@ LATV Fest: Making the case for augmented reality

LOS ANGELES — “If you want your story to travel and become part of what people are doing, and you want those people to become fans,” augmented reality should fall right into your wheelhouse, Brian Hurst said yesterday to kick off a panel on the nascent technology.
With an audience full of young and old striving to get into the TV business or build upon the successes they’ve achieved thus far in this industry, the CEO of The Opportunity Managament Co.appeared to strike the right nerve with his approach. In short, he said, augmented reality takes the tools of storytelling and lets people immerse themselves in the story.
“Linear storytelling will never disappear,” Hurst added. But he’s also sure there will be plenty of other verticals flocking to augmented reality because of the new capabilities it will bring to the fore. Augmented reality (or mixed reality) is a technology that essentially overlays computer-generated images and text on live images that are being picked up through a camera lens.
“We see augmented reality as a strong link to mobile technology and where mobile technologies are going,” said Rebecca Allen, director of Nokia Corp.’s (NOK) Research Center Hollywood.
She presented footage from the Westwood Experience, a narrated augmented reality experience that her lab created earlier this year to showcase the technologies capabilities as a storytelling tell.
Nokia’s approach is to look at objects in the environment and use them to clue in on your mobile device and deliver a richer experience. Indeed, the Westwood Experience, is all about exploiting the “power of a place,” she said.
The theme is set in 1949 as an actor narrates the story to people walking through a 7-block area in Westwood. Like most good stories, the walk ends with a surprise finish at Marilyn Monroe’s final resting place.
Throughout the experience, Nokia smart phones guided people from one place to the next while different objects in the environment would trigger audio and video overlays as they made their journey.
It’s like a “three dimensional reality show. This is a new kind of reality show. The audience is walking through the story,” Allen said. “It’s a unique environment where people get a whole new level of experience because of where they are.”
Executives at Total Immersion at Zugara also presented their respective firms latest work on augmented reality, but it’s all PC based for the time being. While neither company has embraced mobile to extent of others, it’s clear that augmented reality usage is still heavily skewed toward computers. Total Immersion, for example, worked on 270 projects last year. There’s nothing along that scale in the mobile space today.