[App Fridays] If you think you know Augmented Reality, Zoop might just surprise you

This column is sponsored by Nokia Asha

 Marketing and technology have often joined hands in the recent past. Companies like Coca Cola have made great use of technologies, which wouldn't have great use on a daily basis, for a marketing campaign and the novelty of the technology would lend itself to these campaigns beautifully.

Augmented Reality (AR) is one such technology. While its use in a real life scenario is debatable, it definitely has a wow-factor about it, which marketers would love to leverage. OEMs like Nokia have used AR apps to sell their products, Times of India used it for interaction with newspaper content;

the examples are numerous.Today's App Friday is an AR browser from Gamooz - Zoop. It aims to 'give life' to pictures that you scan with it. And to a large extent, it does.

What is it about? 

You can scan pictures with Zoop, and it would trigger an action on your smartphone. For example, you could scan a picture of Ganesha, and it would call a bell app, which you can shake to ring. Check out this video -

Now this isn't applicable to all the pictures and it would require the picture to be readable by the Zoop browser, but the possibilities seem limitless. From simple things like ringing a bell, the app can show scanned pictures which you can interact with touch, to launching applications by scanning pictures.

Zoopar.com has a few pictures that you can scan and interact with. Check it out.

A ready made solution

Going by what this app can do, I would think that advertisers and marketers are it's primary target audience. Generally, a firm would outsource this technology to a marketing agency to build such a system from scratch. Now they don't have to do so. Now a marketer can use Zoop instead. Most effects have been templatized and the team is looking to add to this. If a desired effect is not available in a template, then the Gamooz team have said that they are open to building it as well. The solution can also be white labeled. The pricing for the solution starts at INR 10,000 and the price varies based on the kind of solution that needs to be built.

To me, this looks like a cheaper, and maybe even a better option than building an AR solution in house or getting it outsourced. By productising the whole app building process, Zoop's solution is really scalable and easy to implement alternative as opposed to burning valuable time and money on building the app itself.

Pros and cons 

This a cool manifestation of AR technology. By having enough templates on display, I think Zoop has in a way shown the numerous possibilities that AR has to offer to advertisers and marketers. The app itself functions pretty smoothly and over a stable internet connection, the scanning and processing of a picture doesn't take too long. And for an app that has just released, it is fairly stable, barring some exceptions.

The weird part about this app is that it is a B2B app. But it is branded like a B2C app. If a person randomly downloads this app, he is going to be extremely disappointed because it works only on pictures which is in the app's database. On the outset, the app feels a lot like a typical consumer app, which can be misleading at times.

Our Take 

It's sexy, cool, innovative and it's a B2B play. It isn't always that you put these words in the same line, but Gamooz's Zoop has done it pretty well. The only shortcoming that I see with the app is the fact that it looks like a consumer app from the outset, whereas it isn't.

However, AR apps haven't really cracked a sustainable revenue model. Apart from marketing the app itself, Gamooz will have to market AR too. Many firms are still unaware about what AR can do for them and that's an extra bit of work that Gamooz has on their hands.

But otherwise, this is one really cool app. Play around with it and tell us what you think.

Download the app here and scan the pictures on this site.