Telefónica Digital has announced a global partnership with augmented reality platform Aurasma that’ll see AR technology becoming one of the media services offered to Telefonica’s advertising partners.

The agreement will start in the UK with O2 Media helping brands integrate augmented reality with their marketing campaigns alongside other technologies such as location-based marketing and mobile coupons. Telefonica is also expected to add augmented reality to its own marketing activity.

Aurasma’s augmented reality technology is designed to recognise images and objects, allowing interactive digital content to appear when posters, advertisements or even physical locations are ‘scanned’ by a smartphone camera. The software platform was launched last year, attracting over 8,000 commercial partners to its platform and achieving more than four million downloads of its app. It was created by software company Autonomy, now part of HP.

Shaun Gregory, Global Director of Advertising at Telefónica Digital. 'Augmented reality has the potential to fundamentally change advertising, transforming current static formats and introducing new levels of interactivity,' said 'Aurasma is the undoubted leader in this space with a uniquely scalable platform approach and best in class image recognition technology. It has already demonstrated the power of its technology in thousands of innovative campaigns across the world and we look forward to working with them to further drive the use of this technology in advertising and marketing communications.'

A recent forecast from Semico predicted that the total AR market will be worth around $600 billion by 2016.