This year's holiday shopping season is shaping up to be fertile ground for augmented reality to show its worth, as both Walmart and Target have crafted immersive experiences designed to engage shoppers in the coming weeks.
Nike has launched an augmented reality design tool at its Niketown store in London that lets shoppers customize sneakers and see their designs on a real product.
Nowadays, with the convenience of online shopping, brick-and-mortar retailers and malls have to work harder to draw shoppers to stores. This year, many of them are turning to augmented reality for assistance.
Big-box retailer Target has been on a bit of an augmented reality advertising shopping spree via Snapchat lately.
Marvel and Walmart are looking to capitalize on the uber-successful Black Panther film with a mobile augmented reality app designed to push the franchise's merchandise.
Lowe's Home Improvement laid another brick in their augmented reality foundation with today's announcement of a new app for Tango-enabled smartphones.
Shopping bags are an ecological nightmare, so many modern shoppers use eco-friendly reusable shopping bags. If you have a stash of eco-friendly bags and want to store them more easily, watch this video to learn a novel way to fold these bags that turns them into a tiny pouch, which you could even still use to hold things if you wanted.
While some companies like IKEA and Lowe's zig towards ARKit to entice shoppers, Target has opted to zag to broader appeal with an augmented reality see-before-you-buy tool for its mobile website.
Now that Lego Movie 2, a film about an imaginary world made of plastic bricks existing parallel to the real world, is in theaters, it's the perfect time to shop for Lego apparel at a store modeled after that world.
Amazon has been toying with the idea of opening physical retail stores for some time now, even opening old-fashioned bookstores in select locations and teasing cashier-less convenience stores. But the online retailer has some new ideas in the works, including implementing virtual and augmented reality into retail home stores.
Shopping: you either love it or hate it. With a tight budget, shopping can become a huge headache for even the biggest shopaholic. We've all been there, and we've all given in to our impulses and bought something we probably shouldn't have. Yet strolling through the mall doesn't have to require a strong will to keep your credit card from entering a downward spiral. You just need to keep your hands to yourself.
Signaling a new direction forward for the company, Magic Leap shook up its executive suite by re-assigning to top leaders to new advisory roles. Meanwhile, a new startup backed by Hollywood executives, tech venture firms, and notable angel investors plans to bring new life to AR for marketing entertainment properties.
After Thanksgiving, there's Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, with stores offering holiday shoppers the best deals they can muster up. This year's Black Friday was practically a one-day warzone, with Target taking on most of the mayhem (see videos below).
Due to the downturn of the economy, many smart shoppers have turned into smart crafters instead. Whether it's making crafts for your home or for friends, crafting saves money (we're talking a $2 craft versus a $50 present for a friend's birthday present).
Cosmetics augmented reality specialist ModiFace appears to be really benefiting from the brand power of L'Oréal, which acquired the company last year.
The cantaloupe is a troublesome fruit for some melon shoppers, because it's a really hard fruit to tell the ripeness of, like most hard-shelled melons. If you've been riddled with how to bring home the ripest and freshest cantaloupe melon, then YourProduceGuy has answers for you. See how to determine the ripeness of this delicious melon.
Black Friday is undeniably the biggest shopping day of the year. Black Friday, which occurs annually the day after Thanksgiving, is also the kickstart of the holiday shopping season, the big bang that leads swiftly to Christmas.
People take their Black Friday shopping seriously. Some of them are even willing to fight over it. Every year the stories get crazier and crazier, and someone always gets hurt (or even killed).
Department store chain Target is the latest retailer to offer an augmented reality cosmetics app for customers to virtually try on lipstick.
Augmented reality was recently named the "Mobile Disruptor of the Year" for 2017 by Mobile Marketer, but the technology is showing no signs of slowing down as we head into 2018. In fact, the technology appears to be gaining momentum.
For some, there's nothing more thrilling than carrying an armful of bags while wandering the mall; for others, there's nothing more annoying. No matter what category of shopper you fit into, the truth is that you aren't always in control of what you buy.
