SPONSOR: Imagine AR Inc. (IP:CSE) (IPNFF:OTCQB) is an Augmented Reality platform that allows businesses to easily launch AR campaigns. Clients Include: NBA Sacramento Kings, Mall of America, AT&T Shape and The Basketball Hall of Fame. ImagineAR and NFL Alumni Academy recently signed a 5 year partnership agreement. In addition, the company signed a two-year agreement with Valencia C.F. of La Liga to provide interactive Augmented Reality experiences for almost 7 million fans around the world. Learn More.
AR isn’t just ‘exciting’, it’s practical
- Augmented reality might seem like a daunting new frontier for the average business, but adopting this new technology is a lot easier than it seems
- With an anticipated 3.8 billion smartphone users in 2021, more people are using mobile tech to experience the world, from enhanced museum tours to Animoji
- If you haven’t already considered it, AR can be a smart, practical form of smart marketing and branding.
by Alexis Ong
Augmented reality might seem like a daunting new frontier for the average business, but adopting this new technology is a lot easier than it seems. With an anticipated 3.8 billion smartphone users in 2021, more people are using mobile tech to experience the world, from enhanced museum tours to Animoji. If you haven’t already considered it, AR can be a smart, practical form of smart marketing and branding.
First, it’s important to distinguish between augmented reality and virtual reality. Virtual reality is an almost wholly-digital experience that requires special hardware to immerse yourself in a new environment. Augmented reality is a combination of the digital and physical worlds, where the former is often “layered” over the latter. If you’ve used custom Snapchat filters or played Pokemon Go, you’ve already tried AR without even realizing it.
But the great thing about AR is that it doesn’t require buying new hardware. Virtual reality, while still an exciting new realm, isn’t as widely accessible as AR. For starters, you need pricey new gadgets to play around in VR, but anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can tap into a well-crafted AR experience.
“The biggest benefit of AR is the simplicity with which you can build on top of the existing world that a user is already familiar with to teach them new things or show them new information that was previously unavailable,” says Gal Oppenheimer, who manages Contentstack’s Solutions Architecture Team. AR has, for instance, become a huge part of our daily reality, with Zoom virtual backgrounds helping people continue to meet and work collaboratively regardless of their environment.
Speaking to Oppenheimer and Contentstack’s marketing director Varia Makagonova reveals that augmented reality is a particularly effective, forward-thinking strategy for companies in retail, museums/education, and home improvement; AR works best to convey important, relevant information to customers in a quick, intuitive way. Best of all, it’s surprisingly straightforward to implement, especially if you’re working with an experienced content management team.
Great AR needs great content
As a headless CMS, Contentstack leads the way in helping businesses create innovative content experiences. In 2020, blogs and websites are no longer the main avenues of brand communication – modern customer experiences can include everything from chatbots and apps to new types of streaming media. Contentstack helps you adapt to new technology quickly and seamlessly, no matter the platform.
“When people look at AR, they only see the end experience,” says Oppenheimer. “And what people don’t realize is really there are two pieces to an AR experience. There’s the experience the consumer sees… and that is really just a 3D model, a color map, and a rendering library.” Then there’s the content, which can require just as much attention, depending on the scope of a company’s product lineup. This is where Contentstack comes into play.
A great content platform needs to be streamlined and easy to use, especially if you’re going to be working with new channels and touchpoints like Augmented Reality applications. With the right tools, it’s easy to build a well-organized, flexible content library that can be used to power all kinds of content-rich experiences.
And when it comes to retail, that often means making sure you can easily plug in personalization and e-commerce technologies into these experiences. As Oppenheimer points out, “it doesn’t matter if you have the biggest library of content available for your AR application to use. If the customer doesn’t see the one product that they are looking for to try on or learn more about, the app has not done its job for them.”
Building and tending to a useful content experience doesn’t have to be painful, though. “We have customers that have well over 2 million products in their Contentstack,” Oppenheimer says. “And when they do a release, sometimes that’s 200 products going live the same day… being able to facilitate that process easily, and then making sure that content appears in the mobile application that has all the rich AR content at the end, that’s where we come in.”
Read More: https://thenextweb.com/augmented-reality/2020/10/28/ar-isnt-just-exciting-its-practical-heres-how-to-use-it-for-your-business/
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