Enhance Your Shopping Experience on IKEA Place
When IKEA launched their augmented reality App called IKEA Place in 2017, it gave customers the opportunity to virtually see, personalize and compare furniture with various choices and accurate scale on their smartphone. Nowadays more and more companies have added this function on their App to enhance customer experience and engagement as a marketing strategy.
Say Hej to IKEA Place — YouTube
What is AR and how does it work? AR (Augmented reality) is an enhanced version of the real physical world that is achieved through the use of digital visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered via technology. Users are able to see the real world on the camera with digital augmentation added on it. The technology behind is quite sophisticated. Usually AR is used on smartphones, but it also can be placed on eyeglasses and headsets. One of the most famous examples on mobile devices is Pokémon GO which allows players to interact with Pokémon in a real-world environment.
There are two types of AR which are marker-based and marker less. Marker-based AR uses image recognition as a trigger to identify objects that have been preprogrammed into your AR device or app. Marker less AR means nothing has been preprogrammed into your device and seeks for patterns, colors, or other features to recognize.
IKEA Place is a marker-less App, and you can simply place any furniture on the list which contains over 3000 products including big items like sofa, bed to small accessories like lamps and frames. After you pull the item out, you can rotate, change color and even interact with it. For example, if you place a lamp on a desk, you can touch it to see how it looks if it lights on.
In fact, IKEA used to struggle with e-commerce sales partially because of its slow adoption of digital and AR App really changed its position in the industry, and they see the potential in this aspect. The online sales reached 5.9 billion dollars in 2020 from 1.6 billion dollars in 2016.
I think the trend of augmented reality will be more widespread in the marketing industry because the technology is getting more matured. IKEA Place only launched on Apple for ios11 because of its ARkit features and now the App is also available on Android. After lockdown in 2020, online shopping became popular, and people realized its convenience and efficiency. AR technology definitely helps increase customers’ demand and continuously enhance their online experience.
