The Retail Innovators Guide To AR/VRHow to collaborate with even the most skeptical

colleagues to bring retail tech innovations to market

CONTENTS

03. Innovation Can Be a Long and Lonely Road

04. Lay it All Out: The State of Customer Experience in Retail

05. The PIONEERS Framework: 8 Steps to Implementing AR/VR for Retail

06. Find Your Footing

07. Build Momentum

08. Make it Measurable, Accessible

09. Test and Scale

10. What Success Looks Like: Retail

11. What Success Looks: Homebuilding

12. What Success Looks Like: Model Home Tours

13. You’re Ready. So Are We.

THE RETAIL INNOVATORS GUIDE TO AR/VR3

Innovation Can Be a Long and Lonely Road

You’ve seen the future. You know what needs to be done. So, why isn’t everyone else on board?!

Selling innovative ideas into a big organi-zation is like pushing green eggs and ham. Successfully implementing retail technology innovation takes more than having a good idea – or being right.

To research, plan, convince, align and gather the support of your colleagues is no small feat.

If you have an innovative idea that includes Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR), there’s a chance that it may initially sound far-fetched to your colleagues. “How can this benefit us?” they’ll ask. “Is the technology ready?”

But, once you show them how AR/VR can change your business and drive new revenue, your colleagues will thank you. Because it turns out that you were right all along, and they DO like green eggs and ham after all! Here’s how to identify your path to success with AR/VR.

THE RETAIL INNOVATORS GUIDE TO AR/VR4

Prefer to shop in-store so they can “touch and feel” products before buying

Lay it All Out: The State of Customer Experience in Retail

What Do Shoppers Want?Shoppers like heading to the store, but don’t often enjoy the experience once they get there. Here’s what customers say they want from retailers.

1TimeTrade, Capgemini

Mobile and e-commerce have created a retail reality where shoppers expect a combination of personalization and convenience. Not only do they want extensive product selections, but they also look for customization and instant gratification. When it comes to convenience, a drive to the store can lose out to free two-day shipping or instant ordering.

You can break retailers today into two cate-gories: tech companies innovating in retail, like Amazon and Wayfair, or traditional retail-ers trying to improve customer experience so

they can compete on something other than brand, selection, location and price.

In the latter group, office supply retailer Staples now offers co-working space in some of its Massachusetts stores. In Man-hattan, retailers launch temporary pop-up shops to reach customers in the right location. And, of course, Amazon recently opened brick-and-mortar bookstores. The company is also considering plans to open physical stores to sell furniture and home appliances.

Offering everything from shops-within-a-shop to live entertainment, retailers are trying to make stores the place to be.

Technology can help, especially Augmented and Virtual Reality. With AR/VR, companies can create mixed commerce experiences that are more fun and engaging while eliminating friction on the way to a purchase.

85%

64%71%75%60%

Are frustrated by the lack of in-store guidance and demos from associates

Find it difficult to compare products when shopping in-store

Want the ability to check product availability before heading to the store

Want their store visit to be a social experience with friends and family

THE RETAIL INNOVATORS GUIDE TO AR/VR5

The PIONEERS Framework: 8 Steps to Implementing AR/VR for Retail Incorporating AR/VR into retail isn’t as easy as setting up a few headsets and calling it a day. To deliver the best customer experiences, retailers need to learn how to maximize this technology.

That’s why Marxent has developed an eight-step process that takes an AR/VR project from curiosity, conception and iteration through to a proven concept. Based on experience earned working on hundreds of projects across several industries, our PIONEERS framework is the recipe for a successful implementation.

If you’re one of the pioneering retailers who’s decided to incorporate Augmented and Virtual reality in your business, this guide is for you.

A new retail format where Augmented and Virtual Reality blend traditional brick and mortar stores with e-commerce. Mixed commerce unites online, in-store and at-home shopping into one confidence-building, awe-inspiring visual journey, leading to greater customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Benefits include:

Prepare by getting team buy-inPIONEERS

What is Mixed Commerce?

Learn how mixed commerce makes a difference in retail

Endless aisles. Show all SKUs, not just inventory, in AR/VRConfiguration. Design complex products in AR/VR

Better displays. Pre-visualize shelvesOmnichannel. Complement other channels

Drive higher conversion. Create stickiness, convert to sale

Imagine the full, long-term project

Offer a demoNarrow down use cases

Establish what success looks like

Embrace the customer journeyReady to test use cases

Shift from development to implementation

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Find Your FootingWhat to Know

About 3D Modeling

You’ve got a great idea to use AR/VR, but how do you take it from concept to reality?

As with any emerging technology, you have to get your coworkers to fall in love with the idea as early as possible.

