If you have a MacIntosh, you’ve known for a while that the web can be a different kind of experience than browsing on a Windows machine, sometimes good and bad.

To the good, a year or so ago, Hal Riney & Partners introduced a web site with “gesture navigation” which allowed site visitors with web cams to wave their hand in front of the camera to move the display, left, right, up, down, etc.

GE has just taken that to a new planet with their Ecomagination site, and its “augumented reality” interface. Requiring the “solar panel marker” download to work properly, augmented reality is your image in the webcam, holding the panel, and watching it open up before your eyes, perfectly positioned against the panel image, presenting a 3D diorama from their TV commercials, for example the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz at a wind farm. It moves and changes perspective as you move the image.

Because a lot of people may not have webcams to try this themselves, here’s a rough movie I made of the experience I had.

Very cool new dimension to take flash to, and obviously other technology offshoots on the near horizon.

I’m starting to think that the navigation side of user experience may be the most interesting area of technological innovation in the coming year….

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John + Partners.

Tags: 3D, augmented reality, browsing, ecomagination, GE, Hal Riney, MacIntosh, navigation, web cams, windows

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 11:47 am and is filed under browsers, customer experience, innovation, navigation, online marketing, viral campaigns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.