Its very easy for brands to get lost into the sparkling symptoms of Augmented Reality, especially when it comes to creating wow experience for advertising and marketing campaigns. But often, the most important question is not been asked - "how to integrate, a new technology like WebAR, successfully into a company's digital landscape?".
It is more important for enterprises to consider AR as a service before adopting inside an organization landscape. Let's dive inside to find the dos and don'ts which can help you to onboard WebAR for your business.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Major Challenges while Adopting AR
When customers get past the initial AR potential discovery joy phase, the next challenge comes to them to decide on how to start adopting AR for their brands. Unfortunately it is not something like an add-on to add on your existing CRM tool. In an ideal case, the AR app can somewhat ends up accessing the company's CRM tool, user database, product inventory warehouse, marketing platforms and lot more if you want to build a detailed experience.
1️⃣ Microsoft HoloLens AR
To begin with, companies need to buy expensive HoloLens along with hiring developers to build custom applications. Then buy more HoloLens to showcase it to end users, perhaps in showrooms - a very costly affair from the day one. ROI is not always very promising if it is not aligned to very niche specific industries.
2️⃣ Custom AR apps for Android and iOS
Either companies need to spend months of time on effort on hiring designers, developers, testers or they can offshore the projects to any app development agency. Then, if it is not Pokemon Go or IKEA app, there's a possibility that very less people will download them for few seconds of experience. Especially when we live in an age where people prefer to use a handful of daily useful apps in their smartphones. Adding tons of new apps every now and then is something not to consider as an effective user strategy - even if your apps could be the chosen one. Recurrent addition of new features, more products/services, bug fixing etc. are some of the concurrent budget issues while managing apps in a long run - let alone the fact that you have to do it both for Android & iOS everytime, then upload new versions in app stores and wait for days before getting them published.
Oh! We forgot to mention one more thing - even if you publish the latest bug-free, best user experience AR apps - there is no gurantee that user is going to update the app right away.
3️⃣ Lack of Security for AR integration
While the standalone apps look promising and quite easy to integrate with a company's core tools like CRMs, often they are not very high standard on security. Especially during a time of war, where cyber attacks are all time high, such an attack can demolish a company to ground, via a small loophole like AR apps with open vulnerabilities. Building an app from scratch is itself a challenge. Adding tons of security guidelines is just a set of headaches you have to bear. If your company sits within EU, GDPR could be a standard compliance law against which you cannot even argue.
AR-a-a-S - The New Business Trend
Software as a service (SaaS) is the most commonly used option for businesses in the cloud market. The reason? It’s easily accessible – all you need is an internet connection and a browser – and it’s hands-off. The SaaS delivery model requires vendors to manage all the technical issues – meaning customers don’t need to lean on their in-house IT expertise. Common types of cloud computing services include the following:
✅ Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
✅ Platform as a service (PaaS)
✅ Software as a service (SaaS)
Web based Augmented Reality is in reality: ✅ AR as a service (ARaaS)
Customers can simply subscribe to AR cloud solutions and build the first AR experience with low code/no code editors. Easy to launch AR campaigns and connect to company platform tools with APIs. Thus WebAR solves some of the most challenging issues for the customer companies:
No management of physical infrastructure, no overhead cost
Same quality AR experience without allocating huge budget
No cost of hiring team of software developers every time
Cloud Security ensures the data protection and integration
Instant publication helps to modify any running AR campaign within seconds
Instead of opening CRM to exernal product, import campaign data - it's safe
Summary
WebAR as a subscription model enables the customers to decide whether they need to ramp up or down their budget based on the current needs. A flexible budget is always beneficial for companies to experiment.
A great product offering to be sold quickly in the market. When targeted to the right audience, WebAR based online experience can play magic to increase the brand awareness, lead conversion, sales and loyalty. This is a perfect time to start adoping AR for brands. With WebAR, even SMBs can compete against the enterprises in terms of user experience. 2023 is going to be epic with more adoption of WebAR.