Last week I was one of several people who have a passion for Direct Marketing who were asked to do a talk on behalf of TNT about direct marketing in the digital age. One of my fellow speakers certainly won the prize for the brightest pants… bright red… and with his boundless energy and positivity you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a children’s entertainer!

As well as winning the prize for the brightest pants on the day, Stephen Shaw from BlippAR also won the prize for totally exciting me creatively with the BlippAR iPhone app which takes Augmented Reality to a whole new level. Launched in the summer of 2011, BlippAR is a free smartphone app that uses the in-built camera to recognise things in the real world and instantaneously provides you with digital connections, information or interactive entertainment on your phone screen.

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Imagine walking down any street and holding up your iPhone… what you see on the screen is a view of the street yet there are lots of Zombies running towards you that you then have to shoot. Or imagine walking up to a wall and touching it… just for the wall to then display the view that is on the other side of it…. This is the world of Augmented Reality and it’s a world that looks like it’s going to be very big indeed.

Put simply, Augmented Reality blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell. It adds graphics, sounds, and smell to our world… and through a normal pair of glasses or display screen, informative graphics appear in your field of view, and audio coincides with whatever you see. These enhancements are then refreshed continually to reflect the movements of your head and the world around you.

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