Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality technologies will bring opportunities for merchants as consumer adoption grows.

There is high consumer interest to use VR for making purchase decisions while shopping online or in-store.
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While E-commerce and digital marketing have proven to be effective platforms, Virtual Reality (VR) is the next innovative technology that will improve and impact the retail and marketing sectors, with market-foresight advisory firm ABI Research forecasting that VR in retail and marketing sectors is expected to generate US$1.8 billion in 2022.

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Retail and marketing companies have realized that virtual reality technology can be an effective tool to further assist consumers with the purchase process and provide them with the ability to visualize and personalize the products more realistically,” says Khin Sandi Lynn, Industry Analyst at ABI Research.

Automotive companies and travel agencies are already using VR as a marketing tool, with applications such as virtual test drives and 360-degree tours becoming more widespread. E-commerce is another sector with a good potential for VR deployment. Chinese E-commerce company Alibaba has deployed its Buy+ mobile VR platform for better product visualizing. Alibaba integrates its Alipay payment platform to assist consumers making payment while browsing products using Buy+ VR.

“There is high consumer interest in using VR for making purchase decisions while shopping online or in-store. The availability of low-cost VR headsets is another driver of consumer VR use cases for purchasing products,” notes Lynn.

Walmart’s recent acquisition of VR software company Spatialand is another indicator of VR deployment as a retail solution in the future, as is their use of HoloLens for helping better manage their warehouse logistics. Consumers’ awareness together with investment by retailers and brands will drive the VR retail and marketing market.

VR can be used for market research to understand consumer behavior
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Walmart’s recent acquisition of VR software company Spatialand is another indicator of VR deployment as a retail solution in the future
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Furniture and home improvement stores have been early adopters of VR in the retail segment. VR is an effective platform for customers to view furniture, pick different parts, customize products, and/or visualize an item before making a purchase decision, and has been adopted both in-store and online to provide a better shopping experience to consumers.

IKEA and Lowe’s have successfully deployed Immersive Technologies in their stores
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Swedish furniture company IKEA and North American home improvement company Lowe’s are two examples that have successfully deployed it, as are Augment – a French company that Tech Trends met last year in Orlando, Florida, which builds syndicated catalogs of AR-ready products from the world’s major brands like Microsoft, Panasonic, Electrolux, and make it available to all retailers through an AR SDK, supporting ARKit / ARCore.

“The number one issue we’re hearing from retailers launching AR for eCommerce (Amazon, Build.com, Overstock, Wayfair…) is the management of 3D products,” explains the company’s Co-Founder and COO Mickaël Jordan. “It’s expensive, time consuming, and each retailer is basically building its own catalogue of similar AR-ready models of appliances, electronics and furniture. It’s nonsense,” he says.

Some of the key findings in ABI Research’s VR in Retail and Marketing report include:

• VR software and service revenue in retail and marketing will grow at CAGR 102% to generate $1.8 billion 2022.
• E-commerce and digital marketing has shifted the way brand and retailers market the products. VR is the next innovation in retail and marketing sector. The realistic feel provided by VR provides many benefits to retail and marketing; enhanced shopping experience, efficient marketing tool, more effective store management system etc.
• VR can also be used for market research to better understand consumer behavior.
• Furniture stores such as IKEA have deployed VR for product browsing, selection and customization. Lowe’s has another interesting VR deployment which allows shoppers to learn how to install their products.
• E-commerce and other sectors such as travel agencies are also starting to use VR to visualize products or try tours, hotels or flight experience before purchasing product or services.
• VR assists consumers in making purchase decisions, helping retail and marketing companies to achieve greater footfall and decrease returns rates.
• There is great interest from both retailers and consumers to use VR in purchasing process. However, deployment cost can be a challenge for smaller retailers and VR might not be the right platform for older generation consumers who are not yet familiar with the technology.

If you would like to find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Report: VR in Retail and Marketing to Generate US$1.8 billion in 2022 appeared first on Tech Trends.

HoloLens application PickAR promises to save e-tailers millions.

