How it works
For the first time ever — send your videos as a printed postcard
Like those living newspaper photos from Harry Potter, except it's real and it arrives in your recipient's mailbox.
Remember those magical moving photographs from Harry Potter — the newspaper whose images played like short clips, or the portraits on the walls that waved back at you? That feeling, of a still image suddenly coming alive, is exactly what ARVideoCards delivers. Except this is real, and it works on the phone your family already has in their pocket.
You upload a video. We print one frame of it onto a physical postcard and ship it to any address on Earth. When the recipient holds up their phone camera to that card, the full video plays right on top of the printed image — in augmented reality, with no app to install. The postcard itself becomes the screen.
It is also the safest way to preserve a video. Phone storage fills up, cloud services change their pricing, social platforms disappear. A printed postcard does not expire. And unlike a regular printed photo, yours carries the full moving memory inside it — watchable any time, forever, by anyone with a smartphone browser.
Three minutes from video to shipped postcard
The sender experience is deliberately simple.
Upload your video
Choose any short video from your camera roll — a holiday moment, a birthday greeting, a trip highlight. Up to a minute works perfectly.
Pick the printed frame
Scrub through the video and tap the frame that should be printed on the postcard. That single image becomes the physical card your recipient holds.
We print and ship it
A real postcard is produced on demand and shipped to the exact address you enter — Switzerland starts at CHF 2.50, worldwide at CHF 3.90.
The recipient points their phone at it
No app store visit. No QR code to type. Just open a browser, point the camera at the card, and the video plays right on top of the printed image.
What the recipient experiences
The recipient receives an ordinary-looking postcard in the mail — printed on high-quality card stock, addressed and stamped. On the back there is a short URL and a brief explanation: “Point your phone camera at the front of this card.”
They open the URL in any modern browser. The page asks for camera permission — the same permission a video call or QR scanner asks for — and then shows a live viewfinder. When they point it at the card, the video begins playing, perfectly aligned to the printed image. The postcard becomes a tiny cinema.
There is no app store involved. No account to create. No software to update. The entire experience lives in a browser tab that closes when they are done.
They can share the URL with anyone. Grandparents can watch it on a desktop browser without any camera by using the direct video link. Everyone sees the memory. Only the person holding the physical card sees it in augmented reality.
How the augmented reality actually works
The magic has a name: image-based AR with Natural Feature Tracking. Here is the non-jargon version, and the technical one.
NFT image tracking (Natural Feature Tracking)
When we generate your postcard we create a unique visual fingerprint of the printed frame — a map of thousands of corners, edges, and gradients on that specific image. On playback, the phone camera analyses the live feed 30 times per second and matches what it sees against that fingerprint. When a match is found it locks onto the card and places the video precisely on top of it, even if the card is tilted, partially folded, or held at an angle.
WebAR runs entirely in the browser
The experience is delivered through a progressive web page, not a native app. Modern browsers (Chrome, Safari 16+) expose the camera via the WebRTC API and run the image-tracking algorithms compiled to WebAssembly. The video is streamed and decoded in the same tab. Nothing is installed on the device.
Why the printed image matters
The physical postcard is the anchor. The printed frame acts as a real-world marker — its texture, contrast, and unique composition are what the tracker latches on to. A completely blank white card would not work. A richly detailed photo frame works exceptionally well. This is also why we let you choose exactly which frame gets printed: a visually rich image gives the tracker more features to lock onto.
Want the full technical deep-dive?
Our guide Bringing Postcards to Life covers WebAR runtimes, the WebAssembly tracking pipeline, NFT descriptor generation, and why browser-based AR is now fast enough to run reliably on a three-year-old phone.
Pricing
From CHF 2.50 per card
FAQ
Common questions answered
Create your first card
Takes about three minutes