The battle between digital and print media has deteriorated into a nasty trench war between two divergent camps. Many publications turn to the Web for publicity and ad revenue while print loyalists do anything but; editorial mastheads shed staff members by the minute while online fans buy fewer and fewer print copies, praising the Web's ease and affordability. But need these two camps be so strictly divided?
Esquire Magazine, the national men's magazine owned by Hearst Communications, has found a way to combine the two in its December issue, available on stands nationally Nov. 16. The "Augmented Reality" issue incorporates Augmented Reality (AR) technology, transforming the traditional print publication into a semi-digital experience.
A look at the magazine cover with only the naked eye reveals a photo of Robert Downey Jr. perched over a pixelated black and white square. But look at the same image through a Webcam, smartphone or any other AR reading device, and the image comes to life with 3-D footage of Robert Downey Jr. discussing the issue's special features.
The black and white boxes appear sporadically throughout the magazine to indicate embedded AR materials that include visuals, video segments and sound. In addition to the cover page, multimedia are used in two Lexus ads turned commercials, the December men's fashion spread and the magazine's revered "Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman" page, among several other sections.
Aside from dazzling Esquire fans, the AR issue also aims to add interactivity to its content. Rather than simply clicking "on," readers who choose to view the magazine through AR readers can manipulate the technology using motion, dressing the men's fashion spread models in different seasonal outfits with a flick of the wrist. Or they can choose to modify the content of their issue by reading it at different times. Esquire's "beautiful woman" of the month, Gillian Jacobs — more commonly known as Britta in NBC's new series "Community" — delivers the expected monthly joke (this time on video) during work hours, but offers another, more risqué one for post-midnight viewers.
According to Christine Perey, an analyst at Perey Research & Consulting, which specializes in mobile social networking and AR, such technology works through triggers embedded in real world objects that digital sensors can detect. When a sensor views a real world object absent of triggers, it simply displays an on-screen version of the real world image, much like a natural scene viewed through a camera lens. When a sensor detects a trigger, though — like the black and white boxes in Esquire — the sensor displays an onscreen image of the embedded 3D content superimposed on the trigger.
"Augmented Reality uses real-world triggers to add digital information to what people see," Perey said. "Those triggers could be locations; they can be objects in our environment; they can be pictures in magazines. The way that the triggers are identified is through sensors, and those are now commonly on the mobile phones — such as a camera, a GPS, things like that."
This gives the viewer a combined image of reality and digital reality.
AR technology has been around for about two decades — the term was coined in 1992 — but has until this year been mostly reserved for large companies able to afford the expensive equipment it required. Only within this past year has AR had a market in less expensive, mobile technology like smartphones. According to MSNBC, only since this past August — not coincidentally following the release of the iPhone 3GS — has AR begun to see widespread use within the United States.
But despite its extreme novelty, Esquire was not the first to pick up on AR, which is most popularly used to trace the virtual, yellow first-down lines in football games.
Yelp.com, the user reviewer website, has also made use of AR tecnhology. Users of Yelp who visit the Web site on their smartphones can drastically expedite the process of searching for nearby venues by eliminating keyword searches and simply holding their phone cameras up to view their surrounding areas. The smartphone's GPS technology, in cooperation with AR capability, automatically displays Yelp information superimposed on the images of the nearby venues that have been reviewed.
While digital features my be less expected in print media (i.e. Esquire) than they are in location-based Web sites like Yelp, they are actually more easily achieved in print, Perey explained. The reason is simple: "It doesn't require a GPS," she said.
As far as magazines go, Esquire is the first to incorporate AR into a print issue, but others have tried to lure readers with shiny, new techno-gimmicks before. Entertainment Weekly, for one, included a 40-minute CBS commercial in its September Fall Preview issue by gluing a television screen to one of its pages.
There is no denying these special features are gimmicks, but some — including David Granger, editor-in-chief of Esquire — think that gimmicks are no cause for guilt.
"It is a gimmick, but we're an entertainment medium," he said, according to the New York Observer.
And gimmick or no gimmick, its purpose — in addition to increasing revenue — is ultimately to augment what is published in print.
"We've been trying to do things that cause people to re-evaluate what a magazine is and get people excited about this thing called print," Granger said.
Whether other magazines and print publications will follow in Esquire's footsteps remains a mystery. Esquire itself, though, intends to incorporate the new technology in its issues as often as possible, though high costs will bar AR from making a monthly appearance. And for longtime Esquire readers who are not quite as forward with their technology as the magazine evidently is, Esquire is raffling off 50 Webcams through which the AR segments can be viewed.
