Augmented reality is a growing part of the retail and travel experience

Augmented reality and technology Shopping trends

Augmented reality and technology Shopping trendsThere have been a growing number of success stories that are encouraging companies to try more.

 

photo via www.zaptap.com

A recent success story using augmented reality in China is having a growing number of airports adopt AR technology as a part of the high tech travel shopping experience around the world.

Mobile commerce has become increasingly popular among travelers and commuters.

It hasn’t just been limited to augmented reality. The Frankfurt Airport has used QR codes on a wall to give travelers the opportunity to use their smartphones to shop duty free, using their smartphones by scanning barcodes on a wall. This wall has been called the

Heinemann Duty Free, and has helped to show how successful m-commerce can be within the German Airport. Those consumers simply need to scan the barcodes for the products that they want to buy, so that they can add them to their shopping carts and then pick them up a quarter of an hour later at the collection point.

Similar experiences using augmented reality, QR codes, and other mobile technology are popping up everywhere.

Tesco, for instance, created its experience far before the German airport had its shopping mall. It established its own smartphone friendly purchasing experience in 2011 in South Korea. This was the Homeplus virtual subway store. A year later, in August, Tesco created a comparable experience for shoppers at Gatwick Airport in London.

The retail sector is increasingly discovering that there are many untapped opportunities in the world of mobile commerce, and that all they need to do is appeal to consumers with smartphones at moments when they have time to kill. These high tech, digital services are proving to be quite the draw to travelers and commuters.

China has created the most recent among these experiences, and has chosen “invisible stores” using augmented reality, instead of barcodes. These are being created all over the country. They have further digitized the experience because no physical store is required in order to sell the products using AR technology.

The first one, Yihaodian (which means “number one”) opened in October 2012, and there are now more than 1,000 of these virtual augmented reality locations in Shanghai alone.

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