Grazia Does Augmented Reality

This time last year, Augmented Reality was this hip new buzz word I'd just heard about and it seemed that everyone was whispering 'Is this the future??' in sci-fi voices. It's a groundbreaking piece of technology but a lot of people didn't quite know how to apply it, and brands weren't really sure what it could do for them. Cool for cool's sake, were a lot of people's first thoughts.

Now though, it's really beginning to pick up momentum, and perhaps it's now burst onto the mainstream with this week's Grazia Magazine doing a '3D' (term applied loosely...) issue.

I wrote about Augmented Reality and it's uses in a post I wrote a while back about my Ted Baker project. I (regrettably) never did submit that project to YCN because I got a full time job and that's against the rules :( My idea was great, as well. Yep, genius almost.

Anyway, the example that still stands out is Hugo Boss's augmented reality shop windows:


I liked how the technology takes the image of what you show to it, and manipulates it, moves it around etc, so that it looks like what you are holding is moving in front of you.

When I saw that Grazia were using AR, I assumed it would be a similar thing - hold the page up with all the fashion pieces and the page would come to life in your hands. It's almost that, but not quite. Instead of something like the Lego AR...


...Where the 3D image of the product seems to appear in your hands, instead the webcam/iphone app is activated by the little black and white logo, but then just reverts to a pre-made video which displays the content, with no interaction with your individual copy of the magazine. For example, on the cover, I thought that when you held it up, lovely Florence would dance about within the confines of the cover, weaving through the 150pt type and knocking silly subheadlines away with her mega-voice. But... not really. This is what happens when you hold your cover up:


Not what I was expecting. It's still cool and fun, but not as interactive as I thought.

Also, I don't have an iphone so had to use my imac's camera. The online content delivery bit at graziadaily.com/3D is a bit flaky, I've found. I don't know if the app is better, but my cover didn't want to work at all, and when I went to activate the tutorial on creating smokey eyes, it activated the fashion editorial instead =/ Not cool. So perhaps needing a bit of work.

That said, the idea behind it is great and definitely a step forward in bridging the gap between physical fashion magazines and online content - after all, these days you can find out about new trends in an instant - weekly mags seem old within days. I'd like to see this being a permanent feature within the magazine. Get rid of the cover shoot bit- it's nice but flashy and doesn't actually do anything except give models/singers/whoever a platform to prance around on. But the fashion editorial section could really benefit from this.

If they changed the format to be more like the Lego example above, it would be brilliant. I'd love to be able to hold my iphone (future iphone) over any garment/accessory/whatever in the magazine, and it would come into 3D life on my iphone screen - I could rotate it, see what it looks like at all angles - this is especially good for bags. Then there could be a link to buy it straight away online - done. All through the app. This is a solid way of ensuring fashion magazine's relevance in a digital age. Or even simple things like, you've read a really great, interesting article in the magazine, and want to tweet about it straight away - hold the app up to the title, or photo say, and it will automatically tweet a link to the digital article online. Or an extract of it. Things like that would be so great if they were incorporated into Grazia as a normal, weekly thing, instead of a special one-off 'collector's "3D" edition. Cos it's not exactly 3D is it... no yet. Things aren't jumping off the page at me.

I don't even know if AR has the technology to do all this yet; although I'm pretty sure it can; especially with games such as The Hidden Park around. So it's a step in the right direction, and props to Grazia for having the balls to showcase technology like this, it just shows they're a forward-thinking mag. I just hope they expand on it in the future.

Meanwhile, next issue they're doing a big 'Culture Special' focusing on what's cool this spring. Trend hunters, keep an eye out...

YCN Student Awards 2010: Ted Baker Brief

I'm really excited about this year's YCN Student Awards Briefs. There are so many good ones! It took me a while to to decide which one to do... I almost thought of doing 2 but didn't want to make life stupidly hard for myself. Here are the ones which I found most interesting:

Action Aid

Inspire people to say Bollocks to Poverty by giving a little bit of their cash to support ActionAid’s work.

Fedrigoni

Encourage more designers to visit and use the Fedrigoni London Showroom.

Feel Good Drinks

Make us Famous / Fruit not Sugar.

Ted Baker

Devise a campaign for the launch of the Ted Baker Autumn/Winter collections, that makes use of our store windows as its primary vehicle.

The O2

Create illustrations around the iconic O2 landmark that relate to three key themes.

