Kick it

Nike’s Parisian flagship shop on Avenue des Champs-Élysée has a jazzy new feature, an AR machine that uses NikeID to allow customers to customise their AirMax, LunarEpic Low, and Cortez trainers.

Using a hologram, the augmented video-mapping device lets shoppers place a white sneaker inside the machine and see their choice of colours and designs illustrated onto the shoe.

The machines were designed and installed by SmartPixels, a French company specializing in augmented retail programs…

(via)

 

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Horse hunting

McDonald’s Australia have launched an app to let you track where your food you has come from.

It’s sweetly done and one of the first examples of a major brand opening up their supply chain for scrutiny, which is impressive.

Though, as well as the obvious PR benefits, it may not be as altruistic as it seems. Using the app gives McDonald’s GPS data, the time and date, and the details of the meal you ordered. That could be some useful data on the consumption habits of Maccas Customers:

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Snooker loopy

An augmented reality pool table:

(via)

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Through a glass darkly

Continuing the augmented reality theme…

After the initial round of fancy brochures and interactive billboards, companies are starting to get a handle on how AR can actually be used to sell their products. The common theme is allowing customers to try out products that are either to bulky, too time-consuming, or too expensive.

First up, some lovely stuff from Lego; holding up any Lego box to the in-store screen lets children and their parents can see the finished product sitting on top of the box (animated to bring it to life). It’s been so successful that it’ll be rolled out to every Lego store over the course of the year:

Tissot and Slefridges combine AR with turning their display window into a touch-screen to give passers-by an idea of what a Tissot watch would look like on their wrist:What I particularly like about this is the way it lowers the mental barriers to trying on a high-end watch. Like most people I wouldn’t ever really have considered trying on a Tissot watch. This display side-steps that ‘exclusive’ mentality without undermine the quality of the brand. How many people bought a Tissot watch on the back of this? No idea, but I bet a lot more people now know which Tissot watch they’d like to buy and that could well translate into sales.

While Tissot used AR to overcome mental barriers to trying their product, IKEA and Kogan (a consumer electronics retailer) are using it to overcome physical barriers. Print out the reference card, place it where you want your sofa, then flick through to check out how the various models suit your room:
Or in the case of Kogan, place the reference over your old TV, then upgrade:

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Looking into the past

The Museum of London has launched an iPhone app which cleverly brings its extensive art and photographic collections to the streets of the capital…

The StreetMuseum app uses geo-tagging and Google Maps to bring the guide users to sites in London where they can contrast the current city with the images from the Museum of London exhibition.

On opening the app, it shows the locations of the various sites where you can view historic images of London:

Once you arrive in the location pictured, the app will recognise your location and overlay the historic image over the current view seen through your iPhone camera:
(via)

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Augmentation

Moving Brands are an agency who’ve published a brochure that, when combined with a webcam, becomes a virtual browser through the continually updated information on their website. This video explains it rather better than I have:

What it shows is that static media, such as Moving Brands’ brochure, don’t have to be fixed once they’ve been printed. Instead, they can be constantly updated, by acting as a portal to the information rather than containing the information themselves

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