Seeing the business potential of augmented reality

A large-scale conference about digital fashion and Extended Reality, Exthereal, took place in late November 2021.?The conference lasted three days, and representatives of Accenture, Microsoft, Epic Games Unreal Engine, various virtual and augmented reality companies, and representatives of fashion brands spoke. I was invited to?talk about social augmented reality at the opening of the conference , and I want to share some of the thoughts that we raised at the conference.

Preparing for the metaverse?

Augmented reality (AR) became especially popular with the release of the Pokémon GO game and soon grew from being a toy into a powerful tool that has attracted the interest of the world's largest industries. Organizations are seeing new business opportunities and the potential of AR in the areas of personnel training, education, medicine, trade, marketing, fashion and beauty, retail, accessibility, including solutions that improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, and many others. According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, AR has reached maturity and is considered an industry-proof technology to safely invest in.

Augmented reality is already intertwined with our daily lives even if we don't think about it. The simplest example is blurring or replacing the background that many of us use during meetings in Microsoft Teams, which can be implemented in AR using segmentation technology that allows us to recognize and separate a person from the background.

Here at Accenture Baltics, we create projects related to augmented reality, and develop applications for various AR glasses and mobile platforms. Expecting the release of Apple's augmented or virtual reality headset in 2022, we are sure that this service will become very demanded, especially given the development of the metaverse — a highly immersive, shared virtual world.

“Currently, the metaverse is regarded as one of the most important phenomena of interest to large businesses and industries”.

??What are the roots of AR??

Where can we find the historical roots of augmented reality filters? We can think of ancient Greek masks and about the first cinematic visual effects of Georges Milles. The tintamarresque (photo stand-in) popular in the recent past — this is a board on which the body of some character was depicted with a hole instead of a head, where people could insert their head and take a photo — is another ancestor.

People have always loved changing reality, looking for new shapes, colors, and worlds, new aesthetics, and augmented reality has expanded our capabilities. Augmented reality filters express our feelings and thoughts, entertain us, or make us think and help us communicate with our audience. They are used in a variety of ways and they have a huge potential that has not yet been fully discovered.

What is social augmented reality?

Social AR is augmented reality displayed through social media. We live in an amazing time when augmented reality as one of the most innovative technologies is available to the widest possible audience of the social network. Moreover, users, in this case, can be not only in the role of consumers but can become creators of AR filters, because they have access to development platforms with an intuitive interface, easy tutorials, and a supportive community. Thus, any person, if desired, can make AR filters, and each of them, having their own personal, professional, and cultural background, contributes something new, new ideas and concepts.

Who is the creator?

At some point, it's hard to say who or what is driving this evolution — software developers who empower creators with the power of new capabilities, or?filter creators who use them and inspire developers to develop new technical features and guide the development of the platform.

Thus, the development of social augmented reality technology is determined not by a narrow circle of experts, relatively far from the target audience. It is driven by a continuous creative process with feedback between software developers and content creators, to which anyone who wants to create AR filters can join. This gives flexibility and leads to the fact that the technology develops in the most organic way responding to the needs and desires of end-users. And this means that each of us can become an influencer who will influence the formation of the future of this technology in the global metaverse.

AR filter?Aqua Punk ?created by?Maxim Velichkin entered the list of TOP 10?best filters chosen by the professional creative jury of the competition?Cyberware Challenge 2021.?

?What are the augmented reality filters?

Filters usually change our appearance, surround us with some new content, and may also include an element of a mini game. It is convenient to divide filters into categories according to tracking technology, or by which part of our body or the reality around us they can add augmented reality content to. So, we have:

- Face tracking

- Hand tracking

- Foot tracking

- Body tracking

- Target image tracking

- Plane tracking

Examples:

Face tracking

Used in filters where we can see augmented reality content on the face, for example in the form of makeup, on the head as a headdress, glasses, earrings, as well as around the neck and torso in the form of a necklace, a fragment of a cloak on the shoulders, wings behind the back, or a rocket flying around the head.

Hand tracking

Allows you to get information about the position of the hands in space and the distance between the hands, which allows you to create a variety of experiments. For example, launch a fireball from your hands, let a three-dimensional butterfly sit on your palm, stop the movement of bullets flying in your direction with a hand gesture, as in the Matrix movie, or put the pouring rain "on pause" and see every drop frozen in the air.

Foot tracking

Allows us to try on a three-dimensional model of shoes just like we were in a shoe store. We can walk in the shoes and see if we like this style and whether it harmonizes with our clothes.