Address all concerns — cost, logistics and even technophobia — head-on to avoid a key player vetoing the idea further down the line. Your stakeholders and decision-makers must understand the intrinsic value of the idea and how it will pay off for the organization in the long run.

Companies tend to think in three- to six-month fiscal increments, but if you’re looking to do something innovative, you’ll need to break out of short-term thinking. Experimenting with new tech takes vision, leadership and determination, plus a dash of realism.

Innovative people are often said to have their head in the clouds, but they’re actually taking a longer view than average. Picture how AR/VR might deliver value to your business over the next 12, 24 or 48 months. With that view, you’ll be able to see how your vision complements, rather than conflicts with, your company’s short-term goals.

Learn more about 3D modeling for VR

Most companies aren’t ready or equipped to create content for AR/VR, but there’s an industry devoted to the rapid creation of high-quality 3D models. 3D assets are not just for your AR/VR project, they can also be used for photo replacements (at one-fifth or one-tenth the cost of traditional photography), e-commerce content, quality assurance and 3D printing.

Prepare Imagine

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Build Momentum

Open with a demo for stakeholders. Despite being buzzed about for years, most people have never seen the inside of a VR headset or messed around with an AR app. Seeing is believing, and you’ll generate more buy-in when you allow stakeholders to interact with the tech you’re proposing. Many products currently on the market can provide a little bit of a “wow factor” to stir your co-workers’ imagination.

What do you need to start an AR/VR project? Be prepared to share the following assets with your technology partner:

Project Preparation

A touchscreen showroom brings VR to life without a headset

After the demo, your team will be inspired to come up with new AR/VR applications for your business. Brainstorming is great — encourage everyone to share ideas. From there, narrow your options. Do you want to go AR or VR? If VR, which platform will you develop for? How much will these ideas cost? What’s actually possible right now? Working through these questions will help your team arrive at a proposed project that’s feasible and cost-effective.

Offer

Narrow

Brand guidelinesBusiness rulesBrand font filesAnimation references

Hotspot content and placementHigh-res images and logos3D model specificationsVideo specifications

Make it Measurable, Accessible

Define success early in the process, and stick with that definition. Keep in mind that no product is ever “complete” when shipped, and AR/VR is a technology that’s constantly changing, growing and improving. You can take learnings from an initial project to improve results in subsequent projects.

Embrace the customer experience. The best technology in the world is useless if it fails to make the buying process easier and more enjoyable. Find ways to incorporate AR/VR as a natural part of the buying process, not an unwanted intrusion by technology.

Establish Embrace

AR/VR AnalyticsBy providing new insights into how shoppers configure and interact with products and spaces, AR/VR will also introduce a variety of new metrics. Here’s just a few potential AR/VR metrics that will close gaps in how we measure engagement in physical and even online retail environments.

VR empowers customers to visualize their dream products and living spaces. In time, data could clarify sources of inspiration on a demographic or individual basis. For example, you might find that younger visitors to a virtual hotel tour walk away feeling “inspired” to buy certain furnishings or décor, but few actually convert to sales. Such insight could be valuable for marketers.

VR lets you track and test specific interactions — like gaze, touch, sharing, even smelling — against variables like texture or product type. That provides insight into the meaning behind interactions. Does a longer gaze translate to higher sales? Do sales improve if a customer stands a certain distance from the product? Does sharing on social lead to more conversions?

VR will provide insight into how consumers want to configure spaces and products. For example, you might learn that customers spend most of their time looking at the breakfast nook in a model kitchen, or customizing seat options on a motorcycle. This insight could validate current product offerings or suggest entirely new configurations to add to your product line.

Retailers understand basic purchase affinities (buying milk with cereal, or sauce with pasta) and some lesser-known ones (diapers and beer, chocolate and advil). With VR, you’ll be able to test and discover pre-purchase affinities, which could put you on the cutting edge of product trends. Imagine being the first TV maker to learn that people want to watch in the shower and need a waterproof TV.

Sources of Inspiration

Configuration Insights Trial and Use Affinity

Product Interaction

See what’s possible with an in-store VR showroom

Test and Scale

Ready your organization through testing, training, internal education and marketing. Remember, if you can’t explain to your coworkers how your new innovation works, what hope are you going to have with the general public? It’s vital that you spend time working out exactly how you want your product to work, and how you want to explain it to the rest of the world.

What Are My Responsibilities? Every enterprise has a role to play in the development of their AR/VR experience. Here are the different assets and resources to provide to your technology partner:

Ready

You did it! You’ve developed a new AR or VR application. It’s been tested. It works. It’s now being implemented. Time to sit back, rest a little bit on those laurels, and pat each other on the back, right? Not even close. Your next step is to plan the move from development to scale, service, support, marketing, training and deployment to the enterprise.

