Augmented Reality & the Future of Printing
The man on the magazine cover has come to life. And he's talking to me.
Under normal circumstances, this kind of statement is grounds for therapy, but I'm not crazy. I know magazines can't talk, and unless you're in a David Lynch movie or you're living a day in the life of Hunter S. Thompson, they don't spontaneously animate. Yet, here I am, staring at a magazine as the man on the cover introduces himself.
"Hi, I'm Raimo, CEO of Layar, and this is interactive print," he says, making a sweeping gesture with his hands. "Magical, isn't it?"
...
The man is Raimo van der Klein, co-founder and CEO of Layar, an international software company with headquarters in Amsterdam and New York City. And like I said, I'm not crazy: I'm at a Layar workshop, and I've been given a copy of Layared, the company's self-published magazine-slash-marketing-tool that serves as a demo of its augmented-reality (AR) offerings. After a quick briefing on how to use the app, I hold my phone over the magazine and tap the "scan" button, and the previously inanimate Raimo is replaced by a short video of Raimo digitally overlaid atop the actual magazine cover.
OK, Raimo, you got me, it is kind of magical—and now I'm scanning away like a grocery-store cashier on a Sunday morning. I scan a segment titled "Heroes of Interactive Print," profiling Dutch comics magazine and recent augmented-reality adopter Eppo, and a clickable link directs me to the magazine's subscription page. I scan an ad, and a link to the advertiser's webstore appears. I scan a white Stutterheim raincoat, and a yellow Stutterheim raincoat appears beside it, along with a poll asking which variant I like better. (For the record, I voted yellow.)
Augmented reality essentially enables publishers to do in print anything that can be done on the Internet—Layar allows for links, slideshows, polls, Twitter feeds (updating in real time), HTML widgets and more—making the gap between print and digital media seem less like the Grand Canyon and more like a crack in the sidewalk.
Maxim, Esquire and a number of other magazines have released augmented-reality issues (Esquire as far back as 2009). Ikea added augmented reality to its 2013 catalog. Nissan used Layar in a massive Canadian-newspaper ad campaign for its 2013 Altima, resulting in more than 6,500 page views at a 42 percent click-through rate and a 65 percent increase in Altima test-drives. (Nissan would also win Canada's top advertising award for the campaign.)
"What AR does is provide a positive approach to this negative connotation which print has gotten the last [few] years," says Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, co-founder of Layar and host of the workshop I'm attending. "And also, because it's easy [to use], it's easy to embrace, so in the case you saw with Nissan, because it was AR they were able to come up with these ideas and come up with such a large project [that] was also different from what they did before."
"And that's what I personally really liked, because I believe the printing industry is definitely not dead, it's really strong actually," Lens-FitzGerald adds. "It's a stupid meme that, specifically, technologists endorse, that print is dead."
...
Based on its use cases in the publishing industry, it's not much of a stretch to imagine the ways augmented reality could be used for printed and promotional products—e-commerce, interactive imprints, additional information that won't fit on a label, etc.—but the print and promotional products industries have been slow in adopting the technology.
That could be changing. And soon.
Prime Line, a promotional products supplier based in Bridgeport, Conn., introduced augmented reality in its 2013 catalog, becoming the first industry supplier to do so. The company used Quad/Graphics' Actable interactive print solution (the same one used by Maxim in its AR issue) to create 3-D animations for several products and add links enabling customers to order samples, access a digital version of the catalog or get additional product information.
"When we plan a catalog, we're always looking for ways to make it better and more exciting for Prime customers," explained David Fiderer, director of marketing for Prime Line. "Augmented reality was just the ticket. Equally important, it provided us with an opportunity to generate excitement at our trade shows. We set up iPad stations at our booth, which enabled the 3-D animations to play in a continuous loop," he continued. "Our sales team used these as a way to generate excitement for the products and to reinforce our image as a technology-forward company."
So far, it seems to be working. Fiderer cited "strong interest" in Prime Line's 2013 drinkware and executive-toy lines (the two categories enabled with AR in the catalog), and excitement among distributors. And while not all of Prime Line's 2013 catalog is AR-enabled, the company hinted that more augmented reality could be on the way. "This is really the tip of the iceberg," said Prime Line President Jeff Lederer in a press release. "This technology allows us to interact with distributors in many other ways, which we expect to incorporate into future promotions."
