Music Ally

If you haven’t yet got the hang of what augmented reality might mean for the way we interact with entertainment, check out Amusity. It’s a prototype for a new user interface allowing users to explore songs and music videos, metadata like artist / album / genre plus other related information such as popularity.

Amusity is based around a table onto which images and menu items (resembling stars and galaxies floating around in space) are projected. Information is sent back to the computer not with a mouse but with physical objects such as a disc or a rectangle. By moving the various real-world items around, the digital universe is affected.

In fact it’s not a million miles away from the Reactable – winner of the first Music Ally Midem Labs showcase in 2008, and demonstrated here at Sonar in Barcelona.

Augmented reality is the term used to describe overlaying computer-generated imagery on a live video feed. It’s fairly common in the world of sports TV – think virtual sponsor logos on cricket pitches, or the first-down line used in American Football TV broadcasts.

But there’s an increasing buzz around consumer uses of AR, thanks to webcams and mobile phones. Recently, some of that buzz has included music.

John Mayer

The most recent headlines relating to music and AR came from John Mayer’s launch of a video for his song Heartbreak Warfare. Fans go to his website, turn on their webcam, and hold up a printed or mobile version of a special icon, which launches the video. They then appear in the background of the video, using the live feed from their cam. It has to be said, it takes two or three attempts to work properly, but it’s pretty impressive when it does. However, the press release rather rashly claimed that it was the first AR music video – but in fact it was beaten to the punch by…

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US artist John Mayer has unveiled his latest web wheeze – an augmented reality video for his song Heartbreak Warfare. Fans can turn on their webcam and hold up a printed or mobile version of a special icon, which triggers the video to start playing with them in the background as an extra. See above for someone who’s filmed the results.

It’s being hailed as the first AR music video, although Los Valentinos have just done one too, while in August this year Sean Kingston launched an AR karaoke site, which got fans to sing along to one of his songs with an animated version of the star dancing around them.

Sean Kingston’s new album will have a special image in its CD booklet which, when held up to a webcam, launches an augmented reality karaoke session on his website.

That means fans get to sing along to his Fire Burning track, with an animated version of the star dancing around them. The resulting videos can be shared on the site, or posted to other social networks, according to Reuters.

“If I get a 10-year-old kid to get engaged with Sean Kingston by building a video and showing it to his buddies, I just turned on four more guys and gals to him,” says his label Epic’s EVP of marketing Lee Stimmel. It sounds fun, as long as the technology works.