Gimmick of the month is clearly ‘augmented reality’, aka ‘hold up your magazine to a webcam and watch something appear on the screen’. The tech isn’t new at all – the first conference on augmented reality was in 1999, while AR applications were available on PDAs in 2004, and on webcams at least since 2005. Over the past year, it’s been used in Doritos bags, on business cards and on simple printouts. Now that webcams are all but ubiquitous in new PCs and laptops, they’re finally reaching the newsstand.
Though it’s only recently hit the headlines, AR has already been featured in magazines before. Mini did it in a German magazine ad back in December, while Popular Science did it for their July cover and Kmzero’s presentation at Colophon talked about using it in the next edition of their publication ego[n].
The last few weeks, however, have seen some bigger names stride forward. Red Bull’s Red Bulletin uses it to display a video trailer of what’s inside the mag, Colors features on-page video interviews, and the Clown Prince of all things gimmicky, American Esquire has produced some interesting-sounding movement-sensitive content for its next issue.
Magazines love it because it forces you to buy the physical object in order to see the content. Advertisers love it because you get to interact with their brand by moving a piece of paper, in a way that feels like magic. Readers, however, may find their arms tiring almost as quickly as their excitement.
Of course, I’ll have a play with it, and let you know what it’s like, but the inconvenience factor suggests that it isn’t designed to integrate print and digital as effectively as the Amusement RFID issue (which unfortunately loses points for needing a specialised RFID reader, but you can’t have everything. Yet.)
One question about augmented reality in print still bothers me, though – for those of us with laptops, how do we hold it close to the webcam and yet not mask the screen?
