A little snippet from the IAB’s “Mobile marketing without the hype” event yesterday saw Steve Ricketts, Head of Mobile Commerce and Marketing Services at Orange, trumpet the fact that 20% of all attendees downloaded its Glastonbury application last year.
This year, Rickets said, Orange would be adding an Augmented Reality navigation feature to the application. People will even be able to load the location of their tent, in the app, and be guided home to their sleeping bag at the end of a hard day on the sauce, or whatever.
The audience of fashionably-shirted, 28 year old mobile brand managers nodded along.
IBM is also pushing its Seer AR app for Wimbledon, which it has developed upon a trial launch last year.
Yet, what is this? Here comes this year’s pessimists ADC, to pour a glass of cold water on such fripperies. It says that when mobile networks can barely support voice and text at such big events, it’s a little much to expect a decent customer experience for things such as AR.
ADC man John Spindler, who sounds like a man who’s spent too long in a queue himself, said “AR continues to create a significant buzz, but the technology’s potential can’t be fulfilled yet, and unfortunately many tennis fans are likely to be disappointed when they try and use this Wimbledon app,”
Naturally, ADC’s beef is that events need more dedicated support to increase coverage and capacity.
Spindler continued, “Anyone who has been to a major sporting event will be familiar with the frustration that accompanies dropped calls and text messages that fail to reach friends until long after the match is finished. With AR and the increasing popularity of smartphones, this is becoming even more of a concern. At present, fans simply aren’t getting the service they want, and venue operators are struggling to make the most out of apps that supply information such as the length of the queue for strawberries and cream.”
One Glastonbury regular who downloaded the Orange app last year had this to say. “I downloaded it last year. Worked ok sometimes but was pretty slow, would occasionally freeze and on a couple of occasions wouldn’t launch at all. In the end it probably wasn’t worth using as it seemed to drain my
battery really quickly. As a Glastonbury veteran I would be very surprised if the AR app works properly. Last year I received a text while leaving on Monday morning that had been sent on the previous Saturday. If the network can’t support basic functions like text I think AR might be a bit of a stretch.“