Smile for the camera....

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that Augmented Reality is up there with smellovision and holographic television as a gimmick led techonology with no lasting appeal and little useful contribution to the user experience.

I say this because I've been doing some research of late into how to bring a holiday resort experience online and came across the new Nissan "Good Decision" website via The FWA. Great and thoroughly well trodden idea in principle - answer some questions and the site comes back with a recommendation for the perfect Nissan vehicle for you. Then it gets tricky. You print out a sheet of paper, hold it up to your webcam and get a 3D scene rendered onto your screen that you can interact by moving the sheet around. Except it doesnt seem to work. Whenever I held the printout up to the camera, the scene would keep trying to re-render itself, and whenever I turned it to get a different angle it would disappear and then try to re-render itself. A phone call from my nearest dealer would have been more effective, no? ("hello sir, that pink Micra is ready and waiting for your test drive").

I thought that maybe it was something to do with "me" so tried out a similar use of the technology via the funky website for the new Star Trek movie. Again, in principal a nice idea, but i had to print out the screen, then install a plug in, reboot my browser then find the url again, then get the install to initialise and load in more content etc etc.....

By the time I got it working, I couldnt really tell what it was doing other than showing me a 3D model of the Enterprise that I could wiggle around via my webcam. It asked me to press some buttons but when I did that the model disappeared, I'd have to wiggle it in front of the webcam (this all sounds a bit saucy) and the whole process started again.

Has anyone seen this technology used in a good way, with a simple and easy to use interface and user experience?