interactive technology privateer

Augmented reality (AR) has finally been brought to mainstream, albeit dated, print media. Esquire showcased AR in the December 2009 issue of their high-profile magazine — but that’s really all that happened.

Anyone with the issue of the magazine and a webcam can experience Esquire’s AR goodness. They’ve littered the issue with AR markers, so there’s plenty of content to explore. When holding up the magazine cover, the marker under Robert Downey, Jr. explodes into an AR-ified video. There’s bunch of random letters floating in space with a cutout video of RDJ doing what he does best: spout off-kilter, random phrases. Every time you turn the marker 90 degrees, another floating video of Robert Downey Jr. appears. Going through the rest of the markers tucked into the magazine content produces roughly the same experience. The only exception is the videos and scenes around them are slightly different.

Built by The Barbarian Group (TBG) this AR extravaganza was released upon the world as a self-contained piece of software. This 71MB download is a highly unorthodox and frustrating approach to provide such a widely available AR experience. Certainly there are some benefits to building a custom piece of software. For instance, the marker detection was surprisingly good. However, when AR is already available in Flash, why force people to download your own one-use software? Plus, the performance of the software hit way under par. Aside from it crashing the first time and bogging down my computer, it ran at about 5 frames a second. Flash should have been the platform of choice.

Looking past the sub-par performance, the actual AR-iness left a lot to be desired. There are two basic parts to AR: reality and augmentation. It looks as if Esquire and TBG decided to throw both AR essentials out the window. Their reality was in grayscale and through a strange white gradient. Unless my webcam only operates in grayscale (which it doesn’t), then we should be seeing an unadulterated, full-color feed from the webcam. And what’s with that gradient? My guess is it’s an attempt to make the AR content more visible. Ideally this would be accomplished by better design.

Looking past their strange reality, the augmentation didn’t score any better. We see reality in three dimensions, so augmented reality should also be in three dimensions. This application just put 2D video and graphics in a 3D space. That isn’t augmenting reality, but a stylized way of playing a video. If the content was interactive 3D objects and animations that engaged users with a dynamic experience, it would have been a richer way to integrate augmented reality. In addition Esquire could have utilized more stylized, graphic markers rather than the very obvious and clunky tag-style markers. They could have even used markerless tracking — especially if requiring me to download a special piece of software.

There is still that one quality that redeems this high-profile yet under-utilized mass exposure. The AR community has been growing swiftly, but every new technology takes time to get mainstream exposure and gain everyday traction. Esquire has provided just that, and tons of it.