Puteko colours in award

University of Canterbury Christ Church spin-out Puteko has won an Auggie, awarded for Best App and one of ten awards given out during this year’s Augmented World Expo in California.

Auggie awards celebrate augmented reality and wearable technologies, films, tools and hardware. They were launched in 2010. As part of the award, Puteko won a one-year licence for Daqri 4D Studio, an augmented reality content creation tool.

The app brings children’s colouring to life using augmented reality: users print out the specially designed pages on their printer and colour them in. They then run the app on their smartphone or tablet and point it at the page, making the pictures pop out of the page in animated 3D on the screen, using the user’s own colours and textures.

The company only recently celebrated another success, when its app colAR Mix reached 450,000 downloads in May 2014 – which has since increased to 540,000. The company’s long-term plan is to produce educational materials for schools in New Zealand and globally. Puteko is based Japan, where it has found its largest customer base. The research and development arm however is still in Christchurch, and maintains a strong connection to the Human Interface Technology Lab at Canterbury.

Adrian Clark, one of the app’s designers, said: “We really wanted to enhance the creative experience of colouring, rather than just replace it with technology. We are constantly working to bring out more content in the form of pages and interactivity.”