There’s simply no dearth of Easter eggs across Google’s software products. This penchant for hidden quirks appears to have found its way into the newest Pixel range with a cool new Easter egg that involves a Pixel 4 retail box, Google Lens, and some AR chops. This one, however, isn’t as engaging as Google app’s Flappy Bird-like game, but it’s still interactive enough to serve Google’s marketing purpose.
The Pixel 4’s retail box has a product shot covering nearly its entire back. Scanning it using Google Lens will animate the image with a striking augmented overlay before welcoming you to #teampixel. Then a vertically scrolling slideshow of photos clicked on Pixels takes over with a text encouraging you to follow Google Pixel on Instagram. Tapping on any of these slides shows a Lens card that leads you to the Instagram account, which is constantly updated with photos taken by Pixel users worldwide.
Lens and ARcore got major feature bumps at this year’s I/O, and it seems those are being put to use to enable this Easter egg’s AR experience. As you can see in the included video, the overlay has a fine quality and it (mostly) maintains its original position even when the phone is moved around. Google brought a similar feature a while back when scanning the NBA logo with Lens showed a short animation and relevant game stats.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTZ8oSavBDA?feature=oembed&w=668&h=501]
https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/26/pixel-4-box-easter-egg-google-lens/
