Digital technologies have undoubtedly opened up great opportunities for innovation in order to attract new customers. The augmented reality is revolutionizing the customer experience through new types of interaction with mobile in many areas.
Augmented reality is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be used brilliantly in mobile marketing to boost engagement and create realistic, virtual experiences with products. Lots of dramatic changes have come in various domains through Augmented Reality. Customers are feeling like stepping into another domain.
Smart shopping
American Apparel, Uniqlo and Lacoste have deployed showrooms with virtual fitting rooms that provide try-before-you-buy options in augmented reality spaces. Smart mirror technologies that scan RFID tags also offer the ability to bring recommendations to the brick-and-mortar shopping experience. IKEA customers have access to an app that permits them to click from their phones at links on a screen to super-impose different products to view as they would appear in their own homes. These new innovations are very exciting to customers.
Perfect Navigation
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that displays physical objects into the real world. AR strives to mix the real world with the physical world in such a way that both physical and abstract objects are visible to the user in the same space. An augmented reality navigation system is an application that uses augmented reality technology to assist the user. In essence, the system combines explicit navigation information with real-world objects. Such systems can be employed for motorized, pedestrian and indoor guidance. In all of these cases, the goal is to help the user reach their destination by super-imposing real-world information to navigation. The main purpose is to facilitate expeditious guidance to attain their destination, for example College Campus, Supermarket, Hospital, etc. The purpose is to allow for efficient use of time.
ARKit and ARCore based applications for indoor navigation can provide directions in airports, malls, hospital and office campuses. Gatwick Airport has already deployed its own smartphone solution that provides routes to terminals and gates based on a user’s flight number.
AR-power for the enterprise
Smart glasses are currently at a stage where consumer solutions are likely a few years off. Military, medical and enterprise solutions, however, are beginning to prove the value of combining AR with headsets and smart glasses.
Walmart and Tyson are piloting programs that will move traditional training methods into mixed reality settings. Workers will have new ways to learn about compliance and safety issues by looking around mixed-reality environments and identifying problems in a way that’s practical and engaging. Integration with other recent workplace training trends, especially gamification, may compound the returns that AR and MR solutions generate. According to ABI Research, AR-based training in enterprise will be a $6 billion industry
by 2022.
Augmented Reality with Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are fast-growing sectors in technology. Bringing them together with Augmented and Mixed Reality systems is a natural extension of many of the things that are best suited to AI and ML, particularly computer vision. Likewise, the ability to create human-machine processes that handle problems like disease diagnosis has immense potential to improve outcomes.
35% of sales on Amazon are derived from its recommendation engine, which leans heavily on data science and machine learning to deliver search results and match advertisers with customers. Moving out of the web browser and into the real world has immense commercial potential. By pairing consumer profiles with AR and ML, retailers can identify customer needs based on their environments and provide them with recommendations.
Point-and-shoot retail AR solutions will also be major drivers of innovation. A shopper in a store can get AI-based customer support while walking around. If they have questions about pricing, features or current offers, answers can be supplied by a chatbot based on natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Responses can even be tailored to the customer’s unique profile, allowing greater personalization on the fly.
Robust AI and ML solutions can be extended to the AR and MR spaces to provide value to everyday users of mobile devices.
WebAR
WebAR refers to augmented reality experiences that are accessed through a web browser rather than an app. This means all you need is your smartphone or tablet and an internet connection, without having to download an app directly onto your phone.
At the moment, WebAR offers a limited selection of the main features possible using app AR, including simple animations, video and a certain degree of interactivity. WebAR can also support image target detection to trigger experiences.
The Future is bright
Experts predict the Augmented Reality industry to reach more than $25B by 2025—and the growth will continue steadily. That’s the bright future of augmented reality, and it will be defined by the investments from the following business domains and spheres, which find its practical potential pretty enticing.