Amazon launched AR app to show you before shopping

Amazon on Wednesday unveiled an augmented reality feature in its iOS shopping app that shows customers a 3-D rendering of how a given product will look in their home or workspace before they order it. 

AR View offers the ability to view thousands of products for the home or office – including furniture, electronics, toys, games, home décor and more – in augmented reality.

The retailer before has dabbled with using AR technology in its app, but only in the form of AR stickers. These “shoppable stickers” were not that useful, as they represented a limited product set and were designed in an almost cartoonish way with big white borders that made them seem more like real stickers.

But augmented reality gives you a good sense of a product’s dimensions and a decent idea of its color. And that will in some cases be enough to push an undecided shopper into completing a purchase online they otherwise wouldn’t have. At Amazon’s scale, even a slight increase in a purchase conversion rate leads to real revenue gains.

A number of retailers have recently added AR shopping features to their websites and apps, including Target, Wayfair, and IKEA.

Like IKEA’s implementation, Amazon’s new AR View feature takes advantage of Apple’s ARKit – software that allows third-party developers to more easily add AR functionality to their mobile apps. For this reason, AR View in the Amazon app will only work on the iPhone 6S or higher, on devices running Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 11.

In the screen that appears, you can swipe through a top menu to choose from various categories, like “living room,” “home décor,” “bedroom,” “kitchen,” “electronics,” and “toys and games.” There’s even a “top picks” section which currently features Echo devices, among other things.

In the AR View screen, you can also move and rotate the items to see them in a full 360-degree view, notes Amazon. The addition of AR View is rolling out now to iOS devices, and was announced alongside news of Amazon’s Black Friday Deals Store launch.

In the announcement, the retailer highlighted that it now has a number of ways to shop Amazon beyond AR, including from its curated stream at Interesting Finds, via real-world “Treasure Trucks” in cities, through brick-and-mortar Amazon Books stores, via its lists, guides, and handmade shop, both online and on mobile.