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Marketers love putting celebrities in their ads. Scarlett Johansson flogs Louis Vuitton bags. Sidney Crosby drinks Gatorade. Beyoncé helps make L'Oréal bootylicious. But companies may soon turn to people far less famous to star in their brand pitches: regular folks like you and me.
A technology called ScreenXtreme, developed by Sunnyvale, Calif.-based GestureTek, which houses its R&D operations in Ottawa, can capture the image of a person walking by and insert it into a computer-generated scene. By moving their bodies, people cause their virtual doubles to manipulate on-screen objects in real time—much like playing Nintendo's Wii gaming console. For example, you could kick a soccer ball or bang on some drums. These interactive ads can be easily branded. “The nice thing about ScreenXtreme is it takes advertising from being a pure sell on a product to an entertaining and enjoyable experience,” says Vincent John Vincent, the president and co-founder of GestureTek.
ScreenXtreme uses a standard digital camera, a high-end PC and a large LCD or plasma TV, but its software interprets a person's movements based on gesture-analysis data developed during the company's 20-year history. That data can tell a computer where a hand is in relation to the elbow, for example, or the angles of motion for different body parts.
ScreenXtreme ads will begin appearing in cities including Toronto, Hong Kong and Las Vegas over the next few months. They will feature one or more of GestureTek's roughly 20 animated effects, and be fairly simple. But Vincent believes the ads will get much more complex, even giving participants control over the ending of a commercial. “If you do something wrong, maybe you get flushed down the toilet,” says Vincent. “If you do something right, you come out a hero.”
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