Start-up invents ground-breaking Augmented Reality tech to create adverts the size of sky scrapers.

Start-up invents ground-breaking Augmented Reality tech to create adverts the size of sky scrapers.

New
start-up, Lightvert Ltd., is set to disrupt the Digital Out-of-Home
(DOOH) market with a ground-breaking new augmented reality solution
called ECHO. ECHO is a patented technology that will
take advertising to new dimensions of both height and engagement,
producing huge digital images that appear as if by magic to the viewer.

Imagine
a cityscape where giant adverts up to 200m high appear – only in the
viewer’s eye. It sounds like science-fiction, but the reality is much
closer to home.

The
DOOH advertising market has not been significantly disrupted since the
introduction of the LED in 2005.  Although the market is growing, it is
limited by the amount of available advertising
real estate in premium urban locations.

ECHO
solves this problem using augmented reality to unlock vast amounts of
lucrative advertising real estate on high-rise buildings and other tall
structures.  A narrow strip of reflective
material is fixed to the side of the building and a high-speed light
scanner projects light off a reflector and towards the viewer. This
creates large-scale images that are ‘captured’ for a brief moment in the
viewer’s eye through a ‘persistence of vision’
effect.  The images are fleeting, but striking, prompting viewers to
stop, engage with the image and share the experience.  As seen in this
video
http://www.lightvert.co.uk/home, images can be captured using a mobile phone and shared on social
media. 

ECHO
has a global patent pending, and Lightvert believes it will open up
exciting new advertising opportunities in outdoor spaces that are
currently inaccessible to traditional billboards and
LED screens.

Funded
to date by Innovate UK and a small cohort of seed funders, ECHO has
completed the proof of concept and is now ready to develop a commercial
solution.  Lightvert is completing a crowdfunding
campaign on Crowdcube www.crowdcube.com/lightvert in order to finalise the development
of the technology and bring ECHO to market.

Daniel Siden, CEO of Lightvert Ltd explains:

“Traditional
billboards and large scale LED screens in built-up environments are
expensive and it is increasingly challenging to leverage new real estate
in crowded urban spaces such as New
York’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus. ECHO provides a new
way for brands to rise above the noise of street level advertising and
engage with audiences on an unprecedented scale”. 

“Using
the persistence of vision effect, ECHO hardware has virtually no
physical footprint. It introduces new audience behaviour and is a
powerful opportunity for advertisers and property owners,
which could dramatically change the game in terms of capital costs and
planning permissions for premium outdoor media.”

Simon Dicketts, Executive Creative Director of M&C Saatchi comments:

“This is exciting; technology that frees up the mind to new creative possibilities has to be a good thing.”

To view the ECHO video please go to
http://www.lightvert.co.uk/home