Hallmark Augmented Reality Greeting Cards

Augmented reality became quite the buzz this past year, but then again, many years ago, "virtual reality" had its largely uneventful day in the sun. If you're an iPhone user, you may have played with apps providing augmented reality, usually in the form of overlaying information onto an image from your iPhone camera.

Well Hallmark is trying to take augmented reality mainstream with a new line of greeting cards that have what they call "an online surprise." As you'll see in the video, it is pretty cool, but this might not be the best use of the technology. Plus, I'm not sure that the greeting card buying and receiving audiences are necessarily the most likely to even grasp that their card can do this. Here's a look: