For example, overlaying information directly on the screen and refreshing it depending on the object you’re pointing to. That’s what we did to “augment” the Citroën Creative Tour, celebrating the 80th birthday of the Yellow Cruise.

And thousands of people loved the experience be it in Paris or Berlin (soon in Moscow and Beijing). For the record, it’s been developed within a couple of days leveraging our image recognition API. Can you believe it?

What happens when you take on one side an augmented reality app, on the other an image recognition algorithm and mix them together?

It was the subject of the hack I did at Hack le Camping in Paris. I’m the developer of Augment, an Android application that lets you create, share and visualize 3d models in an augmented reality fashion. If you want to test a famous painting in your living room, print the marker, put it on your wall and look at La Joconde or Guernica. It works also with any object like a television, a smartphone, a tablet or a fridge.

We have an app that displays objects. How do you decide which one to show? It’s where Moodstocks enters the play. By using image recognition I simplified the process of getting the right model. When you browse Wikipedia or if you receive a catalog of products, you want to be able to visualize an object in the minimum number of steps. The workflow is simple, get your phone, launch the application and snap a picture of the product. You’re done. In a second the 3d model will be on your desk or on your wall.

The integration was a piece of cake thanks to Moodstocks’ SDK. Under the hood, when you photography the page, the image is sent to Moodstocks’ servers where it’s compared to the previously registered pictures. When it’s recognized, the server send back an id to Augment. I use this id to load the associated 3d model in augmented reality. That’s all.

At the end, getting Moodstocks to work in synergy with Augment was a matter of two lines of code to start the scanning and five lines to process the result. 3 hours of Hackaton were enough to create a compelling and impressive experience that was rewarded by the second place of the contest. Thanks Moodstock !

You can even test it, install Augment on your Android device and print the marker. Then launch the application, do a long press on the Qr Code button and there you are, in the secret Moodstocks scanner. Scan La Joconde, the Rubik’s Cube, the cover of this book, the picture of this Nas, this phone or one of the two tablets at the top of this page.

Isn’t it cool?