I’ll admit to being somewhat enamored with augmented reality technologies and their potential impact on the retail customer experience.  Not only does this potentially impact the in-store customer experience, but I think it’s a powerful way to extend the real shopping experience into virtually unlimited points of distribution. Fashionista by Rich Relevance, is a great example of this.
I think the impact for retailers down the road gets interesting. At what point does the in-home shopping experience come close to the in-store shopping experience? Is there a point where customers will gravitate more to these virtual experiences? It’s likely a ways out, but I think it puts additional pressure on bricks and mortar retailers to continue to innovate the experience in-store/restaurant, etc.
I’ve also recently written a post on this topic if you are interested in more detail.
I have found that very often retailers can lag other industries in terms of adoption of more operational technologies, but in terms of customer-facing technologies, which are increasingly powerful and prevalent, they will need to be leaders to differentiate and survive.
“[Augmented reality is] closer than you think. And, just as online changed consumers’ expectations from retailers, new user interfaces will easily have the same impact, forcefully thrusting retailers once again to the forefront of consumer technology adoption. Whether they’re ready or not.”
This is clearly going on via the web and even the Sunday paper with companies like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. Increasingly, this technology will be used to differentiate the in-store experience in new, exciting, and innovative ways.
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.
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.
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