‘Old City Gate’AR Debuts in Beijing to Muted Audience

(Beijing) — History buffs may be disappointed, but geeks and bored tourists might find some fun in an attempt to relive Beijing history through a promotion for an augmented reality (AR) lab launched by China's search leader, Baidu Inc.

The gimmick visually re-creates for AR users each of the nine gates that once stood along Beijing’s old city wall.

The Beijing wall, like others in ancient Chinese cities, protected the urban core and used gates to control the flow of people and goods before motor vehicles became commonplace.

Most of Beijing’s wall and gates were destroyed in the 1960s to improve traffic flow and, most importantly, make way for the subway line that now traces the inner boundaries of the old city. The demolition proceeded despite protests by notable preservationists who sought to save one of the city’s most distinguishing landmarks, which had a circumference of 24 km.

Fast-forward to the present, where the former ornate gates set into the disappeared wall have become unlikely beneficiaries of the craze for anything involving AR and its big sister, virtual reality — technologies that are now flavors of the day in China’s high-tech realm.

Baidu announced the formation of an AR lab earlier this week. The new service is a bid to wring more money from Baidu’s core advertisers by letting them add AR elements to outdoor ad campaigns.

The technology lets customers scan images with their smartphones and get treated to product and promotional information that's animated in 3-D.

“Our cellphone-based approach has enabled us to ship augmented reality experiences to a significant number of users in a very short amount of time,” said Andrew Ng, head of Baidu Research, which includes the AR lab. “There is an appetite for this technology. We are seeing rapid adoption by our partners in a range of industries.”

Back in the real world, Baidu unveiled the ancient-city-gate promotion this week but limited it to a display at the Xizhimen station on Beijing’s subway Line 2, which follows the old wall’s path. The original Xizhimen was one of the gates that have long disappeared.

AR users with smartphones can snap photos of the display’s black-and-white pictures of each of the nine original gates, and then get treated to an animated 3-D look at what those gates might have looked like in earlier times.

Not surprisingly, the results look more like children’s cartoons than anything from the real world, featuring animated scenes of swordsmen, horse-drawn carts and peddlers milling around the various city gates.

But because getting to those imaginative scenes is a relatively complex process, and subway commuters largely seemed uninterested in the promotion, virtually no one passing through Xizhimen stopped to check out the promotion during a Caixin visit on an afternoon a few days after the launch.

Baidu plans to extend the promotion to the only old gate that still exists in Beijing — Zhengyangmen, near the Qianmen subway station — later this year, a company spokeswoman said.

Baidu’s effort comes amid signs that a flood of investment into AR and VR companies appears to have passed its peak in China, where such high-tech trends often take on brief but animated lives of their own.

VR investment in China skyrocketed over the past two years, cresting at 761 million yuan ($111 million) in the last quarter 2015 as big Chinese tech names such as Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., LeEco and Xiaomi Inc. piled into the area. But funding slowed as the buzz tailed off rapidly at the end of last year, partly due to lack of quality content to keep customers entertained.

Contact reporter Yang Ge (geyang@caixin.com)