• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, July 10, 2013

Augmented Reality (AR) may not be a household phrase (or even a good one, for that matter), but power users are getting a dose of opportunity to play with it.

We wrote about some of this yesterday (Mobile Tech & Riding along the Back of the Old) after direct mail coupons giant Valpak announced it was going to include AR on its 40 million monthly blue envelope mailers for the next couple of months.

And Valpak is not alone in introducing AR to the public in a big way.

Beer brands like Heneken, which added QR codes to packaging years ago, are experimenting with AR, allowing people to scan a beer bottle to unlock prizes. Anheuser-Busch has used AR to help consumers find locations that carry their products.

There are really two places AR is being predominantly used, on flat surfaces and essentially in space (not as in ‘outer,’ but more like near you).

One of the earlier AR players, Layar in Amsterdam, started using the technology in space so house buyers could see details of real estate for sale by pointing their camera phone at the property. The company eventually found a more active home in the pages of print publications.

“We see publishing as the first major takeoff point for augmented reality,” says Layar Co-founder Maarten Lens-FitzGerald. “We call this starting point Interactive print. Magazines and newspapers are an ideal context to start an AR experience.”

AR adds information to the printed page that goes well beyond a simple link. “On the printed page people can directly watch the video of the celebrity cooking with the advertised product,” says Lens-FitzGerald.

I used Layar AR on the cover of my latest book Mobile Influence, so anyone scanning the cover sees buttons to email me, follow me on Twitter, buy the book, call me, etc., all with one tap. In this case, the interactive buttons stay on the flat surface, the book cover.

And then there is AR is space. With the Valpak approach, the consumer sees things – in this case, coupons – in space.

I chatted about this with Nancy Cook, Senior Vice President of Digital Business Solutions at Valpak yesterday. She noted that while most people are not yet using AR, some will. She said that after the two-month mailer trial, AR would be incorporated into the Valpak app.

What this means is that a consumer can hold their phone and turn 360 degrees and see where coupons are available and the distance to the businesses with the coupons.

Cook noted that the AR capability can be seen now in the app Junaio. (If you want to check it out yourself, download the Junaio app, search Valpak in the app, and hold up your phone. You’ll see any coupons available around you. It is quite impressive.)

The future potential of this, of course, is to be able to see these coupons in space in relation to the products while in-aisle shopping.

With Valpak’s digital coupons in space and AR on printed surfaces, the capability will be available to many millions of people. Valpak takes the capability to the masses, at least from an availability standpoint.

While there will be large scale deployment, there’s a great distance to large scale usage.

There is scale and then there is scale.

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OMMA mCommerce, July 15, New York.  Mondelez, Autotrader.com, IHG, MasterCard, BBDO, Rapp, Joule, ScanBuy, Huge, Spyderlynk, Rue La La, BYNDL, Catalina, Giant Eagle, Ansible, Moxie Interactive coming. Here’s the AGENDA.