No, you haven’t had too much to drink — that beer label is moving, thanks to augmented reality. You don’t need to visit a high-end market or tavern to see that craft beer is on the rise. Suds of all types from every corner of the country can be found at the corner deli or your favorite dive. Microbreweries peddling their wares in cities like Seattle, a city whose love of craft beer is on the rise, can get lost in a sea of delicious foam. That’s why one brewer turned to tech to augmented reality bottle labels to increase its visibility.
As reported by GeekWire, Snoqualmie Brewery and Taproom of Snoqualmie, Washington, has implemented augmented reality bottle labels for one of its products. A nearby art studio called The Medium was brought on to help.
“When you’re staring at crowded shelves full of great offerings, you can’t taste the beer like you can in a pub, so the design is really all you have to attract that hand toward the bottle neck,” brewery manager Dave Eiffert told GeekWire.
When seen with the naked eye, the Sno Falls American Pale Ale artwork could be compared to that on any other colorful label. But if you download the free mobile app Layar, you can scan the label and watch it come to life.
A YouTube video shows the waterfall come to life; fish swim upstream against its current; a flock of birds flies by; and the brewmaster rides a barrel over the falls.
“The Medium has worked with the brewery for years creating new fun label design ideas and we had the idea to do an augmented reality label,” Josh Tuininga, creative director at The Medium, said. “After presenting the concept to the brewery we began design with Snoqualmie Falls as the theme. For the AR, we did some testing to make sure the technology would work on a bottle surface. After testing and design approvals, we started the fun part — animation.”
Unless you live in the area, you’re out of luck if you’d like to view these bottles firsthand. The beer can currently be found at Snoqualmie Safeway, Crescent Market at Snoqualmie Casino, Pourhouse in North Bend, IGA in Snoqualmie, the North Bend and Snoqualmie 76s, Family Grocer in Fall City, and the Snoqualmie Market.
You can also try your hand at brewing your own beer at home and find someone to help you make your own cool labels. Once this is done, try one these augmented reality apps to change how you view the world!
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.