It’s Too Risky for Brands to Stay on the Sidelines of Augmented Reality

The people who make and create AR are getting consumers excited about the possibility of AR on a mass scale. Consumers are using and trialing it, but I don’t know if the excitement goes the other way, and consumers are seeking out AR utilities or entertainment.

I think of AR and a brand’s presence in AR similar to the way we thought of the internet 15 years ago. People back then had a hard time understanding why their brand needed a website and were asking questions like, ‘What good is it going to do for me?’ and ‘What return on investment am I getting?’

We talk a lot about AR and the contextual brand. When AR takes off, your digital presence will be everywhere and it will become your product. For example, take a KitchenAid stand mixer. Sitting on a shelf, you can learn quite a bit about it, but when you apply an AR layer to that stand mixer, the product comes to life. You can see it work and interact with it, or change the colors and try different attachments.

Essentially, it's duplicating our real environment by scanning the world and turning it into an interactive layer. For example, right now, it would be like if you were going to pull something up and learn about it by Googling it. In addition to the data, there would be the actual physical manifestation of the world—a real presence.

In terms of use and scale, AR is going to bypass VR exponentially—we won’t think of AR as a channel but more so just core to everything we do. Whether it’s mapping or finding information, there’s much more volume to the AR experience. We’ll have 10 or 20 AR experiences a day, and VR is still going to be like your TV or Playstation console where you’re choosing to sit down and play the game.

In five years, I absolutely think we will have a virtualized version of our real world. The big game changer will be the combination of AR and computer image recognition with geolocation awareness. Whether we still use our smartphones or head-mounted AR displays, the concept of entering text to get information is going to change to pointing your camera at something you want to learn about and retrieving the information that way. There will be a shift from text entry to more visual entry.