The Web community started getting excited about Augmented Reality, or AR, around two years ago, when GE’s “Plug Into the Smart Grid” demo hit, although the technology has been around in various capacities for a couple of decades. Most people probably first got exposed to AR with the “yellow line” that shows the first down marker in televised football games. But in the last two or three years, AR has been popping up in a variety of new ways, and has really hit a new level of innovation with applications running on mobile phones. But it’s still not really a mainstream technology outside of football and hockey (puck tracers).

Part of the barrier to mass adoption is probably the kitschy factor of many of the early commercial implementations. Printing out a QR code and holding it up to your web cam was pretty cool the first couple of times you did it, but really, what’s the point? And the thing with the box at the Lego store was pretty neat. And, wait, now I can scan the little codes with my phone and see a dancing turtle? Neat. Next!

But the reality of, um, augmented reality, is that it is not only neat, but now we are also seeing increasingly practical applications of the technology. Across all of your major interactive viewports, including TVs, desktops and laptops, tablets, and especially phones, you can get an informative additional layer of content added on to what’s going on around you. Smart companies are realizing that the opportunity to essentially show two things at once (the real world, with an interactive canvas on top) opens up avenues that go way beyond just advertising and entertainment. Not that we don’t all love a good dancing turtle.

Marker vs. Markerless

For now, the software that leading AR companies like Metaio, Layar, and Total Immersion are putting out requires that something in the real world be “recognized” before the real world can be augmented with the additional layer of content. QR codes were the first wave of “markers” that would alert the AR software that new-stuff-goes-here. There are proprietary versions of them as well, like Microsoft Tag or AT&T Mobile Barcodes, and you’re seeing QR codes pop up everywhere from business cards and the sides of buildings to t-shirts and even tattoos (seriously). All of them can be used to anchor an AR experience.

But the software is getting sophisticated enough that “markerless” recognition is possible. Now you don’t have to limit AR to QR. Images are a natural extension, and now an ad in a magazine or a painting in a museum can trigger an AR overlay with sales price information or the artist’s inspiration. But where things get really interesting is 3D object recognition. Total Immersion has implemented facial recognition, so that you can “try on” different eyeglasses to see what they look like on your face. You can pull out your phone and point it at a printer, to see an x-ray view of where those sneaky little levers are that let you unjam a page or change the ink cartridge. Maybe that’ll end that “PC Load Letter” error.

Walking ARound

We’re also starting to see the potential for AR as part of your everyday life. Since we don’t have to rely on markers anymore, the potential is there for everything to have an invisible layer of content that comes to light with AR. Once incredibly practical example is Word Lens, the iPhone app that got a lot of attention recently. Providing real-time translation of printed content, Word Lens lets you see a sign in Spanish, for example, translated to English on your phone. “Beach Closed by Jellyfish” comes to mind. Yelp lets you spin your phone around to see where the highest rated restaurants or coffee shops are nearby, mapped right on top of your camera feed. Going even bigger, Metaio just released the Augmented Reality City concept. Now I can look through my phone at a building downtown and see which offices are available for lease, and on which floors. That one on the corner of the 8th floor looks like it has a nice view.

Gaming

Although the innovative AR stuff has been hitting phones a lot, you’re seeing augmented reality in other capacities as well. Sony has an AR platform out that chances are you’ll be seeing in your next Playstation, and Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect is already fueling new ways of gaming, but the technology is also being hacked into shopping for outfits or studying anatomy – all through AR. And Vuzix and others are putting out augmented reality glasses, bringing AR deeper into product prototypes and demonstrations, heads-up displays for gaming, and even the military. Think Terminator or Iron Man, and you’re on the right track.

Where is it going next?

The potential for the second view of anything is limitless. AR is coming to your car, to the mall, and to the grocery store. But eventually it’s just going to be part of everything. What’s in that Big Mac (you don’t want to know), what else has that book’s author written, where can I find those shoes on sale? Or not even where. Point your phone at your friend’s shoes, see the pricing and information about them, and add them to your cart. From the beach.

