GE’s Augmented Reality Ad

This has got to be one of the coolest web ad campaigns I’ve seen to date.  GE is promoting their new “Smartgrid” initiative using an innovative augmented reality application.  Just print out a PDF from the website, hold it up to your web cam, and instantly an animated three dimensional scene appears on screen.  And if that wasn’t cool enough, the image is actually ‘attached’ to the paper onscreen allowing the viewer to change perspective by moving the paper.  Check out the video above to see it in action.

Augmented reality is nothing new, but this is the first time I’ve seen it integrated into a simple flash application that did not require any additional software. I’m sure we’ll see a bunch of ads like this one soon.

Kudos to GE for an awesome web 2.0 ad campaign. And if that wasn’t cool enough they even provide a link to the source code used to create the application.