Augmented reality (AR) may sound like something that you get to do in a dark basement with a William Gibson novel and a pair of virtual reality goggles. But the true promise of augmented reality will integrate the digital world into our offline world, and ultimately transform mundane experiences into meaningful, holistic ones. Imagine walking into a supermarket and seeing all of the nutritional and pricing information projected into thin air, or overlaid onto products; touching a logo on a box of cereal would trigger a digital reaction and enable you to use your fingers to scroll through information or content right on the cereal box.

We're not there yet, but we're closer than you think.

In the next nine months, mobile applications will make tremendous leaps toward integrating augmented reality into our lives. Today, there are multiple image recognition applications like SnapTell or Barnes & Noble's Bookstore app that trigger a reaction when you take a picture of an object, logo, or barcode. Instead of pushing you to content on a website, these apps will increasingly pull in information that will be overlaid onto products via the screen's camera function. Wikitude is an example of an application already doing this -- simply hold up your phone and it will tell you what places of interest, restaurants, and shops are in your vicinity, based on the direction you are facing. Overlaying the data onto products (and people!) will be a natural evolution. Pattie Maes of MIT's Sixth Sense Project describes it as "seamless, easy access to information" using our bodies to navigate the content in intuitive, natural ways.

In the meantime, before things get really interesting, we encourage brands to use current incarnations of augmented reality to enhance print campaigns, as a part of UGC campaigns, via Facebook applications, to enable customers to try before they buy, or as a content-experience reward for purchasing a product.

This article highlights some of the best recent brand executions we've come across at the IPG Emerging Media Lab.