In an age of fast-evolving technology, the retail industry is making augmented reality integral to giving shoppers an engaging and personalized shopping experience. This technology integrates the physical and digital worlds and enables shoppers to visualize and interact with products in novel ways.
Bridging the Digital and Physical Worlds
At its core, Augmented Reality merges the digital world into the real world, enabling shoppers to do things with products that they could never have done before. For instance, how about pointing your smartphone to the furniture piece in a showroom and instantly visualizing how it would look in your living room? Or even better, try on some new outfit by just standing in front of a mirror and let the clothes get digitally overlaid on your image.
Virtual Try-On Experience
This is where AR also becomes a great feature of retail stores for virtual try-on experiences. Customers can view clothes, accessories, or makeup on themselves, even without physically trying them on. This improves the shopping experience and decreases the need for dressing rooms and product returns. On top of that, AR brings products to life through interactive displays. It can provide detailed information, demonstrations, and sometimes even virtual assistants to help take the shoppers through the journey.
Visualize Products in Your Space
Another big advantage of AR is product visualization. You can use AR to make a virtual selection of furniture, decorations, electronics, art, and more for your actual home or office space before making a buying decision. Retailers offer an AR app that allows you to project a realistic 3D model of your products into your living space using your camera.
This feature makes sure that new purchases will fit and look perfect, and you can see products in scale from every angle, in every room. It removes the guesswork and further enhances satisfaction with potential new additions to a home or workplace.
Enhance Products With Immersive Content Beyond just visualizing products themselves, AR unlocks a world of additional digital content and information overlays. Many brands are leveraging AR to let customers scan product packaging to instantly pull up immersive content like extended product details, ratings and reviews, video instructions or tutorials, recommendations for related items, and more.
Instead of a passive physical product, AR makes retail shopping far more interactive and engaging. You can essentially peel back layers through your camera to access a wealth of digital enrichments. This helps shoppers gather insights, get questions answered, and feel more informed and connected to the merchandise.
Easier Navigation and Guidance
For shopping in physical retail locations, AR is also enabling better in-store navigation and guidance. Some brands now offer an AR app that can map routes and pinpoint product locations, so customers can effortlessly find what they need and get where they want to go inside the physical store.
Staying Ahead of the Curve
For retailers, adopting AR is a way to stay ahead of the curve, meet the rising expectations of the shopper, and catch up with the shift. Shoppers become more used to personalized, interactive experiences in their daily lives, and they expect the same thing from their shopping journey. Retailers offering AR-assisted shopping experiences can differentiate themselves from the rest of the competition and enjoy a much better relationship with their customers.
The future of augmented reality is already here and rapidly changing the way we browse, explore products, and shop. The blending of digital and physical worlds makes it smart and personal. PlugXR is a platform that offers easy-to-use AR creation through their no-code tool for businesses, making immersive shopping experiences accessible to brands and retailers of all sizes. The companies implementing AR today are preparing to be on the leading edge of this coming retail innovation.