Gizmo Greeting Cards: One Little Red Robot Aims To Revolutionize The Physical Greeting Card

Greeting cards, not e-cards, are still the most appropriate means to convey sentiments for special occasions like birthdays, weddings and holidays, even if the physical greeting card is as antiquated as the newspaper. But fortunately for fatigued greeting card givers and recipients everywhere, John Littleboy from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Artiphany is injecting some much-needed fresh energy into the greeting cards space. Littleboy teamed up with the augmented reality gurus at DAQRI to create the Gizmo Greeting Cards, the first greeting cards to be powered by augmented reality.

Littleboy launched the Kickstarter campaign for the Gizmo Greeting Cards on Wednesday, and the project has already raised about 10 percent of its funding in just 24 hours. Artiphany hopes to raise $20,000 to bring Gizmo Greeting Cards to the masses.

Gizmo Greeting Cards -- starring Gizmo, Artiphany’s little red robot -- seamlessly blend the physical and digital worlds into the greeting card experience using augmented reality. Once the user receives his or her physical Gizmo greeting card, users are asked to download DAQRI’s free mobile app, available via Apple’s App Store or Google Play, to power the augmented reality experience embedded in the card. Once the user holds their smart device over the Gizmo target over the card, Gizmo takes over. The little red robot will bring your card to life with one of three augmented-reality experiences: Launching off a birthday cake, snowboarding down a mountain, or sheepishly presenting a flower with a box of delicious nut-and-bolt chocolates.

Nafeesa Jafferjee, campaign manager on the Gizmo project, told IBTimes she’s received positive feedback from many early customers of the Gizmo Greeting Cards.

“Greeting cards aren’t something people talk about every day, but people who have seen [Gizmo] become excited, which is really great,” Jafferjee said. “It’s across all age groups, they think it’s really cool.”

Jafferjee said the goal is to get Gizmo Greeting Cards into stores and make it a mainstream card brand, even if it means getting acquired by Hallmark or American Greeting Cards to make it happen. But she argues that unlike Google Glass, the augmented-reality project that most people know about, Gizmo Greeting Cards are a better artistic expression of the technology, and are more accessible, too.

Gizmo Greeting Cards, Jafferjee hopes, are just the beginning in the relationship between Artiphany and DAQRI. After the greeting card line, Littleboy is looking to start a number of augmented-reality projects, the first of which being augmented reality t-shirts, where users can stand a distance away and even take a picture of the animation as it pops out of the shirt.

“We’re hoping this [augmented reality] platform will be available for artists and animators to use, but John [Littleboy] has a line of playing cards and artistic stuff coming,” Jafferjee said. “This is going to be a new way to tell stories in a new compelling dimension.”

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