Paper that remembers
A video disappears up the feed within a day. A card stays on the shelf for years. VirAR puts the first one inside the second.
So much of what we capture now is video, and much of it is rarely watched again. It lands in a chat, gets a heart, and is forgotten by the end of the day. Meanwhile, the things people actually keep — the card on the fridge, the one in the drawer with the others, the one that outlived the person who wrote it — stay silent.
That gap is the whole company. We make a printed card, on real stock, that you can hold and post and keep. And when someone points a phone at the photo on it, the moment that photo came from plays right there on the paper, aligned to it, moving as the card moves.
No app. No account for the person receiving it. Just the card, and then the card alive.
What we believe
The physical object is the point
The AR is not the product — the card is. Augmented reality that needs an app, a download and a tutorial is a demo. Ours has to work for someone's grandmother, holding a card, in her kitchen, on the first try.
Price should be explainable
A fee for the AR layer, the printer's price plus a stated markup, and shipping at cost. No subscription, no credits, nothing that quietly renews. The whole formula is on the pricing page because we can afford to show it.
Your footage is yours
We use what you upload to build and serve your card — not to train models, not for advertising, and not to share with third parties. If you want it deleted, we delete it.
Printed near where it's going
Cards are produced by print partners close to the delivery address instead of flown from one warehouse. Less freight, faster arrival, and a card that has not crossed an ocean to reach the next street.
How it actually works
When a card is created, the photo destined for the paper is compiled into a tracking target — a mathematical fingerprint of that exact image. That target, your video and a small scene description are published to a link, and the link becomes the QR code printed on the card.
The recipient's camera opens that link, recognises the printed photo in front of it, and plays the video in the photo's place, matching its angle and distance. Everything runs in the phone's browser. Nothing is installed, and the only thing they need is the card itself.
The design side is a full card builder — templates, photos, text, fonts, stickers, layout across every surface a folded card has — because a card that moves is still, first, a card that has to look right.
How this started
I started VirAR in January 2026. It began personally: I wanted to make an unusual card for my grandmother, who lives in Ukraine — because of the war I cannot simply come and wish her well in person. I wanted it to be more than a picture and some text. I wanted a part of me to stay inside an ordinary paper card.
There was no convenient way to do it, so I made the first one by hand: designed it in Photoshop, set up the AR with MindAR, printed it at a normal print shop and posted it to her. It worked. That was the moment I understood how warm a simple object becomes when paper starts holding not only words, but a voice, a movement, a memory.
The process itself was scattered across different tools, and everything had to be joined together by hand. VirAR grew out of that: an attempt to make the same experience simple and natural for anyone.
I build VirAR myself. For me it is not about technology for its own sake. It is about being able to give someone close to you something real, even when you are far apart.
Where we are
VirAR is early and small. Postcards and folded cards are live, printed through established partners in the UK, the EU and the US. Bigger formats, more occasions and more languages are being added steadily rather than announced in advance.
If something you need does not exist yet, telling us is genuinely useful — at this size a single email can change what gets built next. Write to us.
See what one looks like
Start from a template and put your own moment inside it.