You’re considering buying a couch online, but, despite having measured and remeasured the dimensions over and over, you’re concerned. What if it doesn’t look right? What if it completely takes over the room? There’s a barrier to the experience — distance, viability, or simply not being able to get the couch in your living room until you’ve committed and clicked “Buy now.”
These are the customer challenges facing today’s brands. People demand relevance and value — and that means creating the kind of meaningful, immersive experiences that help them definitively decide on that new sofa.
Enter augmented reality — and artificial intelligence.
As technology evolves, so does the way brands connect with consumers. Augmented reality (AR) is quickly becoming one of the biggest game-changers for businesses, profoundly transforming brand engagement.
To create these compelling and powerful customer-centric experiences, AR doesn’t act alone. The underlying technology that makes the new dimensions and immersive experiences possible is artificial intelligence (AI).
The power of AI + AR
AI is at the heart of AR platforms, making the two well-positioned to sync on a variety of applications.
“I believe AR is a game-changer,” says Stefano Corazza, senior director of engineering at Adobe. “I think it allows people to make the world incredibly playful. The digital is really lending a hand to the physical, and they are leveraging each other’s best aspects and best features to make the most meaningful experiential journey.”
AI is the key to enabling AR to interact with the physical environment in a multidimensional way. Object recognition and tracking, gestural input, eye tracking, and voice command recognition combine to let you manipulate 2D and 3D objects in virtual space with your hands, eyes, and words.
AI enables capabilities like real-world object tagging, enabling an AR system to predict the appropriate interface for a person in a given virtual environment. Through these and other possibilities, AI enhances AR to create a multidimensional and responsive virtual experience that can bring people new levels of insight and creativity.
The result is mixed reality in a single physical environment — seeing that sofa in your living room before you click “Buy.” Through examples like this, AI can interpret and enable AR platforms to act on real-time, real-world environments. The end result is more relevant, and delivers more immersive experiences that delight and enlighten the customer journey.
These journeys are becoming increasingly common. AR is quickly becoming part of mainstream culture and AI is already well into its “revolution,” powering countless examples of everyday technology. From identifying and filtering email spam, to finding similar Pinterest “pins,” to deciphering handwriting on checks being deposited via mobile, AI is highly integrated into our days, whether we recognize it or not.
This, though, is just the beginning for both AR and AI. The next step is for businesses, creatives, and experience makers to understand trends and best practices surrounding AR — and, from there, use the power of AI to produce innovative content and consumer experiences. In doing this, brands and content creators can deliver more relevant, immersive, and compelling experiences for a broad customer audience.
AR experiences are already bubbling to the surface in a number of industries and niches, including retail, art, and education. Though diverse in their approaches and applications, these industries are leading the AR/AI charge and, with it, creating incomparable engagement opportunities for their consumers, students, and users. Here’s how:
