Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have been gaining traction in the retail landscape, increasingly attracting marketing spend. According to Digi-Capital, by 2021 the AR and VR market will reach $108 billion in revenue, bringing in $83 billion and $25 billion respectively. Within that market, as IDC predicts it, retail will become the No. 1 industry for AR/VR spending.

They are both two points of the same spectrum and aim to add similar value in retail, providing personalized and engaging experiences. While AR consists in overlaying digital content upon the real world, enriching it with interactivity, VR immerses users into an alternate reality, completely disconnected from the actual world.

As customers become technologically savvy and start expecting more from brands and retailers, these need to step up in order to meet their needs. This involves embracing shifting consumer trends and keeping up with the latest tech. Whether in-store, online or omnichannel, visual shopping can help retailers make shopping experiences smooth, personal and engaging.

Our new whitepaper ‘Visual Shopping Solutions for Retailers’ goes through the main challenges the retail industry is facing in 2017, providing solutions that employ Image Recognition, Augmented Reality and Fashion-specific Artificial Intelligence.

In a previous post, we talked about how to combat “showrooming” ‒ a consumer trend that 46% of shoppers engage in and means  researching products in-store and buying them online. “Webrooming”, however, has become much more common  over the past few years, with 69% of shoppers taking part in it. Also known as ‘reverse showrooming’, it refers to the process of starting to browse  products online, but eventually completing the purchase in-store.

After being interviewed at AWE 2015, we returned to AWE TV’s black table for a hearty chat about the future of Catchoom and the augmented reality and image recognition industry in general.

Many thanks to Mark Piszczor ‒ who works at Occipital when he’s not performing voluntary news reporter duties for AWE media ‒ for giving us the opportunity to share our insights and some big announcements.

Check out the video interview or read the transcript to learn more about our new industrial 3D object recognition technology, our vision of getting beyond markers and depth sensors, our new visual similarity research project for Fashion and a very special 13th anniversary.  

There's so much buzz around Augmented Reality experiences these days that one often forgets to talk about the amazing related technologies such as Image Recognition. To illustrate that it is far from being a futuristic, geeky niche, the industry is already worth $11.7bn.

We will show you how you can use this exciting tech to turn an unexpected asset into your marketing superweapon: your product packaging.