Browsing has never been this much fun.
With a simple smartphone camera and Aurasma’s free app (iPhone and Android), you can get video layered onto real world images.
Sitting behind HP’s recent umpteen-billion dollar purchase of Autonomy is a host of gems that promise to take the IT industry through a realignment around human friendly information, to paraphrase Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch. Aurasma is one such gem: This augmented reality application promises endless fun, but also a healthy dose of practical applications.
While some categorize the company as enterprise search or content management, Lynch insists that Autonomy is out in front of the pack when it comes to managing all unstructured data, but more crucially, to extracting meaning from that data, and doing so in ways that allow human interaction. Aurasma sure packs the punch behind that statement.
Aurasma starts as an app that runs on an iPhone (it also runs on Android; ironically, it doesn’t run on webOS). Point the phone camera at a real-world image or object and Aurasma understands the context of the image and pulls up an accompanying video from its database of over 500,000 videos. For example, a movie advertisement in a newspaper might elicit a movie trailer; a piece of art might conjure a video of the artist talking about it. Point it at a product, and a self-help video might emerge (Aurasma showed a video demonstrating how to connect an HP ProCurve router). Point the camera at a building (or an image of a building) and get a visual tour. Users can also upload their own content from the application–images tagged to video.
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