CAR Magazine’s May issue is ever so slightly different from previous incarnations. Sure, there’s a hot car on the cover. The typeface “CAR” is as red, and bold, as ever. All of the usual sluglines are there. And then you notice this QR code at the bottom left-hand corner of the cover.

Augmented reality? Naughty…

CAR has done an interesting thing here. In an era when print publishers have shorter finger nails and fuller ash trays than at any other point in history, original ways of fighting the digital publishing onslaught have to be found. The answer, as CAR seems to be demonstrating, doesn’t lie in beating a proudly-printed breastplate with a clenched fist. It lies in embracing digital publishing technology, and integrating that into the presentation of the final printed product.

So for the latest edition of CAR, they’ve gone with a dual-platform approach: hold the magazine in your hands, play with it on the internet? So how does this work, and what does it look like?

The most enjoyable part was watching the BMW lift off the page, and morph into a video of the self-same vehicle tearing around Killarney Race Track – and your cover.

A few readers have made the complaint that their internet connections can’t handle the real-time interraction. Truth be told (and this is a hard truth), if you want to enjoy the benefits of technology, you should have the tools to do so, or don’t expect to have a good time.

Try it out – it’s a hell of a lot of fun. And the slightly incongruent feeling between having to actually physically hold something up to enjoy sophisticated technology is ironically pleasing.