Shift

IT contactsContent source materialContent approvalsDesign supportBranding guidelines

REST Services and APIsUI/UX guidance and approvalsApp submission and marketingProject management support

Give your customers the power of VR from any web browser

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What Success Looks Like: RetailMixed commerce experiences can drive up in-store engagement. The North Face, for example, offered virtual tours of Yosemite National Park and the Moab desert for customers in its Chicago, San Francisco and New York stores – a perfect fit for a retailer specializing in outwear and apparel.

At the same time, AR/VR can help you engage customers away from your physical store, keeping your brand top-of-mind and driving sales no matter where they are. Myer, an iconic retail brand in Australia, launched a virtual department store in partnership with eBay that offers both of those benefits.

An Awe-Inspiring Experience

Consumers download a smartphone app and pop on a branded eBay/Myer headset (called “Shopticals,” the headset resembles a Google Cardboard). From there, customers browse a fully designed virtual department store, using only their eyes to call up information about availability, price and more.

Personalized, Simplified Purchasing

Over time, the app learns and adapts to the customer’s product selection preferences, delivering a more personalized experience. Buying is easy — buyers simply look at the “Add to Basket” button next to their desired item, and the app sends them to eBay to complete the purchase.

AR for Furniture Retailers Fast and flawless, Furnished™ makes it possible to publish realistic 3D models of an entire home furnishings catalog to an expertly designed in-context furniture shopping app that integrates with mobile commerce product pages.

Check out Furnished™ from Marxent

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What Success Looks Like: New Home ConstructionBuying a new home is big decision, and it can take a long time for a buyer to feel confident enough in their purchase to make the jump. Home builders have long used online “virtual tours” to give prospective buyers a better look at their properties via browser, but VR can deliver an even richer experience.

PulteGroup, one of the country’s largest home builders, has created a VR experience that allows home buyers to walk through 3D renderings of two communities in the company’s portfolio. All it takes is a simple VR head-set or a smartphone app at home.

Confident Home Buying Decisions

The VR experience for PulteGroup’s Tampa-based Starkey Ranch uses real-life, existing decorated condos to give buyers an accurate look at their potential home. Customers are able to browse layout, fixtures and appliances, and get a better feel for the physical space in a virtual walkthrough.

Unlimited Inventory and Space

Crucially, VR has helped PulteGroup showcase units when they don’t have a real-life designer-decorated model to show. By using a CGI model in VR to demo their New York-based community, PulteGroup has been able to offer tours of new units, already selling one-third of its 27 stacked condos.

Markerless VR benefitsMarkerless AR is perfect for in-field and direct-to-consumer sales. VisualCommerce™ Mobile features high-fidelity visual-ization, configuration, and dual-mode operation so you can always get the best experience possible.

Learn more about VisualCommerce™ Mobile

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What Success Looks Like: Model Home ToursIn a competitive housing market, buyers have to make purchasing decisions in a hurry. But, they don’t want to jump into a large purchase like a home without first tak-ing a look around the property. Confidence is key to the home buying decision.

That’s where virtual tours can make a big difference. Brookfield Residential offered potential home buyers VR-powered tours of its properties in San Diego County, which allowed the builder to generate interest in properties before construction was complete.

Get Buyers Excited

The ability to offer complete, realistic tours of their properties several months before construction is fin-ished means builders can get prospects excited to buy sooner in the process. At the same time, VR offers customizable décor and design, which could help buyers build the home of their dreams.

Work with Remote Buyers

If a potential buyer can’t make it to an in-person showing, a virtual tour allows them to take a look at their potential home sooner. That helps builders and even real estate agents extend their reach beyond local buyers and shorten time-on-market for more of their properties.

VR for Model Home ToursWhen realism and portability are paramount, VisualCommerce™ Mobile with markerless AR is the perfect fit. Designed to em-power retailers, manufacturers and the in-field salesforce with powerful Augmented and Virtual Reality visualization without the complexity and expense of deploying HMDs.

Learn more about VisualCommerce™ Mobile

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The award-winning suite of solutions for manufacturers, retailers and home builders, VisualCommerce™ brings the

power of Augmented and Virtual Reality to the home design and products shopping experiences.

Talk to a consultant to find out how others are using Virtual Reality to inspire their customers

letstalk@marxentlabs.com727-851-9522

You’re Ready. So Are We.Don’t delay on getting your new mixed commerce experience off the ground. If you’re facing roadblocks, we are ready to face them with you. Marxent has the expertise and technology to help you create amazing in-store experiences that will revolutionize your retail business.

Let’s get it done.

Our complete, ready-to-roll showroom solutions are designed to bridge digital and physical shopping with end-user applica-

tions that are tailored to how you sell, so you can create immer-sive experiences that drive engagement and conversions.