Playing with new toys...
Seems to be a convoluted solution. Could they not have done more or less the same thing with QR codes linking to their articles?
Printed pages of lefty paper The Independent can be scanned by a phone app and decoded into links to recently updated words and pictures online. The newspaper, operated by Russian father-and-son duo Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, is using "augmented reality" app Blippar, which uses a phone's camera to recognise pages from the …
But then you'd need a QR code on every article, photo and advert which would just link through to a webpage. This system provides an overlay on each section of the paper that can be interactive.
Can't see this having long term appeal and being that practical without really big investment into secondary content. With digital papers and online news though it can't be worth the investment, surely.
It could be an app for Google Glass I suppose. You're wearing them anyway, so it would naturally overlay extra content onto what you're seeing, and is in position to photograph it as well.
Not that I see this being anything other than a cumbersome idea. If you want this at breakfast, read your paper on a tablet.
The Indy's PR strapline for the Blippar launch is "wouldn't it be great if your paper could update in real-time?" El Reg feels duty bound to point out that we've been doing exactly that since the 1990s, on this wonderful thing called The internet.
Don't be silly El Reg. That there internet thing will never catch on.