of the technology and a mobile phone reflecting off the inside of a windscreen even suffices if the display is reversed.

Delivery of a visually augmented reality depends upon having a huge device delivering the experience if it is any distance at all from the audience, or a very small one if it can be positioned in almost intimate proximity to the viewer and can move around with him or her. Content can be anything from a few scraps of data, to something highly animated and colourful.

AR meets VR

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality are sometimes thought of as being one and the same thing, but they are not. Virtual reality isolates the involved party from the real surroundings around him or her and replaces those surroundings with a view of a digitally created world. Virtual reality has many applications and its price has been floored recently.

It is possible to experience a basic level of immersion in a virtual reality world with hardware that amounts to no more than a mobile phone running a suitable app, and a means of, literally, strapping the phone to one’s face with a cheap apparatus manufactured after the fashion of a Victorian stereo-picture viewer in cardboard.

Such a set up takes full advantage of the phone’s accelerometer to provide the experience of head-turns panning across the displayed content, and of its headphone jack to squirt supporting stereo soundtracks deep into the wearer’s skull. The experience, as basic as it is, can be extremely immersive. But what use is it?

Gaming is an obvious application. It is possible to get truly immersed in the moment. Debate rages as to whether that is a good thing. It can deliver in relatively safe ways the experience of doing dangerous jobs in dangerous places. It has the ability to raise a smile, because VR does a great job of giving the wearer what, for the moment anyway, is a novel experience.

‘Headphones for the eyes’ frames VR hardware well. Headphones and earbuds can position you stereophonically in the midst of the assembled Berlin Philharmonic—close your eyes and you could be there. VR takes that much further—open your eyes and you are there. You can turn around and see the person chomping popcorn behind you in the quiet passages. And you can kill him with your level ten Orcish greatsword.

As to whether a signs and graphics manufacturer would have a role for VR, that question takes us to the realm of the potentially exotic. The short answer is yes. An exhibition stand manufacturer could walk a client through a stand design, but fly-throughs on flat monitors are already known and quite satisfactory thank you. It is the degree of immersion that perhaps sells it. Perhaps. Content is maybe one of the obstacles, it has to be well done otherwise it has a very strong smell of art-for-art’s-sake about it. It is one to keep an eye, or two eyes, on but not one to fear.

More than a phone

AR differs markedly from VR. AR overlays, as we have established, upon the real world, content that ‘augments’ what you would otherwise see in front of you. In the main, that implies some sort of device for doing the augmenting. Looking at this in practical terms, devices capable of assuming that role are abundant, relatively inexpensive, distributed equitably across the developed world’s demographic, and they are easily understood. We are talking mobile phones again.

The mobile phone is capable of seeing, through its beady little glassy eye, whatever is in front of it and of obligingly showing you what it sees neatly displayed on the phone’s screen. Deep in the innards of the phone lurks all the smarts needed to mix in with the image you are seeing other bits of content. Now there is a big idea. Point the camera and phone down the street in front of you and you could see, overlaid on the picture of the very street the phone displays, an arrow pointing where you need to go. If you do not know where you need to go, someone out there would be happy to pay and tell you, with an advertising sign for example, floating over the nearest burger place.



Friction is one component that is used to good effect by anything with brakes that works. Friction though is a prime component that gets in the way of making AR work on the scale of its own promise via widely available displays. It is a bit like QR codes. Very clever idea, but it needs to overcome the basic resistance, friction. People have to stop in their tracks and take the time to whip out a phone. Who makes a speculative investment in their own time scanning a QR code to be fed with a reward unknown? There is a need to overcome friction if AR is to be consumed wholesale. More to the point, the demographic defining those willing to consume content this way is razor thin.

Friction is notably absent when you are fishing your phone out with deliberate intent, for example to answer it, to interrogate Facebook, or to fritter away a few minutes playing a game. As a window into a gamer’s world, a mobile phone is heaven-sent. The latest big thing there is Pokemon Go. That brings the game into the real world surrounding the player. It is a perfect AR implementation and the world is playing it. That is not a basis for calling the AR friction conundrum solved though.

