The Topps card company is now adding augmented reality features to baseball cards in order to bring the staid (OK, dying) business into the 21st century.
Combining a camera tracking system, any webcam, and image processing software from Total Immersion, tiny cartoonish 3D versions of players are super-imposed onto the real-world, and seen on your PC. Once they’re ‘alive’ (residing on top of their own card), you can play simple games with them using your keyboard, including one where you can whack at slow-moving baseballs.
The AR technology found in the Topps cards is similar to the one we featured last year from Germany’s Metaio. That one superimposed 3D UFOs onto the real world on top of books, and just like the Topps system, the camera’s frame is used to create a perfectly synchronized image overlay. This allows a kid to move the baseball card around without the virtual player falling off the frame.
As you can see in the video below, the games offer nothing more complex than anything in a basic flash-based web app, but it’s interesting to see little avatars appear on the screen next to people, even if they’re not really there.
To play the games, you have to visit Topps’ ToppsTown website and choose the player in your ‘enhanced card.’
Card companies have been losing buzz for years and it’s not surprising to see them trying something techy and more immersive.
According to the New York Times, the baseball card industry was once a billion dollar business but it’s now shrunk to $200 million a year. And it’s still falling. Part of that probably has to do with the fact that the internet provides an infinite amount of access to stats that couldn’t be squeezed in the back of a card. And the other is that high-end card collecting always depended upon relatively accurate comparisons between players from different eras and that all ended with the Steroid Era, which devalued modern stats.
As a result, card companies have recently resorted to peddling items of historical figures with a longer shelf-life, like Presidents. Pieces of great athletes’ uniforms were inserted into cards, real strands of hair from people like Abraham Lincoln and Marylin Monroe were in ‘special edition’ sets (see right), and one even came with pieces of the Berlin Wall.
I think I’m going to wait to buy a pack until they have the Abe Lincoln 3D avatar that deliberately throws baseballs to Stephen Douglas’ noggin.
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