Much has been made of the use of robots to increase efficiency in warehouses – with e-tailers such as Amazon announcing significant investment in that area. But as impressive as those robots might look, they are still extremely expensive, and much better suited for picking large items and crates rather than putting together individual items to be shipped out to customers. For that, you still need to have a human walking around a warehouse for 8 to 12 hours a day, picking each item out of a shelf by hand.

Robots are still very expensive and better at picking large bulk items
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Most of the order picking in warehouses still has to be done by hand
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But a team of students from Georgia Tech believe they can make that manual process a whole lot more efficient: They developed an application called PickAR, which promises to dramatically streamline that process by using HoloLens Mixed Reality technology.

Oculogx has attracted attention from major retailers like Walmart
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Their company – called Oculogx – has already attracted attention from major retailers such as Walmart, and were the runners up in this year’s Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s global student technology entrepreneurship competition.

The team were runners-up in Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition
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The features hands-free barcode scanning and navigation
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The app combines features such as GPS-style mapping and path planning, head-mounted barcode scanning and checklist management into a single hands-free interface. This leaves a warehouse pickers free to use both hands to handle the actual items he needs to pick up, as opposed to managing handheld instruments like a handheld barcode scanner and a clipboard with a checklist.

“In our lab, when we were comparing against other dense picking mechanisms like voice pick, paper pick, and tablet pick, we saw a 37% decrease in the time taken to pick with wearable headsets and an improvement in accuracy,” says Industrial Engineering student and Oculogx Co-Founder Charu Thomas.

She met her Co-Founder Sarthak Srinivas outside the office of Thad Starner (Google Glass’s inventor) at Georgia Tech. As they started talking about their respective mixed reality ideas, they found a common interest in the technology’s supply chain applications – Thomas was looking at maximizing the use of space when packing bins into trucks – so it made sense to join forces and start working together.

Two of the company's Co-founders met outside the Georgia Tech office of Google Glass' inventor
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Microsoft supported the team in developing their idea
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At the time, Wenqi Xian was also working with Srinivas at Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab and she – together with computer science student Cheng Hann Gan – joined the Oculogx team to build their first prototype for HoloHack Atlanta – a HoloLens hackathon sponsored by industrial devices manufacturer ThyssenKrupp.

“Initially, we wanted to build a general mapping application, which could map out a space and then provide directions to get from one place to another within that space. However, while discussing with ThyssenKrupp and Microsoft representatives at the venue, we decided to narrow the scope of the app to warehouses, adding features like barcode scanning and warehouse mapping to focus on improving the efficiency of the order picking process,” explains Gan.

Srinivas had previously studied the logistics of order picking during his research for the Contextual Computing Group (another MR lab he worked in at Georgia Tech) but after the hackathon he started visiting warehouses to get a sense of how order picking actually worked on the ground. Seeing the huge technology gap between what is used in a typical warehouse and what they were working on in the lab convinced them that they were on to something.

“By the time we arrived at the Imagine Cup World Finals in July, we had visited over 20 warehouses and interviewed over 60 people involved in logistics and supply chain relating to our application,” Srinivas recalls.

Based on feedback from judges in the Imagine Cup US Finals – that they would to see the product working in a real warehouse, the next step was to test the app as a paid proof of concept in a real in the metro Atlanta region. This led to them working with Walmart, feeding the company’s historical data into the system and offering them estimates of time savings based on their current operations and the use of Mixed Reality technology in comparison to their current methods.

“We now want to make this a real product rather than just a cool demo,” says Thomas. And Srinivas adds that they have identified several facilities in Europe, Asia, and Australia who have expressed interest in actually piloting the technology, and are in the final stages of deciding which one they will be integrating with for the upcoming proof of concept and pilot which they’re aiming to launch next semester.

Oculogx are also continuing to work together with Walmart, but are not yet disclosing the details of the next phase of the partnership. Given the fact that all the students in the team are now working full-time on product development over the Summer and Srinivas is even taking a break from his studies next semester to focus on PickAR, momentum does seem to be building as more companies are getting wise to the potential of Mixed Reality to increase efficiency and save them money.

This article was originally published on VRScout

This HoloLens App Wants to Save eCommerce Retailers Millions via @alicebonasio https://t.co/StsWjPBitR pic.twitter.com/BcSqiNYVd4

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To find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers bespoke Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Making E-commerce More Efficient with Mixed Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.