The play is being performed around the streets of Bath on Friday 25th and Saturday 26th May at 3pm and 6.30pm, as part of the Bedlam Fair and the Bath Fringe Festival.

Dylan Thomas, Artistic Director TEMPA Performing Arts at the college, came up with the initial concept. He wanted to add just enough AR to compliment the play without it becoming something that led it or distracted the audience’s attention.

He also wanted people to enjoy the play whether they had access to the technology or not. This thought process led to the concept developing into what it is now and the content that provides the added value through AR.

The concept starts when you purchase your ticket. You’re handed a pack of cards in a neat little wallet; two scene cards and twelve character cards. (These will be available at the start of the play also).

Throughout the performance, you’ll be asked to scan one of the scene cards. This will allow you to vote live, based on what you’ve seen in the play. A tally of final votes will then be displayed on a large screen at the location of the final scene.

We felt this level of participation was enough as the performance is fast paced, moves around the streets and won’t hold up the other participants. It also deals with network hot-spots and potential for revolt if we held up the crowd for too long.

The character cards are all about providing an insight into the characters, and if you manage to unlock the special content, the actors too.

The students and Dylan’s team all worked hard providing everything from artwork and video to bags of enthusiasm for the technology. The costumes and make-up are great, and the actors will be sure to deliver a great performance over the weekend.

This is possibly the most unusual and unique use of AR we’ve developed here at Media Grand. We’re hoping it will draw a good crowd as people visit Bath for the start of the Fringe Festival.

If you’re planning on coming along, bring an iPhone 3GS or newer, or a top-end Android phone with the Layar Reality Browser installed.

The app is free, so is access to the layer. Search for ‘trial‘ to find the Bath College ‘K’ layer.

Pick up the card pack when you buy your tickets, or at the start of the play.

And for you Tweeters out there, pick up on the play Twitter feed using #twittorelli.

If you can’t make it to Bath and would like to give it a try, please request a card pack PDF by using the contact form. Available from Monday 28th May.

The app is designed to bring the essence of the club night to the person holding the flyer. In many cases, they could be faced with half a dozen flyers all offering pretty much the same thing; a good night out with some funky music. Deciding what club you’re going to dance all night at, is now easier because of this new technology.

Making use of the smartphone’s camera, Aurasma uses cutting-edge image recognition to identify the flyer, before overlaying the augmented reality content. In this instance it’s a video of the club night in full swing with a great soundtrack, characteristic of the night and a bunch of clubbers having fun.

In addition there are quick links to the nights Facebook and Soundcloud websites and even a link to Google Maps so clubbers can easily find the club.

It’s the perfect way to advertise an event, and we’ve heard that ticket sales are up and they’re already looking for a bigger venue. This is a massive win for augmented reality, and proves that the technology works in many commercial sectors.

You can download the Aurasma app onto your smartphones from the Apple App Store or Google Play. Subscribing to the Kick & Snare channel will give you access to their videos. Scan the flyer above to test it for yourself.

Users are required to download the Layar Reality Browser to their smartphone from the Apple App Store or Google Play before pointing it at the pages in the programme.

Using the camera, Layar uses image recognition to identify each page, before overlaying a number of buttons to play audio, video or link to a website.

When browsing through the programme, you’ll be able to instantly watch a video of an artist, before clicking through to buy tickets. This makes selecting events faster and easier than ever before.

Try it for yourself on this page from the 2010 festival programme.

Open Layar, press Tap to View while holding your smartphone camera over the image below.

Sheard Hudson Creative have partnered with Aurasma and MediaGrand to launch an Augmented Reality experience for Jersey Tourism.

Jersey is an island within the Channel Isles, located 100 miles south of mainland Britain, just off the French coast, has an unspoilt coastline, 45 miles of impressive countryside and a vibrant and cosmopolitan capital.

Jacqui Sheard, partner at Sheard Hudson Creative says “This is an exciting development for Jersey Tourism, it enables us to offer them the opportunity to have a fully integrated campaign linking all the key elements of their marketing together.

The current National Press campaign, ‘Meet the Locals’ is literally brought to life by simply scanning the printed image with a phone or ipad, this then activates videos for each of the Ambassadors. A strong call to action at the end of each of the videos links the user through to the jersey.com website where more can be found about the island. A copy of the PureJersey destination brochure, designed and produced by Sheard Hudson Creative can then be requested. What I love about it is that both creative agencies working for Jersey can now see their contribution in context and working in unison to give a cohesive and truly integrated experience.

Partnering with Aurasma and MediaGrand has enabled us to offer a complete service to our customers and more projects are being planned for launch this Summer”.

Martina King, Managing Director of Aurasma said:“Suddenly the beautiful Jersey shoreline has been brought that much closer to my desk with these compelling interviews with local cultural icons, linked to Jersey Tourism’s press campaign through Aurasma. Now everyone can get to grips with Jersey’s cultural scene by simply holding up a smartphone to these Aurasma enabled adverts to find out about all the great things the island has to offer from the people who know it best. Aurasma has worked with a wide variety of clients in the Tourist sector and I think this usage shows brilliantly how Aurasma’s technology can bring potential holiday makers that much closer to their dream destination.”

To view the content users simply download the Aurasma app onto their smartphone or iPad using the Apple Store or Android Marketplace and point their device at the Aurasma enabled Jersey Tourism print campaign. Aurasma then recognises the image before launching Jersey Tourism’s new Ambassador videos.

Bath based AR specialists and official Aurasma partners MediaGrand provided additional development support.

Thursday saw the VIP launch party at the Roman Baths with Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries in the UK amongst other dignitaries from Bath Council.

