Augmented Reality (where real world and computer-generated data are blended in real time) has been around for a while now - think of the Hawkeye replay clips you see in cricket and tennis coverage - but up to now it has not really been used to any great effect within the marketing space.

The Wall Street Journal (you need a subscription to read the full article) has a piece about how some brands are starting to experiment with it. Papa John's have launched a campaign based around a road trip in a 1972 Camaro (the car that the founder sold in order to fund the business). The road trip is happening for real but consumers will be given the opportunity to take part in a "virtual" trip by pointing the icon on the bottom of their pizza delivery box at their webcam. Once on the virtual trip they will be offered exclusive discounts on future purchases displayed on virtual billboards along the virtual road.

This all sounds a little bit gimmicky to me and I'm not sure how many times you are likely to go back to this site once you have played with it once. The United States Postal Service, however have come up with a genuinely innovative and useful implementation of the technology. Their Virtual Box Simulator allows you to hold an object that you want to send by post in front of a webcam and use the resulting 3-D image to determine the right size box for shipping the object.

Another area of AR that has been receiving a lot of attention recently is that of Building Recognition. There are a number of mobile applications being developed that allow you to take a picture of a building using your camera phone, upload it and then get information back about that building in real time. The technology uses GPS to narrow down the field of possible buildings that you could be looking at, and once it has identified the exact building from the database, returns you data about it. You can easily imagine a world of possibilities that this opens. For example, you are stood in front of a restaurant, you point your camera phone at it and immediately receive the menu with prices, opening hours, a list of customer reviews and a link to make a reservation. You can read a bit more about this here or watch an episode of BBC Click that features it here.