Alcohol! Phones! It’s a double win!


Meet me and you’ll soon learn that I have a penchant for beer. Perhaps even the odd cocktail. This love of alcohol has sometimes caused problems though, and when you’re attending a swanky PR launch for a new phone with free alcohol … well, things can get blurry quickly.

This is an email from Jason Atherton’s City Social. It’s a swanky restaurant down in London which has lots of art-deco design and stuff.

Posh. No tracksuits in there. No Happy Meals. Oh no.

Anyhoo, they’ve got an app and, when you wave it in front of their cocktails, an augmented reality cocktail menu pops up. They sent us a video, so we ripped it and uploaded it to our YouTube channel so it would make us look good.

The idea, apparently, is that you order a cocktail (presumably off some other menu), then it appears on your table and you point your phone at it. Via the app it’ll – ahem – “transform the guest’s perception of the cocktail and will bring their surroundings to vivid life”. Here it is in action…

According to the blurb, the inspiration behind the list of cocktails is “art through the ages”. Each cocktail is “influenced by a different artist or era”. From Van Gogh to Banksy.

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t need any augmented reality to start seeing things after drinking some cocktails. Sheesh.

GIMME COCKTAIL!