Are you ready for the next wave in design and content creation? Augmented reality is coming… Just kidding, it’s already here.
What is augmented reality?
You might be familiar with virtual reality (VR) - where someone ensconced in a headset is experiencing a world of their own, as you stand by their side and wonder what it is they’re swiping their arms at. Augmented reality (AR) is sort of different. Instead of replacing your environment with an entirely virtual one, augmented reality technology lets you overlay on top of your existing environment a mixed reality experience that can include fantastical modifications to the viewer’s world via colors, text, or objects. AR was once the province of big brands with deep pockets and large development teams. Gucci and Adidas for example, for the last few years have been using AR tech in collaboration with dedicated apps to sell high-end designs. Now, with giant advances in spatial computing over the past few years, AR design software becoming more accessible, and AR development platforms becoming more sophisticated, augmented reality has finally hit a mainstream tipping point. If you’ve ever used a tiktok or instagram filter that turns your head into a unicorn, or puts sunglasses on your face - you’ve already used this technology.
Step 1: Brainstorm a memorable experience
Brainstorming an AR experience (either on your own, with a designer, or with your team) is the epitome of blue-sky opportunity. The most fantastical thing is usually entirely do-able, so you will want to expand your thinking into all the far corners of your imagination. The crazy, the quirky, and the oddball are all fair game, as long as you keep your audience in mind. The wilder, the better. For inspiration, let’s take a look at some branded experiences that were really able to speak to the interests of their customer base in a memorable way.
Gerber baby photo contest
This year, baby food and accessories brand Gerber decided to use an AR effect to promote their annual baby photo contest. They hired AR designer Ben Ursu to create a camera effect that makes the user look like the illustrated logo of the company, sketched in 1928 and highly recognizable among parents. Pictured below is the winning baby, Magnolia, with the camera effect applied. A+ for cuteness! Try it out on your phone here.
Snap at Carnaby Street, London
Snap’s London-based development team built a social AR experience where users get to splatter Carnaby Street with giant gobs of colored paint. Snap, the social network that also manufactures AR glasses, wanted to show off their new ‘local lenses' that now allow anyone to create AR for different landmarks and locations all over the world. This experience perfectly captured the spirit of this offbeat locale, a popular spot for fashion and art boutiques and a destination for the company’s target age group. See it in action here.
Image: Snap
Sneakers in the Wannakicks app
In the Wannakicks app, you can try out all kinds of rare, expensive footwear without actually getting your hands on any in real life. Just install the app, and put your feet in front of the camera. Surprisingly realistic, this app shows off AR’s ability to fool the eye pretty well, and it can actually help you make fashion decisions. Users share photos of themselves with the shoes on various social media platforms - driving exposure and allowing Wannakicks to make money from the affiliate purchases that result.
Image: My feet in Wannakicks
The Reali-tee
This educational t-shirt offers an AR anatomy lesson for kids or grown ups. You download an app, point your phone camera at the shirt, and it will show you all your interior organs. Of course, there are lots of opportunities (educational or otherwise) to use prints on clothing to trigger an AR experience in the camera. Logos, drawings, photos or any other images can be used to start an animation or make 3d objects appear. Get one here.
Image: Virtual Reali-tee
Cap’n Crunch
In an un-realized but very cool concept, AR artist Mario Leo Nolasco created this interactive box for Cap’n Crunch. You open Instagram, point the camera at the cereal box, and the characters inside appear to move in 3D, along with some falling cereal. By his own description, the execution here is rudimentary, but the possibilities for incorporating AR into food packaging are full of opportunity.
Images: Mario Leo Nolasco
Disneyland’s new rides
Disneyland Paris used Swipeback Studio and BETC Agency to create 4 different camera effects that would simulate new rides in the theme park and get visitors excited to try them. Shown below: the Thunder Mountain effect, and the Magic Castle effect, where you can open your mouth to set off the fireworks.
Images: Swipeback Studio
E-commerce possibilities
The possibilities for e-commerce are clearly endless. Below shows an experimental concept I created for home design use. As someone who loves to shop for housewares but finds it hard to imagine how certain items might look in my home, I made this AR camera effect to try out different place settings for my holiday table. If you are a D2C brand, you might consider letting users “try on” your wares virtually.
Image: my own
Step 2: Build for your specific audience
It seems that every week new tools are released for both developers and designers to create AR experiences, and other tools become outdated just as quickly. It’s such a new and changing landscape that by the time you read this, these tools may have been superseded by even more powerful ones.
AR in Mobile apps
If you’re a brand or a company with a dedicated app, you have the most options in terms of execution. Lots of SDK’s are available to develop custom AR capability within apps, using the smartphone camera. Google’s ARCore, Apple’s ARKit, and Vuforia Engine are a few of the most popular. Whichever you choose, a developer and a designer can help you get the most out of the software, as it can be complex to explore. You can use spatial plane detection to orient objects to the floor or walls, image recognition to overlay experiences over the top of pictures, posters, or packaging, or audio capabilities to modify the experience according to sound and music. The possibilities are really limitless - and so is the price range. In the same way that app development pricing ranges from project to project, and provider to provider, AR development will too. Your developer will help with estimating how many work-hours your specific project will take.
Web AR
With a web AR experience, your viewers don’t need to download anything or open any app - just their web browser. You can send or post a link to an experience and it opens automatically in the browser when clicked. Currently, the most popular platform for developing webAR experiences is the game development platform Unity, a favorite of programmers because it lets them seamlessly develop for many different platforms at once. 8th Wall App also offers promising new tools in this space. Vectary, which is relatively new to market, allows you to add AR capabilities right into your Wix site, and similar tools for other no-code website builders are in the works. One caveat when using this method is that the quality of the experience will depend on the viewer’s having good internet connection. Like with AR in mobile apps, expect to pay custom pricing here.
Creating on social media
Not just developers but also designers and illustrators can now create AR effects, games, and experiences for you directly inside social media platforms. Some examples are SparkAR for publishing AR effects to facebook and instagram, as well as Tiktok’s own EffectCreator, and Snap’s Lens Studio. All work on similar principles, allowing you to use a no-code interface to design and publish effects, or develop custom scripts if you really want complexity. Similar in functionality to the SDK’s but with much more limited capability, these programs also allow for plane tracking, image tracking, and audio/music integration. However, the benefits of creating AR directly in these programs are twofold:
You can purchase custom-made effects or have a designer customize an existing one for relatively low cost, compared with custom development. Good quality work ranges from only $200 and up to $2000 depending on complexity of the experience.
If your brand’s audience is already concentrated on a specific social platform, you will be able to reach them much more easily when publishing to that platform directly.
Step 3: Release it into the wild!
When your experience is ready, you will want to promote it via all possible channels and begin to measure the engagement it is getting, whether via video captures, shares, tags, saves, or other methods specific to your brand. Aside from these traditional metrics, you may also want to look at conversations that the audience is having around the experience, what kind of reactions it’s getting from their friends, or if it is driving awareness in any other measurable way - such as increased interest in a specific product. Most importantly - recognize that this is still a new medium. It will take some experimentation to work out, but once you get started, you’ll have a powerful new engagement tool in your toolkit.