What is Augmented Reality?
AR is a visualization tool; a method of displaying digital objects (including artwork and products) in a viewer’s physical space. Depending on the execution, these manifestations can appear very real. With a click, furniture on a website can appear within a room and be moved around to see how it will look in the viewer’s house. Eyeglasses will appear on the viewer’s face on command, allowing them to change colour and frames with a quick motion. Entire buildings can be made to appear in a specified location, incorporating animated characters that respond to the real and physical environment.
Do I need to install something to make it work?
Until recently, AR required an app to be installed, however experiences can now also be developed to view in anyone’s native web browser for a wider audience. The browser version can be developed at a lower cost, however it lacks the tracking abilities of a dedicated app.
Social Media platforms including TikTok and Snap Chat have AR built in, allowing for an infinitely sharable and trackable experience. As both of these platforms are trusted and available with a wide audience, it is beneficial to have the AR experiences available on one or both of these platforms as well.
TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users, making it the fifth most popular social media platform in the world. The majority of TikTok users are under 30 years old, with a large percentage of those users being between the ages of 18 and 34, and Snapchat has over 443 million daily active users worldwide, with Gen Z users accounting for 51.1% of Snapchat monthly active users in the US.
What good is it anyway?
AR creates additional levels of engagement that will help communicate your brand and products, retain customers, and provide additional reasons for your viewership to share and promote your business and message for some much coveted word-of-mouth adververtising. Use it for educational purposes as well, like illustrating ways to accurately install lighting within the viewers actual space, or creating hands-on tutorials on how to use your rowing equipment. Every interaction is recorded for your benefit, allowing you to use the engagements for everything from product refinements to ROI reports.