Body tracking

Actively used in the fashion industry, where we can see many examples of all kinds of dresses and designer clothes that move in place with the body of a real person. One of the strongest arguments in favor of the fashion industry using augmented reality is its environmental friendliness since the creation of a three-dimensional model does not require such a large industrial scale and a corresponding environmental impact as the creation of traditional material clothing. Also, AR users?are less likely to return purchased items.

In addition, such filters allow you to create any creative effects, for example, a magic flame emanating from the body, or a multicolored trail remaining in the air during a person's movement, as well as all kinds of tattoos on the body and animated motion graphics on top of various parts of the body.

Target image tracking

Allows you to animate static pictures, whether they are photos that can come to life like in Harry Potter books, prints on clothes around which animated elements will appear flying in the air, a company logo that will suddenly is three dimensional and flies up to the viewer. It might include having a business card over which an interactive author's portfolio will appear, an illustration in a children's book in which depth will appear and we will see characters in motion, or a product packaging design from which beautiful Sakura will grow, blowing delicate petals into the wind. In addition, there are incredible museums and exhibitions where works of art are integrated with augmented reality, representing a new art form.

Plane tracking

Allows you to place some content on any flat surface anywhere in the world around the user. A relevant example from the field of retail business is the classic try before you buy use case when we choose furniture in the catalog and can use augmented reality to place it in our room and evaluate how it will look in real life and in the natural light of this room, try different options with different colors and materials and furnish our entire room with furniture and then order all the selected models by sending a request to an online store.

It also can be all kinds of animated characters, for example, revived historical figures that make the process of school education more exciting for children, or, for example, as in the game Pokémon GO where location-based augmented reality, in addition to entertainment, stimulated people to travel and explore the environment. It can also be a magic portal that we pass through and find ourselves in another world, making the distinction between augmented and virtual reality more blurred.

?A powerful marketing tool?

Augmented reality allows you to reach a potentially huge audience. The creators of filters have access to detailed statistics of its use. We can see that one filter can gain hundreds of millions of impressions (views), and the creator of several popular filters can gain billions of impressions in total. This turns the AR filter into an incredibly powerful tool for creative communication with your audience, a way to express your thoughts and feelings and opens up incredible opportunities for marketing.?

What makes an AR filter successful? There is no universal recipe here. Sometimes a technically complex filter that we’ve put a lot of effort into may turn out to be less popular than a filter that you made in an hour for the sake of a joke.

If we are talking about success from the marketing point of view, and you are interested in the popularity of your filter with a mass audience, it is worth thinking about the strategy, who your target audience is, what message you want to convey, what tone you use, etc. In addition, filters can be divided into those that exist outside of a certain context of specific events, and those that are tied to a specific context, event, organization, holiday, or movement.

Filters out of context can be popular with a wide audience because they reflect universal and widespread human interests, for example, makeup filters, funny filters that cause laughter, interactive game filters such as prediction filters, everything that can become the basis for a trend or challenge similar to those that we see in TikTok.

Context-bound filters will be popular with the audience associated with this context. It can be a sporting event like a football match, or a political movement, such as a filter that allows the user to speak out in defense of political prisoners and indicate their point of view.

What is happening in the world of AR filters now and what awaits us in the future?

What may be important for those who are interested in starting to create filters and plunge into this world — I think we see a very stable trend of democratization. Augmented reality platforms, in addition to a simple interface, good lessons, and community support, provide us with visual programming tools, where, with the help of a visual drag-n-drop interface we can create interactive logic by connecting logical nodes with arrows. Logical loops, if/else statements, all kinds of logical and mathematical operations, render passes, all this is available within the framework of a visual programming interface, such as Patch Editor in SparkAR. This way we can create complex logic without writing a single line of code.

Programming skills, if you have them, will still give you a strong advantage to create unique things, but if you are not a programmer, then you do not need to be able to write code to create amazing and complex filters. Considering that we have already heard announcements about the release of future development platforms with an even more intuitive interface, I think the entry threshold for new creators will continue to decrease, and we will see even more new ideas and new experiments soon.

In addition, it is very interesting to see how different creative approaches are formed among the creators themselves. One approach is to impress with something unusual, fantastic, the other is to achieve maximum integration, harmony between the filter and reality.

Initially, augmented reality content stood out strongly from the context of the environment. It could be, for example, an alien standing in your living room — he should not fit into the environment, he is interesting because he belongs to another world, so it is interesting for you to approach him and interact with him. But in design, in beauty industry projects, and product marketing, for example, we see an attempt to achieve the most harmonious, seamless transition between reality and digital content. So that they complement each other and coexist almost seamlessly, and you can’t see where reality turns into augmented reality. Both approaches are effective in different cases and have a great future, and it is very interesting to see where it will lead us.

Maxim Velichkin, Creative Technologist

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