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MWC 2012 - Our favourite stands

Charlie and Chris headed over to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress at the end of Feburary. It's an amazing event which gave us a great insight into the industry from a non-applecentric point of view.

We met some lovely people and could talk for hours on what excited us there but for now you can read about a
couple of our favourite stands:
 
 
With more and more projects requiring augmented reality, I made a special point of visiting
the QualComm stand. They have a very exciting development platform, Vuforia, that I
wanted to check out.
 
Vuforia is a development tool that allows developers to provide their clients with marker
based augmented reality. This technology has been around awhile (ie QR readers),
however, where this particular tool differs from others is that it is able to make a marker
out of any image and still remains orientation & size related.
 
Often the biggest obstacles to a clients requirement to use marker based AR is the
requirement to use a large, awkward, inconvenient QR code. With Qualcomm, this is no
longer the case and quality of visual product no longer needs to be compromised by the
marker.
 
Good examples of where this technology can be implemented are:
 
Providing extra/secret content tied into magazines, brochures, advertising boards, etc.
- The markers can now be the normal images.
Real life, real location adventure games.
- A board game where the board is the marker and the game is in the mobile device
- A real life treasure hunt where billboards, signs, shop windows are markers, revealing
the next level when viewed in the device.
For visualisation tools when someone is buying a product
- What size TV will fit into living room?
- Do you have enough space for a new wardrobe in your bedroom?
 
I had a very good conversation with the guys at the stand and am excited about the
prospect of including this in projects moving forward.
 
 
(yes - without the Ericsson)
 
Less work related, but equally interesting for me was the Sony stand, very much appealing
to my geek side.
 
Most everyone is familiar with Apple TV, but for those that aren't the basic premise is
that you can buy a box that hooks up to your TV and then through that box you can watch
movies, use youtube, can share the screen of your iPad/iPhone on the TV as well as a few
other neat things.
 
Sony are taking this concept one step further and are coming out with devices that have this
functionality built in as standard. So, not only can you connect your laptop to your tv, but
you can also connect it to your phone, your stereo and any other Sony devices you have.
And it is all done wirelessly.
 
It was very impressive to watch the woman demonstrate by dragging a document from her
laptop to the tv and then onto her mobile. She then, using her mobile, played a video on
the tv, while playing the sound through a set of speakers on the other side of her room.
 
Fully connected homes are now very close.

7th March 2012

Posted by Charlie