Amazon New App is Leveraging Apple’s Technology to Boost Revenue

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4Q 2017 | IN-4817

On November 1, 2017, Amazon announced an augmented reality option for its mobile app called “AR view”, which allows users to preview online products within their current environment, such as a home or business. The feature uses the mobile device’s camera and display to show a 3D rendering of products within their space. The customers can move the products around within the camera’s field of view, manipulate it, and get a general idea of what something might look like in their own environment.

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Mass Market AR with Amazon’s AR View

NEWS


On November 1, 2017, Amazon announced an augmented reality option for its mobile app called “AR view”, which allows users to preview online products within their current environment, such as a home or business. The feature uses the mobile device’s camera and display to show a 3D rendering of products within their space. The customers can move the products around within the camera’s field of view, manipulate it, and get a general idea of what something might look like in their own environment.

AR View is available on Apple iPhones 6S or higher operating on iOS 11. Amazon plans to make the feature available to Android phones sometime in the future. 

Augmented Reality to Become a Mainstay of Shopping and Product Experience

IMPACT


With AR View, Amazon joins furniture retailers like Ikea, Wayfair, and  Houzz, which have released their own augmented-reality apps to help consumers experiment with products; changing position, color, size, etc., of items in real-time has proven to be a compelling part of the shopping experience.  Furniture retailer Ikea was one of the first to support Apple’s ARKit back in September, while Wayfair teamed up with Google to display a similar functionality for Tango phones on a mobile version of Chrome at the I/O conference in May. Houzz also rolled out an app update in May, which offers the new 3D augmented reality option to let customers try furniture before buying.  

AR visualization is a growing trend as the technology becomes common, thanks to the new efforts from Apple with ARKit and Google with ARCore, both mobile device SDKs bringing similar functionality to mixed reality smart glass devices: spatial awareness, object recognition and tracking, and linking digital content to real objects, etc.With ARKit, Ikea launched a new app ‘Ikea Place’, which is said to be 98% accurate in scale, rendering a much more realistic portrayal.

Before the introduction of ARKit and ARCore, both scaling and lighting were questionable at best in “AR” powered applications. No machine vision capabilities on the devices meant that the camera feed was treated more as a live 2D video feed than a 3d representation of the environment. The new sensing capabilities seen in ARKit and ARCore allow for a far more accurate representation of the 3D object in the environment. To make the digital representation appear natural in the space, shadows and lighting must be created for the object and interpreted in the surroundings to ensure accuracy.

Developing AR for Retail

COMMENTARY


AR has begun to find a place in the retail industry, and already has promise of wide-scale applicability. In ABI Research’s survey for  Transformative Technology Adoption and Attitude-Augmented and Mixed Reality, logistics and retail show the largest number of companies currently assessing AR.

As compared to traditional brick and mortar shopping and online retail, augmented reality offers a few novel features. AR can provide interactivity between sold products and consumers by immersing them in a different environment. AR technology can bridge the gap between a picture online and the reality of a product, lessening the potential for buyer’s remorse and strengthening sales as a result. Additionally, AR helps retailers to recreate the try-on experience that customers can get in store, which could encourage online shoppers to make more purchases. AR is especially promising for retailers in the furniture and beauty markets;  for example, cosmetics retailer Sephora’s app ‘Virtual Artist’ allows beauty product consumers to see what certain products might look like on their own faces, which provides entertainment, inspiration, and advertisement of the products.

To provide significant value-added and personalized services, AR can be strengthened with artificial intelligence (AI), enabling e-commerce websites to recommend products uniquely suited to shoppers, and allowing consumers to search for products using conversational language or just images (Chinese e-commerce website Taobao already has this function) like they are communicating with a sales person. Other metrics, including length and type of product interaction or location-based interaction differences can build out this functionality even further.

The AI and AR synergy is not limited to product recommendation and search either; object recognition is a major component of current augmented reality usage, and machine learning off the back of constantly iterating machine vision algorithms can improve product/object recognition exponentially. AR content creation for an entire catalog of products can be daunting, and nearly impossible when dealing with the scale of an Amazon or Wal-Mart, but user generated content from AR product user interaction can help to fill the gaps.

We can expect more retailers to integrate AI functions into the AR apps going forward as the capability of AR grows and more proof of ROI for retailers is seen, but the involvement of major players like Ikea and Amazon early in the lifespan of AR highlights the promise and potential scale of AR in retail in the coming years. 

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