Aurasma, Taiwanese news giant launch ‘first Augmented Reality’ newspaper

The world’s leading augmented reality platform, Aurasma has teamed up with one of Taiwan’s biggest newspapers, the United Daily News, to create the world’s first augmented reality newspaper. Placing a mobile phone’s camera over images, advertorials and featured editorials makes them fully interactive.

Martina King, Managing Director of Aurasma, explained how readers would be able to identify the ads: “Look at any newspaper today and chances are advertising inside will be carrying the ‘A’ logo – identifying to readers that it is Aurasma enabled.”

“It is an incredible achievement just four months after our launch,” she added.

Launched in June, Aurasma has had more than two-million downloads, making it the world’s leading visual browser platform. Downloads are available on iPhone4 and 4S, iPad2 and high powered Android devices.

United Daily News, meanwhile, has a daily circulation of one-million.

The group hopes the partnership will enable its readers to create multimedia experiences from their newspaper by bringing the physical and virtual worlds together.

The visual browser promises exciting experiences with friends by creating and sharing content in a unique way. By identifying symbols, objects, logos and images the technology recognises them and delivers relevant content in real-time, creating augmented reality actions.

Even though millions of people are already using iPads and other devices to retrieve news from various media applications, Aurasma and United Daily News believe the application holds promise for future uses in education, engineering and medicine.

Duncan Wang, Chairman of the United Daily News group, said: “The application of Aurasma’s visual browsing technology marks an important step in UDN’s drive to pursue innovation and provide the best services for our readers. As well as providing high-quality news, UDN is also committed to providing greater levels of digital convergence through a multichannel approach.”