While many retailers have introduced try-before-you-buy features in their apps, Walmart has gone in another direction by bringing shoppers an augmented reality tool to help them compare products they want to buy.
Department store chain Zara is temporarily ditching its mannequins and dressing up its stores with augmented reality experiences featuring virtual versions of real fashion models.
If you've been longing since the '90s for the total Clueless experience of virtually trying on clothes, you missed out by not attending London Fashion Week earlier this year.
When it comes to the athletic footwear retail game, it's just not enough to just sell shoes anymore.
Consumers are chomping at the bit for augmented reality smartglasses from Cupertino's finest, but one market analyst is saying not so fast, Apple fans. Meanwhile, automotive AR is gaining speed, with the latest milestone coming courtesy of a major investment in waveguides by Continental. And although mobile AR apps have already arrived, retailer Target is taking a different approach. So why is Target tinkering with web-based AR? Answers below...
In the weeks following Google's AR toolkit launch last month, the availability of quality ARCore apps has been somewhat limited. That changed on Tuesday, as a flurry of new and updated apps arrived on the Play Store, including some AR experiences available exclusively on Android.
The holidays are here. From the week of Thanksgiving until the end of the year, retailers will be offering massive discounts on your favorite items. So if you're looking for smartphone accessories, this is the time to buy. From Walmart to Best Buy, there are deals everywhere on a host of items.
All Kohl's wants for Christmas is Snapchat augmented reality. In conjunction with a holiday pop-up hosted in New York City from Nov. 7 through Nov. 10, Snapchat ran a sponsored portal lens available to targeted Snapchat users in the AR carousel. The experience gave users the ability to virtually transport themselves to the pop-up.
The Halloween season is the perfect time for telling scary stories, but augmented reality is here to bring the tradition of frightening children to the modern age.
It appears that the Project Aero 3D content development tool isn't the only augmented reality project that Adobe has in the works.
Like Marvel's Avengers, Facebook's Camera AR platform now has a number of new AR superpowers at its disposal, so it is fitting that Earth's Mightiest Heroes have the distinction of displaying them.
To create a destination for coffee connoisseurs, Starbucks has ordered up a venti cup of augmented reality to make the visit more interactive.
Chipmaker Qualcomm introduced the second generation of its Qualcomm Spectra image signal processor (ISP), which has gained capabilities that will enable smartphones to facilitate augmented reality apps.
Verizon will be exclusively selling the ASUS ZenFone AR, which supports Tango (Google's mobile AR platform) and Daydream VR.
At the Google I/O keynote presentation today, Clay Bavor, Vice President of Virtual Reality for Google, shared a number of new initiatives in virtual and augmented reality. This included new services for the Tango platform called visual positioning service, or VPS.
Jeep has now jumped on the AR-retail trend with their introduction of the Jeep Compass Visualizer. Customers can now view and customize a Jeep Compass to their liking, all without a real Jeep even present.
This is a prank me and two friends from my high school did this last summer. We went to Walmart to try pranking shoppers. In this video, we were throwing things in walmart. We took super soft stuffed animals (to make sure we didn't hurt anybody) and threw them over the aisle to try putting things in people's carts. If they didn't have a cart we'd try to land it close to them.
Apple Pay has been available to use in stores, as well as in select apps and websites, ever since its first appearance in iOS 8.1. Now, with iOS 12, there are currently 13 different iPhone models that support Apple Pay functionality without the use of an Apple Watch, and the list of partnered stores that accept Apple Pay has only grown. Here's our always-up-to-date list to keep you in the know.
It's already Halloween and the night is fast approaching. You swore to yourself last year that you wouldn't wait until the last minute again for a Halloween costume, yet here you are on Samhain without a costume… again. All of the costume shops are sure to be crammed with last-minute shoppers, and you don't feel like spending a lot of dough anyway, so what are your options?
