What was once a fanciful and imagined future has now become an increasingly familiar, even casual, actuality, with augmented reality (AR) being incorporated into shopping experiences across the country. Various devices, as well as the mobile phones of shoppers, are being utilised to enhance the browning experience with the creative endeavours of brands enabling customers to experience products in a combined reality experience.
What Is AR?
AR is a practice that combines computer-generated content and the real world. It is commonly confused with virtual reality (VR), in which content and information take place entirely inside a ‘virtual’ space. AR, alternatively, allows users to experience various digital content overlaid onto the world around them.
How Are Retailers Using The Technology?
The potential for AR is being explored across the retail industry, with a number of brands already recognising that the technology can add both fascinating experience and improved functionality to their retail spaces. For example, as IKEA has popularised, customers can use AR to interact with virtual furniture, placing digital models in their personal spaces, scaling and moving objects on their mobile devices as needed to see how they might look or fit in a space. This not only allows customers to see how a product might suit or fit within their interior but also enables an entire catalogue to be experienced with just the tap of a screen.
Other retailers have implemented the same technology into their own shop mirrors, dubbing them magic mirrors, allowing customers to try on various outfits without needing to change. Nike even launched an entire experiential concept around AR with their space, Nikeland, and continues to implement QR codes across their retail establishments, encouraging customers to digitally interact with shop spaces and products.
The Future Of Retail Spaces
This technological progress is being celebrated and experiential shopping spaces are on the rise. As a result, retailers are adapting their spaces more readily to technology with interior designs having to take into consideration the potential elements of both a physical and digital space.
There is already a shift in retail design with shop layouts preferring to dedicate space to design and customer capacity than an abundance of products. This allows for high-street shops to shift the focus of their spaces toward experience and browsing over catalogue contents, leading to an interior design preference toward vertical and modular furniture, those that can be easily adapted, such as slatwall panels, allowing for dynamic retail environments.
Many customers are already showing a greater preference for such creative spaces and experiences within retail, expecting retailers to offer unique and rewarding shopping experiences. This is leading to, what is simply being referred to as experience over products.
Crown Display
