I bet once upon a time you would have never dreamed of checking your email during lunch with a friend. Or dinner with your family. It would have been not only rude, but incredibly inconvenient. Today, in our “always on” culture, social norms and expectations are changing.

According to recent studies, so are our brains. You might have thought your ability to chat, text, surf the Net and make dinner for your family meant you were adept at multitasking. In fact, studies show that people who identify themselves as multitaskers are in fact the worst at it. Researchers believe our relationship with technology has actually changed the way our brains work. As reported in the New York Times series Your Brain on Computers, technology provides sudden bursts of information to which our brains respond with a release of dopamine. In other words, digital stimulation can be addictive. And it compromises our ability to focus and switch among tasks. (You may want to check out the series’ two interactive tests in which you can see how you measure up in these areas.)

Many of us have been feeling the technology creep for awhile as it invades more and more areas of our lives. New devices have eliminated the “where” of  being connected—you don’t have to sit at your desk to check email—but, perhaps of more significance, it also eliminated the “when.” That puts the burden of turning off on you.  

How has technology impacted your life?

Augmented reality’s recent presence in digital marketing has been felt with a plethora of head scratching and jaw dropping applications that have been launched in the past year.  At the top of my list of favorites is Jack Links Beef Jerky’s “Living Sasquatch.” From the landing page the audience can interact with the illusion of their own personal sasquatch in real time, with which they can control the sasquatch’s actions and mannerisms, record and send to a friend or upload for others to view. The interaction with this application creates a unique, personal and memorable experience.

How does it work? Most web-based applications of AR require a pattern for your camera to detect.  The pattern acts as a marker in 3D space for the superimposed elements to base their position off of.  The pattern’s relationship to the web cam calculates the distance and tilt of the plane the pattern is on, thus changing in real time the size and angle of the superimposed elements.  AR is not new by any means; it has been used by the military, museums and tradeshows for several years.  The first time you might have seen AR in action would be watching a football game where they have the yellow line indicating the first down.

Why is it so popular now? This is the first time that general consumer technology has caught up to utilize its capability i.e., web cams, software developments, open source code, and the access to it from home computers / mobile devices.  Many companies have jumped on the band wagon producing a wide spectrum of results from baseball cards to full on interactive games.

Game Example:

Although there has been much skepticism on the longevity of AR’s appeal on the general consumer, many consider recent uses of AR to be very gimmicky with no practical use.

One such example is GE’s smart grid technology, where the users hold a piece of paper up to their web cam and a 3D sun and windmill farm emerge out of the paper in their hands.  Useful or practical? Not really, but definitely does create a unique experience.  I found myself interacting with the internet in a completely new way, by moving back and forth in my chair, getting up and walking as far back as I could to see how far away my web cam would detect the AR’s pattern.  Though I think uses of AR such as GE’s smart grid will become outdated soon, purely because of its non-value factor, I do not think AR will go away. Its a fast exciting medium with potential that has only begun to be tapped into.