To start off the Holiday season, everyone will be enjoying a Thanksgiving meal and enjoying a day together with family and friends. For the holiday shopper, Target is integrated augmented reality into their holiday sweepstakes! In the weekly ad circular from Nov 22 – Nov 26, 2009 Target has included a mystery marker that users can use to go to their weekly ad website to enter into a 2 Day Giftacular sweepstakes.

Target Holiday Augmented Reality Sweepstakes

What a novel way to incorporate AR into the holidays using a sweepstakes mechanism. To get started got to: http://weeklyad.target.com

Of course I had to do a video review to demonstrate to everyone who is curious how this works. Well, it clearly disappointed.

I had to edit out a few portions of the application as it failed to recognize the printed marker to allow me to ’spin the wheel’ to select my gifts. Fortunately there was a manual way to spin the gift.

The twin hosts of the experience seemed to want to distract me more than the actual AR experience as they quickly became annoying. If you want to understand what I am talking about go ahead and watch the video demo. Please let me know what your experience was like.

Video Review

Final Thoughts

Once again, a brand trying to utilize augmented reality more as a gimmick and it seems to fall short of useful. I would have liked to see the application actually working consistently when trying to use the QR marker. The rich interactive experience was welcoming but made the AR experience secondary to the video and rich graphics.

What was your experience like? I would love to hear other thoughts.