Augmented Reality on your business card

Have you heard of Augmented reality (AR)? It is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery. Here’s an educational video that tells you more about AR:

Perhaps this sounds all very high-tech but Augmented Reality is also available for your mobile phone, for example by using the application Layar. Layar works by using a combination of the mobile phone’s camera, compass and GPS data to identify the user’s location and field of view, retrieve data based on those geographical coordinates, and overlay that data over the camera view. Check out how this works:

That’s a long intro to introduce a cool new and easy tool which will add some AR to your business card. It’s called Visualcard.me and it works by adding a marker (see example) on the back of your business card and by creating an account on their server. People will then have access to an augmented reality version (using a Flash applet) of your business card. A short introduction:

And if you take personal branding extremely seriously you can go create business cards with Augmented Reality like this (not via Visualcard.me):

or this