Posted by Sarah Dunleavy, Head of Design
This week, Grazia magazine jumped on the 3D bandwagon and published an augmented reality issue they described as having Florence And The Machine singing and dancing on the cover. When I held the cover up to my webcam I was expecting my actions to control Florence singing and moving away from the cover to unlock more content. A good example of this is Esquire's December mag where Robert Downey Jr introduces the issue. They took it further in one of the magazine’s fashion features, where tilting your magazine in different directions controls the weather and the model adjusts their clothing appropriately.
However, in the case of Grazia’s cover, holding the cover up to the webcam just loads a video, which then plays at you. It’s not really an augmented reality application at all, it's just a standard app with videos of Florence spinning round, singing, while the user scratches their head, wondering why they needed to buy the magazine to see that.
Using augmented reality as a gimmick to increase mag sales may work as a one-off, but in terms of using it to get people to really engage with brands it needs to give the user more control and have a useful outcome. A good example of this would be the Ikea mobile application that is a portable interior planning tool.
The customer aims the phone's camera at the area of the room where the furniture might be placed. The image of the room appears on the phone screen, along with the IKEA furniture. The furniture can be scaled larger or smaller to make it fit better in the scene.
Augmented reality should mean the real world becomes interactive and digitally usable. However, in Grazia’s case it just seems like a long-winded way of watching a video, as opposed to simply using a mouse to click play.