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AR shopping continues to sit at the opportunistic fringes of consumer commerce. It includes everything from product spinners in eCommerce to virtual try-ons and dimensional product visualization using your smartphone camera. It’s all about boosting buyer confidence.
We’re seeing ample investment from AR-first players like Snap, which continues to infuse virtual product try-on functions into Lens Studio. Then there are retailers themselves leaning into AR, such as IKEA and its Place App, which lets users virtually place furniture in their home spaces.
In the same retailer boat is Walmart. Its recently-launched virtual showroom feature lets users outfit a room with various items. This includes a virtual staging area, with a sidebar where items can be dynamically dropped in for users’ rapid prototyping in their room-design endeavors.
The idea is to expand beyond other immersive shopping products that focus on one item at a time. With a full-room UX, users can get a more multi-dimensional understanding of how colors and styles play off each other. For Walmart, it could be a clever Trojan horse to boost basket sizes.
Future Proofing
Stepping back, Walmart’s virtual showroom is just one of several AR efforts in play. In fact, this is the company’s sixth such project in the past two years – some of which we’ve covered – from furniture visualization to cosmetics try-ons. Altogether it signals a long-term commitment to AR.
Perhaps more telling than user-facing features is the fact that Walmart has developed its own full-blown AR platform. Known as Retina, it powers all of the company’s AR shopping projects. One doesn’t invest in building a bona fide platform if they aren’t all-in on a given technology.
That investment is driven by conversion boosts from virtual try-ons – a result of strengthening buyer confidence. Similarly, it can lessen return rates as shoppers have a better sense of what they’re getting. And it all aligns with habits of the increasingly spending-empowered Gen Z.
Zeroing in on that last part, we’ve learned from discussions with Snap that Gen Z represents about $3 trillion in collective purchasing power. They’re camera-native and increasingly expect immersive experiences in their shopping. So this is a future-proofing move for Walmart.
Familiar Cycle
The broader effect of all the above will be accelerated AR adoption. It’s a familiar cycle: early adopters – Walmart in this case – offer a technology and condition user behavior. That behavior grows into expectation, after which other retailers are forced to adopt to stay competitive.
Meanwhile, Walmart is thinking bigger by examining how AI fuels AR shopping. In fact, it could be a force multiplier in streamlining experience creation. This is currently an expensive bottleneck, including generating accurate 3D product models with color and texture variations.
The key term above is “generate,” as that’s what AI is becoming very good at. Rather than utilizing photogrammetry – the traditional process of stitching together multi-angle HD photography – generative AI could accelerate and lower costs by extrapolating 3D product models.
That’s a critical step when you’re talking about Walmart-scale product catalogs. But beyond the Walmarts of the world, it’s also about unlocking AR for smaller players. The question is how long that will take, and if AI’s democratization effects can speed up the adoption cycle.
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