AR in Retail Is Useful Exactly Twice
Place-in-room and scale confirmation earn their keep. Almost every other AR feature is a demo.
I have now shipped augmented reality on two retail sites and sat through perhaps thirty vendor demos. The technology works. The use cases mostly do not, and the two that do are unglamorous.
One: does it physically fit
This is the whole thing for large items. A customer standing in their living room holding up a phone is answering a question a photograph cannot answer, and getting it wrong is what causes returns.
Two: does the colour work in my light
Less reliable, because phone white balance is not trustworthy, but directionally useful. Customers report it as the second most valuable thing.
What did not earn its keep
- Animated assembly sequences. Watched once, by staff.
- AR-only discounts. Novelty, then nothing.
- Full room planners. Too much work for a customer who wants one sofa.
The unglamorous requirement
Model accuracy matters more than model beauty. If the AR model is five centimetres wider than the real product you have manufactured a return, not prevented one. We now dimension-check every asset against the physical item before it goes live, and we brief suppliers like AR 3D Studio on tolerance in millimetres rather than on visual fidelity.
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