Recently, Doritos began an innovative campaign, Doritos Late Night, in which you can use a webcam and a bag of chips to see a concert appear in your hands. Bags of Doritos have been printed with a computer vision tracking marker which the webcam detects and uses to render a pre-recorded 3D concert. To see the 3D concert, you must first purchase a bag of Doritos printed with the marker. Next, you plug in your webcam, visit doritoslatenight.com and hold the bag in front of the camera. You can choose to see concerts from either Big Boi or Blink-182. The site was developed using the Flash AR Toolkit (FLARToolkit).

Here are video captures of the performances.

This promotion is an excellent example of using innovative technology and engaging content to capture audience attention. Simultaneously, it provides a unique avenue for artists to promote their music and live shows.

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that has been around for quite a while, primarily in the academic and research domains. Recently, its mainstream presence has increased due to the development of the Flash version of the Augmented Reality Toolkit (FLARToolkit). The ARToolkit was developed by Dr. Hirokazu Kato with Dr. Mark Billinghurst at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Lab (HITLAB) over ten years ago.

In 2000-2001, I led a team which modified the original C based ARToolkit to work on 3D accelerated desktop Windows PC’s. We used the toolkit to develop interactive augmented reality projections for the band Duran Duran’s live concert tour. Here’s a video of ARToolkit effects that we used in the live shows.

The project was documented in this presentation at the 2002 Augmented Reality Toolkit Workshop:

Jarrell Pair, Jeff Wilson, Jeff Chastine, Maribeth Gandy. “The Duran Duran Project: The Augmented Reality Toolkit in Live Performance”. The First IEEE International Augmented Reality Toolkit Workshop, 2002. Download PDF