Lego turned heads last month when it used augmented reality technology on the side of its packaging to give shoppers an idea of what the kit inside can produce. The boxes, created by augmented reality expert Metaio, interface with kiosks in Lego stores. Users hold them up to the camera and see an image of the completed kit seemingly pop out from the package.

But that was then. Another use of augmented reality on packaging can be seen in a Nestle campaign rolled out in France at the end of the year - a campaign that proved so popular that it is expected to be deployed in the U.S., either by Nestle or another consumer goods company, in the mid term.

Here too, AR technology was used on the side of packaging - in this case a children's cereal box. However the technology was interactive; when children held the box up to a webcam a game was displayed, played by characters from the children's movie that the campaign was promoting - Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard.

2 Million Sold

Some two million boxes were sold - one of the few performance metrics publicly available about the campaign. "A lot of what you will see in with augmented reality campaigns are static representations - such as with the Lego packaging," David Laubner, head of Product Marketing with3DVIA, which is owned by Dassault Systèmes, tells MarketingVOX. Dassault developed the Nestle campaign. It worked with Nestle's Chocapic and Nesquik brands, using the box of cereal as the stage for the interactive game.

The player's movements are detected in real time when tilting the cereal box. The player must collect balls of light to bring the character Bétamèche out of the Minimoys world -  or in this case, from inside the package - and onto the side of the box.

Stopped in Their Tracks

The campaign attracted a lot of attention in France, says Laubner, which doesn't surprise him at all. "When I display the technology at trade shows, it literally stops people passing by in their tracks." Companies like it because, unlike the fleeting novelty of a static augmented reality display, the interactive game keeps consumers engaged for some time, he adds.