Augmented Reality has been slowly making its way into our lives, mostly in the form of demo videos, games, and Google's forthcoming Glass project. But Aurasma is a cool little app that puts the tools to create AR content into the hands of everyone, and has implications that could put an interesting twist in filmmaking for the web.
As a promotional tool, this would be great for indie filmmakers. Giving your business card to someone would mean that they would be able to check out your demo reel and click-through to your website just by holding their phone up to your card. Or you could make a location-based aura for a movie poster or a stack of promo post cards. The location of your image shows up in Aurasma so people can easily seek it out --and once they find it-- they can see your film's trailer and website.
But to me, this isn't the most interesting aspect of Aurasma. What interests me more is using this as a filmmaking tool. With the Aurasma Lite app, you can shoot video or take pictures on your phone or tablet to make auras --global or location-based-- which you can then put into a public channel. That's all well and good, but what if you want your aura to consist of something you shot on a different camera and edited? For that you will need to sign up for Aurasma's free online content creation site, Aurasma Studio. After you fill out a short form and get an approval e-mail you're good to go, and this is where things get interesting. Imagine posting up images around a neighborhood or a city (or taking pictures of the locations themselves) and assigning them all location-based video auras. Each video would tell part of a story that would be continued at the auras in other locations --which you can either implicitly or explicitly point the viewer to in the video-- or make public in your channel. If you really want to get creative, you could make a series of films in such a way that the sequence they go in is not evident, so the order in which they're discovered suggests a different story to each viewer (a la Pattern Recognition). Or you could make a film with multiple plot pathways, creating the AR equivalent of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
If you want to check out the Aurasma Lite app, it's available in the App Store for the iPhone or iPad and on Google Play for Android phones. And if you're ready to start using Aurasma for filmmaking you can sign up for Aurasma Studio here.
Link: Aurasma (Note: there is a video on the homepage that autoplays and loops)
