Published on ona11.journalists.org on September 24, 2011
ONA11 co-chair Teresa Hanafin brought the latest technologies to this year’s conference, including augmented reality, game show style. She reached out to six augmented reality app developers for Saturday’s “The REal World – Boston: Augmented Social Experiences.”
In front of three judges and an audience asked to text in votes, presenters demoed their augmented realities, American Idol-style. Judge Will Sullivan brought a Coca-Cola with him to mimic Idol’s Randy, while Twitter named judge Robert Hernadez the panel’s Paula.
Up first was Retha Hill from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She developed an app that tracks black history through historical locations using the iPhone’s camera. Related historical facts and photos are displayed over the camera’s view based on related info from geotags.
“The voice on the video sounded really familiar,” said judge Robert Hernandez of #wjchat and USC Annenberg, referring to Hanafin’s narration of Hill’s video, originally shot for the Boston Globe and boston.com. Hanafin is the director of user engagement and social media for Boston.com.
Dana Farbo of Imano Inc. followed with his app that enhances city wandering. His app works similarly through a smart phone camera and geotags to display restaurant and shop information available on the Internet, overlayed on the camera’s display.
“That was great. Could have used that last night when were walking around in the rain looking for the subway,” said judge Will Sullivan, director of mobile mews at Lee Enterprises.
The Italian contestant opened his demo with photos of his personal lasagna recipe, introducing the layering process that became his metaphor for augmented reality. Adriano Drana of OWNI, an augmented news site website, developed an app that traced Stanford University’s history.
“I think you may have given us a new metaphor that will live past this conference,” said third judge Regina McCombs from Poynter Institute.
Matthew Szymcyzk of Zugara.com created a “webcam social shopper.” Using an laptop’s webcam, users can snap a photo of themselves, then Szymcyzk’s augmentation forms the clothing item to the user, who then has the option of taking a photo.
“I can upload this to Facebook… to solicit feedback form friends and family immediately,” he said while demoing.
Lauren Offers and David Stone are responsible for the world’s first visual browser, Aurasma. Using image recognition technology and an iPad or iPhone camera, the app sees photos, ads and physical objects, and is able to display relavant content, mostly in video form. The two demoed a movie poster from Harry Potter that quickly replaced the ad with an identically sized trailer from the movie.
Judges and audience members were blown away by there demo.
“I have not seen this presentation before and that was epic,” said Hernandez. “I’m speechless,” Sullivan agreed.
Tamara Manik-Pelman has the answer for history buffs visiting Philadelphia. Her app complies historical facts and photos and displays them similarly to Hill’s black history by overlaying content onto the camera’s display.
Originally, Hanafin hadn’t planned on naming a winner even though the session was styled after American Idol, but with audience pressure, the judges removed their mics for a moment of deliberation before naming Aurasma the winner.