Retail is one of the fields where AR offers a wider range of possibilities, from satisfying and engaging the consumer in order to reduce returned products, to linking products with social media or personalizing the shopping experience. Some examples of this are as follows:
- Trying products before buying them. This is where users visualize clothes, shoes, glasses, or even makeup before actually buying the products.
- Seeing how a product such as a piece of furniture, a piece of art, or even wall paint looks in their homes with AR.
- At the store, seeing extra information about a product, such as comments and reviews, before buying it.
- In a commercial center, receiving geopositioned information and discounts from the stores in it.
- In supermarkets or big stores, orienting customers through sections to the product they want.
This field also allows us to display AR on various hardware, including customers' mobile devices, tactile screens, and virtual fitting rooms. Therefore, in the past few years, AR solutions in retail have multiplied, especially since ARKit (from Apple) and ARCore (from Google) appeared on the market. These two pieces of software allow us to easily recognize the environment using the camera and sensors of the mobile devices and place virtual elements over flat surfaces such as the ground or tables.
In this chapter, we will take advantage of Vuforia Fusion, Vuforia SDK's ground detection features, which can also be combined with ARCore, to place virtual objects in our surroundings without any kind of printed target, creating an AR furniture viewer that customers can use to see how the furniture fits in their homes.
For our project, we will be using the real catalog pages and 3D models from the company Euro Seating at https://www.euroseating.com/en/, a seating manufacturer present in more than 100 countries all over the world. Using their high-quality 3D models and real catalog will help us visualize this project as a real-life AR application that can be used in any other marketing context. The models and images that are used in this chapter have been handed over by the company for their use in the context of this book.
We will start by exploring Vuforia and how to integrate it into our Unity project.