Brightkite boosts augmented reality ads

Brightkite made some waves by being the first to offer augmented reality advertisements late last year but these were actually kind of lame, banner-style ads overlaid on your screen. The company has boosted its ads but some of you may not like them.

Before, the ads were at the bottom of the page and pretty much stayed out of the way. Now, the company has teamed with big-name brands like Starbucks and McDonalds to create a larger branding presence. The Starbucks ad, for example, will show off a bigger Via logo when you’re facing your device at an applicable location. This eats up screen space, which may not please the user. Clicking on the icon will give you more information like pricing and directions to the nearest location.

I’m not trying to be an apologist for advertisers but this may be the sort of boost augmented reality needs to become more mainstream. There needs to be a monetization model that makes the big guys invest in this still-new technology and being able to create a stronger connection with the user is a perfect reason. Granted, these ads don’t look like it adds much to the experience (and it could annoy some users) but there is something very powerful about augmented-reality ads done well.

I think the big gorilla in the AR world is Google and its Goggles applications. As you can see from this video, the visual search engine doesn’t always get things right but the search giant continues to add new features to make it incredibly useful. It recently added translation abilities that could be very handy if you’re trying to order food in a foreign country, for example. It also plans to open up Googles to other developers and I think it could really take off once it’s a platform.

[Via TechCrunch]