Augmented Reality Brings Touch and Feel to Online Shopping

Online shopping has entirely changed the way that consumers seek out the goods they want. And augmented reality (AR) is bringing touch and feel to the online shopping experience. According to eMarketer during 2010, ecommerce reached $165.4 billion dollars last year. This is 14.8% growth over last year!

But even though online shopping has enabled us to skip the lines, poor dressing room lighting, get what we want at better prices and avoid pushy sales people – there’s often still an inherent desire to actually touch and feel the products we’re interested in buying. Augmented reality and other experiences are changing the way people shop – and making the online shopping experience infinitely more personal.

72% of consumers find ratings and reviews on retail sites very important in the shopping process and another 50% will spend a half hour or more reading reviews about the product they are interested in. Despite this reliance online product information – many still wait to purchase the product in person. Research has shown the consumers are four times more likely to buy a product once they’ve held it in their hands.

What if technology allowed to you virtually “touch and feel” the product you desire from the comfort of your home?

Electronics giant Olympus wanted to see what consumers’ reactions would be if they did just this when rolling out their new SLR hybrid camera. People shopping for cameras typically want to touch the camera, feel its shape, size, how it feels in their hands, where the different controls are located, etc., and, naturally, that has usually required a trip to a brick and mortar store. Knowing this is an important element of the buying experience, Olympus wanted to provide consumers a hands-on opportunity with their new product – without having to head to a retail store.

Olympus’s ad agency, Mullen encouraged the brand to use Total Immersion’s augmented reality (AR) tool, D’Fusion@Home. Since this was a unique product rollout – Olympus and Mullen built a site specifically for this campaign. Consumers went to the site to look at camera specs and go on a product tour. If interested in more in-depth information, consumers were prompted to load the D’Fusion@Home AR plug-in and print out a paper marker. When printed and folded the marker produced a scale-size representation of the camera. The coolest part? Once AR reproduction appeared on the consumer’s screen, key features (shutter button, flash switch, video record etc.) were highlighted with bulls-eye targets that consumers could click to see how they function. Consumers could also set the ‘product’ on a tripod and snap a few digital pictures which they could also share via Facebook. Experience, experimentation, sharing – this campaign pretty much had all the bases covered.

Check out this demo video Olympus provided:

A Demonstation of Olympus Pen Augmented Reality from edward boches on Vimeo.

Combining online shopping with a virtual ‘touch and feel’ opportunity proved to be quite successful for Olympus. More than 22,000 consumers watched the product tour and 51,000 interacted with the product via augmented reality. Although online shopping may make our lives easier, this case study reinforces the fact that products become more memorable when we have a ‘hands on’ interaction at some level.

Much like we mentioned in our recent post about the Picasso exhibit, one of the great things about augmented reality is that it allows more opportunities for consumers to interact and connect with products (whether it’s art, music or consumer goods) regardless of geographic limitations.