When the Microsoft Advertising team asked Springbox to evaluate the feasibility of a concept for a client’s new campaign, it sounded like an interesting challenge. T-Mobile wanted to steam video from three concerts into four environments: Facebook, Xbox, Windows Live Messenger, and a mobile site. And they wanted to stream them in real time. We determined that live streaming was possible, if not particularly common, for the mobile site, Messenger, and Facebook, but at that time, not possible in Xbox. After consulting on the design of the experiences, we were tasked with building the Facebook tab, and other agency partners tackled Messenger and the mobile site. Xbox would get the same features, but with prerecorded video after the fact.

Working closely with Austin-based production company Giant Pictures, who had originated the concept for Microsoft, we identified the only two vendors at the time that were authorized to live stream video within the Facebook environment, and partnered with Ustream.tv to handle the streaming. We set about creating the Flash-based experience for T-Mobile’s new Facebook tab for the campaign, now dubbed  Live Rising. We built out features like the band bios, video players, Facebook Events for each concert, and fan interaction features including commenting, Like and Share buttons all over the place, and entry forms to win a trip to watch the making of a video by one of the concert artists: Ellie Goulding, Cold War Kids, or Rye Rye. With the Ellie concert up first, we were ready to rock when the bottom dropped out from under us, two weeks from launch.

In February and March, a series of updates to Facebook dramatically altered how applications are embedded within Facebook Pages, specifically affecting Page Tabs like our new Live Rising one. Tabs moved from a top navigation structure within the Page to a left navigation structure, altering the size of the Tab’s content area. Around the same time, Facebook added support of secure-socket layers (SSL) to improve security, and changed the sharing features used in applications, deprecating the Share button. Big changes for our design, and a lot of rework for the Rich Media guys, but we stayed on schedule.

The bigger challenge was the iFrame problem. Up until that point, much of our Facebook work, at least for Tabs, had been done on Facebook’s own infrastructure, using FBML. We would build them in Facebook’s environment, and they would run off of Facebook’s servers. The new rules announced in February required all Facebook applications, including the kind of stuff we were building for Live Rising, to be run in an iFrame, meaning the application would be built on, and run from, an external hosting environment that we would have to setup and maintain. Now, we are not a hosting company, but we know some good ones. We started calling them.

We’d get one identified, and then the new SSL requirements would stop us. We’d find another good one, but the potential load from the concerts (and all those T-Mobile fans) would shift our approach to a cloud-based solution. We ended up with our friends at OpSource, a cloud hosting solution with great support. With all of the Facebook changes, we had to rework how the commenting and Like buttons worked, and helped Ustream tweak how the video players and streams worked. But a few hours before the Ellie Goulding show, we were all set to live stream the concert into Facebook. And it worked beautifully. We found out later that the Microsoft team happened to be at a conference with their T-Mobile clients, and they all watched it together.

Our team got invited to the second show, Cold War Kids, here in Austin. It was a lot of fun to watch the guys from Giant Pictures running around shooting the show, and watching the stream on our phones from the audience. The concerts continued to gain viewers, and T-Mobile added a fourth show, Robyn, to keep the success rolling.

 

Bob Metcalfe invented the Internet, or rather, he invented one of the key technologies that led to it, the ethernet. Then he started 3Com. Now he's a professor at the University of Texas and an investor with Polaris Venture Partners. For the past five years, his passion has been energy. Specifically, Metcalfe wants to solve the looming energy crisis, in part by using his experience laying the groundwork for the Internet to help plan for a more sustainable, greener energy future. He's nicknamed this approach the Enernet.

His key point is the need to focus on more efficient, less destructive sources of energy to allow for huge increases in available energy. The Internet has shown us that innovation and distributed resources can not only provide faster, cheaper, better access to information and entertainment, but also create a foundation from which unknown advances will spring forth. Metcalfe quipped, "When the Internet was being built, I was there, and no one mentioned YouTube." Now, services such as YouTube and Netflix use enormous amounts of bandwidth to deliver content. (According to Google, YouTube gets 35 hours of video uploaded every minute, and 2 billion views a day.) The founders of the Internet took a closed system provided by IBM and AT&T and distributed it across a global, accessible network, but they never envisioned the dominance the Internet would have a few decades later as a platform for providing disruptive and positive changes to our way of life. As we try to solve the energy problem of reliance on unsustainable, damaging fossil fuels, Bob foresees a "squanderable abundance" of clean energy and the impetus for currently impossible ideas like cheap space travel. For Metcalfe, the exciting part is the potential for great benefits we can't even dream of — and solving global warming in the process.

