#Vcommerce #AugmentedReality #ArtificialIntelligence
Our next in-deth retail technology sector report will look at developments in "immersive retail".
Due to its young age, immersive retail is a diffuse concept overlapping several different well-defined technologies, including Holograms, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, Smartphones, Headsets, 3D Television sets, and much more.
What is common is that innovation in the immersive retail space accelerated following the launch of smartphones in 2007.
The ecosystem of software that has to emerge for immersive retail to work as ideally as we think it should (watch this space for a definition) are pentiful. For retailers to create 3D versions of their goods and then to transfer these into a reasonably realistic look and to use it takes a lot of effort and numerous pieces of software. However, the process to serve 3D imagery and to include some level of AR/VR has become far easier with the introduction of XR tools such as Apple's ARKit, Google's ARCore and Mozilla's WebXR (there are about 10 different suppliers of these SDK's).
One of the more interesting developments has been these SDK's and that they allow internal IT departments the luxury of experimenting with AR and get an idea of how it might work for them and their customers. Compare this to the past where you get an AR experience and that's it.... no leverage on changing the output, etc as it has been going through all the various software packages, etc.
Oh, and on the question if a video screen in a physical store constitutes immersive retail? Watch this space (again) is all we can say...