The Geek Church

In this modern age of technology, businesses and product manufacturers continue to take advantage of every available tool to advertise their merchandise to the general consumer. Gone are the days when the general public only had to face junk mail, television commercials, billboards and advertisements from newspapers, magazines and books. In more recent years, online commercials, pop-up ads, spam and junk emails have become regular methods for companies to push their products on consumers. Now technology has added augmented reality as a new weapon in the advertising arsenal of businesses. Furthermore, Adidas, well-known among shoes and sports product companies is now using this weapon as a marketing strategy.

The company has recently developed a new product line of footwear that is equipped with an augmented reality marker. This literally enables the newly designed shoes to function as controllers for game applications online. The company calls its new product line Adidas Originals. These shoes work by using a special marker built into the shoe’s tongue to bring virtual objects visually into the real world. In order to use them, you must first choose from a selection of product models, which includes Superstar, Stan Smith, Forum, Nizza and Samba. Then you log into the Adidas website and use the shoes you chose to play a game application.

If you’re interested, footwear in the Adidas Originals’ product line starts at a price of $65 and goes up to $95. These augmented reality shoes certainly serve a three-fold purpose, functioning as footwear, entertainment and a unique form of advertisement to other potential customers. This new concept for Adidas products seems to be just another marketing ploy dressed up as a trendy form of entertainment. Personally, I have to wonder how many parents and teenagers will open up their wallets for this one.

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While I was at PAX, Sony Playstation had an amazing demonstration of a new game for their new EyeToy camera accessory. The game was simply known as EyePet, and it was pretty much the coolest thing that I saw all that day.

Eyepet allows the user to play with a virtual pet that will only appear on the screen. The eyepet is simply a lovable furry creature that is often found in most “pet” games. What makes it interesting is how the player interacts with the pet.

The player holds up a plastic rectangle the size of a piece of paper, and it has a paw print in the center of it. This serves as sort of an odd sort of controller to this game that really thinks outside the box. With this controller, I was able to wash the virtual pet by moving the rectangular controller to change the angle of spraying. As you can see from the video above, that rectangle comes in handy for a lot of other fun things like an x-ray. You can read more about the EyePet here.

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