Go – Go Augmented: Award winning augmented reality designers of Innovative Innospace.
Another Innospace tenant is one of four young Manchester start-ups to have been included in a list of ‘the most resourceful, original, exciting and disruptive businesses in the UK’.
Tech-savvy marketing company GoAugmented is aiming to change the way we look at the world – using mobiles not booze. They are probably the only award winning AR designers in the UK and they plan to add an extra dimension to not only advertising and marketing but everything we interact with, by adding a virtual layer to the real world, which can be viewed through your smartphone or tablet.
This could be anything from – extra directions to signs, imaginary figures appearing from walkways, to advertising coming alive and linking to facebook, and different ways of understanding the business world.
“GoAugmented is a really good, modern, virtual reality marketing company doing a great job in what is still an experimental marketplace,” says Matt Thomas, commercial manager and editor of Smarta.com. “They are at the cutting edge of augmented reality using graphics to add value to traditional advertising.”
But they want to go further than that as Mr Sodergren explains ‘Due to the nature of things at the moment most of the interest in Augmented Reality comes from marketing people. It’s ever marketers dream as AR doesn’t need QR codes and creates a seamless experience – it really gives the wow now – which impresses people which is why big brands such as Tesco’s are using it. But the potential of augmented reality applications on mobile phones is much greater than this. Limiting AR to advertising is like saying the printing press could have only made flyers for theatres. As we know, it did a lot more than just that.”
Introduced to each other by Manchester Metropolitan’s business incubator Innospace, lead developer Nadeem Rashid, 23, and marketer Dan Sodergren, 35, have formed a partnership which has seen huge growth for the company in their first year.
As Nadeem Rashid – Lead developer for goAugmented puts it “Augmented Reality will change the world. Not just with augmented reality in advertising but using augmented reality in design and in the way we interact with our homes, our cities, our friends. Adding graphic information to add value to things we buy and things we love. You will be amazed at what AR can do.”
Yet, making amazing technologies and being at the top of their class in development may have actually held the company back initially. As Mr Sodergren reports: “It’s great to have amazing technology teams, we are lucky here at goAugmented as Nadeem is ranked as one of the top two developers in Europe by the German-based augmented reality platform Junaio (our main supplier). The initial problem was they were so busy making stuff that they weren’t selling it to clients. They would make something amazing and then go onto the next project. I saw their potential in this and I’m now the commercial manager. We have turned the company around to be more client-focused and so in the last six months we’ve seen the turnover increase by a factor of ten.”
Big names clients such as Samsung and Manchester City FC have bought into this new vision of things to come and been added to forward thinkers like the British Museum as goAugmented clients. With a lot of the technology created by goAugmented’s Nadeem Rashid as well as external AR provider platforms like Junaio from Germany.
The company is now exploring many other uses for this in house built technology such as working with fashion labels – with people will be able to transpose items of clothing onto themselves using web cams and mobile phones and will be releasing a white label product around this in October.
A blog post by Afia Khatun