Take your phone out of your pocket, turn the camera on and hold it up in front of you.
Move it around and you see the world on your screen. Your phone can now add labels, pictures or video to that plain world view. As you move the phone around, the labels change with the view, precisely in lock step with the things they relate to. Or the phone might recognise something and superimpose graphics on it say an historic view of a building or a video.
The technology that does this is simple, available on almost all smart phones all over the world and has the needlessly portentous name of 'augmented reality' or 'AR'. If you are reading this on a tablet or smart phone follow this link to see crimes near you (this link will prompt you to install an app called Layar which works for most smart phones).
Why is this important?
For over a century huge industries such as advertising and local news have been based upon using a person's immediate environment to sell them content in context or use cues in that environment to push information to them. Augmented reality is a radical new way of getting information to people based on where they are or what they are pointing their phone at.
The rise of smartphones has taken augmented reality from a science fiction or military technology to something that hundreds of millions of people can use. The phones have become very powerful and can now handle the once demanding software with ease.
The cost and technology risk of experimenting with AR content has plummeted in the last couple of years as the software for AR on phones improves – there are dozens to choose from. A media company can quickly get an augmented reality project off the ground by building into their own app the work AR platform producers have already done, bypassing the cost and risk of writing their own stuff.
What does this mean for bloggers?
It's very easy for bloggers to play with augmented reality and see what it does for them. Blogs with a strong sense of place in their content can make a rapid start. The main platforms, Blogger, WordPress.com and .org, Drupal etc all have features or plug ins that allow you to geo-tag your content by clicking on a map.
Talk About Local offers a new service, HypARlocal, funded by charities Nesta and The Nominet Trust for you to drop your RSS feed in to our service and see it in Layar. Or if your blog is about recognisable things with physical presence in the real world – say cars, books, magazines you can use say UK-developed Aurasma to experiment with someone pointing their phone at the thing your write about and the phone bringing up your content or a graphic as an overlay on the object.
What does this mean for publishers, newspapers?
Augmented reality on mobile phones allows news organisations to publish news to people that is about the precise place in which they consume it. It allows human level localisation well below the level of the (sadly) increasingly uneconomic local paper, without the costs of a local distribution network. The ease with which this can be done is a new dimension for news publishing. News networks don't have to develop risky new augmented reality technology – they can use the kernels of the augmented reality platforms in their own newspaper apps. There would be editorial processes to work through – tagging where a restaurant review is (geo-tagging) is fairly straightforward, but tagging a national story is harder.
Augmented reality though is part of the wider approach of news organisations to mobile phones. The phone apps delivered by many papers and broadcasters seem to see mobile phones as little more than single column reading devices. The apps don't really tap into the functionality nor different reading characteristics offered by a phone. The few experiments with mobile augmented reality by newspapers have been in advertising or engaging gimmickry. Nesta's Destination Local programme is working with blogs and local papers to kick start experiments in geo location and AR. Augmented reality and news editorial is virgin territory for newspapers and media groups in the UK and there's huge potential for a group to steal a march by being first to integrate the technology into their mobile app.
You've mentioned geo-tagging, what's that?
Mobile search about local information is forecast to overtake desktop search by 2015. Naturally people searching from their phone often want results that are nearby. But who decides what's nearby? Sadly, at the moment Google forms its own view on where your blog or news article is. Starbucks or a business in a directory Google will locate precisely – but Google isn't yet interested in any geo tagging you may have put in your newspaper article or independent blog about a place. But Google come around in the end.
Ok, I'm in, what do I do?
It's a fantastic time to experiment with using augmented reality to add new context to the content you publish. It's quick, easy and low cost to prove a concept if you use services like hypArlocal or Aurasma. To build a working service you'll need a developer who can work with one of the mainstream AR platforms and with your web content management system – you'll find big AR groups on LinkedIn. As the platforms have become easier to use, the cost has plummeted.
Augmented reality on mobiles is a startling new method of publishing, the potential for it built into mainstream news apps is huge. And it may only be the tip of the iceberg for new geo-tagged, location aware media.
William Perrin is a community activist working to empower communities through online action.