Exactly how will that lamp look on your bedroom night stand? Now you can find out without ever taking your eyes off your smartphone.
Augmented reality – the ability to project an object onto another image, in this case a picture from an area in your home – has moved from science fiction to retailing reality.
Many online sellers of home furnishings products – including lighting and home décor – are now offering the technology on their mobile websites and apps.
Generally acknowledged to have been introduced first by Wayfair, augmented reality features are now turning up across the entire shopping spectrum, from West Elm to Walmart.
The process is fairly straightforward. A consumer shopping for a new lamp will hone in on a single item, isolating a silhouetted version on the phone’s screen. She then points the phone at the area of her home where the lamp will be used, say on top of a nightstand, on a desk or next to an easy chair. She can manipulate the scale on her screen and often also rotate the view so she can see how the pairing will look from different angles.
The process can repeated for as many products as the site offers this technology for. Market penetration for this new technology wildly varies from seller to seller and category to category.
While Wayfair at first, and then the others who followed, developed the software to make this all work, part of the responsibility for its adaption rests back on vendors’ shoulders. They are the ones required to provide the multiple pictures and digital images necessary to get the process to work. For vendors who offer hundreds of products through the various online sellers, this becomes both an added expense and a time-consuming endeavor.
But it is increasingly becoming a cost of doing business. It’s why other retailers are arriving at the same conclusion. For the time being, not all products on home-focused sites are viewable using augmented reality but the numbers are increasing and the customer is getting used to buying this way.
If you’re an independent retailer or a supplier selling direct to consumers, it’s only a matter of time until offering AR technology is no longer a competitive advantage but a near requirement.
Wayfair, in an online posting dedicated to its technological advancements – a good read, by the way: https://tech.wayfair.com/2018/06/everywhere-you-look-computer-vision-at-wayfair/ -- said such accomplishments were resetting the shopping bar in home products: “We pride ourselves on being a disruptive technology company that is changing the way people shop for their homes.”