Share virtual content with the Aurasma app.

By  |  June 14th, 2012  |  Posted in

First and foremost, I preface this by saying that, while I have a smartphone, I’ve only used the basics, never even played Words with Friends. So when it comes to design and doing different things with photos…I am, well, let’s just say a little lacking in that department. But then I heard about this cool app called Aurasma, and saw this and this YouTube demo about it. I got so excited about this new FREE technology that I downloaded Aurasma Lite from the Android Market and started playing around with it myself.

Let me explain what this product is and does. It’s an augmented reality app that basically allows you to take a picture of something, ANYTHING really, and then use that picture as a background to link to a video, music, or 3-D animation. My Android didn’t work the greatest (I know, iPhone users…that’s because it’s a Droid), so I used a friend’s iPhone. I started with my dog; maybe not the brightest idea, but seemed smart at the time. Anyway, I took a picture of her looking all cute and innocent and then I was able to interlay it with a video of Jackie Chan kicking some major butt. I was excited that it worked but then I couldn’t figure out how to view this awesome thing I had just created. It took me a day to figure out I can only view the “Aura” I made by opening the app and then hovering the screen over the image I used initially. The app was supposed to recognize the image I took of my dog and then initiate the Aura. Well, you know what that means; I had to get my dog to sit still again in the same location in the same pose to view my Aura. Major bummer. I never got her to do it so I couldn’t view that one.

Then I tried an object that could sit still; a bottle of Frank’s hot sauce. I made a really interesting one of that, too. It was so cool, once I was able to actually view what I was using. The downside, however, was when I tried sending my hot sauce Aura in an email to my mom. She tried,  but because she had the hot sauce in front of a different background it wouldn’t work. I also had to write an explanation to my mom, in detail, of how she was supposed to go about viewing it which was a huge pain. I really wish Aurasma had a play feature so you could send and view the Auras after they were made. There might be an option for this but my non-techy self hasn’t found it.

This app is very interesting and is a great idea. If you can get your app to work every time it’s awesome, but if someone has trouble with it I’ve found that they just give up. You have to have patience, because it took a while to create an Aura, and everyone I tried to send it to had issues trying to view it. It has done very well for advertisers currently using the app such as Mercedes, Kellogg’s, USA Today, Budweiser, and GQ because all the kinks were worked out and the images were tested a bunch. It would be awesome to go into Wegmans and see a display for Dove chocolate that says “Use your Aurasma app and see what happens.” That would catch my eye, but I think the app itself needs to be advertised more to draw other people’s attention. 

Now download the Aurasma app and try it yourself!! And when you do, use the app to hover over this awesome Coca-Cola ad.

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