Week X: AR, VR, and AI

Augmented Reality in E-commerce Settings

  • The challenge of using AR in e-commerce settings

    • In e-commerce, there is a lot of uncertainty. Augmented reality addresses the sensor deficit and offers more stimuli to consumers to reduce the risk they perceive when they are

    • m-AR (Multi-sensory augmented reality) blends visual environments with interactive tactile and auditory inputs

  • The willingness to pay for a breakthrough

    • Consumers exhibit a significantly higher level of WTP when manipulating holograms with kinaesthetic touch control

  • Decision Comfort

    • The affective signal the brain produces when mental intangibility is successfully minimised through multisensory feedback

  • Auditory Addition

    • sound moderates and boosts decision comfort independently. It validates the visual and physical inputs, exponentially increasing the consumer’s structural confidence in the hologram

Spatial Consumers Personas

  • The Assessor (High Involvement Consumer)

    • Driven by making the right choice. Highly reliant on deep comparison and physical evaluation

  • The Locomotor (Low Involvement)

    • driven by speed and task completion. Largely unaffected by multi-sensor inputs

Evolution

Traditional E-Commerce ← Basic AR (Visual+Voice) ← Multi-Sensory

Strategic Virtual Reality

The reality-virtuality continuum

AR

  • Low/Partial overlay

MR

  • Medium Interactive

VR

  • Total/Immersive

From immersion to presence

  • Immersion: Technical Reality

    • The objective degree of realism provided by the system

  • Presence: The Mental Illusion

    • the objective feeling of being there and feeling as though the world is real

The augmented journey

  • Pre-purchase

    • Moving away from passive awareness to interactive spatial exploration

      • Mobile AR advertising

      • Haptic Ads

      • Virtual Product Placement

  • Purchase

    • Using spatial visualisation to bridge the gap between imagination and reality, lowering the risk of purchase

      • Virtual Try-On

      • Smart Dressing Rooms

      • Virtual Pop-Up Stores

  • Post-Purchase

    • VR/AR is not just a sales tool; it is a medium for extended product consumption and co-creation

    • VR as the product

    • Consumption Enhancement

    • Gamification and co-creation

Strategic Imperatives for the Augmented Brand

  • Design for the Journey

  • Measure the Unconscious

  • Embrace the Post-Purchase

From analytical AI to generative AI

  • Analytical AI

    • Predicts the future

    • Requires structured, numerical data

    • predicts a customer’s likelihood to default

    • powers optimal pricing and next-best offers

  • Generative AI

Lever 1: The Input Trade-Off

  • utilises a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach to tune a general LLM specifically with a curated set of internal wealth management documents, protecting client data while leveraging Gen AI reasoning

Lever 2: The augmentation Spectrum

General Models: Speed vs Safety