Zara Augmented Reality App Makes Shopping More Fun
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Fast fashion retailer, Zara, has recently experimented with an augmented reality campaign, putting AR screens in 120 stores across the globe for two months from April to September - and apparently the experience has been something very different to the normal application of augmented reality on the retail front. The secret seems to be in Inditex, a clothing brand owned by Italy's lender, Citi Group. When you put an Android device on your screen, it identifies certain areas of your chosen store that you can enter by looking at Android icons or through the GPS capabilities built into your phone. This results in Zara displaying clothes items that you might find interesting - or that you might not, depending upon your mood. For instance, if you're interested in shoes, you are shown a list of shoes, their brands, prices and images of what they actually look like. Zara is then able to advise you on your best options based on its proprietary algorithms.
With the help of an Inditex Android app, customers can choose from the many brands of Zara stock at their leisure. This is not an innovative idea. Many retailers already use the Android technology in controlling their in-store inventory. However, Zara's approach to augmented reality is somewhat novel, as it allows its customers to enter a virtual store, look at a catalogue of items they're interested in, enter their credit card information and then choose what items they want to buy from the catalog.
In some ways, this is similar to Google's Project Glass, which lets consumers "sense" items by looking at them and performing other actions based on their gaze. However, Zara goes even further, allowing customers to interact with a virtual storefront while being entertained by an augmented reality video interspersed with high-definition images of different items, according to a press release from Zara. Zara isn't the only luxury fashion brand to integrate augmented reality with its app. For more information on how you can experience augmented reality on your mobile phone, check out our dedicated mobile website now.
