Econsultancy recently announced the winners of its 2009 Innovation Awards. You have to “see” the winner in the ecommerce category – Glassesdirect.co.uk
Glasses Direct wins for its use of augmented reality tool that allows you to “try on” glasses virtually, and I have to say it looks pretty good, check it out: (email and RSS subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click here).
Not only do augmented reality tools help customers make a more confident decision (and improve conversion rates), they also reduce returned merchandise by reducing the risk of ordering something that won’t look good in real life.
Rich Relevance has a similar product for apparel called “Fashionista” which it demonstrated at the Shop.org Summit in Las Vegas. There’s no doubt Fashionista is an amazing technology and many of the younger female set will find this fun. But superimposing a 2-Dimensional outfit is not the same as trying on a garment — I don’t think augmented reality for apparel will have the same impact on conversion and return rates.
Augmented reality tools are one more stop in the never-ending quest to make online shopping more like offline, and offline shopping more like online.
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Nice feature. The point of “reduce returned merchandise” might be enough alone to yield a good ROI on this, the increased conversion can then be considered an extra bonus. Unfortunately this only fits well to a limited number of product categories; as your example with Fashionista points out.
I will say, even if you need a web cam to use Glasses Direct’s tool, it is pretty amazing.
I have wanted to make a ‘help me select’ tool also, EastBay.com has a pretty good tool for selecting shoes, I may pattern mine after.
The selector tool is on my top 50 things to do for 2010.
GlassesDirect Video Mirror is a great tool, finally showing how Augmented Reality could be useful for your business. Ray-Ban and enjoysunglasses.com also show the same technology, developped by FittingBox, the virtual tryon solutions expert (http://www.fittingbox.com).
This would be particularly great for glasses.
People who wear glasses need their lenses to see.
But, when you try on a frame, it either has no glass or clear glass. So you end up peering at a mirror and guessing.
Microsoft are doing a similar product with Project Natal…
A virtual shop where your avatar can try on clothes from a virtual wardrobe and then purchase them to be delivered to your home.
sounds cool, will have to see if it actually works tho