Creating great AR Mobile App Campaigns -Part 2 (the Ikea 2014 AR app)

I briefly discuss the IKEA 2013 catalogue app in my last post -well, guess what? The 2014 IKEA app is out.

Consumers can place the catalogue on the floor of a room in their home, point at the catalogue with their smartphone or tablet and see how a selected sofa, area rug or other item would look in that particular spot in the room if purchased.  A great try-before-you-buy solution which makes every user part smart shopper, part interior decorator.

Integrating AR into an app can be fun and engaging, with features like 3D model creation and animation.  At its core, AR is about visualizing the environment through a combination of real environment and digital content anchored to reality. 

This is exactly the experience offered by IKEA’s AR app.  However, aside from being cool to use (and being a preventative tool for any buyer’s remorse), what is it about the app that makes it so special?  Well, it’s not just the AR aspect of the app, it’s what IKEA has done around it.

AR is not magic.  It can only do so much.  It alone cannot get the word out about an app, cannot make an app come flying on its own into your home, cannot make users download an app, cannot make an app successful.  Although IKEA is not the first furniture company to use AR in an app, it is the first one to have successfully done so.  IKEA took existing, familiar technology to develop a new experience for consumers that didn’t need to be explained, dissected or examined—just promoted—and therein lies the difference.  IKEA threw some consumer marketing muscle behind the app through videos and outreach to major online consumer media outlets, thereby generating that coveted buzzword:  buzz.

Companies need to think of the bigger picture when developing an app, incorporating not only the tech aspects but the promotional side of things too. Many brands spend large chunks of time and money on developing the app itself, only to fail to plan how it will be launched and marketed to consumers.  If a company’s app only has 100 downloads, that’s not a stellar return on investment but rather a hefty sum thrown out the window, and it’s probably a safe bet that the next app-building budget will be slashed as a result. 

 Neither existing brand awareness nor a brand’s coolness factor will guarantee app downloads without the use of marketing punch, and AR apps are no exception.

So this is the beauty of the IKEA app—and the lesson to take away here.  For a successful app, create a useful app—one with a purpose—but also create a promotional and marketing budget in parallel that will support it, draw in users and encourage app downloads.  Also, ask how such an app will help users and if AR is really the best way to go about doing it.  AR is cool, but it cannot do the heavy lifting alone.

Metaio, Augmented Reality and E-commerce - Retail Use Cases

San Francisco/Atlanta -The following is the press release from Metaio relating to their e-commerce Augmented Reality product that helps consumers see products in their own space (akin to the IKEA AR application in a previous blog post). It represents one more step towards AR becoming a mainstream technology.

The Internet changed how people shop. Now, YOUReality LLC and metaio Inc. are changing how people will shop online. With the introduction of its Online Retail Visualization 3D tool, YOUReality is making it possible for consumers to see products in their own space before they purchase them by integrating Augmented Reality into a suite of commerce applications. The new services allow shoppers to make more confident buying decisions, deliver retailers a higher sales conversion rate, and significantly lower product return costs.

Online shopping is attractive to an increasing number of consumers for its convenience, speed, product selection and other benefits. To make the shopping experience even more engaging and informative, many retailers are enhancing their websites with multimedia features such as video clips, virtual visualization or slide shows so that shoppers can better understand product features. With YOUReality, customers can even "bring it home" and try before they buy, allowing consumers to visualize context sensitive products with life-like 3D models in a photo of their own home environment. The resulting image provides a realistic view of what the object will look like in that space with the ability to move the item around (maintaining correct dimension and perspective) and change colors, styles, sizes and textures of the 3D object while viewing it in the photo.

By pioneering the concept of Retail Visualization using the metaio platform, YOUReality has harnessed the power of 3D for a practical purpose. "YOUReality gives a cool technology relevance in the world of commerce by driving retail sales through increased conversion rate," says YOUReality Founder, Michelle Fallon. "Retail Visualization takes the guesswork out of the visual aspects of shopping, such as selecting fabric choices, textures and colors, making the buying decision faster and easier because consumers can literally see furniture, electronics, appliances, even accessories, in their own space at the point of sale. Retail Visualization for e-commerce allows the user to visualize products in a web store and then add the selected items directly to the shopping cart to complete the transaction online," she says.

Ikea Augmented Reality Concept-coming to a smartphone near you (maybe)

For those of you who missed it, last August an AR concept for IKEA was launched based on a simple premise of allowing customers to picture what a certain piece of furniture would like in their home. The concept reflects the increasing possibilities of Augmented Reality to marry the real with the digitally-enhanced world within sound commercial solutions.

The application, of which you can see some screenshots below, allows users to view an overlaid picture of the desired piece of furniture and place it within the intented position in a room by viewing the room through the mobile device's videocamera.



The user can also save the picture and send it via MMS if they wish to do so.

While it may be some time before these types of applications become mainstream, the current prediction for smartphone sales suggests this will be sooner than you think. Smartphone sales that support AR apps account for less than 20% of the overall global market but are growing fast and are predicted to reach 50% of the mobile market within the next five years.