Nokia and AR going Hollywood
Okay, I don’t want to stress that silly term of “Moving PictARs” too often, but I just had to refer to my own predictions for 2010 at Augmented Times on this one:
Nokia just made another serious step forward exploration of augmented and mixed reality for customers in an outdoor bigger scale. The Nokia Research Center (NRC) has locations all over the world, but the one closest to the biggest movie production hub, aka Hollywood, just started a new pilot in Westwood, a town near the University of California, Los Angeles, tagged the “Westwood Experience”.
Quoting the source (via wirelessandmobilenews), we don’t really get an idea about details, but nevertheless:
The augmented realtiy pilot explores how a narrative, combined with a user’s physical location (context) augmented with digital content as well as social interactions with other “participants” can enhance the user experience…
It is supposed to be an outdoor mixed reality social experience, where story telling elements are blended with real-time exchange of other “players”/”watchers”. The close cooperation (well at least the location lets us assume it) with Hollywood studios, writers or other creative staff sure sounds promising to bring the technology from another point of view to a better content-including event. As the posting linked above mentions, the Nokia pilot is supposed to
“provide the media industry with new options and business models”.
Information is still rare on this one, but I already smell more effort into the whole location based gaming and movie-launching viral marketing action thing. There is ongoing research not for the fun of it, but for new money to make…. maybe industry will be able to find a standard protocol for this one (at least this one time) from the beginning on, not only working on Nokia phones.
If you happen to be German-speaking you might want to check out an interview on AR and gaming, I gave last year, and browse through the German platform for (Location Based) Gaming on gameslabor.de.
I’ll update on this one, once I get more background info. :-)