The Future of augmented reality and magazines

"What if the pictures in magazines weren’t just pictures but short movies, and what if you heard music connected to the articles? What if you could interact with the printed content? 
Augmented magazines - the magazine experience of tomorrow"

The combination of augmented reality and paper magazines create the possibility to offer digital features (additional content like video and sound as well as interactivity like commenting or instant purchasing) while keeping all the benefits of paper magazines such as its tangibility, smell and feeling.
 
We will investigate the state of the art by looking at current technologies and offers as well as conducting interviews with people from the industry (Metro, Ikea, VICSTHLM, Pointcloud). Then we will envision how augmented (or hybrid) magazines could look in the future, especially at different technological solutions as well as different kind of additional content.

Readly (spotify-gruppen)

Why be satisfied with only one magazine when you can read them all?  With Readly it becomes possible.

We will make a magazine service that allows everyone to access magazines anytime anywhere. We will make user studies where we look on features to include in Readly, how Readly should be user friendly and which restrictions that are needed. From there, we will develop a prototype of Readly that is customized for the user.

MagZone™ - Turning stacks to riches

How to turn the magazines stacks in cafés into digital revenue?

In the future magazine reading will happen out-of-home as consumers have less time to read whilst they’re at home. With “MagZone” venues like cafés, doctor’s offices, airplanes and many more will be provided with a system that enables magazine reading there, but on their own device. Through a system based on near-field-communication users can chose a magazine and directly download a temporary copy to the device with the restricted usage based on the area. This new way of distributing magazines creates a business-to-business relationship which leads to opportunities to gain non-price sensitive customers. It will also increase the phenomena of magazines as a concept of entertainment and in that sense broaden the customer base.

MAGi - magazine intelligence

Our dream is a future where we live in smart environments, where all devices are connected with each other and work together intelligently to provide an amazing user experience. Even magazines will be perfectly integrated in this intelligent environment.

MAGi is an intelligent system for magazine reading that provides perfect usability for readers in the year 2030. She is completely integrated in her readers' daily life, their intelligent environment and she is connected to all relevant devices. She really knows her readers!

The first step to anticipate a future scenario is to find resources that provide a realistic forecast about future technology and society. To get to know problems and needs, readers in the year 2030 might have, we establish personae which represent a future society. Knowing the future needs of our future target group we deduce functions of our service. For substantiating our predictions we will have an expert interview.

Digital contact lenses as a window for future magazine reading.

Group name :

Digital contact lenses as a window for future magazine reading.

 - Complete immersion through magazines. 

Summary:

Just imagine sitting in a restaurant reading an article on dinosaurs and when you look out of the window you see dinosaurs walking about, as if the restaurant was in the middle of a dinosaur infested jungle.  
The magazine is projected on an imaginary plan in front of you and the environment change depending on what you are reading about. It can suddenly start to rain or maybe the surrounding changes so that when you are in the subway in Stockholm suddenly the Mongolian countryside passes by outside the window.

MAGnify

“I can’t believe it, I read the whole thing!”

What if it was the easiest thing in the world to find out what your friends are reading at the moment, what famous people read right now, the most popular articles right now and the fastest rising articles? With MAGnify it is, and it only takes a second.

Based on the mass-survey and interviews with social media experts, business-developers from publishing houses and media-researches we strongly believe that the platform based on social recommendations for readers could be real (as a business model and consumers’ demand both).  Based on the data we will visualize the framework of our platform, write a business-plan for it and make a short movie, explaining how it will work. 

Audience of One

"The future is made by you, not for you."

As active content consumers and social media users we have decided to address the problem of content overload. As media consumption continues to shift from a traditional broadcast model to a one-to-one model, the need for personally-tailored news feeds will become a significant issue. We hope to creating a near-perfect abstract solution to this problem that would allow users to get curated, personally interesting, and niche content in a manageable easy way.

Journalist Rockstars

The future of journalism: Journalist Rockstars

"Sex, Drugs & Journalism"
   
Journalism has always been one of the most important societal institutions and has always been responsible for upholding many of our democratic values. The problem we’re facing today is a lack of willingness to pay for journalistic content, which affects both the way individual journalists work and the way news get funded. The rise of social media offers alternative ways for journalists to promote their work, as well as new ways of paying for it. The music industry shows a similar development, with artists having to make money through different channels than before. We believe in a similar development for the journalistic industry, though obviously with slightly different consequences. In the future, journalists are no longer the lowly paid writers who do the biddings of their supervisors at the newspaper, but self-promoting rockstars funded by you and me, and driven by the fame that comes with the next big story. To support this theory, we are planning on interviewing people in different areas connected to this future scenario, for example: the news industry, music industry, as well as a social media expert.

