The birthday card in the video is unremarkable by augmented reality standards. However, I think it does open up an interesting business opportunity for someone who can weasel their way into bed with a big name greeting card producer like Hallmark. I’ll explain more:
The example in this video uses a standard marker for displaying the card. As a business, this would fail for a couple of reasons. The first is no one wants to print out a marker (or at least I don’t.) The second is that if you give the “marker” to someone who doesn’t have a webcam, then your card is useless.
The marker could be integrated into a standard greeting card (or commonly called a markerless) , so it could be freely given without worry of them not being able to recieve it. If the person had a webcam, then they could view the extra content. If not, then they still received a nice greeting card. It might even have the side effect of driving someone to purchase a webcam if they didn’t have one to see the AR content. A smartphone viewer might also make the AR greeting card more accessable (purchasing a card supported by your smartphone, so you could show them the extra content when you gave it.) Either way, its a business oppertunity in the making.
