The whole issue of how the public is being made aware of the ‘hidden’ augmented reality (AR) feature is also puzzling.
GoMo News visited its local Post Office to acquire the whole set of Great British Railways stamps and was hardly surprised to learn that the postmistress had no knowledge of the stamps’ “world first intelligent” nature.
For starters, there’s absolutely no mention of any computer compatibly on the stamps packaging, let alone details of how to acquire and load the requisite Junaio browser.
Eventually we enlisted the help of iPhone software developer, Steven Dow, of Stuck4words fame. He kindly downloaded the Junaio browser onto an iOS4 compliant iPhone.
The next task is to locate the correct ‘channel’ before the digital content can be viewed. We eventually found the Royal Mail channel although the Junaio browser has no ‘search’ capability to facilitate this.
Finally we pointed the iPhone’s browser at the stamps and … absolutely nothing. Basically, GoMo News can’t get this to work.
We agree with one of the comments left by our reader, Stan Timek. Rather than a video of Mr Cribbins reading a poem, surely the logical content to associate with a stamp would be a video message from the sender?
Obviously, Mr Timek has a vested interest in pointing this out because his company – Atomic Greetings, just so happens to offer this very capability.
Atomic sells greetings card which can play back a recorded video message on a PC. However, the firm appears to have re-invented the wheel with its own complex EVX technology.
As far as we can see, Atomic could use 2D barcodes and have the built-in code resolved by a clearing house such as Neustar. Then it would work on cameraphones, Mr Timek!
We look forward to a reaction from Metaio’s Tobias Eble about our experiences.
Tony, thank you for mentioning my post and Atomic Greetings. I am always excited to read about other people using augmented reality in novel ways. I was really happy to hear about this postage stamp and am really sorry to hear about your difficulties with getting it to work.
As you said, I’m a little partial to the way we do things at Atomic Greetings. Our system is based on Flash (for PC and Mac) so most people won’t have to install any software to get our cards to work. All they need to do is go to the web site which is clearly indicated on the card. As you mentioned, a 2D barcode is a great solution for millions of cards and millions of unique video messages. We chose the QR Code system invented by Denso-Wave for it data-carrying capability. Our patent-pending EVX system refers to our entire end-to-end solution.
I hope that you will soon be able to enjoy Mr. Cribbins’ recital of “The Night Mail.”
Stan Timek
Atomic Greetings
http://atomicgreetings.com
Augmented reality greeting cards done right, with video!
Hi Tony,
Thanks for the suggestions and feedback. We are always looking for ways to improve. Image recognition and non-2D-marker was an obvious choice for Royal Mail, as the stamp is quite small to encompass another 2D bar code. By keeping the stamp as is, it keeps the originality of the stamp. For more details regarding how to launch the AR experience, you can go to http://www.youtube.com/metaioar#p/a/u/0/UTHp53VM72E
Thanks!
Lisa
The handset we were using was running iOS 4.01 and we note you’ve just released a bug fix for this. Using a ZTE Racer running Android 2.1, we have finally got this to work.
I really like the AR experience junaio offers, though stamps recognition is not really AR. b.t.w. junaio does have ‘search’ function, and it works great on my iPhone 4.