A Magazine For Several Senses

A Magazine For Several Senses

"As long as it makes sense."

One of the most common answers to the question “why do you prefer print before tablet?” is that people like the smell and feeling of holding a magazine. This far, we have only been able to smell and feel the actual paper, which of course can be nice, but as very few magazines are about printing machines and techniques, it would possibly be nicer to also be able to smell and feel the golf course, the tomato soup in the recipe, the new fragrance from Dior or perhaps even listen to the soothing sound of birds in the forest.

We want to connect the senses to the content!

The future of magazine distribution

The future of magazine distribution

How can the distribution of magazines at train stations and airports be revolutionized in the future in order to account for the customers’ preferences within these settings?

Our vision is based on three main consumer behaviours having been observed in context. First, consumers tend to enjoy taking their time, reading magazines as a means of time consumption while waiting for the train/plane. Second, many consumers enjoy the element of surprise in magazines. Finally, about half of the consumers would like to be able to customize their own magazine.

We believe that the best solution is to remove many of the physical magazines and create space for a small digital library. The library contains furnishing aimed for relaxation, and digital tablets through which the customer not only reads the available magazines, but also has the possibility to customize their own magazine by combining parts of different issues of the same magazine. The consumer can also choose to add “surprise content” where the amount of surprise content being displayed in the magazine is completely up to the consumer to decide. Once a magazine is chosen/customized/complete, it can either be loaded to a personal tablet reader, or be printed on demand in the store using technologies for nano-printing. Finally, consumers in a hurry also have the possibility of logging on to the their profiles on the magazine network, choose or customize the magazines as they wish, and then buy the physical version of them in the store, or download them to their tablets.

The Future of Collecting, Summary

The Future of Collecting

We bring out the megalomaniac in you.

Our idea is a virtual bookshelf that can be customized and used to brag about your collection. The user can get rewards and trophies for purchasing certain magazines and certain amounts of magazines.  Magazines also contain hidden surprises with a certain probability. All of these will be displayed in the virtual bookshelf. The virtual bookshelf is connected to a portal, where users can interact with the product. The portal contains a shop. Each user has a profile on the portal. Each profile is mapped to a virtual bookshelf.

Week 43: Spotify

Group name: At the moment we will keep the name Spotify as the group name. But till the final presentation we will give our final “product” a name.

What we have done: We have looked at some information about the digital services that you can use today and especially some magazine services. We tried to book an interview with Spotify, but have not yet get an interview. We are still waiting for an answer from one person that work there. We have planned an designworkshop to next thursday and made an schedule on what we are going to do, on which time. Also planned what everyone should do and what equipment we are going to need.

We also booked an focus group, the main purpose to have a foucs group is to get feedback on the ideas we get from our designworkshop, and a second opinion on the sketches we are suppose to do.

We also made an document for the book chapter. Where we already can right down the things we done, put in good sources or hand in good pictures in.

Problems encountered: It seems to be difficult to get an interview with Spotify. We don’t have any place to have the designworkshop at the moment, the only big room that students can borrow is unavailable. But we are working on the problem at the moment.

What we will do: Accept the methods we have planned to do. We are going to make a film for the presentation, and also of course make a powerpoint presentation. We have planned start times and deadlines for these activities.

When we finished the methods we are going to have a solution for the final “product”. The solution need to be in some kind of prototype that we can demonstrate. We think we are going to solve the problem by doing it in Photoshop.

Changes in the project: We have not made any changes since the last meeting with Daniel and Leif.

Other: An article about The Future of Magazines Should Look a Lot Like Spotify:

http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/26/the-future-of-magazines-should-look-a-lot-like-spotify/

If anybody is interested to attend to the designworkshop next tuesday (30/10) at 15:00 (take about 1,5-2 hours), feel free to just comment and we will contact you. We will serve swedish fika of course. The target group in the design workshop is magazine readers, both digital and paper-readers.

Or if you are interested in the focus group (14/11) at 13:00 (we are not sure how long time it takes, maybe 1 hour). The target group is human-computer-interaction students.
Feel free to just comment and we will contact you. We will serve swedish fika of course.

Week 43: the Future of Collecting

Group name: The future of collecting

What we have done:

We have sinned. 'Cuz what we have done is -- sinfully good. Our plan was to first create a conceptual model for our product, and then to evaluate it using structured interviews with collectors and publisers alike. This week we have executed the first part of the plan - we have developed a conceptual model. Tis was done in a couple of brainstroming sessions. When four of the finest minds on KTH put their minds together, the result can't be wrong. We looked at current successful services and systems like the steam-portal for games. We also looked at the achievement system of PS3 and Xbox. These things are similar to what we want to do, and smart minds don't reinvent the wheel - they make a superwheel that's even better than the first one.

