Ford goes all viral with mobile app

BIZARRE WAYS of flogging cars - well, actually Kas - of our time. Ford has released a mobile app into the wild called 3D Ka. Supposedly it lets you view and interact with a 3D image of this vehicle.

It's obviously part of a very much orchestrated 'viral marketing' campaing.

The INQ suspects that the technology doesn't work too well because the 3D image we managed to view kept disappearing PDQ. Might be the tired old Nokia handset we tried it on.

Anyway, the idea is that geeks - oh, sorry, participants - download the 3D Ka app by going to using their mobile's browser.

The site should correctly identify which handset you're using. It did. This is where the first snag hit. The app only works on certain Nokia cameraphones as well as some Windows Mobile phones.

Fordka.mobi correctly identified the first handset we tried as a Nokia 6600S but that was far too new and unsupported. More success was had with a Nokia E65.

So you've downloaded the app. What next? Well, it's really just a fancy QR code scanner. All you've got to do is find the requisite QR codes and you will see a 3D image of the Ka.

It's possible to download some appropriate QR codes from the campaign site. That didn't work too well. So the INQ followed some of the links to Youtube videos.

This was the impressive bit. By freeze-framing the videos it was possible to scan some of the codes and see the 3D images people had been watching in the video. Neat trick and shows how well QR codes work.

Theoretically the 3D images should let you walk around a 'virtual' image of the Ka. No such luck, though.

Not sure whether the nation's youth will bother to take the clues from the Gofindit site and walk the streets of Camden Town to find hidden QR codes.

But it's a nice try, Ford. µ