3 posts tagged “wearesocial”

In all the years that Waterloo was London's Eurostar terminal I caught the cross-Channel train from there a grand total of ZERO times.  Shame really as Waterloo's my 'local' London station, it's where trains from my town terminate - with the fast services whisking me there in as little as 40 minutes.

Now, in just a matter of a few weeks I've been on two return trips on the Eurostar from their new location, St Pancras International.  The first one was last month to Brussels courtesy of Nokia WOM World and the latest, Paris this past weekend, courtesy of Eurostar's Little Break, Big Difference (more on that in a future post).

St Pancras is a far nicer station than Waterloo - but it's a bit of a pain to get to for those of us travelling from towns south west of London.  It doesn't help that the Tube's a little on the confusing side to say the least (but then I'm easily confused!)  Anyway, back to the trips themselves...

Brussels had been the shortest time I'd ever spent in a foreign country, at barely 24 hours.  Well, that was until last Saturday - I went to Paris for the day.  Yes, the DAY!  Which is, when you think about it, y'know, kinda nuts!  The Eurostar does indeed make a big difference - can you imagine attempting the same by plane or by ferry and coach?

I hate long, boring, wordy posts - so I'll leave this one as it is.  I'll attempt to humourously go into more detail in a future post - that is, of course, if I can be arsed.  Anyway, I'll leave you with a bunch of pictures taken of y'know, stuff in Paris.  All shot on a Samsung i8910 - making the most of that 8 MP camera it sports.

If you've got a newish S60 phone and access to some mysterious black and white codes, you too can have a bit of fun with augmented reality!

Just go to gofindit.net where you can download the application and the codes.  The codes will work just as well on an LCD screen as well as printed out.  Actually, I think they work better on a back-lit screen rather than 'old school' paper.

The clever technology behind all this is from HIT Lab NZ (the NZ stands for New Zealand, funnily enough) and they have a bunch of interesting projects on their site, including ones you can download and have a play with.  In this instance they licensed the technology to agency Wunderman for a Ford Ka campaign promoted by wearesocial.

I'm about to embed a video below these words of mine.  The video is of a hands-on demonstration that a bunch of so-called Mobile Geeks of London*, including my good self, witnessed last week.

In a nutshell this is augmented reality.  Read up on it, this is the 'internet of things'.  Point a phone at a special code (or at a distinguishable object/building/picture) and and added details will appear on screen superimposed on the live image of what your phone's camera sees.

Anyway... if I think this is so great, why would I not want you to see the videos?  Well, for a start, they don't do the experience justice.  And, you really should try it for yourself before you've seen the videos (it's more fun that way).  The good thing is you will be able to try this for yourself if you have a suitable Nokia handset as there's an app on the way and codes to print out (actually, since typing this, the app is out - I'll post the link in my next post).

If you really want to see the video, here you go...

And there's more of them over at their YouTube channel: HERE

*'Cool Folk Who Like Getting the Most Out of Cellular Telephony Devices and Just Happen To Be in London Tonight', doesn't have the same ring.