Augmented and virtual reality are slowly but surely being integrated into shopping experiences worldwide. At CES for example, GAP and Asus teamed up for an AR shopping app that may point toward the future of mobile shopping engagement.
And previously we covered Adidas and their promotion of a new soccer shoe using virtual reality throughout Europe. Now, a Nike store in Paris is letting customers get a look at different shoe colors using augmented reality.
While the GAP application allows customers to get a look at clothing on mannequins that hopefully reflect their own shape, this AR experience from Nike lets you take an actual white shoe and switch between different color styles on the fly. SmartPixels, a French company specifically specializing in augmented retail programs, is responsible for this new development and their work interfaces with Nike’s existing online NikeID customization service.
You have to use an in store tablet as opposed to being able to use your own smart device because the display actually projects a hologram onto an actual shoe. Unfortunately, only three styles of shoe are available for AR customization: AirMax, LunarEpic Low, and Cortez. Despite the limited shoe options, this along with our previously reported retail AR and VR initiatives will hopefully serve as gateways into the technology and inspire developers and major retailers to invest more time and money into their work so that options are expanded upon. NikeID has an expansive database already, so it shouldn’t be very long before the AR options grow if people show genuine interest in using it.
If you’re near Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, France, pop over into the store and give this a shot. It’s a cool idea in its current form and hopefully, in the future, there will be some way for consumers to use an app at home to project the entire shoe onto their foot through a phone or glasses display and get an idea of what they’d like to purchase.
