Are business cards dead?

When was the last time you’ve exchanged business cards with someone?

And how long did you keep the other person’s card for? Did you take a snapshot of it with your camera phone and tossed it away?

What if you can create a business card that people would keep and remember for a long time? What if your business card is something they show off to their friends and coworkers because of how cool it is?

How would that impact your ability to network with others, create a memorable brand, and leave a great first impression?

At Augmentop, we are breathing life back into the dying business of business cards, brochures, mailers, and magazine ads by turning them into interactive augmented reality experiences that showcase your work and brand in an engaging and memorable way.

Over the past couple of months, we’ve experimented with various ways of augmenting print marketing material with interactive animated experiences that run natively in the browser, and we created several prototypes to validate our vision for the future of print marketing.

We were mostly blown away by the response we got when we shared a video of our interactive AR business card on social media, and the dozens of emails we have received from people asking us to mail them our card so that they can “play with it”. (When was the last time someone emailed you asking for a copy of your business card?)

Here is what the back of our business card looks like when its QR code is scanned by an iPhone camera:

The AR experience above runs fully in Safari on iOS, and requires no additional apps to be installed. And it was created using Sketch and Reality Composer in five days.

In this article, we will share our step-by-step process for how to make an AR business card, as well as the assets and templates we’ve designed, so that other AR designers and developers can create similar experiences for their business cards.

If you’re not an AR designer or developer, and you would still like to create an interactive AR experience for your business card or print marketing, drop us a line.