How Web AR works?

To get to know a quick snapshot of how website based augmented reality works, please do watch out the below video. It is not as simple as you see to create it and yeah if you think its so simple to use, then yeah its going to be the future of advertisements.

By this time most of you would know what FASTag (India) is? Hope you have seen this above video. If not please do watch and continue reading...

In the above video you might have seen how Airtel (India) released a game in Facebook and Twitter and gained more user engagements. Using smartphones people click on a website link and it automatically redirects to their camera rear view. They see a huge toll plaza in an minature version, at their destination. Real traffic sound and cartoony visuals of how FASTag works can be understood easily. Isn't it so cool?

The game is to stop the car, exactly at a particular point after it has passed through the second lane of Toll plaza. Usually second lane is meant for "FASTag" customers who had sticked their tag on car windshield. Also from the above augmented reality experience Airtel customers can purchase FASTag (India) through Airtel Thanks App from Play store or App store. So after you purchase FASTag, help you pass through the toll plaza without stopping for cash transactions. The same has been augmented!

The reach was tremendous through social media campaigns. Many people have participated in the Twitter & Facebook game for attractive goodies. Responses were tagged in the below URL references. We would call this as yet another successful web based Augmented Reality experience by Augray Inc.

Cheers

Shiva Mathivanan

#Augray #AR #AugmentedReality #FASTag #Game #Airtel #shivamathivanan

Business cards are dead

Yeah, I'm equally surprised to get to know this. It will be quite disheartening to learn that business cards were no longer useful - A sad story!

I was at TESTCON 2019 Bangalore on Test Automation. It was a premium software testing conference organised by Clavent Technologies.

Many CEO's, entrepreneurs, limelight testers across the globe volunteered to confer with budding testers. Testers from various organizations like Accenture, Microsoft, Hotstar, Techmahindra, Comcast India, CSS Crop, GE, Qapitol QA, Matryxsoft Tech, WinVinaya Infosystems, Taqanal Energy, Xebia, Author Renu, Moolya Testing & AppAchhi spoke so well at the conference. It was indeed a great conference. I was very happy to confer with interesting people post conference during break time, as well. That's when I got introduced myself to participants who attended the conference. Luckily I had carried my business card so I gave it to couple of participants who attended the conference. It was all good until I saw my own business card in the dustbin :(

I always love carrying business cards in my wallet. Needless to say it was an amazingly designed business card. I was told that business cards are essential tool for marketing. If so, then why it was not noticed? was it so ugly? to get thrown in dustbin?

Why my business card failed to grab attention? It definitely informs others who am I? What do I do? How I can be of help? How can someone contact me? I was pondering why there is no life in printed paper cards? Just because it doesn't have life in it, people throw away? here is the untold story of business card which reveals the truth...

The Untold Story
27 million business cards printed daily turns into just under 10,000,000,000 business cards printed annually. How many business cards are thrown out within a week? Of the 10 billion cards printed each year, 8 billion is being tossed within a week. That's 88% of the cards printed. Wow, isn't it an amazing statistics?

What can we do differently?
This made us to keep thinking on what can we do differently such that we give life to printed cards? as Arthur C. Clarke rightly quoted any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Augmented Reality is one such magical technology. We thought AR could help us to make use of useless business card useful.

AR business card is Born
At Augray Inc, a group of engineers teamed together to do differently. Suresh Thankavel is the ideation brain behind the successful AR business card. Jothieswaran and his creative team executed the idea with Swaminathan A and his technology team - Congratulations.

You can customize your persona. Isn't that interesting? We imagined how it would be to add our sales representative voice, his intended message to our clients, his appearance in the form of 3D avatar with and the way he pose and express with voice modulation. Yes, our imagination was limitless. You know what? we made that in real too :)

Watch out for AR Business Card we developed at Augray Inc. All you have to do is scan the business card using Augray app and experience the magic. The same has been recorded in a video and displayed below for you to understand. We would love to hear what you think. Lets discuss in comment section.

Regards,

Shiva Mathivanan

Augmented Reality May Not Be Exciting

Oh wait, what is Augmented Reality? Hey, I know a lot about Augmented reality and it is of course so exciting. Why the hell do you think it may not be exciting? I hope you are comparing with virtual reality and calling it to be not so exciting? am I right? Nah..whatever, this is supposed to be a testing Blogosphere where only testing articles is shared, isn't? but now this title sounds so irrelevant to the testing community.

First, let me clear you guys on the blog title okay. So, are you someone who is working in AR domain? then yes you might feel bad about this title. However, if you continue to read upcoming context then you might nod your head and give me an yes - unknowingly.  Haha

Here you go, Augmented Reality (AR) lives in the mixed reality spectrum. AR lives between the real world and the virtual world. Just because, AR brings the elements of the virtual world into our real world how can it be made exciting? If it is exciting then it would have attained the global market place in large numbers, isn't?

The Wait Is Not Over

Augmented Reality was discovered to enhance the visual effect of real world objects. What did it do after enhancing the visual? put it back into the real world. Ah...how can one do it? Yes, through AR technology this is possible.

One such example could be, using AR technology we can create human body parts and make use of it for science graduates to visualize and understand more in details. Real sounds can be incorporated to the graphic visual by profound sound engineers. These were made to appear close to reality. But Is that real? Nope!

AR world sustained so far with Markerbased, Markerless, Projection and Superimposition technologies. There are many apps in the Appstore and Playstore developed using these technologies. Most of them call themselves to be successful comparing to other AR products. What makes your customer delight? All product success stories revolves around this brilliant question.

Let's me put forth this question to all AR product owners out there in the market? Is your customer happy?

AR is a very powerful word. It has not evolved completely. We all live in AR evolution. There could be more avenues in years to come. At the same time, many organizations have had made tremendous efforts to build lots of interesting avenues using AR. To name a few, Pokemon Go by Ninatic Inc. Harry Potter Wizards Unite is way more complex game than Pokemon. TaDa Time - 3D AR Messenger app by Augray Inc etc. Money and time is invested to gain this momentum in Research and Development arena. While the development of new AR products in full swing we are parallely creating new areana of testing scope as well. There is a huge demand for AR automation. This is the right time of the year to get us equipped with AR testing skills. AR apps are mostly camera sensitive, geo-location based apps which could potentially work with beacon devices.

We all know it is so difficult to test on varied android and iOS devices. Though there are many cloud testing tools which could help us leverage testing better. But still automating remote camera, recording and saving the recorded AR file in remote device and validating it, is still a challenge. Yes, this calls for new testing openings. New challenges in development and test automation pave way for new testing openings. Let us all enhance our skill set in this AR arena and grab more opportunities during upcoming years to come.

Yes, the wait is not over yet. It could be a long wait too...

 

Regards,

Shiva Mathivanan

PS: This image in this article represents an apparel advertisement in newspaper. If scanned using mobile phone can experience the actual product in 3D. I have used that image to represent augmented reality. The image is copyrighted to www.yeppar.com. With due respect I'm signing off right now. Please do write your comments and feedback to discuss more on this topic. Thank you!