Geek Culture
The Real McCoy: How Augmented Reality Benefits Businesses and Engages Customers
Through the power of AR, businesses can give customers a deeper level of interaction.
Let’s face it, no matter how you might excel in engaging your customers, you’re not going to win, and keep their business if you’re not able to help them understand how your product or service will make a tangible difference in their lives. And yet that ability to build real value for your costumes is often the key difference in converting a prospect into a sale.
It’s usually not enough, though, to appeal just to your customer’s intellect. You need to do more than explain, more than simply telling them what you have to offer. You have to make them feel the need, make them want the solution you have to offer. That usually requires a deeper level of persuasion, one that really shows them the difference your product can make in their lives.
And, increasingly, you have the power to do just that–thanks to innovations in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).
What’s the Difference?
It can be easy to confuse augmented reality (AR) with virtual reality (VR), but they’re actually quite different. AR uses technology, such as glasses, digital screens, smartphones, etc., to alter the sights and sounds of the physical environment you’re actually in in some way.
VR, on the other hand, takes you out of your actual physical environment and plops you down in some alternate reality. Through the use of headsets, gloves, and other peripherals, you’re able to engage with this other world as though you were really there.
Even Better Than the Real Thing?
The simple fact is it may well be in the fields of business, marketing and customer experience that AR achieves its highest potential.
For example, with AR, shoppers can use a selfie and their smartphones or mobile devices to “try on” different shoes or articles of clothing. Clients can experiment with different hairstyles before making a trip to the salon. You can even check out a seemingly endless variety of specs before you shell out the big bucks for your new prescription eyewear.
Customer experience is, after all, imperative to capturing and growing that relationship. And there’s nothing like being able to offer your customers a level of service and engagement that competitors just can’t match.
AR can provide a second-to-none customer experience because, not only can your customer lose themselves “playing” with your products, but they’ll also be much more likely to actually like how the item looks on them. That’s not only going to decrease the number of returns, but it’s also going to boost your relationship with your customer. What your customer sees is what your customer is going to get, which means no nasty surprises when your customer shops online or places an in-store order.
But that’s not all. AR even allows customers to transform photos on a traditional print page, such as a magazine or newspaper, into 3D images they can practically reach out and touch, all with a simple smartphone app. This can bring your advertising to the next level. It’s notoriously difficult to take a 2D image and accurately envision what the object would look like in 3D, but with AR tools like these, you’re helping your customers overcome that problem and, in the process, potentially revolutionizing your advertising!
The Takeaway
Virtual and augmented reality is more than a gamer’s dream. Now, more than ever, they’re also the best way to optimize your business. That includes providing your customer with an experience that other retailers just can’t compete with. It’s about taking your customers’ reality and making it better!
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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