How do we get there? Interviewer Joel Greenberg noted, "Efficiency is the cheapest form of innovation." A lot of very smart companies are trying to find alternative sources of energy. Polaris has invested in Sun Catalytix, a startup developing a method of separating hydrogen and oxygen from water sources, including contaminated water and sea water. The output is powerful, clean‐burning gases and super‐clean water. Cool stuff.

Other Polaris interests are working on various methods of energy storage such as "giant scuba tanks" for compressed air and bio‐fuel research such as carbon dioxide loving algae. Not all the investments end with great success, Metcalfe admitted: "One of our investments was in algae, but it didn't work out. But it wasn't the algae's fault, it was mine."

Metcalfe is betting on nuclear and solar, but suggests that natural gas will be the bridge to get there. Natural gas is cheaper than oil, produces half the harmful biproducts during use, and — due to recent advances in drilling — is available domestically in "virtually limitless" quantities. The evolution of primary energy sources has been wood, coal, and now oil. Gas is next, and Bob sees solar and nuclear beyond that.

The discussion pointed to learning from the innovations of the technology, strategy, and government involvement with the proliferation and growth of the Internet, and applying the same ideas to energy. Bob hasn't been happy with the results of the industry so far. He noted that the Department of Energy was set up with the explicit goal of ending the US's dependence on foreign oil. He thinks it should now be shut down due to failure to make inroads towards that goal. Even early attempts to shift to more domestic resources, such as corn ethanol, have been unsuccessful, although Metcalfe did note, "At least we're wasting the money in the Midwest now instead of in the Middle East."

When hiring for a developer position at an interactive marketing agency, finding someone with the technical chops is only half the battle. The developer also needs to thrive in the agency environment, which can be very different from a traditional software development shop.

Most people think of programmers as brainy geeks toiling away at Microsoft or Google, cranking out impossibly complex code on a steady diet of stale pizza and Red Bull. Or maybe they imagine cool guys in turtlenecks at Apple or some social media company like Facebook, calmly making the final tweaks to the most elegantly simple site you’ve ever seen, espresso in hand. We have those same types of developers at Springbox. The difference is the kind of work we do. And the pizza is fresher.

Software developers at places like Google and Apple work on projects that typically last for months or, in the case of Microsoft, years. If you dropped in on the team working on the next version of Windows, or Safari or Gmail, you’d likely see dozens or hundreds of programmers, all on essentially the same project. They make software, be it in a shrink-wrapped box or on a website, that is big, feature-rich, and when it changes you hear about it on the news.  It is technically complex, taking rooms full of diagrams and thick books of documentation to truly understand how to fix or upgrade it.

At an agency, the programmers tend to call themselves web developers or web designers. The projects are much smaller, much shorter, and typically a lot less technically complex – but no less important. We do something quickly that solves an immediate need, and doesn’t try to do a ton of other stuff at the same time. At Springbox, our projects have a focus on marketing, meaning that our work is very much client-focused. The users are going to see it first-hand so it needs to be visually appealing. It may not be super-complex, but it needs to have a great user experience and it needs to help the client get the word out, right now, about their product or service.

If you come to work at Springbox, you’ll work on ten projects at once, for different clients. Each one may last a day, a week, or a month, but rarely longer than that. You’ll work on simple microsites, styling a couple of pages to match the client’s product, or you’ll work on an email to convey the excitement of a product launch, in all browsers and on your phone. You’ll build Facebook, MySpace and Twitter pages for Fortune 500 companies, or you’ll help get the information from three different places into the new site that the client wants to be able to update hourly. It’s fast, it changes a lot and it’s stuff you get to see right away.

If that sounds like fun, call us. We’re hiring.