Starbucks Holiday Cups Get Animated With New Augmented Reality App

This Holiday season, Starbucks is launching their first major augmented reality app that aims to bring their red seasonal cups to life for the customer.

The Starbucks Cup Magic app launches next Tuesday for both the iPhone and Android platforms. Novel and more promotional than useful out of the box, the application uses your smart phone’s camera to point at the company’s red holiday cups as well as 47 other objects around Starbucks retail locations.

Once the camera phone has locked in on particular store objects, animations involving one of the five Starbucks Holiday Characters “magically come to life through augmented reality.”

From the looks of the preview video (below), you’ll be able to turn your scanned experiences into ecards and share via e-mail and social media.

We’ll try this badboy out on Tuesday of next week.