Let’s review a few key considerations that will help you define and build an immersive content strategy.
#1 Focus on Content
When building AR content, it’s important to consider the practicality of the model as well as the entertainment value. What message are you trying to get across, and how will you keep your audience engaged with your item? A good place to start is to create an AR model so that your customers can examine the product details, compare it to other items, and better conceptualize the item in their own personal space. This is a great strategy for practical items, but what about use cases involving items that fold, fly, or would be better suited to a video like format to explain the value?
With the recent release of ARKit 3.0 Apple is now supporting AR animation. As an example, you can create an AR drone and use the model to compare and view product details. Alternatively, with a little animation, you can reuse the same model, have the drone flying around and interacting with other items in your environment, and provide your customer with a completely different look and feel to the experience. Being able to A. extract and prolong the longevity of the item so that you are lowering production costs and B. using the same model and presenting it in different ways, enables you to have content that’s fresh and innovative without building everything from scratch.
#2 Who will create your experience?
Augmented reality has reached a tipping point. Businesses of all sizes are starting to understand the importance of capitalizing on this new wave of technology in order to meet consumer buying expectations. But how do we create this content, and where do we get started?
Today, there are two challenges with mixed reality; creating and publishing. Aside from some of the more traditional considerations such as; quality, tools used, resources required, and competence of the artist, it’s important we think about who will help create this experience. We need to be looking for artists specializing in; PBR rendering, texturizing and 3D modeling, but where do you engage these resources? Do you sign a contract with a digital marketing agency? Do you invest in in-house expertise? A lot of large firms with big budgets can afford to hire an agency, but what about the smaller eCommerce sellers? A good strategy would be to outsource the creation to smaller boutique organizations that offer a full service, without commitment, and on a per model basis. You can find designers specializing in the entire AR creation cycle and at an affordable per model price point.
#3 How to publish your content?
Once you’ve found a way to create AR content, its time to consider the next step, how will you deliver the experience to your customers. Do you want them to download your application? Do you want to embed it directly on your website? What platforms will it support and where is your audience most likely going to get the most out of the experience? With AR 1.0 mass adoption was a challenge. Getting a user to download an application or requesting the fulfillment of multiple steps during their buying process, was proven to be extremely costly and difficult to accomplish. For this reason, unless you are a large retailer with a marketing engine, we recommend using a platform agnostic, and browser-based strategy. To offer a seamless experience to the customer you can embed the model directly on your website. When your customer visits your page, they can launch a browser-based experience right from their iOS device!
To learn more about how to create AR content, please visit Vew Inc. Vew is an iOS-based application that allows users to create, manage and publish photo-realistic AR content. By downloading the Vew application, submitting photos of your items, and providing real-time feedback, you can have a browser-based AR experience created for you in just a few days. All this without signing any agency contracts or commitments, and most importantly, without having to allocate any resources and turn this into a project. You can download their application and get started here.