How To Create Augmented And Virtual Reality Implementations For Retail

By Shaun Kirby, Chief Technology Officer, Rapid Prototyping, Cisco

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been growing in popularity among consumers and are currently poised for explosive growth in the retail industry. Forward-thinking VARs and systems integrators (SIs) can find success by jumping on this trend early to help retailers create their AR and VR implementations. Having worked with AR and VR technology partners and retail customers, I wanted to share some of the best use cases I’ve seen, as well as advice for how VARs and SIs can educate their retail customers and bring these initiatives to life.

1. Delivering Hyper-Personalized Recommendations
By combining AR with analytics, VARs and SIs can help retailers provide hyper-relevant recommendations to customers in real-time in a fun and immersive way. When combined with customer insights gained from analytics solutions, AR technologies can make recommendations more personalized and better integrated into the customer’s shopping experience by presenting just what they need, right in their field of view, at just the right time. For example, a person with diabetes or a food allergy could use an augmented reality app on their smartphone while in the grocery store to quickly and easily find items that fit their personal dietary restrictions. By simply holding their smartphone in front of their field of view, AR technology can highlight specific items on the shelf that fit their personal needs, display information on the source of the ingredients, or how an item was produced. The convenience of having this information displayed on their smartphone automatically in front of them as they shop provides a superior customer experience over having to research individual products manually.

2. Visualizing How A Product Will Look
Some of the most exciting use cases for AR are those that help shoppers visualize how an item will look on them, or how it will look in their own home. Lego augmented reality kiosks show consumers how the kit will look when fully assembled, and IKEA offers an AR app that shows consumers how items from the store’s catalogue would look in their own homes. AR styling mirrors such as the Snap Fashion smart mirrors used at the London retailer The Dandy Lab allow shoppers to virtually “try on” outfits without getting undressed. Customers can even see how an item would look when paired with other items that may not be available in the store; then order those items for home delivery.

3. Creating An Immersive, Endless Aisle Concept
VR technologies take the experience a step further by creating entirely immersive, 3D environments. This makes them especially well-suited to helping consumers experience products or full environments they otherwise would not be able to. VR also serves as an excellent way to bring virtual, remote experts “face to face” with consumers in a realistic way to provide advice, share product expertise, or up-sell goods and services.

For example, VadaBing, a company that specializes in creating virtual reality solutions for the retail industry, is working with a leading office furniture retailer to help it solve a unique challenge. The retailer has more than 30,000 SKUs of office chairs, but can only fit about 30 different SKUs in their stores. The retailer felt conversion rates are lower than what they could be if it could showcase its full product line in the stores. Furthermore, experience taught the retailer sales could increase if they had experts available in the stores to describe the features of each chair and explain to shoppers the differences between a $50 office chair and a $250 one. However, staffing an expert in each store would be cost prohibitive. By providing a VR experience in the store to guide shoppers through all the options to find their ideal chair, this retailer believes conversion rates could increase significantly. They can even bring remote experts into the virtual reality session to answer questions or up-sell products. This type of “endless aisle” approach, with superior realism and virtual experts available on demand, could be a game changer for many segments of retail.

In another example, a department store VadaBing is working with has created a dedicated section within the store where shoppers can put on a VR headset and walk through an entire virtual home outfitted with the home goods and furnishings sold by the retailer. Customers can walk through and experience different variations on each room, seeing how the décor and items from the store’s catalogue can all come together, or viewing different home design styles and the season’s latest trends. The department store can not only display much more in a smaller footprint, but also show it in a more realistic, immersive way. With department stores like Macy’s closing hundreds of locations recently, VR offers a cost-effective way for retailers to let their customers experience all available products within smaller storefronts. Moreover, early experience shows sales per square meter can increase as much as 10 times when retailers use virtual reality technologies.

Recommendations
To successfully bring these types of initiatives to life, VARs and SIs will need to help retailers combine AR and VR applications and endpoints with other technologies and capabilities:

• Retailers will need an agile infrastructure, founded upon scalable data centers or cloud, to better digitize, collect, filter, and analyze vast amounts of data and to be able to create new AR and VR applications quickly.
• Content quality is paramount, so working with top user experience and application design talent is key.
• Content Management systems will be tremendously important for managing all the 3D and digital assets used in AR and VR.
• Guided selling software and collaboration platforms are an important part of successful VR initiatives. Guided selling software can change the inventory that the shopper is seeing in the 3D environment in real time, based on what the customer is looking for. Collaboration platforms such as Cisco Instant Connect, Cisco Spark and video collaboration technologies, and Cisco Contact Center enable the retailer to bring real people — remote experts — into the VR environment at the right point in time to help the customer or close the sale.

Most importantly, VARs and SIs should take an agile approach to AR and VR, quickly trying and refining new ideas in rapid iteration to see what works best for their retail customers.

As their popularity grows, AR and VR solutions will become important tools enabling retailers to increase customer engagement and drive sales. By helping bring together the right combination of technologies and capabilities to retailers, VARs and SIs can position themselves for early success in what is sure to be a fast-growing trend in the increasingly competitive and digitized world of retail.

As CTO for Rapid Prototyping at Cisco, Shaun Kirby is responsible for sensing and evangelizing the key trends that will disrupt and transform the business world. Working across industries, he incubates game-changing solutions to propel customers ahead of the curve, while leading the interlock between the field and Cisco Engineering and Research and Development.

Kirby’s current role is backed by years of deep industry experience. Prior to his role as CTO, he led Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group Innovations Architecture Practice, which developed robust reference architectures for visionary solutions.

Before joining Cisco, Kirby served as the Chief Architect for Vitria Technology's Professional Services team. Kirby has also served as a trusted advisor to CIOs, CTOs, and other technology executives, beginning with his extensive experience as a management consultant at Deloitte. Kirby holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Physics from Princeton University, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology.