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Consumer Behaviour Augmented Reality Technology

Blipping hell – why do we always look at innovation in the wrong way?

By Amy Kean, head of futures

June 30, 2016 | 7 min read

It’s a shame that augmented reality still isn’t adored by the masses in the way augmented reality experts predicted.

blippar

Clunky, mobile-data-draining and at times underwhelming, it’s been a hard sell (for media agencies at least) with mid-level advertising campaigns rarely boasting enough budget to buy both quality production and the media to drive people there. In APAC in particular, volatile 3G reception in many markets has been a huge barrier to adoption. The opportunity to use your own product packaging as interactive real estate via AR sounds fantastic in theory, and while cereal brands have led the charge, there’s still an education job to be done.

In the absence of a big consumer push of its own, Blippar has relied on brands to do the marketing job, thus leaving us with a media stalemate that typifies most of our conversations with AR providers – including Shazam, which launched its own product last year.

I’ve long been an advocate of augmented reality. I think that anything with the potential to make our mundane daily lives more interesting should be encouraged. Some of the executions I’ve seen from Blippar have been beautiful, adding huge amounts of value – Maybelline nail polish being the perfect case in point. Of course I want to see how colours look on my nails before I purchase them! It’s just not the same when you hold the bottle up to your fingers. The problem is, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say “this poster at the bus stop is great, I just wish I could use my mobile phone to make it jump out at me.”

But it’s ok, because teething problems aside Blippar has just officially relaunched as a search engine powering ‘visual discovery’ which is (in the brand's words) “powered by a combination of computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence and augmented reality.” It has also introduced the ‘Blipparsphere’ – a “new proprietary knowledge graph [which} builds on our existing computer vision and machine learning technology to capture deeper and more rich information about the world around you.”

The process is very simple – you Blip an object in real life using the application, and you are delivered a dynamic word cloud that identifies, contextualises and then defines what you’re looking at, before serving additional information.

And as it announced just last week in Cannes, Blippar is offering an API for developers and a build-it-yourself Blippbuilder for people to create all manner of weird and wonderful augmented reality executions for themselves, thus cutting out an expensive middle man. Which sounds promising. And I got very excited when I randomly ‘blipped’ my Frappuccino cup this morning to see a cute little animation about Rwandan coffee pop up.

But launches and updates happen all the time, so what makes this so different? Is it so different? How do we even decide? Well, let’s think about what we – as an industry – tend to pay attention to when we’re assessing whether an area of innovation is worth our time...

Revenue predictions. It’s predicted that the augmented reality industry is going to generate $150bn in revenue by 2020, when in 2016 it’s currently single digits. Too often we look at the predicted size as the only reason for embracing new technologies. This is where the mobile industry has fallen down: ad spend doesn’t make an industry mature, it could just mean that lots of people are doing totally average campaigns. By way of example, in 2013 Business Insider predicted that Google Glass would shift 21 million units by 2018. You know, my wardrobe’s probably worth a couple of thousand dollars, next year it might double, but that’s no reason for anyone to ever come to me for fashion advice.

We also pay close attention to VC funding announcements, articles in the trade press and creds presentations. But how often do we really, truly look at things from the consumer’s point of view?

The Mindshare APAC office was recently visited by the Blippar team and its CEO and co-founder, Ambarish Mitra. We were given a speech about the evolution of digital, the role of visual search and the sophistication with which the updated version of the app had been created. Artificial Intelligence? A billion data points? You’re talking 2016’s language, my friend!

But in the middle of the meeting my colleagues and I fired up the app and started pointing it at things… bottles, shoes, the ceiling, before pointing it at each other’s faces. “It says you’re an idiot”, one said to another. “Blippar just told me your hair’s going grey” and so on and so forth. It was funny, for a while. And this was before we asked Ambarish how many men had blipped their own penises. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “A lot.”

Aaaaaand there we go. If you find the common denominator and an immediate ‘in’ for users, regardless of how basic, then you’re probably on the right track. Sex, self-obsession, LOLs, information – probably the most fundamental things that humans need from a new platform. Snapchat was originally used by perverts, people having affairs and drunk white girls, whilst at the same time catering for our ever-decreasing attention span. Now we’re swapping faces and creating stories all over the place.

So someone – whether it’s Blippar or us as marketing professionals – needs to decide what the basic urge is. But the real urge, not the one that’s listed in the creds presentation or client’s brief.

Some of the most exciting applications for augmented reality are when it’s used to solve human problems related to mental health and physical disability. I’ve seen apps designed to address arachnophobia, autism and even paranoia. Some of the best manifestations of this new wave of tech innovation have both blown minds, but also put them back together again. I can imagine a future where we blip faces to try and identify early onsets of liver disease, or blip the sky to see how long we’ve got before it starts raining. No one’s going to blip a can of beans in the sacred five minutes they have free on a Saturday morning. Not yet, anyway.

In reality, I think Blippar could change the world. Well maybe not the world, but it could change the way that people search, think and behave. It has a lovely interface, a wealth of intelligence behind it and is a brand new lens with which to analyse the space around us. We just need to lose any tech snobbery we have, and think about the honest quirks of human beings. And then if we’re still excited about the prospect of a future of visual search, then it’s not just Blippar’s responsibility to make that happen.

Amy Kean is strategy lead for Mindshare APAC. She tweets @keano81

Consumer Behaviour Augmented Reality Technology

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