Nokia Point & Find pilot campaign kicks off in Colchester UK Tweet

COLCHESTER, England – Augmented Reality is a term that has begun to bubble to the surface in pop culture of late (Esquire magazine even dedicated an entire issue to it Stateside last month) – the concept of using your phone’s talents to extract relevant and often valuable info from your real world surroundings. But where it remains a concept in most cases, Nokia Point & Find has entered the wild and is currently running a pilot campaign in the city of Colchester in south east England.

We’re planning a trip to Colchester later this week to test it out to bring you our initial thoughts on Nokia Point & Find in action, but in the meantime read on to discover how it’s being piloted and what to expect.

Nokia has collaborated with one of the UK’s leading outdoor advertising companies, JC Decaux, to run a real world test of Point & Find centered around bus shelter advertising space peppered throughout the self-contained city (pictured below). Anyone passing one of these Point & Find advertising posters will be able to access relevant location-based info about local services, products and special offers, simply by pointing their phone’s camera at the image or object in front of them, having first downloaded Point & Find by texting HERE to 81066 – the phone then uses a combination of its advanced image recognition talents, web connectivity and GPS skills to scan the image and determine what it is, its location and what relevant and valuable info is available. Once your phone has evaluated a device it goes online to tap into a database of virtually tagged items, returning the associated media, such as movies, URLs, phone numbers or special offers. One of the best examples is if you point your phone at a movie poster, it might then send you the trailer, let you know where your nearest cinema in relation to where you’re standing, and give you the box office number should you want to book tickets.

As part of the pilot JC Decaux is offering all advertisers the chance to use Nokia Point & Find to include special offers in their interactive posters. Likewise, alongside the posters at the bus shelters sit a series of icons that can be scanned to get relevant local info – from left to right, Download Nokia Point & Find, Local news (BBC news and sport), Entertainment (cinemas, theatre, clubs, bars), Eating (restaurants, pubs, fast food), Shopping (stores and supermarkets), Info (about town, such as nearest ATM), Travel (local taxis, train times, parking and hotel booking).

Labels: