XR Experience Evaluation #2
Published in
2 min readApr 13, 2019
- Application name and platform — Times Leader Step Inside. I reviewed this from my iphone.
- Description — This application is a form of mixed reality for newspapers. It allows the reader to scan their phone over the newspaper and watch videos or find out more information. Once you point the camera at the newspaper, a screen will pop up in your real environment, which you can move closer to or farther away.
- Audience — This application is made for people ages 4 and up. However, I don’t think it is reaching all of these people because newspapers aren’t most people’s first source of information.
- XR Implementation — This application is an example of mixed reality because it places a screen in your real environment. It is an iphone app, so it is handheld. The application allows you to use your phone to scan anywhere on the paper. If you don’t have anything to try it out with, it takes you to their website where they have example of posters and articles. You can then scan it from your computer to your phone.
- Supporting Technologies — The application uses haptic feedback to scan an image and then display the video the goes along with it. This is important because the camera is the only supporting technology required to use this mixed reality app.
- Strengths — The app is very easy to use and did not have any sort of glitch. The video always appears very quickly after I scan the image and is a high quality video. I like the overall concept of being able to scan real newspapers or other posters and see the corresponding video or webpage.
- Improvement — I think that while this is a really good idea, it needs to expand past more than just newspapers to include things like posters, magazines, brochures, and any other form of information that is handed to you in reality. I think that this is a great way to advance newspapers, but it isn’t very practical when most people get their news online already. I can see this being more used for promotional materials that could be handed to people in the form of flyers and then they can watch a video with their phones.
- SLAM — this app uses tracking in order to place the virtual screen on the paper. When you move the paper around, the virtual video will move with it and continue to play. It also knows when you move away from the paper and it’s no longer in the camera’s site, to make the video stay on your screen.
