What is Augmented Reality?

Increasingly aware of the central role technology plays in everyone’s lives (including those who are not directly connected), many managers, managers and entrepreneurs are looking for investment alternatives in digital marketing .

In addition to being extremely efficient, digital marketing is inexpensive and its results can be easily measured, giving an accurate idea of   the strategy’s success.

However, this form of marketing goes far beyond search engine optimization (SEO) and offering quality content. With more and more people connecting to the web through smartphones and other mobile devices, you need to think about how to use these technologies to your advantage and your digital strategy .

In this context, augmented reality can be of great help. Consider, for example, the success of the 2016 Pokémon Go game. In addition to appealing to public nostalgia, the game uses augmented reality and geolocation to show monsters on the map and through the camera.
With a week of release, Pokémon Go has valued Nintendo’s shares at $ 7.5 billion, and in less than 5 months the game has reached 100 million downloads between Android and iOS!

What is Augmented Reality?

The first point to be made when asking what augmented reality is is that it is very different from virtual reality. This concerns an immersion environment created through computational tools in which the user performs certain tasks. A good example of virtual reality is The Sims. Augmented reality designates the interaction between virtual environments and the physical world. A good example of augmented reality is QR Code tags in city sights.

Through the reader application of this type of label installed on tablet or smartphone and with internet connection, you can access a kind of virtual guide, which indicates the places to which the tourist should go (including mapping the route to reach the local) and, upon arrival, show the history, curiosities, tour options and whatever else is relevant. Given this, it is not necessary to go very far to imagine why augmented reality is so high in many fields, including marketing and advertising.

How does it work?

Now that you already know what augmented reality is , you probably wonder how it works. Simple: through software, a marker in the physical world and GPS.

In the example given above, the QR tag corresponds to the tag in the physical world, the tag reader app corresponds to the software gateway that provides the information to the user, and the GPS functions as the ‘eye’ of this software, as it indicates the user’s location in the physical world.