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McDonald's has been playing around with its menu a lot lately—finally offering breakfast all day, putting guacamole on fries, stirring smoothies with Greek yogurt, and even miniaturizing meals. Now it's messing around with Happy Meals. Taking a page from Google's book, the burger chain will sell the smiley-faced kids' meals in boxes that fold into virtual reality viewers.
Aptly named Happy Goggles, the initiative begins on Friday and is so far limited to Golden Arches locations in northern Sweden, which will only offer a combined total of 3,500 headsets. The cardboard viewers, when paired with a smartphone, will become immersive VR experiences for children.
Wired reports that the project stems from a partnership with ad agency DDB, where a team of designers came up with the perfect perforations and folds needed to transform the bright red box into a VR viewer. "We try to bring education to our Happy Meals, and the answer was kind of staring us in the face," Jeff Jackett, marketing director for McDonald's Sweden, told the tech site.
While this might seem extremely gimmicky, Wired points out that it's not unlike the New York Times' mailing of 13 million Google Cardboard sets back in November. That enterprise was widely well received, with the experience even lauded as "meaningfully new."
The difference, of course, will be in the content. The Times transported us to places of political unrest—in lesser known corners of the world—with sweeping, 360-degree views; meanwhile, McDonald's is giving kids an animated ski-racing game called "Se upp i backen" ("Watch out on the slopes"). So if this ever makes it Stateside, we'll let you be the judge of its true value.
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