Monday’s total solar eclipse will cut a swath over the USA from Oregon to South Carolina. 16.5 million Americans live in the path of the stellar occlusion, but 306 million others will just have to watch it on TV…or they can have fun with a silly video from Dunkin’ Donuts, Moonchkin.
In an impressive feat of marketing, Dunkin’ Donuts has used Apple’s ARKit to connect their donuts to a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. Moonchkin places a moon-sized donut hole in front of the sun to mimic the total eclipse.
https://vimeo.com/redpepper/moonchkin
When the app starts up, it uses GPS to find the phone’s location, then cross-references that data with the star maps API to locate the sun. It then targets the brightest spot in the heavens and drops a new moon in front of it. We’re not sure why all location calculation is necessary to the app’s functionality- surely targeting the brightest spot in the sky would be sufficient during the daytime? Maybe QA didn’t test for night skies, or maybe marketing felt lunar eclipses were off-message.
An actual moon-sized version of the tiny munchkin donut holes would offer about 8,212,017 calories of wholesome nutrition- and probably enough hydrogenated oils to make anyone’s arteries as brittle as glass. The gigantic donut sports UV, height, and normal maps to give it the perfect DD texture of a donut hole that’s been sitting in a glass case for hours with all its moist, delicious mantle hiding under an oxidized chocolate crust.
Since ARKit isn’t accessible to consumers yet, Moonchkin won’t be available during Monday’s eclipse. We’ve reached out to Dunkin’ Donuts to find out if they intend to release their eclipse-creator to the public later this year.
