What 'Augmented Reality' technology has in store for Singapore

How can Singapore lead the world in yet another aspect of technology or entrepreneurialism while capitalising on one of the world’s highest penetrations of smart phones?

According to a recent report in CNN, thanks to its minuscule size, Singapore has the infrastructure to support island-wide 3.5G mobile and wireless internet access.

Also, according to Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), there are 6.5 million mobile subscribers (as of July 2009), making for a staggering 140-plus-percent mobile phone penetration rate, and over four million in wireless broadband subscriptions. “Augmented Reality” could be the next technology wave to ride on this exceptional user penetration.

Every once in a while, some new invention comes along that totally transforms people’s lives or the way in which they work or play. The introduction of such new technologies often, however, depends on the maturity of other supporting technologies and infrastructures.

For example, in order for modern light weight hand-held mobile phones to be introduced to consumers, as contrasted with the ‘brick phones’ in use during the 1980s, the market had to await the arrival of 2G digital cellular networks.

Or, in order for Compact Discs to supplant vinyl long playing records the music industry had to wait for digital encoding and reading technology. When a technology tries to leapfrog those earlier preparatory stages, such as in the case of Virtual Reality, specifically Linden Labs’ Second Life virtual environment, which had ambitions far in excess of both internet bandwidth and PC microprocessing power, the technology often fails to live up to the hype.

Henry Ford’s oft-quoted aphorism, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” also comes into play here. Should technology evolve according to customer feedback or through the visionary far-sightedness of select innovators?

In the case of Augmented Reality (‘AR’), the technology is predicated upon the maturity of such factors as bandwidth, processor power, and the sophistication of camera and displays, not to mention the growth of sufficient mobile phone and hand held device penetration in a given market so as to justify developers’ efforts to create new applications.

Right now, Augmented Reality is an idea whose time has come, and never before has this been more so than in a market like Singapore, which leads the world in the penetration of hand held smart devices and smart phones (IDA once refered to Singapore as not just a small red dot but a “giant hot spot”!) AR is also a technology which, as in Ford’s quotation, is being driven by true visionaries, thus creating whole new vistas of usage innvoation undreamed of by the ordinary end user.

In a nutshell, Augmented Reality takes every day reality and, using a smart interface, overlays it with an additional layer of digital information which enhances and ‘augments’ the ordinary world which is available to us through the visual sense.

This could mean the user strolling down the street and being able to access a layer of environmental information relating to such things as restaurants, retail outlets, special offers, tourist attractions and details about public transport networks, all in real time on the fly. It is quite literally the stuff of a hundred sci-fi movies such as ‘Minority Report’.

AR-based technology and applications which are dynamic, fun and enriching are today starting to filter through to the public’s perceptions. Perhaps one of the most well-known examples of AR technology is Google’s ‘Project Glass: One Day’ in which a pair of wearable goggles streams real-time digitised environmental information to the user as they stroll around the streets of a city.

As Google were quick to point out about ‘Project Glass: One Day’, the One Day video shows how technology shouldn’t interfere with your life but instead make it simpler and better fit for busy schedules.

Other AR applications can be applied to many different kinds of industries, such as education, travel & tourism, retail, or equipument manufacturing, where AR can replace the traditional instructions manual with a virtual one which interacts in real time with the product, machine or gadget.

AR has already been available in the publishing and retail world in Europe for a few years now, through the work of developers like Metaio for example who have enabled AR applications for magazines like the German periodical STERN and toy makers such as Lego. These applications are considered quite ‘old hat’ today.

But the important thing to note is that AR technology has been proven to work and to provide a flexible, adaptable platform for the creation of innovative new marketing techniques, in just the same way as the iPhone has enabled the development of thousands of useful ‘apps’.

The unmistakable trend in convergence technologies is towards the increasing merging of reality with digital media, and Augmented Reality provides the ideal nexus for this marriage of two entirely different layers of reality. The possibilities are quite literally endless.

Envisage fully animated 3D bus stop posters which spring to life and talk directly to you as you point your smart device at them, or digitised movie characters providing impromptu movie preview trailers on the walls of your favourite cineplex. All these things are made possible by AR, and can be done right here, right now.

One particular application of AR which is highly relevant to the property-obsessed Singapore market, involves the extension of AR to the commercial and residential real estate industry.

The technology now exists to allow local property developers to roll out fully AR show suite presentations which can give prospective buyers an animated summary of any new property coming on the market in Singapore.

We predict that the response to this ground breaking new way of displaying any retail property’s attributes and benefits will be truly incredible once the fad takes off amongst developers.

Overseas, AR is taking off fast on the international scene. Nokia recently introduced its ‘City Lens’ technology which makes use of smart phone cameras to provide comprehensive location-based information which can be viewed in real time in your phone’s screen. Cadillac meanwhile has leveraged AR to provide driving tours of some of the most inhospitable driving environments on the planet, as a way of promoting the driving abilities of its brand.

Audi envisage a time when a car’s instruction’s manual is disgarded in favour of a fully-AR animated manual which interacts in real time with the owner’s vehicle.

AR also needs to be regarded in the full richness of its applications and expression. It has, for instance, quickly skipped the limitations of fixed physical dimensions.

What began as a simple digital overlay to the real world in two-dimensions, using 2D markers or image recognition, has already progressed into the three-dimensional world, made possible by 3D markerless tracking, geolocation, triangulation, digital compass and GPS-based applications as well as gyroscopic applications.

All these factors determine how AR is able to relate to the ‘real life’ environment around the user and ‘augment’ it in the same three dimensions as the end user perceives the environment himself.

Ultimately, AR lends itself to the ‘big picture’ in a small city state such as Singapore. It is not inconceivable that the entire downtown central district could soon be ‘mapped’ with the assistance of the relevant building authorities and a full Augmented Reality ‘grid’ be set up for the wider applications of mobile AR solutions in areas such as retail, hospitality and tourism, not to mention public infocomm servcies too.

It just requires a visionary bold first step to transform Singapore into the world’s first fully AR-enabled city scape and we have the governmental foresight, IT programming skills and creative applications developers to make this an exciting new reality.

There have been some nay sayers in the world of AR, it is true. Volvo's Mobile Marketing Manager, Mikael Karlsson described AR as "overhyped" and "a marketing gimmick" at the recent Apps World event in London.

But as the technology matures the voices of dissent as regards AR are becoming fewer.

When you think about it, there were many nay sayers at the time that the Internet and World Wide Web were being created too! And look how heavily we’ve come to rely on these business- and lifestyle-critical technologies.

Many major brands are indeed recognising the potential of AR, and these include BAE Systems, Hewlett Packard and many others.

But AR itself also sits within a wider marketing trend which is towards making every retail, consumer or even corporate interchange an “experiential” event in which the senses are engaged at multiple levels and the emotions are aroused.

In our increasingly information saturated world, marketers are having to work at double time to find techniques which break through the static of ever-faster digital information overdrive and access consumer decision- making in effective, decisive ways.

This is where it is also important to innovate by bringing AR into the area of “experiential marketing” - enabling customers and end-users, as well as corporate audiences, to experience their reality of brands, products or services at their own pace and in tune with their own personal interests or will.