InStyle December 2009

InStyle magazine has followed in the footsteps of Esquire magazine and launched their own augmented reality experience with the December 2009 magazine with Taylor Swift on the cover.

As you will see in the demo video below, unlike the Esquire magazine where the QR marker was placed prominently on the cover, the InStyle magazine doesn’t have a marker at all. All you need to do is to hold up the magazine cover to the web cam after a strenuous procedure to set everything up to function properly.

The fact that the AR experience does not have a prominent placement in the issue, makes the AR experience to really gets lost in my opinion. It is actually placed on page 44 of the issue (flipping through countless ads with no page number sure didn’t help the cause). Once you get there to the AR page, it is step-by-step guide on how to activate the 3D experience.

First thing that needs to be done is go to: http://taylor.instyle.com

To my disappointment, it didn’t automatically recognize my webcam. I had to manually install (on my Mac OS) the Total Immersion D’Fusion Web Plug-in which is required. After this was installed I felt like I was on a 56K modem to get the application to load in my browser.

InStyle December 2009 - Augmented Reality How To

Once I got past these steps I held up the cover and experienced the below video review.

Video Review

Final Thoughts

This is another good example of how magazines can use augmented reality to (hopefully) increase sales. However, if the AR experience does not have proper usability many people will get frustrated and it will do a discredit to the possibility of including AR in more magazine experiences. Let’s hope this improves for the next issue use case.