Best Buy Uses Augmented Reality to Make its Print Advertising Interactive

Consumer electronics retailer, Best Buy, is using augmented reality to make the weekly print ads that it inserts in newspapers interactive and three-dimensional. The ads invite consumers to go to a dedicated Web site (bestbuyin3d.com), where a video instructs them on how to hold the ads in front of their Web cam in order to trigger a 3D-style augmented reality animation: the animation (or at least the version that [itvt] saw: we were unable to get our hands on one of the ads before we went to press, and so had to rely on a print-out of a sample ad provided by the bestbuyin3d site) consists simply of an image of a Toshiba laptop that jumps out of the page, together with 3D-style speech bubbles that promote Best Buy's new Twelpforce service (tech advice from Best Buy employees, delivered via Twitter). It can be viewed from different angles by moving the print ad around in front of the Web cam. Last week, [itvt] reported on an advertising campaign by Procter & Gamble that makes a similar use of AR technology (see article published on itvt.com, July 30th).

In other augmented reality news: iPhone ARKit, an open source augmented reality toolkit for the iPhone 3GS was launched at the iPhone Dev Camp over the weekend. More information can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/iphonearkit/ and in the demo video above.