It was noted that the Roman Baths was cutting edge in its day, with under floor heating and lead pipes. What have the Romans ever done for us, huh?

It was indeed, a fitting venue to launch a festival all about cutting edge and creative technology.

Friday saw the first event of the 10 day festival; X Media Lab Bath, and what an event it was too. Speakers from all corners of the world, leading creative minds, Emmy winners, pop-stars and founders of some of the world’s best known creative media. And of course Media Grand. OK, so not so well known (yet) but give us chance!

We had a stand at the Expo, where delegates could try out some of our AR examples. It was very busy and brought smiles to lots of faces.

Delegates of X Media Labs Bath, Bath Digital Festival 2012 enjoying our Augmented Reality content. You can see them here grabbing the Statue of Liberty – it doesn’t exist guys!

The app is designed to unite the offline and online communications using 3D architectural maps of the city’s Enterprise Zone that are brought to life with film. Users are required to download the Aurasma app to their Smartphone’s or tablets using the Apple Store or Android Marketplace before pointing it at the 3D maps. Utilising the Smartphone’s camera, Aurasma uses cutting-edge image recognition to identify the image, before showing one of three 90 second films on Technology, Sustainability and Creativity. Each film is designed to highlight the unique elements of the city, from its culture, quality of life and diversity to the global technical advancements that can be traced back to their Bristol roots.

The concept of Augmented Reality is to merge the physical world with the virtual world, and this recent application has been launched by TheAgency in time for MIPIM, the world’s largest real estate show based in Cannes. Attended by more than 20,000 people, the expo enjoys representation from more than 400 cities across the world.

Saman Mansourpour, partner at TheAgency says “We always strive to provide an integrated brand experience, and wanted to take every opportunity to bring the Bristol Enterprise Zone to life. Partnering with Aurasma and MediaGrand allowed us to harness this technology and provide our users with a new way to engage the brand.”

Aurasma have enjoyed incredible success with their Augmented Reality app, having attracted more than three million m users and three thousand commercial partners since their launch in June 2011 – making Aurasma one of the fastest growing platforms in the world. There are new applications for Aurasma’s Augmented Reality being discovered every day, and they encourage creative agencies, technologists and consumers alike to help develop the platform by pushing its capabilities and realising its potential.

Martina King, Managing Director of Aurasma says “Bristol is a creative community that understands excellently cutting edge innovation in the UK. It is therefore really exciting to see companies such as TheAgency from the area adopting our technology. The Bristol Enterprise Zone channel within Aurasma is a brilliant example of how people can use the platform autonomously to create their own content to share with others. I look forward to seeing how the channel is used in the future.”

Bath based AR specialists Media Grand, official partners of Aurasma, helped TheAgency bring the concept to fruition by supporting them with development and video streaming services.

Bath has an amazing digital community which I’m very proud to be a part of.

Unfortunately, the word about Bath being a thriving digital hub doesn’t seem to have reached the rest of the world yet. They think we’re all about the Romans, Jane Austin and Georgian architecture; well they’re not far off!

But we’re also one of the most creative cities in the UK, and given our size, that’s a pretty big feather in our cap.

The Bath Digital Festival (15th – 25th March) combines some of the best creative and technology networks, with hands-on events, amazing speakers, an awards ceremony and a meet up for geeky dads – which, by the way, I should be feeling discriminated against as I don’t have any kids, but I’m not, I get a lie in!

Anyway, it wouldn’t be much of a digital festival without a good dose of augmented reality, and seeing that we are the leading authority on such matters, it made sense to put our hand up and get involved.

Having already got our feet wet augmenting festivals, we know that it’s all about information; getting your hands on it quickly and easily, with as little fuss as possible.

The idea we had was to create links to each website and event, pull in social media, link to location based services and add a bit of fun. Not much then!

We used the Layar platform to take advantage of the new, simplified layer access – take a snap of the image and it returns the info! Couldn’t be simpler so it was perfect for the job.

Try it for yourself on the image below (one of the new postcards).

BTW If you’re wondering how people know they can scan it with Layar, we’ve put the icon on the reverse side with all the other details!

If not, you’re probably one of the few, that for some reason has decided browsing on a small screen just isn’t for you.

Now this is an important point because the experience you encountered is what so many of us have persevered with to get to content.

We all know, for example, that the web pages appear so tiny that you can’t read the text, so you have to constantly zoom and scroll around to find what you’re looking for.

Form filling is a complete nightmare, and those all important check boxes for NOT subscribing to junk can be easily missed.

Basically mobile browsers take beautifully designed websites and trash them, making them difficult to navigate and no fun to use.

We’ve seen it and carried on regardless, or we’ve given up and the website has lost an opportunity.

Recent figures show that over half of smartphone users shop, browse and research products on their phone.

Around 2-12% of traffic to many websites is from mobile devices. With over 17 million smartphones in the UK, that’s a lot of users zooming, scrolling and time-wasting which could be better spent buying your products or services, not your competitors.

Of course, there are some very good examples of mobile friendly websites that we should all look to for inspiration. Off the top of my head amazon.com and bbc.co.uk both layout perfectly well on mobile and are user friendly.

If more websites were mobile enabled and the experience was fast, user friendly and to the point, would more smartphone users consider browsing via their phone?

There is also a link between mobile augmented reality and mobile websites.

Lets say you set up an event where users scan your brochures and posters to view AR content. The links that are followed form a part of the experience and they need to be good, otherwise it’s going to be viewed as poorly executed and potentially, a poor investment.

So we say, make it a priority to get a mobile friendly website, otherwise you’ll be losing out to businesses that have.

And it’s not as big a job as you might think, there are ways to do it quickly and cost effectively. Contact us today to find out how we can help you get mobile.