It’s no secret that, for the best part of a decade now, magazines and newspapers have been suffering severely at the hand of free online news from the likes of Google News, YouTube and sites such as the Huffington Post and co. That’s why it’s perhaps more necessary than ever for larger, more well-known names in the fledgling industry to adopt new technology to stay relevant. In the case of the New Yorker, the hit magazine, the firm has been willing to try out new technology in the past, and they also have an active website as well. In this week’s latest issue of the New Yorker, dubbed the Innovator’s Issue, both the front and back covers feature impressive Augmented Reality tricks for people to explore.
Illustrator Christoph Niemann has lent his art to the cover of the New Yorker, which would otherwise look just like your regular New Yorker cover. However, thanks to some help from Qualcomm as well as Augmented Reality app Uncovr, the front and back covers of the New Yorker come alive with animations and a sense of scale. Niemann says that “between the front and the back cover, and the experience created by the app, I like that we could show essentially two different angles on the same world” and that the AR experiment helped fulfill the question of “What if you could step into that world or if something could come out of it?”
Augmented Reality isn’t something that’s new, smartphone apps that use the feed from your camera and then lay over some 3D graphics or animation have been around for a decade or more now. With the arrival of mainstream Virtual Reality, which is fully immersive as oppose to an addition like AR, the technology is enjoying something of a resurgence. As people start looking for something different, something off the beaten track to go against the grain, it wouldn’t surprise us to see Augmented Reality take off in a whole new way. Not to mention that AR is much more accessible, as every smartphone or tablet can experience it, without the need to use any further hardware or anything like that. AR is also something that publishers, advertizers and so on already know how to use to maximize exposure and such. This latest attempt from the New Yorker might help sell more issues, but even if it doesn’t, it helps to get the New Yorker name back out there, and that can only be a good thing.