I like my Augmented Reality (AR) like a Swiss Army knife utility, functional.  Just because you technically could make an egg whisk for the knife, should you? At what point does something that can offer lasting value become a cheap trick, done only for the sake of using the technology?

Although this does necessarily mean that I am advocating a tyranny of practical utility on AR, rather there should be context, purpose, relevance and meaning in an execution; not just an augmented overlay on the physical world, used only for whimsy effect. For every working execution, for example, the UPS Package application, there are playful and fun romps, such as the Bigfoot AR, that showcase imagination and usefulness – making us smile is still one of the greatest tricks that a piece of advertising can play on us.

There is a range of possibilities with AR, and over time, rather than look at how the medium can entertain, consider where is can extend and change what people are doing in society for the better.

Technology as Anthropology is an emerging theme that agencies, businesses, and academics are analyzing – how technology influences culture and creates new behaviours.  The iPhone is changing not only how we spend our time on a commute, but though applications like FixMyStreet, how we can interact with our local authorities to make our community better and safer.

Brands that harness core human values for improving and bettering our condition, in a way that Johnson and Johnson has for parents, through the BabyCenter site, will lead; and those that do for cheap effect, such as the Pepsi Amp App, shall follow.

Technical solutions should enable these socially-led marketing executions to go beyond what is just titillating or amusing. The TED lectures are a responsible zeitgeist that demonstrates the possibilities of blending technology with social conscience.

A recent collection of apps that allow you to locate underground transport , created with the GEO / Orientation features of the iPhone, and AR, show what meaningful executions are possible. With time, more data is going to be either embedded into objects, situations and via devices, people -  then the possibilities start to get very interesting. Real time display of beliefs, vital life signs and knowledge could be shown for others  to view and interact with, enhancing communications and value exchange.

Otherwise, without a compass to why and how, we are just adding additional functions to the campaign, those that are not only unnecessary, but damage the utility of the core use of a tool, to help – to have sometime to pass down, not just on. We need to avoid the absurd conclusion, irrational in its rationality, that one more item, feature or piece of functionality gives us more, not less.

In short, more reality, less augmentation.

There has been a lot of recent talk about the future of agencies in this post-digital age, each agency-type making a stand to justify how future-proof their models are with what seems like much hyped self-benefiting prophecy.

Traditional networked ad agency stargazers are claiming the demise of the pure play agency and the digital rise of, yes, you guessed it, the traditional networked ad agency. On the media side, Damien Blackden, President of Omnicom Media Group, wrote in the Guardian this week about the ‘potential demise of creative agencies’, predicting media agencies were best placed to take advantage of the new world of social media / digital 3.0.  A good article, it has to be said, yet Damien does work for a media agency and in the words of the first person to post a reply comment on the article – “no shit Sherlock”. Other industry commentators (read ‘specialist digital agencies’) are proclaiming that traditional agencies only understand digital through the narrow lens of their marketing speciality (i.e. advertising); that it is only digital agencies which really understand digital from a business transformation perspective (as outlined by Mike Nutley of NMA recently)

Over the last 2 weeks, I have been speaking to two different multinational organisations on this subject and the recurring belief was in having a focus on building relationships with digital agencies like Skive – independent, medium-sized and owner-managed – as they were better value for money compared to bigger traditional agencies. Their words, not mine!

As the future agency debate rages on, the possibilities in digital become ever greater and the speed of change moves up a gear. It is only right for agencies, with their natural survival instincts, to seek evidence demonstrating how best placed they are to take advantage of the changes in consumer behaviour and interactions with digital media.

However, as the traditional lines between agency disciplines (media v creative v PR v digital) become ever greyer, clients need to seek out agency partners which they feel really understand the opportunities which digital has to offer and how to exploit them to their advantage. Regardless of agency type, clients should give the job to the best agency in terms of vision, creative insight, delivery skills and value for money.

Whoever wins that war will be the agency type of the future!

After the success of my Augmented Reality business card application I was fortunate enough to be invited to Adobe MAX 2009 in LA by the O’Reilly guys, to talk about my experiences with AR. Here are my impressions of the conference.

