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.