When I was a kid, Topps baseball cards were it. There were really no other trading cards out there. And I collected them with a passion. Course, had I known what I do know about those cards, I probably wouldn’t have fixed them to the spokes of my bike with a clothes pin to get that cool “clacking” sound. How many thousands of dollars did I waste out of ignorance in just one summer? Alas, back then, you collected cards because you loved the sport, not because of their market value (oh, and the gum, of course). Well, baseball card seems to have hit a plateau thanks to competition from other collections including YuGiOh and Pokemon games, etc. Former Disney chief Michael Eisner has bought Topps baseball cards in hopes to bring a little Disney-eque magic to the flagging card collecting industry. And he wants to do it by turning them into 3D holographic cards … sort of. Enter “Augmented reality.” Can it hit the ball out of the park?
The idea is that the cards have special codes on them and when you place them in front of a webcam and go to the Topps’ special website, you’ll see custom 3D models magically appear on the video image. Some, will even have animation from pitching and catching to batting. Kinda cool. But unless they do it Harry Potter style where you just see it and don’t need your webcam to make it happen in Virtuality, it seems more marketing that any serious innovation for the industry.
Then again, it could be a step closer for the YuGiOh crowd who love to duel and see it happen virtually. And movie clips. There’s vast un-mined potential here.
The cards well be in packs of five or ten and cost between $1.00 to $2.00 a piece (webcam not included). That’s not bad for cards, even though I spent a quarter on mine and got a piece of gum!
Hat Tip – The Giz