When people watched Sci-Fi or Fantasy movies in the past, they dreamed about the opportunity to be a part of these worlds. Meanwhile these dreams can become true. All the fantastic ideas from these movies are now available in reality. This makes it for almost everyone possible to interact with most of their senses in a fantasy world. To make this possible two different technologies are responsible: Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.
What is Virtual Reality?
Virtual Reality is an artificial, computer generated simulation or recreation of a real live environment or situation. The screen is powered by a computer, a gaming console or mobile phone. Controllers or glasses let the people interact with an artificial world in an intuitive way.
What is Augmented Reality?
Augmented Reality is a similar technology, but it takes the view of the real world and adds digital information.
Examples in the real world
Last year, there was this “Pokemon Go” hype. Everyone was outside and trying to catch a Pokemon with their mobile phone. This app was created by using augmented reality technologies and it is an example, that the new technologies could be used by a wide range of different customers. People using these kind of apps do not have to pay an extensive amount of money to be able to use these technologies. Nowadays you do not need to be a computer expert to understand how these technologies work. But AR is not only changing the life of average persons. Many companies now begin to create VR and AR campaigns. For example a Makeup-Mirror, that uses Augmented Reality to let the customers see how they would look with Makeup on or data glasses that take you to your dream destination using Virtual Reality.
Another example is the IKEA catalogue. Via AR you can see the virtual furniture in your living room.
A new way of storytelling
Maybe VR is going to be the new way of storytelling, because this reality can easily be used with smartphones or special VR devices. A Samsung VR Gear headset costs only about 70 Euro. But AR can be used even more easily with almost every smartphone and tablet without needing any sort of headgear. It also can give customers the possibility to buy articles directly out of a catalogue via an app. In this case products could be promoted in a successful way in popular magazines. Both technologies are a new ways for companies all around the world to interact with their customers.
Future?
At this moment media concerns are investing in Startups and hardware which develop and provide AR and VR content. Many of them seem to think that e-commerce using AR will grow. They also seem to think that haptic technology will allow VR to impact the body as well as mind. A concerning point from the customers view is the security regarding private data. From a company’s view both technologies can be a big financial risk, because at the moment it is very expensive to produce such content. But what can be securely said is that,both AR or VR grant the opportunity to change the future advertising market in a huge way. At the moment AR seems to get ahead of VR in terms of being used by companies, just because it is easier to integrate AR sequences in present campaigns. For companies it opens new ways of letting the customer experience products which are otherwise hard to show. But only time will show us if Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality will change the advertising market and if how much.
Maybe in a few years, you can go shopping in this way:
Viktoria Baier, Sarah Fuchs, Regina Reinecke, Adriana Vratonjic, Ju Hyun Yoon
Sources:
http://www.livescience.com/53392-virtual-reality-tech-uses-beyond-gaming.html
http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/augmented-reality/10-examples-augmented-reality-retail/