A problem is how to create value in digital things. To develop a conceptual model that integrates a value for digital things we made this little diagram. It matches each of our ideasfor the product to a value-creating factor. It might look simple, but genius hands have written it:

We also wrote down a sketch of the concept in the shape of a box-diagram, relating the different part of the product to each other.

What we will do:

Next step is to evaluate the concept against collectors and publishers.

Problems encountered:

We have encountered a problem on whether to choose the collector's point of view or the publisher's. In the end we thought that their interests should converge so essentially we choose both. Another problem is to get the right people to interview. The interviews could be a source of error because the views of the interviewees might not be representative to our whole target group of collectors.

Changes in the project:

The wind of change has had mercy on us so far.

The future of augmented reality and magazines

Group name: We changed our name from Hybrid magazines to The future of augmented reality and magazines, it might change again though! It's Evas, Jens, Joels and Havvas group

What we have done:

• Trying to start to find articles and sources, working on that one right now and next week we hopefully have all background information we need for the project.

• Get in contact with people about augmented reality and hybrid magazines, we have sent out emails and tried to call relevant people and hopefully we have at least two interviews next week.

• Tried to narrow down our subject even more which is really hard and something we need to focus on next week as well so we can start to produce content.

We have come down to 4 questions that we will work with in the future:
- state of the art
- What will be possible?
- What kind of content can be created?
- How to get people to use it?


What to do next:

• Metro interview about their hybrid magazine app, we have called them ,and are waiting for an interview (hopefully)
• The presentation on the 9th of november and the preparation for that
•  Narrow down the team and choose which path we will start to work on

Problems: Still having problems with narrowing down the theme and get in touch with relevant people

Changes: The project is more turning to augmented reality then hybrid magazines but we are currently trying to incorporate magazines into that scenario.

Project Summary: The Future of Interactive Dynamic Advertisement

“Our challenge is to create more dynamics in ads for digital magazines by finding the perfect match between readers, advertisers and magazines” 

The idea is to combine the value properties of advertisers, readers and magazines in order to create ads containing value for all the three parties involved. In order to do that we will match them according to their future attributes, i.e. how magazines will look like in the future, how ads within them will be shown and what kind of personal information readers will allow advertisers and magazines to have access to, enabling them to create personalized relevant ads.

Ads created depending who is reading what, where and at what time

Week 43: The future of journalism

Group name 

The future of journalism

What we have done

After having previously decided amongst a variety of topics, we decided to look closer into the subject of crowd funding.

    This week, as well as the last one, we’ve mainly been discussing how we should approach the subject of crowd funding and what kind of results we would like to present at the final presentations.

We’ve also contacted two possible candidates for an interview who both have experience from crowd funding in different ways. The first candidate, who is an author, has partly made use of crowd funding in order to finance the work and release of his book. The second candidate possesses general knowledge in the area and performs a lot of study on the topic. The interview dates are not yet set but if everything goes according to the plan we should have performed one interview in the beginning of next week.

    In order to get a clear structure of what should be done and when, we’ve created a preliminary project plan and schedule. Potential changes to the project plan might become necessary. In relation to the project plan we’ve also divided the future workload of a pre-study which will be essential in order to get an even clearer view of how the topic should be treated. It will also be important in order for us to have relevant questions at the interviews.

What we will do

Next step in the process will be to undertake a pre-study on the topic at hand. Even though we have a somewhat clear view of how we want to investigate crowd funding, there is still a possibility to change the direction of the approach if new or deviating results would come up. Besides performing an analysis of the current situation of crowd funding, we will investigate the issues of the topic from three different perspectives: practical, economical and ethical.

    We will prepare for the interviews by creating an interview plan, partly created out of the results from the pre-study. As earlier mentioned we also aim to carry out at least one interview by next week.

Problems encountered

We had some minor problems finding relevant candidates for an interview. The phenomenon of crowd funding is not as widespread in Sweden as in e.g. the states. By searching forums and blogs on the internet as well as recalling earlier guest lecturers in previous courses, we although managed to find two very appropriate candidates.

Changes in the project

Regarding changes in the project we never had any. From the first meeting we have all been in the same mind of thought concerning what we should do and how we should approach the topic.

Tag each blog post with your group name (or an abbreviation).