The keynote kicked the conference off with a real bang. These initial talks are renowned for being fairly dull affairs but Adobe pulled out all the stops to make this one something to behold. It started with an incredible dance performance by one of Adobe’s charitable endeavours, the Peapod academy. A discussion on the developments of the Flash platform followed. This included discussions of the new features built into AIR, a sneak look into the the latest developments in the openscreen project and a discussion of ColdFusion and LiveCycle with a look at some extraordinary enterprise projects. The climax was the announcement (after a hilarious Apple slanging Myth-Busters take off) that Apple was now accepting Flash applications into the App store. Now this isn’t exactly Flash in the iPhone browser but it’s certainly a positive step forward.

But by far the most awe-inspiring spectacle was the extended screener of James Cameron’s Avatar. A pair of 3D glasses, a 6th row seat and a massive 50ft screen heightened the experience to the point where I literally shivered in my seat. The producer John Landau passionately introduced each scene and discussed the extent to which Adobe software was used in the making of the movie.

Although there was a vast amount of sessions, as an interactive artist and non-Flex using Actionscript developer, I initially struggled to fill my schedule. There was a whole host of top flight Flash developers such as Ralph Hauwert and Andre Michell (regulars on the Flash conference circuit) missing from the list. However, the day before the conference started, I learned that Influxis had flown a bunch of them over to talk at the FITC Unconference sessions. For me, this development filled several gaps and led to my schedule being significantly reshuffled.

My main highlights included:

Joshua Davis was as inspirational and entertaining as ever in his Space talk. His latest experiments and influences were explained with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, impressive for a 9am slot. I enjoyed watching the developments of each project from initial idea through to the finished product. His investigation into bezier curves was fantastic, as was his installation and iPhone work. This will be Joshua’s last speaking engagement for 2 years as he plans to have a well deserved rest.

Being an Augmented Reality monkey, I was inevitably going to end up attending Tomohiko Koyama AKA Saqoosha and Yoshihiro Shindo’s talk on FLARToolkit and the Japanese open source Flash community the Spark Project. It was great to hear about the history of the project and the inner workings of the AR library from the guy who wrote it. Almost as impressive was the huge tea-cosy like bear hat that he wore throughout the talk and for the rest of the day. I had a chat with Saqoosha afterwards and gushed like a schoolgirl whist droning on about how much I loved using his code library. He didn’t seem to mind. Nice guy.

A few great FITC Unconference sessions followed. Seb-Lee Delisle wowed us all with his playful work. Highlights of the talk included a look at his 5kb 3D Lunar Lander game, a walk through his fantastic 3D Big and Small website and participating in a 3D version of Pong with the rest of the audience. Ralph Hauwert was up next. Ralph is one of, if not the top 3D Flash developer on the planet. By the end we were all stunned by his experiments with fluidic, dynamically lit, interactive geometric shapes. And all this in Flash, and at a very high frame rate. Koen de Weggheleire was up next with a talk on some of the latest features in Flash Player 10. He deserves a special mention for dancing around like a crazed baboon to cheesy house music whilst demonstrating the TriangleMesh feature. Sheer entertainment.

The Adobe MAX awards ceremony followed with special guest Mark Hamill. An inspired choice considering the crowd, Hamill was highly entertaining throughout. We left before the sneak peaks to get ready for the evening but I was later reliably informed that one of the Adobe guys did some live coding dressed in a Chewbacca costume. Wild.

The MAX Bash followed and was an impressive affair. Adobe had taken over almost every establishment in the L.A. Live park. In addition to a Star Wars themed area, complete with Chubacca and Darth Vadar exhibits, Mark Hamill joined the party and was predictably mobbed the moment he arrived. Later that night we met up with some great guys from Sapient and had a ball at the Latin club.

The following morning was my talk, Augmented Reality in the Flash Player with Jesse Freeman. Both halves went very well, we got an above average rating and there were plenty of questions and positive feedback afterwards. Jesse introduced the FLARToolkit library and discussed some of his own work with limitations and the future of FLAR. My half was a discussion of my experiences with FLAR and a discussion of promotion in the field My advice for anyone planning a presentation – make sure you have lots of comical images in your slide show. There’s nothing like a few cheap gags to get the audience on your side. A bit of research is also useful.

