I'd like to conclude this module by talking a bit about technology. And how technology is so exciting because it's changing the ways that we think about perception. Traditionally, we think about perception, as we've seen already in this module, in terms of the physical senses that our bodies are equipped with, but profound changes are on the horizon. And we're seeing that technology is forcing us to rethink this whole relationship between what is going on outside of our heads in the physical world, and what our brains are actually processing. So it's a really, really exciting time to be in marketing, for many reasons, but for one, because these new technologies are just really really mixing up the game. Let's talk a little bit about what I think of as the cutting edge.

In terms of these technologies, and I want to focus on just a couple of examples that you're probably familiar with by now, because they're starting to show up in the news more and more. The first of these is augmented reality, or AR. augmented reality technologies combined physical and digital experiences. So in other words, we start with physical sensations. And then we overlay a pattern of digital data in order to augment or enhance that basic experience. If you've ever held up your phone, took a picture of the physical environment such as a store, and then we're able to overlay other data on top of that, such as the stores opening and closing hours or whether they're offering a sale today.

You certainly experienced augmented reality. I've been promoting the potential advantages of augmented reality for a number of years now. And I really got a kick out of the recent developments where suddenly the Pokemon GO game has really brought augmented reality to the forefront for a lot of people. So many people who had never heard of augmented reality, literally a few months ago, are talking about it today. And and if nothing else, whether or not this particular game continues to be popular, I suspect it will be replaced by others. Suddenly, many, many people are aware of what augmented reality is, and hopefully thinking about other ways they can use it to really change the experience that consumers have with their products and services.

One of the best examples of augmented reality that we're Just starting to see is the HoloLens that Microsoft has recently unveiled. And if you're not familiar with this, I strongly urge you just to Google, Microsoft HoloLens. And you should be able to find some really cool videos that illustrate how this technology works. So essentially, it's marrying these two layers of perception, digital perception, and physical perception and integrating them in one place. So the marketer is literally able to superimpose a lot of additional information on to a physical environment. And I just can't begin to tell you how many ways I see that this is going to really change the landscape of advertising and product usage.

For example, augmented reality can extend the customer experience, either in store or outside so a lot of people today are worried about the decline of bricks and mortar retailing. And they're saying that people no longer have a reason to come to stores. I think this is an important exception. So if retailers are clever about it, they can turn ordinary store displays, or even product packages into living breathing advertisements, or educational platforms that tell consumers so much more about the products that they're looking at. I'd like to share with you a brief video that I think really powerfully illustrates the potential of augmented reality for marketers. And this video was made by an agency in Canada that I've worked with for the last several years that develops augmented reality applications and you're going to see a demonstration of the power of this technology, where they're going to take literally a product off of storage shelf and a magazine and turn these everyday items into living breathing extensions of the product.

So think about augmented reality now as a platform that will enable your customers to explore your product in much greater detail and to understand what it's like to experience that product. Let me show you that right now. To atras foundation to help you The product disappears by the time you get there, don't worry. Virtual Reality is actually a technology you've probably heard more about. augmented reality, it's certainly gotten a lot of press coverage within the last year or two. VR, as opposed to AR is a totally immersive digital experience.

So keep in mind that both of these technologies alter the perceptual process. But augmented reality involves a marriage between the physical world and the digital world. Whereas a virtual reality technology is a totally digital experience. Virtual Reality really got a kickstart into the mainstream when Facebook a couple of years ago, bought the Oculus Rift technology. And so this was a signal when Facebook paid several billion dollars for this company. This to me was a signal that virtual reality was ready to enter the main Extreme market.

And indeed, we're now seeing a kind of an avalanche of new virtual reality products, different headsets from different companies that are starting to make it possible for everyday consumers to experience a virtual environment. So we're going to be seeing more and more applications like this one coming at us from Volvo, where they are creating a Volvo experience that is entirely situated in virtual reality. To illustrate to you how important these technologies are going to become in the future, I wanted to share with you one final slide that is a patent application. And this is an application for a pay per gaze system, a gaze tracking technique, and what you'll see here is that it's described as an image recognition algorithm. executed on the scene images to identify items within the external scenes viewed by the user. That's a long winded sentence.

So what it means is that this is a technology that allows the company to track where exactly on an image, the user's eyeballs are falling. And, and the eventual goal here is to charge advertisers based not on whether the consumer just opens up a magazine or clicks on a website, but rather to charge them based specifically on the images that they view within that broader picture. It's worth noting just who applied for this patent, and you'll see them down below. Yes, it's our friends, Google. So when a major company like Google starts to pay serious attention to this kind of pay per gaze model, you know that things are about to fundamentally change in the Marketing landscape