Week 43: A Magazine For Several Senses

October 26 - Week 43

Group name: 
A magazine for several senses.

What we have done:
We decided to work into two directions, namely a cooking magazine and a gardening magazine. We brainstormed ideas about what we can do in the magazine (reuse pages as seasoning, having seed paper, meltable ‘paper’) and did internet research on these ideas trying to answer questions such as: how can you change the aggregate state of materials? What kind of edible paper is already out there? What materials can you use to create edible paper? In connection to this we started looking into molecular gastronomy for example and talked to a chef and a chemistry student.

We also set up a structure for interviews we want to conduct and divided the different fields of interest for further research. These include chemistry, printing technologies, printing industry, future consumers and the seed industry respectively the food industry.

What we will do:
Our next step is to conduct the interviews and also trying to get experimental with making some kind of prototype.

Problems encountered:
Talking to people made us realize that a lot of the people wonder about the hygiene issue with our product, since you can’t really give the product to someone else who might be interested in an article since you want to use/consume this page later on.

Changes in the project:
We still like the idea of the reusable cooking magazine and will continue to do research in this field but we decided to go a second way as well namely the gardening magazine. We will gather information in both fields and later on decide which would be the better option to go with. This is because of the above mentioned critique that we got from several people addressing the hygiene question and other.

Other:
Here are a few examples of what we stumbled upon when searching the internet for inspiration.

Jello Origami - 

http://designtaxi.com/news/351359/Jello-Origami-Lets-You-Eat-Your-Paper-Cranes/

Disappearing Transparent Ravioli -

http://www.molecularrecipes.com/techniques/disappearing-transparent-raviolis/ 

Hello Kitty Seaweed

Week 43: New revenue opportunities for digital magazines

Group name
New revenue opportunities for digital magazines.

What we have done
We spent the last weeks mainly with brainstorming and desk research to develop our scenario and the idea that we want to work on. During these extensive brainstorming sessions we identified several domains where we can discover the future revenue sources. The two principal revenue sources for magazines are: consumer revenue and advertising revenue. To be more detailed, we separated different kinds of revenue sources on the consumer side. As a result, principal domains “Advertising”, “Copy sales” and “Subscription sales” have been identified. Because another group is focusing entirely on the future of advertising, we’ve decided to focus more on upping the revenue through paid content. We tried to develop a concept of how the different revenue sources are connected and which forces drive them (see picture below):



One way of upping that revenue is to increase the price of the magazines, another is to increase the amount of customers using the product. To be able to increase the price without harming the relationship with the customers you really need a product the customer is willing to pay extra for. We assume that a more thorough study of ways to increase readership is a better study topic, as it has more space for creativity rather than standard calculations. Independent price changes are not an effective method of regulating the number of readers without strategy changes.

This far we’ve come up with two solutions about how to increase the volume of readers. Cafés, airports and other public “places” often provide magazines and newspapers to customers to make their time more pleasant and attract more people. Our idea is to translate this into digital magazines with a solution around technologies like “near field communication”. The second idea is about social recommendations and discounts. The readers should want to participate in increasing the volume of each issue, because then they will get it cheaper.

What we will do
Next week we are going to interview a Russian-American expert about magazines. He is a member of global WAN-IFRA board and the head of digital media lab at Russia's largest news agency. We will also work on finding a company who changed their strategy in digital content and who actually succeeded. To understand what has been done in the past can help us understand what is going to happen in the future.

We have a lot of work with our solutions but as soon we have our ideas ready we will send out a survey to the magazine users to check what they are thinking of our solutions and what they really want. Our project will probably lead to more than one solution due to the broad subject. Even though we will focus more on the revenue from paid content we cannot ignore the fact that advertising is a big part of today's magazines. Therefore we will also look into this category and ways to raise the revenue through changes there.

Furthermore, we want to look into other ways to boost readers' spending: mainly by offering supplementary digital services, but also through events and merchandise.

Problems encountered
A big issue for us is to not step on other groups toes when coming up with new ideas. We find it really hard to come up with a totally new revenue source and if we use the existing ones our solution would probably be developments in either the product, the distribution or the business model. Changes in these areas could certainly increase the revenue, our problem is that other groups already are looking at the future in these areas.

Another problem is that we find it difficult to come up with “the radical change” in technology or behavior connected to finding new revenue sources. The revenue model for magazines has always been pretty simple and even though there are new sources of revenue like events, the two main sources have been the consumer through sales and advertising for the last decades. We will have to work a bit more on crystallizing the radical change in our scenario.

Changes in the project
There have not been major changes in the project, but more effort has been put into narrowing down the ideas we’ve had so far.