Greeting card retailer Moonpig has partnered with AR company Zappar to create AR-enabled cards. Customers creating their own cards on the Moonpig site can upload videos, which will be triggered when the recipient scans the card using the Moonpig app.

“This will be the next step in how people receive and view greeting cards, providing purchasers and recipients with a whole new way of creating personal messages,” says Zappar MD Caspar Thykier. “We feel implementing AR in such an everyday item as a greeting card is a great way to use the Zappar platform. It really demonstrates how the technology can truly enable a product in a commercial context with a tangible consumer benefit.”

Its a smart linking of technology and application, for sure. Its not hard to imagine the kind of heartwarming uses it could be put to. Moonpig MD Iain Martin is full of them.

“Making a card through Moonpig is really simple,” says Martin. “Explaining to Granny how you managed to send her a greeting card with a video of the grandchildren singing Happy Birthday – that might be more tricky.”

But, as is often the case with AR, the process of downloading a specific app for one-off usage seems like it could be off-putting. What will really be tricky to explain to Granny, surely, is how she actually accesses the video in the first place.