Intimate displays

Maybe near-eye devices are the answer—tiny displays in intimate proximity. Things like Google Glass. Glass and wearable tech like it struggle to look like glasses, spectacles if you prefer. Those who choose to wear them look like spectacles as well, some might argue. Glass does something weird to human interaction. It is perhaps because the glass wearer stood next to you, or opposite, sees things you cannot.



Overlaid on his view of you and the world could be anything from your waist size, to your car’s tyre pressures, and all you can rely on by way of bio feedback indicating what he is experiencing is a flicker of a smile for who knows what reason. Good luck getting anything like a conversation. It is an extreme extension of experiencing from the outside one-sided hands free mobile phone conversations.

Near-eye devices need to overcome the covertly sinister and overtly geeky overtones they communicate because AR needs to be as near friction free as it can be if its use is to become accepted to the extent the mobile phone is. Were that day to come to pass you would hear an almighty roar as augmented reality took off in a very big way.
And a bigger roar still while the technology readied itself to spend the next five years fighting to defend your rights and basic privacy.

In a deeply augmented world, you or I could look into a shop window and see goods and prices displayed that might be different to the ones others see. All sorts of things could come unbidden to our attention which, of course, we would welcome because it would be strongly preferences based. If you, like me, struggle with your Facebook privacy settings you might be better off ignoring AR for a while. You probably have plenty of time though.

AR is also probably coming to an appliance near you. But it is going to be a thin end of the wedge thing. Initially, it is what is happening on your phone that will be overlaid on your view of the world and probably via a discrete accessory of some design unknown. Ear buds are OK now everyone wears them, or everyone could. Those funny little in-ear Bluetooth things? Rethink those—there is no getting away from it—they look weird and isolationist.



If anyone can sell the world the idea of wearable wireless tech, it is Apple. Its sparkly new wireless earbuds are instantly and utterly cool and OK to wear. Over a decade of resistance to in-ear wireless devices overcome in a flash. If we eventually go forth in an augmented world, it will be behind a pair of gorgeous Ray Bans or Oakleys.
Engraved inside one of the arms will be lettering that says ‘Augmented by Apple’. Unless you are queuing for Comdex or Comic Con, today’s generation of glass-like augmentation hardware is not going to win you many new friends. Siri told me as much at dinner the other night.

Out-of-home

The out-of-home (OOH) adverting industry has a deeply vested interest in scorching memorable messages into your retinas, your memory, and your consciousness on behalf of its global brand clientele. It has noticed, like you have, that people do not spend nearly as much down time gazing out of bus windows as they once did. In fact, people seem less aware of their surroundings now than they ever have been. It was once the case that if someone on a bus was preoccupied with anything other than the view, it would either be a conversation or a newspaper.

Now, practically every chin rests on its owners’ chest and eyes are down, consuming something on a mobile phone.

Slapping huge paper posters and billboards up all over the place is fast losing its appeal. Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is developing fast in an attempt to keep advertisers fed with the attention their brands crave and to keep the DOOH industry thriving too. The industry’s statistics, and boy can they produce them, says it is working. There is no doubt, there is some impressive digital stuff around, but is it truly augmenting anything?



One notable campaign, ostensibly for a shampoo brand, recently sought out some of the most foot traffic heavy locations in train stations available. The need was very specific. The site absolutely had to have a digital poster site platform side and the brand wanted exclusive access to it. That is an expensive location, and an expensive site being digital and the exclusive element does not come cheap when you are buying media design to house multiple tenants. The brand used the site to display, wait for it, a static monochrome poster. Why?

The brand used the digital poster in a particularly clever way, borderline creative genius in fact. Looking for all the world like the static poster display it was, when a train came through the station, the wind blew the model’s now full-colour gorgeous hair around in billowing waves of recently shampooed tresses. Heads turned. Smiles alighted on commuters’ faces. The brand or tech made a point. When the train left, the static poster just sat there and faded back to monochrome.

That campaign overlaid on the surrounding audience’s view of the world around them a bit of digital content that was not ‘really’ there at all. Subject to an external stimulus, it came to life. It was a totally friction free experience for the observer and on that basis, it succeeded. Thousands could consume it at once. Nobody needed to ‘interact’ via any appliance. It just plain and simple worked.



