Augmented Reality TV Coming Soon

Augmented Reality TV Coming To Your Home Soon

by Jessica Drew

Recently a science game show in Germany, called Galileo, ran an interactive quiz through the TV for any viewer who downloaded Junaio, an augmented reality app for smartphones. What is this exactly? Basically, if you were a viewer, you could download and launch the app on your phone, hold your phone's camera up facing your TV and select answers to the multiple choice questions displayed on the TV by tapping the answer on your smartphone.

[caption id="attachment_251" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Augmented Reality TV Coming To Your Home Soon[/caption]

The image recognition software in the Junaio app detected the answers a viewer chose and automatically submitted it to Galileo's servers. Viewers instantly knew if they were right or wrong and the show's producers could display how well players as a whole were doing in real time. It's as if the smartphone app, in conjunction with the game show's display, can turn your TV into a touch screen interface.

Techies call this augmented reality and this type of viewing experience, tested in Germany, will undoubtedly become a mainstream, worldwide phenomenon. Why? In an age where everyone knows at least one person addicted to Farmville on Facebook, it's evident people love socially connecting through games and augmented realities. Also because the experiment was a huge hit.

The word "Galileo" was number one in German Twitter trends the night the show aired and during the well-promoted experiment the viewership of the game show jumped to a whopping 14 % percent of the entire market share for 14 to 49 year olds. Television producers cannot ignore numbers like those and you can bet augmented reality TV is coming to your home soon.

This is another example of Augmented Reality getting more useful and another demonstration of broadcast TV facilitating the active audience by giving them an opportunity to join in. This is more than test message voting, this is live at home audience participating from the living room and advances in this area could open up a range of possibilities across TV schedules. TV shows like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" and others could harness this, but so could any TV content that could be enhanced through audience interaction. Once augmented reality TV does become more popular, can you imagine how Hollywood writers and other creative professionals are going to use it in conjunction with some of the craziest reality TV shows on air? The possibilities are nearly endless and it should interesting to say the least. 2012 is an election year and the televised political debates could use this technology in the debates!

Jessica Drew is a freelance writer and editor who blogs about a variety of money making topics such as personal finance, frugal living and credit cards.