by Mike Vicchitto | Editor | The Daily Anchor
Students at MIT have developed some impressive technology, Wear Ur World (WUW), a computer-vision based wearable and gestural interface – a wearable computer that lets you use natural hand gestures to augment the physical world with digital information. While not nearly commercially available yet, it is piquing my interest as a marketer.
By combining visual data input from a internet enabled mobile device, and visual data output via portable projection devices, it allows the end user to call upon aggregated data from web and interact with the subject of interest in real time, be it a book, groceries, or even a human being.
This is above and beyond the level of interactivity suggested by displaying advertising based on scanning the viewer. This can become a real guerrilla marketing tool, as it allows the user to project relevant information publicly. Find yourself in a situation where you wish your brand was present? Quickly access your ad and enter it into the public conversation – a coffee table in Starbucks, the darkened wall of a movie theater, the empty seat across from you on the subway. I think the practical, at least experimental, applications are limitless.
On the other end of the spectrum, as a consumer, this could change the way in which we receive advertising. We are accustomed to digesting advertising passively, and we are at our most actively engaged while on the internet, specifically when accessing a traditional internet browser. This technology suggests a major shift in the way we access internet data, which of course heavily includes advertising content. It suggests that the physical world around us is the browser, and the internet becomes a “data enrichment” tool for the world around us as we interact with it.
I’m definitely looking forward to monitoring this fascinating new medium – or rather, intelligent enhancement of existing, physical media – as it continues to develop.
Read Wired’s coverage of the WUW here
You can download this PDF detailing the group’s work.
