Currently I have been researching into how AR fits into the consumer market, allowing brands to be visualized in front of users eyes promoting great user experiences for people to virtually interact with products, touch feel and see what colour, shape and size fits into their home lifestyle. Many commercial vendors are already adopting this into their business strategy with online store builder Shopify using AR to enhance user experience to be able to show products in real time allowing customers to change colour and size of the product and completely personalize the aesthetic in real time.
AR brings alot of aspects of VR into the physical world, for example OVR a augmented reality company has used the WhatThreeWords api to allow owners of their token to segments of land in the real world. This works by using google maps or similar api and dividing countries such as US and UK into segments with each own able land parcel having an address allowing for teleportation to that address through the mobile app.
What Three Words is an application which divides maps of countries online in to segments identified by a three word address for example, “pig.bacon.product”. This address acts as an IP address or post code to identify the location to other users and allow them to enter and teleport their directly.
Use Cases
Currently in OVR there are only a few places that have been created such as AR art galleries, these are 3d scenes made in a software such as blender or maya and uploaded into the AR world to allow people to interact with them and others over the internet in real time.
Returning to shopify, this is definitely a use case for the implementation of AR in the world of eCommerce as users can change products in real time and then proceed to order a customized version of the asset. However, the implementation of AR is far from over, currently to render objects in real time they have to be 3d and modeled from programs such as Blender. Then converted to a web/ app render-able file such as GLTF. These are files which can easliy be rendered on browsers as they are much lighter than obj files. Nonetheless, this visual representation is just that visual and would need photo realistic rendering to be able to convert images into real life simulations of products.
The technology to do this is here, with facebook labs using PIFuHD to create realistic 3d models from full body images of people. But like every emerging tech.. it need work but don’t let that put you off.
The Future of Marketing
Although experimental lots of brands are already entering VR worlds built on the blockchain such as decentraland and VR chat. Brands are realizing that this provides a fully immersive experience to customers and creates a friendly relationship promoting a better customer experience.
I see the implementation of AR and VR being a core aspect of marketing in the future just how previously experimental social media sites became a core part of marketing workflows and our lives.
