Posted on November 20, 2009 - by Jennifer

Well played, Esquire!

How do you get people to fall in love with magazines again?  Esquire thinks they have the answer in the form of “augmented reality” http://www.esquire.com/video/#v49407280001.  A chip embedded in the latest issue of Esquire allows you to hold it up to your computer screen and then interact with the magazine’s content.  For example, you can change the clothes and even the weather in one of their fashion spreads (like a high-tech paper doll!)  My first reaction was “Wow…that’s cool” (something I rarely think when looking at an issue of Esquire).  And then I started to wonder, “Is this kind of like CNN’s surreal election coverage when Wolf Blitzer interviewed a holographic version of  will.i.am?”  Point being, while seeing will.i.am appear in CNN’s studios like some kind of jedi knight was first weird, and then kind of astonishing, it didn’t make Wolf Blitzer ask better questions.  It  didn’t make the election coverage more informative or more nuanced (although it did make it more humorous).  And it certainly didn’t make me want to tune into CNN more often.  But, like most technology, this “super chip” that Esquire has up their sleeve is agnostic.  So, in the hands of Esquire, I’m not sure what it will offer, although I can speculate that it will involve cigars and scantily clad women.  But, in more creative  hands, it could probably offer a really cool fusion of the printed word and the glowing screen and that’s got some potential.