I’m pleased to say that we had an above average rating for the talk and had a great write up on digitalarts.co.uk.

Breathing a huge sigh of relief after, I ventured out to see a few of the other MAX talks. The best of the day was A Deep Dive into 10 Innovative Projects for Flash by Thibault Imbert and Michaël Chaize. Some of the better projects were Tomek Augustyn’s face tracking library, HiSlope, due for release soon, and the WiiFlash server which allows Flash developers to use WiiMotes, Nunchuks and Wii Boards as input devices. Another great talk included Kevin Hoyt’s Integrating Flash and Hardware. In a nutshell this session explained how to use a variety of different sensors in Flash using electronics equipment. A must for any aspiring installation artist.

Although initially it was a struggle to find relevant sessions, I was consistently impressed with the scale and quality of the event, the welcoming and informative staff and (in the end) the range of talks on Flash. My fiance Juliet Lall accompanied me, and found the talks on After Effects and Illustrator to be very helpful. I would definitely recommend Adobe MAX to the typical user of Adobe’s range of software. And if Influxis continue to invite the top Flash guys I would recommend it to the atypical rest.

Ever since I joined Skive, I’ve been producing 3D games for the web, using Director and Shockwave (not to be confused with the Flash plug-in, which is sometimes referred to as “Shockwave Flash”). I started developing 3D games in 2002, and in the early days, Shockwave’s capabilities were so far ahead of its time that the main consideration was whether the average home user would even have the hardware required to run the game at all.

Some of the 3D Shockwave games we've produced at Skive

Since then however, much to the disappointment and frustration of many Shockwave developers, upgrades to Shockwave’s 3D and game-related capabilities have been almost completely negligible. At the time of writing, Shockwave still has pretty much the same 3D feature set that it had in 2001, and we are now in almost exactly the opposite situation, where most modern computers – even cheap home PCs – have advanced 3D graphic capabilities which the now antiquated Shockwave plug-in simply cannot make full use of.

Adobe claim that their long-term plans include making Director “the preferred environment for games creation”, however until they release a clear roadmap or a significant upgrade in this area, we can only speculate as to what this means.

I recently had the opportunity to research and evaluate some of the modern alternatives for a new project, and of these, “Unity 3D” emerged as a clear winner. I had been keeping an eye on a few of the 3D alternatives over the recent years, but it wasn’t until I actually got stuck in and started developing in Unity 3D that I realised the extent to which it feels ‘alive’ as a tool. The community is buzzing with new ideas and talent, the company is responsive and easily approachable, and the engine’s capabilities are modern and expansive.

Unity 3D - The Editor

As well as the obvious graphical advantages that come with a modern 3D engine, there are many other features which throw Director’s shortcomings into stark contrast. Here are just a few:

• Supports C#, a modern professional programming language. In addition, you can work on the code in Visual Studio, which sweetens things even more.
• Very active forums, with many Unity engineers and product specialists contributing regularly.
• A user feedback system where ideas and feature requests can be added and voted on. Members of the technical team actually comment on these ideas, and some of them do end up getting implemented!
• A public roadmap. They tell you what they’re working on, and roughly when it’s due for release.
• New communities are growing around the technology. People are tweeting and blogging about Unity. There are typically 40-80 users in the IRC channel at any given time (including regular Unity staff). By contrast, the community around Director feels as though it has been dwindling since around 2004, and of those remaining, a high percentage are old-timers.

So now, having completed my first (rather large) Unity 3D project, I’ve come away very impressed with Unity – with both the product itself, and with the company and community that comes with it! And on that note, I’m hoping to dedicate a little more time to such things as blogging about my experiences, experiments and research over the next few months.

We’ve been doing quite a lot of work with Coty to support various fragrance launches and sales initiatives with rich media banner ads.

Recent work includes campaigns for Davidoff Hot Water and Daisy by Marc Jacobs.

The latest is for a limited edition CKin2U metallic bottle, with creative by Staffs and Raks, inviting users to ‘come play’ with the bottles, which liquify upon touch before reforming.