After seeing Mark Ronson’s “Watch the Sound” series on music, my 10-year-old son is now very into drum machines and beats. And while he would love a vintage Roland TR 808 to kick off his burgeoning music career, I think instead I’ll get him a box of Reese’s Puffs cereal.
Not that I think a bowl of Reese’s Puffs is the breakfast of champions, but a new promotional box for the cereal out now features an augmented reality drum machine on the back. I received a press release about the new cereal box beatmaker this morning. Usually when I get these types of emails, I immediately toss them. But as I looked at the information, it actually seemed like a pretty cool use of technology, so I went out and bought a box this morning (with apologies to my wife, who does not yet know there is a giant box of sugar cereal jammed into our pantry).
Here’s how it works. On the back of the box is a diagram of the RP-FX drum pad. You scan a special QR code with your mobile phone and it takes you to a special Reese’s web app that accesses your phone’s camera. Place cereal puffs wherever you like on the drum pad spaces and then hover your camera phone over the box. Using AR, the app “reads” where you placed your puffs and generates a beat accordingly. Move the puffs around and the beat changes.
It’s definitely not high fidelity or Pro Tools quality production, but it actually works surprisingly well. Once you have your beat just as you like, you can use the app to record it, so you can share it with friends or use it as the basis of your next club banger.
You can hear the one I whipped up this morning here (or, you know, wait a few months and it’ll be all over the radio).
As noted earlier, I typically shy away from covering promotional stunts like this. But as a parent and a fan of both music and technology, this promotion is actually worth, well, promoting. Besides, using a cereal box to build your own beat sure beats digging for a cheap plastic toy at the bottom of one.
