I was reading a blog post by John Sviokla on the Harvard Business website asking, “How Will Augmented Reality Affect Your Business?” Since I’d been spending some time thinking about the specific applications to retail, I thought I’d take a shot at answering that question for the retail space.

In this post, I will show some general examples, some retail specific ones, and then talk about what I think this means for retail.

For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, the basic idea behind augmented reality is to visually merge virtual objects with real objects. The most common example is the first-down marker you see on televised football games. To get the juices flowing, below are some examples which have fueled my imagination with regards to the topic.

A marketing campaign done by Nike in Japan (warning – the audio is terrible).

A game created by Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD-Atlanta):

An industrial/operations example from BMW:

Here are some more retail-specific marketing examples:

• Best Buy
• Wal-Mart
• IKEA

And an example from Zugara:

Most of the above scenarios are enabled by a ‘tag’ – a visual symbol that starts the visualization. Here is a different example from a company called Layar which instead uses GPS and compass orientation to display virtual information over the live video feed from your camera.

I think the mobile aspect, adding the context of not only location but also the specific customer using the application, is significant. Using an AR shelf tag, one application might be to display different promotional offers to different customers based on their loyalty status or even time of day.

Thanks to Keith McGreggor, I had the good fortune recently to meet with Blair McIntyre, who heads up the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech. Brilliant guy. I appreciate his taking time to meet with me. While he pointed out that there are still limitations (camera quality, iPhone API issues), I’m convinced that we are at the front of a convergence between the mobile web and the real world.

The retail business against the current economic backdrop is about value, differentiation and growth by seizing market share. Augmented reality technology has the potential to transform the customer experience in fundamental ways that separate the winners from the losers. I also believe that while AR will be used first in marketing and customer facing applications, there are significant operational applications as well.

We are just starting up the hype curve now and it will be several years before we see the trough of despair and mainstream adoption, but depending in the overall value proposition of the retailer, AR technologies have the potential to change the game.