If you revisit old end-of-year roundup tech trend articles, the ones that predict which technologies will break into the mainstream the upcoming year, you’ll notice two things: 1) most of us are demonstrably bad at predicting the future (myself included), and 2) augmented reality was a ‘hot new tech trend’ in 2018, 2017, and all the way back to 2016.
Augmented reality is not a rising technology anymore. It’s here. You know what it is, you’ve seen it in your everyday life (whether that’s a Snapchat filter or Pokemon Go), and you may even have already been asked to design an application for it. If not, there’s a high chance you will be soon—users of AR technology are expected to hit the billion mark by 2020, and there are currently over 500 AR companies listed on the startup database AngelList.
So how do you design for an application that uses augmented reality? What are the best practices, what obstacles will you face, and most of all, how can you ensure you’re getting the most out of the tech, especially in an ecommerce use case? Let’s dive in.
Why use augmented reality in ecommerce?
In case you’ve missed it, augmented reality describes the combination of real-life input, stimuli, or environs with computer generated ones. Though it’s often bucketed with virtual reality, VR replaces the analog world completely, while AR augments it, melding the real and the digital to create something new. Again, you’ve almost definitely seen it in recreational or gaming applications, but why use it in ecommerce?
Read More: Designing For Augmented Reality
