AR navigation: Indoor navigation from locandis now with augmented reality function
Hamburg, May 12, 2022 – locandis indoor navigation has already been used in many different environments. A new function now makes it even more intuitive. AR navigation allows the user to view the environment through their smartphone, on which navigation elements such as arrows and hints are displayed.
What is Augmented Reality and what is it used for?
The term “augmented reality” describes the interaction of analog and digital content. Compared to virtual reality, augmented reality does not take users into a completely digital world. Rather, the analog world is used as a starting point and enhanced with digital elements. This is usually implemented via the smartphone camera or glasses, which project content that fits the context of the location into the camera image.
Application examples of augmented reality today are:
- Smartphone games – e.g. Pokémon GO
- Online shopping – virtual placement of furniture in your own home
- Landscaping – planning and presentation of entire landscapes with simulation of changes due to plant growth
- Social media – interactive AR filters for images and videos
- Maintenance – virtual repair or assembly instructions in industry
- And much more.
AR navigation in the DIY store
Especially in complex structures with many aisles, AR navigation facilitates orientation during navigation. Classic solutions of navigation supported by augmented reality are primarily used outdoors, as is the case with Google Maps. The technical innovation of locandis’ solution is to enable navigation with augmented reality support indoors. This offers exciting applications for airports, hospitals or retail, for example.
Such a navigation application is much more intuitive for customers to use, as no digital map has to be understood and translated into a route. In addition to simply overlaying the navigation instructions in the environment, the solution is linked to the locandis product search. This enables customers to navigate to all 60,000 products in a DIY store using both AR navigation and conventional indoor navigation with position information on the digital map.
AR-assisted shopping: virtual and physical shopping experience merge
While app users are guided to the product they are looking for with AR navigation, they can be sent complementary product recommendations. The recommendations and offers can be determined individually on the basis of the user’s search and navigation behavior. AR navigation offers further possibilities, such as the interactive display of offers, which are displayed at the corresponding positions of the products in the environment.
This addition of virtual content to the physical shopping experience enables a completely new shopping experience in stationary retail.
An example of use in a DIY store could be the display of offers of fertilizer products on the relevant shelves when searching for soil, plants or pots. If the overlays are designed in a medially appealing way and contain product films, images and co-text information, they are perceived as appealing and helpful. At the same time, there is no need for small displays on the shelves that play product videos in a continuous loop and are often perceived as annoying by employees and customers alike. Here, the personalization and relevance of the messages is missing.
Instead, the virtual recommendations have a high relevance due to the delivery at the POS and the connection to the user’s currently searched products. This ensures that these offers are frequently noticed. Thus, in addition to the intuitive route guidance, additional sales can be realized, which pay off economically for the retailer.
If you would like to implement your own digital customer card with AR navigation from locandis and are looking for more information on a current application, you can find an overview of all the functions of the digital customer card for the hagebaumarkt here:
Further press releases from locandis can be found here.