Fiderer wouldn't go into further detail about Prime Line's augmented-reality plans, but he seemed optimistic that the technology could make a significant impact in the industry. "Without getting too specific, augmented reality is a fantastic way to tie an offline promotion directly to an interactive experience online," he said. "From answering specific questions, to customer service videos, to product demos—the ideas are endless."
...
Prime Line's foray into augmented reality has been a success, so far, but it's still more in line with the way the technology has been used in the publishing industry. Interactive catalogs are one thing, but augmented reality—with its ability to enhance a small, finite space with an infinite amount of information—seems tailor-made for printed and promotional products.
So where are they?
"It doesn't work ideally yet, but that will come," says Lens-FitzGerald. "Everything will be recognizable at one point. Right now, Layar is optimal for planar surfaces: posters, packaging, publications—that's what it's best for."
"It's a matter of us focusing on that market for 'round things,'" he continues. "And already we have demos where, for instance, a milk carton (we have this live already in R&D) that there's a plane flying around it, and then you just turn and wherever you hold [the phone] the computer knows: 'Oh, the plane was there, the plane was there.' It's fluent. It flows."
I'm envisioning a day where a digital King Kong, planes circling above his head, scales my milk carton like it's the Empire State Building as I eat breakfast. But we're not quite there yet.
Still, there are at least a few instances where augmented reality has already been used in ways the print and promotional products industries could look to co-opt. Lens-FitzGerald's business card is Layar-enabled (scanning it loads up a Layar demo video and buttons linking to Lens-FitzGerald's Twitter, LinkedIn, email and phone number). Heineken has used AR on its coasters and bottle labels. Starbucks has used AR on its holiday cups. Essentially, any product with a surface flat enough to print on can be enabled with augmented-reality features.
"It's a logical step also to go to packaging," Lens-FitzGerald notes. "I think that's close, yet another category that technically is relatively easy to do. And after that it's going to grow in lots of ways, and technology-wise is going to be more difficult," he adds. "Cause then we're talking about recognizing 3-D objects, recognizing you, and I don't know how that's going to work. I mean, some of it works already, but what that means for the medium—it's going to be so diverse, the use cases you can come up with in that context."
...
Fry Communications, based in Mechanicsburg, Pa., is one print supplier that has recognized augmented reality's potential in the printed products industry. The company has begun offering Layar AR services through its electronic and digital publishing division (the Fry Family Network) providing everything from consulting to base-production to creative and technical coding on AR projects.
"I think it's very important in the industry," said Alan Snyder, manager for the digital product and support group at Fry Communications. "If I were to put an umbrella label around it, I would call it 'interactive print,' which could overlap with things like QR codes, page-recognition technologies, anything that allows us to bring what I would call bonus content into the print publication. [It] creates a value add for the consumer as well as the advertiser."
Snyder listed several market segments that could benefit from augmented reality features—catalogs, trade publications and, notably, direct mail—but he cautioned that it's less about where the technology is used and more about how. "We all know even the best technology applied poorly will not get the result you're looking for," Snyder explained. "Just like the all emerging technologies, I think the biggest key for publishers is to really evaluate what they hope to get out of this and the strategy that they're going to employ to do it."
For Lens-FitzGerald, that's the biggest challenge faced by augmented reality and other forms of interactive print: The technology is, to borrow from Raimo's introduction video, magical—but it can't sustain itself on magic alone. For it to stay relevant, people need to keep using it. "The publishers, the marketers, the advertisers, need to ensure that all the experiences are up to par, are fulfilling a need, are fulfilling a wish (latent or otherwise) that the consumer has," Lens-FitzGerald says. "And that's where we have to get."
...
We're in a conference room after the workshop, and I've asked Lens-FitzGerald the big question: Where does augmented reality go from here?
At first, he's hesitant. He's been looking ahead for so long, he says, and now he's finally starting to "look at his toes." He mentions the practical stuff, the near-future stuff. Packaging. 3-D objects. AR goggles. But then he starts to look ahead, again. "I do see a far future (and yes, I am a science fiction fan) where, literally, I can alter and change my reality to whatever I want to," he says. "That could be through my phone, 'cause I look at it like that [points phone at a statue of an Eagle on the desk] and the phone recognizes that eagle and makes it fly away. Or it's my lenses, or even if I have it hard-wired, that will come at one point."
"And that will only happen if we do our job well now, making sure it takes with packaging, with publications," he adds. "And from there on it'll grow."