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Printing_News_June_2016

content like so-called rich media (audio, video, animation) or even to glean data for marketing analytics purposes. Marketers found the advantage of email marketing to be that, when a potential customer clicked a web link in an email, the sender knew exactly where that customer was coming from, and could easily gauge the eff ectiveness—or the ROI—of a given campaign. For years, the gripe was that you couldn’t do that with print. With AR, now you can. Ultimately, it’s about getting print “networked.” When you print something, said Ed Lee, group director of InfoTrends’ Worldwide Consumer and Professional Imaging Services, “you take the digital fi le out of the ecosystem. What could you do with a piece of paper? Is there a way for that piece of paper to get back into the electronic world?” A lot of AR development has been on the consumer side. Photobooks are one area where Info- Trends has been seeing a lot of activity, such as adding watermarks in images in printed photo albums that launch related video content. Th ink of the applications for wedding albums, for example. AR can also be used for educational purposes. “Shutterfl y does off er AR in their photobooks for audio captioning,” said Alan Bullock, associate director of InfoTrends’ Connected Imaging Trends. “Th ey have a special app that supports that.” Called Photo Story for Classrooms, it allows students to create self-published books that have 30-second audio clips on each page. Little Triggers Augmented Reality, regardless of its specifi c implementation, requires three elements: the trigger, which is the mechanism on the printed page that contains the AR data or destination; the actual destination, rich media, or other content Shutterfl y’s Photo Story for Classrooms is geared for students and allows them to create self-published books. Clicking on the audio icon launches a 30-second audio narration. that is triggered; and a reader, which is a mobile app that can scan the trigger. Take the QR code. QR codes have proliferated because they are easy and essentially free to create. Th ere are many free online QR generation tools, at least for QR-ing URLs, such as www. qr-code-generator.com. You simply paste in the destination website and it will generate a QR code. (Some now have for-pay subscription plans that off er print-resolution QR codes and other advanced features.) Th e QR code is then downloaded and placed in a page layout like any other image. When it’s printed, the end user can read the code with any of a wide variety of—usually—free mobile apps, such as QRReader. QR codes are more eff ective than you would think; industry sage Heidi Tolliver Walker recently published a report that found that QR codes are accessed by around 30 percent of mobile users. A third of users is not a majority, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at. Th e problem with QR codes is... well, just look at them. It’s in the eye of the beholder, but the general feeling, particularly among designers, is they’re not aesthetically pleasing and take up valuable design real estate. “Th ere are more subtle ways than QR codes of making a link,” said Bullock, “such as image recognition, where you train the system to look the image up, or with a digital watermark where an image is transformed subtly.” “Nobody wants to put a QR code on the design because it disrupts the design experience,” said David Murphy, worldwide director of marketing & business development, PageWide Web Press Division at HP. HP has developed a digital watermarking technology for AR which it calls Link, which is designed to make print part of “the Internet of things.” (We’ll return to Link shortly.) Regardless of the actual mechanism used for the AR trigger, there needs to be some kind of symbol or design element that indicates that the AR content exists. Who AR You? What are the solutions for transforming images and making them AR-able? Metaio—and its corresponding reading app called Junaio—had been pioneers in the AR space. However, last year Metaio was bought by Apple and no word has come out since, much to the consternation of Metaio users. (If Apple does end up including some kind of AR solution in the iOS—and at press time this is purely speculative—it could solve one of AR’s big problems: the proliferation of mutually incompatible platforms and formats. QR codes have caught on because they’re a standard: any code reader can read any QR code. But with AR, you oft en have to juggle a bunch of apps. “We need standardization,” said InfoTrends’ Lee. “It’s the Wild West today.”) Another pioneering name in the AR space is Layar, which was recently acquired by Blippar. Th e Layar website says, in bold capital letters, “Easily create your own interactive augmented reality experiences.” I took that as a challenge and tried it out. And you know what? Th ey’re right! (See “Layar Cake” sidebar.) HP has also been active in Augmented Reality. HP’s Aurasma platform has carved out a niche in the AR space, but in production print, the company is pushing its Link platform, which it will PrintingNews®com June 2016 ® Printing News 21


Printing_News_June_2016
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