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Augmented Reality Shopping Service Launched

Augmented reality is going shopping.

Having been used for all kinds of things ranging from chasing characters through Pokémon Go to tapping into companies like Ikea to visualize what a piece of furniture would look like in a home, augmented reality is now being tried out for shopping, in a big way.

KT Corp., the largest telecommunications company in South Korea, has launched the country’s first ever AR-powered mobile shopping service.

The service, called AR Market, gives mobile shoppers an online shopping experience similar to being in a physical store. Products can be viewed via 360-degree AR videos. Lifestyle products, fashion and consumer electronics are featured.

Plans are to add next-generation technologies, featuring AR, artificial intelligence and 3D modeling.

Augmented reality has been used effectively for showing products in homes before making a purchase, but this approach moves the entire shopping experience into augmented reality.

Rather than using augmented reality to bring individual products to a specific location for visualization, this approach takes the consumer into the entire shopping environment through AR.

Augmented reality has more long-term potential than virtual reality, as I wrote about here recently (Augmented Reality Seen As Beating Out Virtual Reality). This shopping program is yet one more reason why.

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