When Kaushik Krishnan first heard of the Celebrity Cricket League (CCL) concept, which is fielding the country’s top actors, he rushed to get tickets.

The fourth edition of the cricket league is currently under way and it’s got drama and glitz on the ground.

But what the 24-year-old movie enthusiast did not expect was 4D images of his celluloid favourites on his 5-inch smartphone when he trained it on the posters at the stadium. It is an emerging technology called Augmented Reality, which is slowly evolving as a vehicle of brand promotion.

Vijay Karunakaran, who two years ago founded ingage, the Chennai-based company that delivered the tech goods to CCL, says there a clutch of brands riding his technology to get to the customer: “When the CCL people approached us, they had the youth in their minds. They wanted to promote their brands on a platform considered ‘cool’.”

How it works The idea is to fit image-processing technology into the operating system of a smartphone, and build a software (the app) that can throw up images when an pre-identified object is picked by the camera of the phone. “Basically, the image caught on the smartphone’s camera is enhanced to the fourth dimension through software,” says Karunakaran.

He had worked with Intel for 14 years, doing development work on the tech giant’s Atom processor. His company now provides the platform for a clutch of brands including Mitsubishi Pajero, GRT Hotels and Resorts, PayPal, and som big brands are set to get on board. The Rajnikanth-starrer Kochadaiiyaan is being promoted by Karbonn Mobiles on ingage’s platform. His revenue flow is two way: In cases where the platform is licensed to the brand, the company gets an upfront payment and revenue share for every unit sold, and from brands for which campaigns are run for a fixed period, there are content development and promotional charges.

The charge for renting ingage’s platform to advertise a product is at ₹1-3 lakh a month.

The technology itself has its roots in the US, where small-time application developers write such software for a variety of brands, from realty developers wanting to inform buyers of their properties to retailers advertising new merchandise.

In India, its application in real estate has begun. Indiaproperty.com, an online property search portal, took to the technology quite early. Through an in-house developed application about two years ago, the company streams images of prospective buys to anyone with the freely downloadable app and whose location can be picked up through the internet.

“Since we have built reams of property data, it is easy for us to superimpose photos of homes and send it across to the smartphone,” says Ganesh Vasudevan, Chief Executive officer of company.

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