MONETISING MOBILE: Aurasma on the potential for augmented reality

Head of sales Matt Mills explains what Autonomy's AR division is up to.

The second augmented reality talk at ME's Monetising Mobile conference in London today came from Aurasma, a division of Autonomy that is focusing on AR.

"A lot of the awesome stuff we do in the enterprise and in the defence industry, we can start to do inside mobile phones," said head of sales Matt Mills.

"We think this is visual browsing," he said, showing off projects with Debenhams, where users can point their iPad's camera at a print advertisement, and be taken to a website selling the clothes they are browsing. "You can go from a print advert into an m-commerce funnel in less than a second," he said.

Aurasma has also worked with GQ Magazine this month: people can point their devices at the front cover to get a preview video of what's inside the magazine. Which might not sound useful, but there's more inside, where adverts for brands including Dunhill can be pointed at to play videos superimposed on the page.

What next? Mills talked about a new area of user-generated augmented reality content, using the Aurasma app to shoot a video of the Monetising Mobile audience, then associated it with a sign on the conference table, so that when the app was pointed at it, the video played.