There are 20 briefs in total, have a look here, they're all good. I found it hard getting down to these few:

• ActionAid I thought would be a good one, because I've done work for their Bollocks to Poverty campaign before and so have a good grasp of it.
• Fedrigoni would be a really interesting one because you could do all sorts with paper; I would have gone down the origami/paper art route, creating a viral/ad something made entireley out of folded paper. Something.
• Feel Good Drinks are a great little brand, not unlike in feel to Innocent, although much smaller. A good brief that I feel I could execute well, print ads, that sort of thing, and I almost chose it. Almost.
• Ted Baker leapt out at me because the brief is to design a new store window design for this year's A/W collection, utilising digital media, not traditional advertising. So this was a bit of a winner for me - I can use my design/illustration/fashion knowledge to create a beautiful/crazy window display, and then use my brilliant marketing skills (lols) to dream up crazy digital media uses to get the word out there. Augmeted reality anyone? Oh yes. Rachel will have fun with this.
• The 02 sounded like a good, solid, easy brief. Create a few illustrations. Could have done that. But it felt too easy... not challenging, not pushing me in new directions.

So, Ted Baker it is. Read the full brief here if you like. I think it sounds kick ass.

The general idea is to 'devise a campaign for the launch of the Ted Baker Autumn/Winter collections, that makes use of our store windows as its primary vehicle, and utilise other media – digital, ambient, etc – to bring the idea to life, but not traditional press or TV advertising.'

Immediately my mind ran away with me; live fashion shows in store, live mannequins, parties/events, interactive twitter feeds, give aways in store that gave you links to download stuff, possibilities are endless really. I love the idea of augmented reality in windows, this is something that's just starting to appear but Hugo Boss have done it brilliantly:



If you can't be arsed to watch the video all the way through (you should though), the idea is that you are given a card in the store, when you hold the card up to the screen, it does all kinds of magical things and opens up and gives you your own catwalk fahsion show. Spesh. You then take smae card into store, put it against a different camera window, it then plays blackjack and you might win a £50 real voucher to spend in store. It's the perfect way of getting people curious, excited, then get them into store, give them a gift/giveaway (£50!) and they then spend spend spend. Done.

Other examples of this kind of video technology and augmented reality without the use of iphones as a platform are:

Some hockey mask brand using it so you can see what the hockey mask looks like when it's on:

This kind of thing has infinite possibilities in the fashion world. I'm thinking, virtual changing rooms, oh I like that top but can't be bothered to wait in the queue, step in front of the camera, yeah that's a good look. Hmmmm :)

Lego using this to brilliant effect in store:

This is great from Lego's perspective because the buyer can see what the model looks like once it's been made; not always easy to tell from the picture on the box. Kids love this, I bet. I'm jealous of the kids of today. In my day, we had Playdays. On VHS.

The reason why I'm interested in this sort of technology without the use of iphones etc is because it's easier to implement in a shop window, rather than relying on people actually owning iphones, they just step up to it with the trigger which is a card given away/product box/clothing etc. There's lots of 'Real life' AR apps out there - Foursquare, TwittARound, that rely on location and what other people are posting. Not sure if that kind of thing would work here.

Themes:
So I'm set for various ideas of how to market/implement the shop window and it's interactiveness, but before this becomes more concrete, I really need to nail the theme of the window. The brief says 'Just think about how many store windows have leaves in them come September/October. We need something distinctly more interesting than this. We could even ignore the fact it’s Autumn completely. Everyone has a calendar and knows when the season’s change. So perhaps a celebration of new Ted Baker collections is more apt. Or something completely different.' And I agree. Leaves/orange/trees/weather in autumn windows and L&F are everywhere. Themes that I'm playing with at the mo are:

Future
Retro
Death (as in, the death of summer, which is the reason I hate autumn, and also links with Halloween)
Medieval/Victoriana
Circus
Casino
Tea Party (this is my fave so far... obviously... I want cupcakes in there somewhere.)

These are all very initial, just visual themes that I love and fit in well with Ted Baker's humour/sense of british/fun/irreverent feel it's got going on. I'm doing lots of visual research on crazy window displays and images of these themes in general, here is a tiny selection of my random brain:








I have an obsession with Union Jack cushions. No really. Maybe that'll feature.

So these are all my initial thoughts, and I'm feeling really positive about it. I've even bought myself a new sketchbook/notebook for this, so I make sure I keep my thoughts organised. Feels just like being back at uni, this is how I used to approach my uni projects. Good times.

I will update when I find anything interesting and relevant to the project; not sure how much of my idea I'm going to post when I've decided on it - I'm aware this is a competition and don't want my ideas to be used by other people before I've entered myself! Such is the woes of t'internet.

Wish me luck! Deadline is March 26th!