The Haagen-Dazs Debacle
I like to be
supportive of almost any implementations of new, exciting technologies – even
when I think that some are definitely “solutions in search of a problem” or the
latest and greatest examples of “software that only the designer’s mother could
love”, but there are limits and sometimes you see something so sad; so
ill-conceived; and so poorly executed that you have to speak out just to avoid
all of us toiling in these fields from being tarred and feathered with the same
brush or beaten over the head with the stupid stick.
I’m very excited
about the prospects of augmented reality across many different fields including
education, entertainment, marketing, etc., but the recent Haagen-Dazs lid top “Concerto Timer” AR demo – available free in
the Apple iTunes store
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/haagen-dazs-concerto-timer/id670015815?mt=8]
is so awful that it’s likely to set the entire AR field back a century or two.
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The premise is
that you take the ice cream container out of the freezer and then you use your
phone to download an app and then stand somewhere nearby and watch an
AR-generated music video that appears on top of the ice cream container lid for
the two minutes that Haagen-Dazs
thinks you should wait for the ice cream to reach the ideal temperature for
consumption.
The only thing
that’s remotely smart about the whole thing is the hook to a charitable
donation for honey bee research and preservation for each of the first 15,000
downloads, but frankly, I’d pay the 5 bucks directly to the charity myself just
to have the time back that I wasted on the demo and a promise that I’d never
have to try to watch the thing again.
Where should I
start?
(1)
Who
exactly is the audience and how old are they likely to be?
If anyone is
experimenting with new, cool AR apps, it’s tech-savvy kids and young adults –
not grown-ups.
(2)
Who
thinks that kids today are listening to classical Bach violin pieces?
Bach Inventions
No. 14 for violin and cello? Really? Have these guys spent too much time in the
freezer?
(3)
Who
waits 2 minutes for anything today – especially ice cream?
We live in an IG world – Instant
Gratification. Waiting for your wine to breath might make sense after you
unscrew the lid. My ice cream melts in
my mouth.
(4)
Who
is going to stand anywhere for 2 minutes (like an idiot) holding your phone
precisely focused on a pint of ice cream while it “tempers”?
I thought it was painful to watch paint
dry. But this is much worse and you only have to watch paint dry once. Here,
because the video isn’t persistent, it disappears the second you move your
phone away from the lid so you have to stand like a mime (while your arm cramps
up) to watch something you wouldn’t choose to watch on a bet.
(5)
Who
can even see the image clearly or hear the music being played?
Using Kinect to capture the image of the
performer rather than playing a clean, simple video (if you absolutely had to)
was unnecessary and foolish overkill – like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly
– and resulted in bad sound, poor video quality, and overall a completely
disappointing experience. What were they thinking?
There are already plenty of
intelligent uses of Augmented Reality technologies and some very smart
applications that are finally getting traction and which even make good
business sense because they supplement and add to the user experience instead
of wasting our time. This clearly isn’t one of them.