Augmented Reality placement — inhouse R&D project

Story

Augmented reality application for showcasing interior design
Three user-friendly and easy-to-use products with clean, responsive design and optimized for viewing on any device for a non-profit organization.

About Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality presents an entirely new way to engage and expand retailers’ abilities. The possibilities of Augmented Reality are endless, especially when combined with the ever-evolving wireless technology, which enables the integration of mobile devices and home appliances to provide an enhanced connected experience for the end-users.

Combined studies by McKinsey, World Economic Forum, and Goldman Sachs forecast that AR and VR will grow incrementally, reaching as high as 50% in 2025. The creative market potential of AR is also pegged to be in the range of 4 to 27 Billion USD.

There are a lot of popular industries for AR. E-commerce can grow a business’ conversion rate. Gaming is a fast-growing part of AR. Manufacturing. Beauty, where Augmented Reality is usually used with other technologies such as computer vision and image recognition. Visualization, like IKEA mobile app. Tourism and even Data mining.

There are a couple of ways to implement Augmented Reality

• AR Core & AR Kit

AR Core (Google) and AR Kit (Apple) are the best-known libraries. We could develop AR apps in their native environment thanks to using those libraries. But, developing apps natively limits our app to either Android or iOS.

• Unity

Fortunately, there’s a way to make cross-platform AR apps. Unity game engine allows us to use those libraries in conjunction. AR Foundation library consists of AR Core and AR Kit made specifically for Unity engine to be a cross-platform solution. This way, there is no need to split the development on Android and iOS.

• AR on Web

Recently, Google presented a way to implement AR into a browser, which is revolutionary. No need to download a bulky app from the store. Just open a page in the browser, and you are ready for the AR experience directly from your website. Sure, this simplicity has its drawbacks. Its functionality is limited, and the experience is not as fluid as using the app. But, it’s perfect for simple tasks (displaying a model of a product) without the hassle of downloading the app.

• Vuforia

Vuforia is a popular SDK for industrial and enterprise apps. It’s also well-integrated with Unity. In addition, it introduces an excellent image marker functionality, which allows augmenting virtual objects on top of real images.

• Other

There are a bunch of other less popular AR libraries and frameworks, which also serve a great purpose.

AR is a great visualization tool for customers.

We wanted to share one of our projects, which works as a demo for a furniture business. The app allows users to rearrange virtual furniture in the room using AR, a great visualization tool for customers interested in furniture shopping. Though, the furniture rearrangement is not the only purpose this app can have. It could be anything from flowers to bikes and cars, etc.

The app we’ve demonstrated was made using Unity engine and AR Foundation library. As we made it using a cross-platform framework, it could be deployed as an Android or iOS app. In our app, the flow of adding furniture models to the world consists of scanning the available surfaces, then selecting the models and augmenting the world with them. We wanted to make it as user-friendly as possible, so we approached a scanning phase in a way so it minimizes input error.

We noticed that some apps allow placing objects in the world after scanning the first available surface, which introduces the problem of scanning the wrong surface. After all, our living space doesn’t consist of the floor as the only horizontal surface. The app allows users to scan all available surfaces and select the suitable one for furniture arrangement. The app has an intuitive catalog of furniture, allowing users to search the items by category.

Reliable web app in a few weeks

As a result, Vstorm created a web application using the best practices in Javascript frameworks. It allowed a reliable web app that WOŚP can reuse for the annual non-profit events. The Vstorm also supported WOŚP during the event to ensure that everything went evenly. P.S. even the President of Poznaт city participated.

What could you get with this technology?

● Increase the engagement of potential customers
● Visualization helps also grow the conversion rate
● 40% of shoppers said they would be willing to pay more for a product they can view using AR.
● 72% of people said they purchased something they weren’t planning on buying after an AR experience.
● Being better than your competitors, who don’t use new technologies in the decade of industry 4.0.