Esquire is getting some good press for their augmented reality issue. Personally, “augmented reality” to me means something William Gibson’s Virtual Light or Ghost in the Shell, where a constant stream of data is overlaid on top of your vision. While a neat effect, I’m not sure how showing a specialized image to a webcam to play a movie really counts as the same thing. We’ve had multimedia embedded into digital editions for years now – it was what I was hired to do 4 years ago, from extra online-only content to full ad replacements. This augmented reality stuff seems more like a gimmick, like the CueCat and other mobile tagging schemes.

Gimmicks are what the print world is about this month – just look at the Marge Simpson Playboy cover. For some bizarre reason the big media players are desperate to sell print copies even at the cost of the digital initiatives. I know of several magazine publishers, both large and small, who have cancelled their digital projects because “they just can’t deal with it right now.” Can’t deal with the very thing that could save their business, based on how it saved some of their early adopting competitors.