The Black Eyed Peas are playing around with the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in their music video for “The Time (Dirty Bit)”. It’s a perfect song for those times you wish you were listening to bastardized oldies in a club full of Lego-people. Although the PlayBook is likely to be a dummy unit with the screen graphics added later in post-production, the band does play around with the idea of augmented reality and image recognition.
I think it would be interesting marketing if the Black Eyed Peas had an app available at the PlayBook’s launch that would recognize posters using the the tablet’s camera, and generate an on-screen 3D dude that did a little dance number, just like the music video. The guys at Junaio already do a lot of AR and and 3D modeling crossover, and I’m sure the BlackBerry PlayBook’s dual-core 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM could handle something like that. The 5 megapixel camera on the back would be good enough to recognize QR-code style markers at a distance.
As much as the Black Eyed Peas are cozy with RIM, they have plenty of loyalties in the tech sector – just check out the lyrics at 3:15: “Who’s the baddest of them all, you gotta be the apple, I’m the mac daddy y’all.” Take a look at the video for yourself, and spot the PlayBook at 2:10, 3:15, and 3:50.