Alcatel-Lucent's Augmented Reality Efforts

Alcatel-Lucent's Augmented Reality Efforts

Something is brewing up in Alcatel-Lucent. The company that tried last year to bring second-life avatars into the real world (video here), but failed to impress the crowds, and had some cooperation with Total-Immersion (video here), is now pushing onwards in multiple AR frontiers. First, there's Alcatel-Lucent Touchtag initiative (until last month it was known as Tikitag). Touchtags are cheap ($1 per tag at Amazon), programmable RFID tags that Alcatel-Lucent hopes will help create the internet of things (here's a commercial).
Moving on to visual markers based AR, Alcatel-Lucent presented their "Enhanced Reality" application for Symbian cellphones at Barcelona's GSM Mobile World Congress last month -



And then, there's this video Alcatel-Lucent released a few days ago, presenting their vision for the (near) future



I have tried contacting Stéphane Dufossé (the Alcatel-Lucent manager who posted the last video) for comments, but failed to get any reply. However, it's clear that the behemoth company is interested in AR and invests resources in this field. After relaunching Tikitags as Touchtags and posting those videos to Youtube, I'm expecting to see more of them in the coming months, making their AR strategy clear.