John Mayer has made music and technology history this week as the first recording artist to release an augmented reality music video. It’s an interesting experiment. Engaging, unique and… pretty damn cool.
There are several ways to get the marker (icon) to reflect in your webcam. Though, if you don’t feel like wasting a piece of paper or don’t have access to a printer to print out the marker, the steps below worked like a charm for me and had it up in under a minute.
- Download the icon here (PDF)
- Save it as a note to Evernote Desktop or Web app
- Open the note in Evernote Mobile
- Go to JohnMayer.com on your Mac or PC
- Hold up the icon (on your mobile) to your Mac’s / PC’s webcam and voila…. your own 3D Music Video experience courtesy of John Mayer.
Also, as the site suggests, once you have the markers aligned don’t move the icon until you see John.
Earlier in the month, Wired interviewed Mayer on the augmented reality video set during production.
The augmented-reality music video for “Heartbreak Warfare,” the lead track from Mayer’s upcoming album Battle Studies, debuts Tuesday at the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles before hitting the internet later this month.
Here’s how it works: When you hold a printout of a specially designed augmented reality “marker” in front of your computer’s webcam, it triggers the start of Mayer’s 3-D music video. The webcam will then transmit images of your face into the onscreen tableau so you appear as an extra, perched behind Mayer as he sings about heartbreak and betrayal.
“It’s very cool,” Mayer told Wired.com during an exclusive video interview (embedded below), in which he describes the AR technology as “sort of like a digital hologram.”
“It’s like a completely 3-D, immersive experience that you have,” he said in the interview, which was taped in between takes of Mayer’s August music video sessions on a green-screen stage in Hollywood. Fans can download the “Heartbreak Warfare” AR marker, a special symbol that triggers the augmented reality elements in Mayer’s video, from his website later this month for free. Battle Studies will be released Nov. 17.
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Augmented reality technology is increasingly being used to create interactive entertainment and promotions that let fans take part in virtual concerts and other events. For instance, a recent Doritos campaign had Blink-182 performing a virtual concert in a bag of corn chips, while a line of action figures for James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi film Avatar will include special codes that unlock animated models of the toys and other onscreen extras.
It’s not Mayer’s first foray into the high-tech world. The singer-songwriter, who introduced Apple’s GarageBand recording software from the stage of the 2004 Macworld conference, has also done commercials for the BlackBerry Curve, tweets obsessively, uploads jam sessions on YouTube and previews works-in-progress on his blog.
Behind the scenes at the shoot:
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