This brings me back to my next point. Location, location, location. A few very big companies have their arms around the world’s prime out-of-home advertising sites. These are now primarily digital. The media owners, brokers, and advertisers know more about the eyes that see these sites than those whose eyes they are watching. They want your attention and will go to lengths to get it.

If they can get inside your pocket and on your phone as well as inside your head, they will. Beacons and other near field communication hardware give all this adverting estate a sense of who is around it. It can react to that and augment your view of your world with a zero friction display device that sends you a message that matters. At that level and in that format, AR stops chasing little furry things around the street and gets serious. Nothing in the rulebook says you have to own the display.

Print persists

Augmented reality has had a pretty good showing in print. The basic idea is, you point your ‘device’, it will be a phone of course, at a piece of augmented print. The phone recognises what it sees and bombs off and gets content to overlay on the print you are seeing on the phone’s screen. This has deeply practical applications.

One Microsoft app will look at text in a magazine, or across the road in a sign, and it will overlay on that printed text or sign a translation in a language you choose. Very impressive, very useful, and very much a present-day application. Birthday cards have flirted with the tech too. Point your phone at a card and some little piece of content vividly underscores the sentiment and makes your digital day complete.

Augmented signs may have value in promoting the wares of the businesses they identify. Should you find yourself adjacent to a business, you could for example, point your phone at its sign and then see upon the screen a compelling offer or enticement to enter. It is one more way to your wallet, but is it going to drive step-function growth in either the application of AR or in the sales of the hopeful business? My vote says no.

When the motivation has a basis in sentiment, or you are informed or rewarded, the experience of getting into a position to receive your dose of augmentation does not seem so burdensome. If you want to just consume and digest things the eye alights upon, squeezing a few drops of augmented content out of it hardly seems worth the bother.

Digitally augmented signs

Supplementing the man-made environment with variable content, itself context sensitive, clearly has a role in our lives. If you cannot persuade the population to pull out a phone to access it, and you populate a world where wearable devices are not yet ubiquitous, you can always consider restoring to augmenting persistent graphics.

Digital content popping out of the midst of printed matter both surprises and delights those who see it. The effect is sufficiently novel to give digitally augmented print celebrity status. It is relatively easy to achieve and relatively inexpensive too. Here is how it is done.

A digitally augmented sign or print needs at minimum a display means to perform the role of augmenting the print and the easiest to work with is a data projector. Simple data projectors are available in all shapes and sizes these days, with cost tending to follow power, resolution, and quality. Even the very smallest can, in minor way, help add a bit of digital pop to a print.

Graphics displayed on windows are the simplest to augment because the window itself can support media suitable for projecting images upon. A basic etch effect film makes a satisfactory back projection screen and that is the basis for augmenting part of the print. With back projection, the projector is behind the screen or, put another way, the screen is between the observer and the projector.

To augment a static print with digital projected content, part of the print needs, in a design sense, to benefit from animation. For example, a picture of a dragon could emit animated flames, rain can fall from the sky, and so on.

Once printed, the areas of the print that will be augmented have to be cut out and replaced with identically shaped panels of the etch effect back-projection material. The whole print is then applied to the window or display surface.

With the projector trained on the areas to be augmented with digital content, the design side of the print will simply and very dramatically spring to life. For best results, the content should loop continually or rely on an external stimulus to trigger it. Really adventurous applications can ‘involve’ the observer.

Technology in waiting

Achieving digital impact at shop window scale is, or could be a very expensive undertaking. Augmenting printed matter with a smart phone app may simply not achieve the cut-through needed because of the thin population who will interact with it. Adding a digital condiment to a print though is inexpensive and it can be consumed and appreciated, friction free, by anyone who sees it.

In a hands down battle for attention, for impact, and for creating memorable impressions, AR holds much promise.

Until it can be consumed passively and on a more or less ubiquitous basis though, its commercial appeal will be limited. The sign and display industry on that basis is a beneficiary in waiting. The structures, the content, and the print we produce and install is not going to be subverted by a virtual impression of itself. That same print is unlikely too to be prescribed on the basis it is a content trigger.


Digital content though will find a way. Its very life depends on the means to give it a vent. That means phones.

That means big digital billboards. That means anything you can put in the public eye-line that is capable of displaying it. That, as a condiment to sign and display technologies has pretty much immediate appeal.

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