Now Alcatel-Lucent Augments Movie Posters

Now Alcatel-Lucent Augments Movie Posters

Not two days have passed since Nokia has released (a beta version of) their augmented reality application "Point and Find", and Alcatel-Lucent has a come-back. "Point and Find" enables the user to scan movie posters in order to get reviews and local-screening times, and requires only the installation of a single application. Alcatel-Lucent's solution doesn't even need an installation, and looks great:



I've finally dug-up some information about how Alcatel-Lucent "Enhanced Reality" solutions (which we previously discussed here and here) work - the secret is video calls. When a user "scans" an image (in the above case, a movie-poster) she actually video-calls Alcatel-Lucent and transmits her camera input to its servers. Alcatel-Lucent's servers try to match the incoming image to known "augmented" images, and sends back information, a ringtone, or in the case above a video stream back to the user.
Obviously, this technique requires a very fast network connection (especially for a "textured effect" as seen in the embedded clip), and may be difficult to scale. However, at least in lab conditions, it looks wonderful.