In this weeks instalment of the Future Series, we contemplate what changes in Augmented Reality technology could mean for your business, and suggest what the future could hold for your marketing plan.
Augmented Reality (AR) has been gradually developing in the past few years. The launch of Pokemon Go caught everyone’s attention to the possibilities of AR, IKEA’s Place app and Amazon’s AR view now allow you to virtually place items around your house before purchasing them, and Snapchat’s Lens Studio even allows you to create your own AR characters and content to amuse and delight.
Currently AR can even help you promote your business. Our friends over at Digital Glare have started specialising in providing Augmented Reality Marketing. From posters and brochures to business cards and billboards, these guys can help you create a campaign where your customers can scan in the AR sign, and then enjoy interactive extra content on their phones. You can even track in detail just how successful the campaign is, this customer data can become priceless.
There is an important disconnect at the moment between this AR technology and the end user, and that is having to download the app to be able to view the interactive technology. We’re hoping in the future, that these kinds of apps will become obsolete as it will be integrated into all mobile phone’s camera software.
Magic Leap One boasts being able to wake up to a Mixed Reality in the very near future, where images and content appear before your very eyes. But with wearable technology which looks, to put it lightly – less than attractive, surely the next step in Augmented Reality will first be to have a more stylish wearable device. When design meets smart, we’re sure to see the AR industry take off.
Near Future:
Hopefully the next steps we will see in AR, is the ability for it to be more interactive. Where gesture control meets the three-dimensional images in front of your eyes, you’ll be able to move graphs around by simply moving your hands. This will revolutionise the ability to create products or designs which are more to aligned what the creator had in mind.
Boardroom presentations could be taken to a whole new level, where meeting participants will be asked to don AR enabled headsets. Presentations will suddenly become more interactive than ever before, with products appearing right in front of audience members. We’d even be interested in the concept of presentation goers to be able to select a part of the presentation which they would like more information about, and next minute the information is downloaded to their phone for future use.
Far Future:
We’re hoping that AR technology will be somewhat of a short cut to living the reality of having three dimensional holographic conversations. With current advancements in synthetic eyeballs, we’re thinking AR enabled contact lenses won’t be too far off in the future – bringing about the wearable technology that will truly become indispensable.
As experts in communications and presentation skills, we’re hoping that this technology will also see digital conversations, be they by phone or workshop presentation, increase in quality, with people becoming more and more comfortable with interacting with each other over the internet, as it truly does feel that the other person is in the room.
We’re also hoping to see marketing campaigns literally come to life – and therefore see the content move from somewhat presentation style to interactive, with customers determining their own marketing experiences and coming out of it with the knowledge that they were looking for. We’re hoping that websites will be replaced with a digital environment, as if you had walked in the door of their business – bringing back the customer relations experience.
Speaking of immersive digital experiences, please join us next week for the last of our future series articles as we discuss Virtual Reality and what it could mean for new opportunities to market your business in the future.
As always, we love hearing from you! So please feel free to comment or drop us a line about your thoughts.