HEY! magazine has been revamped into an augmented reality (AR) title that’s got the nod from new and old readers alike
It’s got tech, it’s got style, it’s the new HEY! magazine, revamped for the smartphone age.
NTU President Prof Subra Suresh launched HEY! at the Freshmen Welcome Ceremony with the help of a Tyrannosaurus rex that popped out of a page in HEY! into the auditorium.
“It was super cool to see the dinosaur look as if it was right beside us. I had fun playing with it on my phone too,” says Samantha Lee from the Nanyang Business School.
Final-year engineering student Kelvin Kaung was surprised at how much he enjoyed playing with the AR features: “Seeing the first AR-enabled magazine in a university definitely reinforces how technologically advanced NTU is. Having seen the magazine come to life, I don’t ever want to read normal magazines again.”
Students who downloaded the NTU HEY! AR app had a good time posing with the dinosaur and interacting with the pages that came to life before their eyes. With AR comes a whole new way of taking part in contests and giveaways. For example, students got to win home décor items featured in a HEY! story on upcycling by submitting photos of 3D models of the objects creatively placed in their own rooms.
The NTU HEY! AR app, available on the App Store and Google Play, trended number one on both platforms under the education category in Singapore at its launch.
The fun did not end there. Three weeks of outreach events brought the excitement of discovering a whole new way of reading a magazine to even more students on the NTU campus and also at junior colleges and polytechnics.
It’s cool that you can see photos ‘jump out’ of the pages as 3D animation and watch videos seamlessly as you’re flipping through the magazine. It is important in this digital age for content to go beyond just print, which is why the 3D pop-ups and videos will definitely engage us more,” says Marcus Tan from the School of Computer Science & Engineering.
And if you find this too long a read, take a cue from second-year student Zheng Zhenkai, who says: “Now you can listen to the magazine instead of reading it.”
Go on, whip out your phone and scan this page with the app now.
Download the NTU HEY! AR app on your smartphone or tablet and scan the images indicated as AR elements with your device to see the pages come to life. For a step-by-step guide, click here.
This story was published in the Oct-Dec 2019 issue of HEY!. To read it and other stories from this issue in print, click here.
