My Mac Book pro fans are still spinning but the effect worths the cpu stress. I have no printer now so I use my Iphone and actually I accessed just the first steps, but it works pretty good

The Star Trek augmented reality experience seems a very good example of the potential of this tecnology, that is more and more applied to interactive advertising. Marketers have the possibility to engage customers in a mixed reality experience that will stick in mind surely more than a TV spot seen ten times.

Let’s monitor how many people will take a loo at this video, that has comments of enthusiast people, other that says is a fake  (try yourself here to test it)

Another funny example is this one, that reproduce in augmented reality the “testimonial” of a TV campaign (a Sasquatch). You can take a look at the video or go directly here

Living Sasquatch – Papervision – Augmented Reality from Boffswana on Vimeo.

The spot is funny too

So, I was particularly intrigued when I read “First Person Plural” by Paul Bloom

An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind” another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?

There are several concept in this articles that are interesting, offering many cues that can be useful for a team leader, a martketing responsible or simply a person that want to imprve the relation with himself and the others.

1) What we remember and what we experience can be different. Our working time can be less stressful than a sunday spent thinking about monday morning, and reaseraches evidences that people asked to randomly record their activity and mood each time they hear a beep were on average “happier” in working time than in vacation. Paul Bloom gives more evidence of this inconguence of memories.

Personally I believe that too ofter the working envioronment doesn’t allow to express all the different personalities of us as human being, and this is a huge loss of potential both for the indivual than for the organization.

Self and others acceptance, the incentive to express completely going sometimes outside the borders is a practice that should be encouraged especially a team level.

2) Absoulte coherence is not necessary a value.

The idea is that instead, within each brain, different selves are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.

” Walt Whitman gave us a pithier version: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Our different personalities may have different point of views, that can be experienced and understood  while these personalities are expressing themselves. Communication between our different selves, and the persistence of the stimulus in different occasion of our life make this internal dialogue easier allowing to express our inner wealth. On the other hand, a censure on opinion change can create barriers between our different point of views.

3) We can experience outside “real life”

After all, the most common leisure activity is not sex, eating, drinking, drug use, socializing, sports, or being with the ones we love. It is, by a long shot, participating in experiences we know are not real—reading novels, watching movies and TV, daydreaming, and so forth. Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

There is a great opportunity offered by Internet and especially by the virtual immersive environment as Second Life, Play Station Home and the constantly increasing virtual worlds: being an active player in a fiction environment.

The sociologist Sherry Turkle has found that people commonly create avatars so as to explore their options in a relatively safe environment.

By this perspective, the ideal virtual worlds is the one that allows to express inner-self potential and experiment situation that can be useful in day-by-day life.

Some interesting evidence can come from trends in virtual worlds creations. A useful map by KZero shows how VW for adults are mirror worlds and  the ones focused on socializing and content creation.

There is a debate on the effect of virtual worlds on behaviour and personality development. In a safe environment people can adopt unusual behaviours, personalities and way of interacting in a quasi-real, where experimenting different selves

The process of self-binding happens when one self can predict that it will later be dominated by another self, and it can act to block the crossing—an act that Thomas Schelling and the philosopher Jon Elster have explored in detail.  This is, for example, one of the process that can be overcomed in a virtual environment with (almost) no immediate consequence for real life.

Can it be a good opportunity? That depends by the virtual social environment: on how violence or abuse are judged and on the value schema that is created to drive participantrs to self-improvement. I have experienced by myself how healty relations created in virtual environment cah be traslated into real life. Balancing the 2 aspect is of course foundamental, but there are many evidence that Virtual worlds can enhance and increase our potential as individual and teams.

4) Self-binding can be a good strategy or a risk

Blooms goes deeper in the analysis of the long-term and short term self and in the implications of self-binding, increasingly used by the goverment to regulate peoples behaviour. While this latter is actually worring, self-binding can be a useful strategy when we want to overcome critical aspect of one of the our-selves.

Thinking yourself as a community of peers can help self-improvement, self-consciousness and relation with others, and in this meaning might be more useful to “convince” your different selves instead of binding…

In these sense, Bloom’s closing is a good hint:

The community of selves shouldn’t be a democracy, but it shouldn’t be a dictatorship, either.

At the moment in Maison,the we are studyng how a mixed reality environtment can enrich the user experience in different spheres, from marketing and product presentation to remote collaboration.

Augmented reality can enhance all the 3 key elements to enhance digital interaction:

• Inform: adding digital content to reality can dramatically increase the quality and the quantity of inputs that can be percieved mantaining the fruition habits. The example of the digital books perfectly rapresents how a standard action can benefit of a digital enhancement.
• Entertain: we are competing for attention, and engaging the user in a challenging interaction is the better way to get it. Entertaining is keeping people “pleasantly occupied” to get their attention
• Play: under-estimated and often considered a “distraction”, but actually one of the most important aspect of life (at least for me). Play is an important part of learning in many animals, and is a key component of the cognitive development and socialization for humans.

If your goal is to create a relation with your customer, to sell a product or to strenght your brand, but also if you want your team to cooperate in more creative and unbundeld way, take a look at the videos for inspiration. Let’s bet that the increasing adoption of these technologies will reduce more and more the boundiaries of the companies, and that the relation with customers will include them, sooner or later, more deeply in all the marketing processes.

Introducing augmented reality

A nice test with Second Life by the friend Cristian Contini

Augmented Mixed Reality: Second Life pops out from the Screen from cristiancontini on Vimeo.

Augmented reality applied to art

A working online application (funny) that you can try here

Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

An example of use of augmented reality for collaboration (and of bad presentation of a good idea by DaimlerChrysler

And last but not least the post by Luca where all started, with a couple of interesting cases showing Second Life avatar in a room and an application by BMW to assit mechanics.