Augmented Reality SEO - Dixon Jones - Guest Blogger

If you think that SEO has gotten complex over the last 12 months, this is going to blow your mind.

20 years or so ago, shortly after leaving University in London, I found myself as part of a Microsoft focus group. At the time I wrote mystery games and the Microsoft researcher was responsible for developing "Blue Sky Thinking" for Microsoft on how the gaming experience might develop over the years. Now the Internet was still more or less off the radar at this time, but the research did come to the assumption that eventually, bigger and bigger computer screens would give in to just a pair of glasses for a wide angle vision experience. These glasses would be small enough to be a fashion accessory. I was at the Gadget Show at the National Exhibition Centre on the weekend. I can safely say that this prediction has come to pass. So park that idea of your computer screen being in your glasses for just a second. I'll come back to it.

A few weeks ago I found myself at another conference - this time in Reykjavik (before the Volcano I might add).

Because Iceland only has 300,000 people, conferences on Internet Marketing have to cover a much broader range of topics than you typically see in the UK or the US, simply to attract enough interested people in the audience. This makes for a very different perspective, and the one day agenda ended up with a section being dedicated to augmented reality.

Augmented reality is where you overlay computerized data onto real world images and activities. An obvious example is the "hybrid" view on Microsoft's mapping technologies, where road names and even places can be embedded onto the image of the landscape on your mobile device. The examples used in this conference, though, took augmented reality a step further, showing us technologies that allowed you to view your current world through your mobile phone's camera. The system then added additional information about what you were actually seeing at that point in time. Let's say you are looking at Niagara Falls. The software might overlay you picture of the waterfall with information about how old the falls are, which side is the Canadian border, that there is a café on the ledge beneath you, that going over in a barrel has only a 27% survival rate. That sort of thing.

This is much closer to the augmented reality that was envisioned, I think, in the focus groups that we had 20 years back.

Right. let's park that for a second too.

The third thing that inspired me to make this post also came out of the Iceland conference. It was discussing the idea of a treasure hunt style game, based on augmented reality, where a clue or imaginary idea might be attached to an otherwise mundane object. So on a bus ride, you could use augmented reality to enhance your journey as you tried to solve a mystery on your route.

So now, if we tie these three thoughts together, we are one step away from a new form of SEO. Imagine now that everyone on the bus is wearing glasses which have augmented reality screens built in, running different software. The bus ride goes past Niagara falls, but one person sees information that Niagara falls was created millions of years ago, during an earthquake, the next sees that Niagara falls was created 2,500 years ago when god went all "Intelligent Design" about building it. The third thinks there is a dragon under the water that can be used as an ally in his quest to avenge the driver of the oncoming bus (in game mode) and the last simply hears that there is a really nice Café 200 yards away over the ledge with a stunning view.

Here's where the SEO comes in. The café owner wants you to stop at his café - regardless of the glasses and software you are running. He can train his team to be characters in the game player's dragon sequence, he can set up some data boards by the waterfall about the different theories on the evolution of the waterfall and mark these as further reading in the two pairs of glasses of the archaeology program and the Intelligent design program and - of course - I am sure he will be able to buy the ad-space to tell people that he has a café just over the brow of the cliff. Only one of these four channels to market represents PAID search marketing as we understand it today.

The other three will fall into the SEO category, influencing what the user sees, whenever they search in a related situation. They are all searching within alternative virtual universes, yet the café owner can still find a way to get the user off the bus and into their café.

I think this is all wonderful. SEO will never die, but will always evolve.

A word of warning, though. If humanity is heading down this road, and I think we are, then we are all, as individuals, going to have to learn to be a little more discerning on what we believe, lest the black hats convince you that jumping over the cliff is the short cut to "Salvation Dragon Café".

The one thing I would like to leave you with is this. Microsoft used me as part of a focus group looking at this kind of stuff 20 years ago. They seem to be thinking considerably longer term than your average Internet company, wouldn't you say?

Cheers

Dixon

Dixon Jones is a founding director of Receptional a UK based Internet Marketing Consutancy.