Update: The app received Gold at the Innovation Mobile Awards from Strategies Magazine (French only) and the Marketing Mobile Association at the Buzzness Mobile event in Paris.

C4M, with Total Immersion, adds a dimension of augmented reality to a large ad campaign by Lustucru (leading pasta brand). Here's the video of the AR parts.

In  500 supermarkets in France, posters invite you to download a Lustucru iPhone app. The app opens your video camera, which recognizes the poster and displays a funny little martian coming out of it. The Martian challenges you to play a game with any Lustucru pasta box and either a computer with a webcam or an iPhone. For the latter, it was decided to have the game inside a second app in order to leave the 'in shop' app as lite as possible (roaming download speed issue).

The game inside the second app pits you against the Martian in an augmented reality shootout: the green guy emerges through traps placed on the box and throws tomatoes at your iPhone. If you don't move fast enough, the tomato splats on your screen and you lose a life. To score points you fire pasta back, that the Martian tries to evade by switching trap in a 'Whack the mole' style.

To offer some augmented reality fun to those without an iPhone, C4M also produced the Flash app. Place your Lustucru pasta box in front of your webcam and a plate appears above the box. On the plate, a Martian surrounded by pasta. Incline the box, and thus the plate, to move the Martian in that direction. Move it too far and he falls off the plate and you're one life down. Pasta pops in and out faster and faster to increase the risks you have to take to add points, until the fall is all but inevitable.

The iPhone and Flash games run fine with all 50 different Lustucru pasta boxes.