You may not know because they have not done much, if anything, to promote the app but Starbucks just released a new augmented reality app called Cup Magic. This app brings the characters on its annual red holiday cups to life. When someone points their camera on their unique red cup, the special characters on the cup pop out and come to life. For example, the carolers on the cup may build a snowman or the girl may skate around an ice rink. The app is a great way for Starbucks to test into augmented reality but this app could do so much more.
Changing the Environment
One of the featured characters is a boy with his dog on a sled. When a user scans the picture, the boy and dog appear to be sledding down a hill. What would be great is if you could take the boy and his dog and bring them away from the cup to have them sled down a ramp on a desk. There would be some fun course building for this of course.
Trading Characters
The app encourages users to collect all of the different characters and even specifies where you can find each character (i.e. on a Venti holiday hot cup and a bag of Christmas Blend coffee). It would be great is if you could trade characters with with others who also have the app. Maybe I have scanned two ‘boy & dog’ characters but I need a ‘skater’ to finish out my collection and one of my friends has three skaters and is willing to trade. We could set up the trade in the app and then bump phones so we could each complete our sets.
Rewards
I think that the collecting different characters is a test by Starbucks to see if they can get people to buy different sizes of drinks. It would be really cool to see Starbucks doing some sort of surprise and delight so that when someone scans a character, instead of snowflakes or a character, a gift card appears.
Overall, this was a great first test for Starbucks and I’m very excited to see a mainstream company testing into this but I’m more interested to see how they take this campaign to the next level.