Augmented Reality and Its Applications

Your dream home is finally a reality. You go shopping with your significant other for just the right furniture you always wanted. You spot a piece of furniture that you like and place it in your house to get a feel of how it would look. This time however, there is something different. You are not in a furniture store and your significant other is in a physically different location than you. Welcome to Augmented Reality for retail.

Augmented Reality (AR) is soon changing how people experience shopping and e-commerce. It allows shoppers to try articles of virtual clothing on themselves before making the purchase or as discussed above, try how furniture would look in your newly remodeled home before committing to an actual purchase. Whats more,  Augmented Reality hold the potential to address the pain points of certain customer use case scenarios thereby providing a more customized, integrated and interactive retail experience. Its set to transform how retailers are thinking about designing the stores of the future.

Imagine being able to project a hologram of your next laptop right on your work-desk and interact with it to evaluate if its the right fit for your needs or if it would fit in your current laptop bag. AR technology can work with the smartphone you are using today, to something more elaborate such as the Microsoft’s Hololens or Google’s MagicLeap. If success of Pokémon Go is any indication, any modern smartphone can be a potential AR device.

Augmented Reality experience for retailers can be ether in-store or out-of-store. The AR experience can be developed to be tightly integrated with a physical brick-and-mortar retail store were it can offer product purchase assistance where the user can see the actual product and then try-out the virtual one – for example in fashion. It can also offer an educational sales pitch where a well crafted AR experience can explain product features live on the shopping floor while the customer interacts with the real product.

An out-of-the store Augmented Reality retail experience can be enjoyed by retailers right in the comfort of their living room. This can offer a unique and unparalleled user experience mimicking real world product interaction. This can transform and revolutionize the e-commerce industry as customers no longer have to rely upon access to physical stores, static text and images or videos. They will be able to project the product in front of them and understand the value proposition clearly.

Augmented Reality is an emerging technology but the writing is on the wall. AR and VR startups raised $658 million in equity last year. Some project that AR and VR investment in retail will be close to $30 billion by 2020.