Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Augmented Reality

First it was Facebook applications, then it was i-phone apps and now the latest fad to catch on is augmented reality. Essentially, it's a way for people to literally interact with brands and break the "fourth wall" of the computer screen; a combination of the real world with a virtual one. We've been playing around with this at Firstborn and a few possible projects have come in the door. In one form, you print out a sheet of paper with pre-determined coordinates that are tracked by a web cam. What you see on your computer is a virtual object or character that reacts to your hand movements, for example. There's an example of this in a recent GE site that was created by Goodby Silverstein and North Kingdom.

Roger Smith Hotel

I had a meeting today with Adam Wallace who's the new media director for the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue between 47th and 48th Street. Chris Brogan wrote about the hotel and it piqued my interest. It's one of the few family-owned hotels in the city and they're certainly under the radar for the most part. The owner is a sculptor and you can see his work and other art throughout the hotel. They're doing some interesting work using social media to reach out to their customers and it was interesting hearing about that.

A. Lincoln

I'm about half way through reading Ronald C. White Jr.'s new book , A. Lincoln: A Biography. I never get tired of the Lincoln story. As Doris Kearns Goodwin pointed out in podcast I listened to the other day about her book Team of Rivals, Lincoln dealt with tragedy from an early age; his mother died when he was a young boy, then one of his sisters and as a father he lost 2 children. He never joined a particular church and wasn't so sure about the afterlife so his ambition sprang from his hope that when he died he would live on through the memory of how he made the world a better place. And he really meant it unlike modern day politicians, although no doubt the ramifications of his acts rippled through the years to the election of the first African-American president. It's really hard to believe that a man such as Lincoln once existed who was both so humble and so great.