Raphael Thys
The holidays are a critical time for brands to engage with consumers. As one of the most profitable times of the year for many retailers, brands must find new and innovative ways to stay top of mind with customers.
During the 2021 holiday season, U.S. shoppers spent more than $878 billion, with roughly $211 billion of that coming from online sales, up 54.9% compared with the 2019 holiday season. Accelerated by the pandemic, ecommerce has become the new normal for many shoppers. This shift to online shopping significantly impacts brick-and-mortar stores whose success relies on shoppers going into the store. So, to drive more foot traffic, retailers need to rethink the in-store experience and give consumers new reasons to visit and explore the physical location.
One of the ways in which retailers can do this is through augmented reality (AR). Augmented Reality is intrinsically experiential, as it makes users an active participant with the virtual content they engage with in the real world around them.
By taking advantage of the physical space, AR unlocks a location’s digital twin, which can be augmented to create an infinite number of extraordinary experiences. This gives new meaning to a location and engages consumers in an interactive experience that can lead to measurable results. And with web-based augmented reality (WebAR), this can all be achieved in the browser, with no app download required, making it extremely easy and accessible for users to engage with.
Transform everyday locations into experiential destinations
Augmented reality can drive customers to real-world places by converting them into interactive location-based AR experiences.
Launched as a demo for this Halloween season, the “Hell’s Sovereign” WebAR experience created by immersive technology agency, Unbound, aims to drive traffic to the central business district (CBD) precinct in Sydney, Australia. This location-based experience uses AR to reveal the historical city center’s Halloween-themed parallel world and rewards shoppers with discount vouchers for surrounding stores.
As part of the demo, shoppers who visit the CBD precinct can use their smartphone to point their camera at a bronze statue of Queen Victoria to trigger the AR experience. Once activated, shoppers see the statue change into a haunted version of itself, while zombie hands burst up through the ground and a flock of crows land on the statue, completing the spooky scene.
The AR crows are tied to exclusive and limited daily retail offers and only a certain number of crows are spawned each day. This creates a sense of urgency for consumers to visit the statue and encourages them to return.
This experience connects the real world with the digital one by anchoring AR content to locations with unprecedented accuracy and precision using Niantic’s newly released Lightship VPS (visual positioning system) for web technology. This technology enables location-based AR experiences that feel more personal, more meaningful, and more real, and gives users new reasons to explore the world around them.