Pulp affection

Paper that triggers interactivity on your computer screen? Real time graphics on your smartphone during a game? Getting recommendations for restaurants depending on where you’re facing on the street? It’s hard to wrap my mind around all these innovations called “augmented reality” (AR) where smart phones and computers provide a degree of interaction between the physical and digital worlds. Karthika Muthukumaraswamy’s blog post “Augmenting reality through journalism” covers the various innovations in progress, and how they offer possibilities to journalism.

Take for example Yelp, an iPhone app that calls up information on reviewed establishments such as restaurants depending on your current location detected by the GPS and what you’re pointing at with your iPhone. This concept offers the basis to “embed” any type of information onto places in the physical world, detectable by a smart phone’s GPS system.

This is where news organizations come in.

If breaking news in the city can be mapped as soon as it’s published online, this information can be updated to people’s phones as well. For example, it could alert people of an ongoing emergency nearby which could save lives. Think of the Virginia Tech and Dawson College shootings where people did not know where the threat was, and all the cellphone connections were jammed.

The police rely on media outlets for important public alerts, and Yelp can make this far more effective. I’m not sure if Quebec has the “Amber Alert,” but there is a police warning system in Ontario and British Columbia for citizens to keep their eyes peeled for a recent child abduction. Police alerts could get out to people within minutes – the minutes that are crucial to stopping a crime – in the area where the suspect was last seen by “flagging” the area for the Yelp-equipped phones to pick up.

Traffic reporters can give commuters to-the-minute information that is specific to the kilometer, not just big sections of roads and highways. City news can be delivered in a fashion that is much more interesting and relevant to the audience as they go about their lives – people can interact with their physical environment by searching through interesting facts that are updated real-time. Imagine walking through a neighborhood, and finding out that it is undergoing gentrification, or walking into a building and browsing through interesting facts about its history.

Yelp on an iPhone.

Information overload? This could be the worse example to the nth degree. But this can be solved with the use of filters. People can flick on and off, pick and choose what categories of information they would like to see at any given time or location. If you look at the screen in the above picture, Yelp has already created categories of information for people to choose from.

If I may use a worn-out expression, knowledge is power. If this form of AR is made universal, it will offer unprecedented access to information for the masses in real-time, relevant to people’s specific location, activities and interests. It is up to news organizations to stake a claim in this AR medium and establish a demand for this product early on – before the tech giants do so and once again determine the rules of the game like they did with online news (read: Google News and the Apple iPad).

If something like Yelp succeeds in gaining widespread support in infrastructure and content suppliers, it could change everything. Journalism can be part of that change.