The July issue of BBC Worldwide's science and technology magazine Focus is using augmented reality to, as the magazine puts it, make your skin crawl. The front cover of the magazine shows an image of a scream-style mask - but when readers visit the 3D section of Focus magazine's website and hold the image on the cover up to their web camera, a spider will appear to crawl out of the eye of the mask and run across the page.

The July issue also uses augmented reality to show a video of an exploding death star and a 3D model of two neutron stars colliding.

Myles Peyton, EMEA sales director at Total Immersion, the company responsible for helping develop Focus's augmented reality cover, predicts augmented reality will become a more regular feature of magazine publishing as the technology evolves. Her reasoning, not surprisingly, includes poor newsstand sales that could be goosed by sexy virtual applications as AR.

There have been a few instances of this already: In July 2009, Popular Science magazine ran an interactive 3D augmented reality magazine cover, followed by Entertainment Weekly’s September 2009 issue, whose AR cover showed a video through a small screen integrated into the pages of its magazine. Another example is  the London newspaper The Sun, which published a 3D edition with 3D-color ads and editorial for the World's Cup. The July issue of Focus will go on sale on June 3 in the UK, priced at £3.60.