Messing with Sasquatch using Boffswana’s Releas3D’s engine.
Boffswana is a manufacturer of “novelty AR” fromt he first hour. They say themself they’ve introduced AR to the online space with their Releas3D technology.
Living Sasquatch - Papervision - Augmented Reality from Boffswana on Vimeo.
This newsmade me realize something:
They talk about Releas3D technology like it’s part of the product, or maybe even a product itself. I personally think it’s nothing more than what the saqoosha FlarToolkit does (which is imo by right the first open source AR toolkit out there). But I DO applaud this decision. The technology behind AR is quite abstract, it’s not something that’s easily grasped by the average consumer. But if you put a certain name on it the consumer can see what kind of level of AR is used.
It might be hard to see my point, so let me elaborate it with something similar that happened with graphic cards. As a 90’s PC gamer, I was in constant need to upgrade my PC to play those cool 3D-games like Quake, Unreal Tournament and maybe even Black & White. Well I wasn’t in NEED ofcourse, but it was certainly a WANT. The point is, when you want to upgrade a PC to play those games, a graphic card is a vital part to run 3D graphics. And if you did some research on what to buy at that point in time, the choices were endless.
A non-gamer didn’t really needed to buy a graphics-card, most motherboards supplied enough power to render the 2D-images needed for text processing and the like. But a gamer wanted devoted graphics cards that were like a magical artifact plugged in the computer to make it PERFORM. And how did we (us-90’s gamers) do our research to buy a card? We weren’t that smart kid in class who knew you needed an “AGP Card running on 100 MHz, 128-bit memory bus width and 8/16 SD/SG” we only knew we that Voodoo® was the name which branded the best card. And we had to look out for names like Virge®, Rage® or Mystique®. They being decent, low-cost cards we got if we nagged tricked asked our parents for a GFX-card. (I should note here i’m from the 80’s so nagging and tricking is what got things done those days). All these cards had a cool name, or should I say Brand, which DID got them sold.
Concluding, the point here is that naming a technology is a smart thing to do. Even after 10 years, I still remember that cards were named Voodoo, Rage or Mystique. Even though they probably were based on the same principles of technology. If Release3D really get’s popularized so that it evolves from a anonymous word to a meaningfull term used by kids on the schoolgrounds (like when I asked around in the 90’s to figure out which card to buy), then this will create more awareness around AR itself.
Currently AR is mostly used as a novelty. Which is really dangerous. A novelty will become a fad, and a fad will be forgotten the next day. I hope marketeers, AR-developers and designers will keep that in mind. I really would like to see things like mscape’s roku’s reward and What’s in the Box? and even Iron Man’s Jarvis to become a reality. Though I have full confidence in AR evolving that far, it currently is dependent on the technological advances of smartphones before it can evolve into something that immersive…