Augmented Reality Birthday Card

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.