Augmented reality and virtual reality implementations are building steam at Kimberly-Clark, Farmers Insurance and Foot Locker, say CIOs for those leading brands.
General Electric, Boeing, Ford are among the several leading companies that prize augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies for enabling employees to inspect and design machines more efficiently. But companies are also embracing AR/VR as ways to freshen up the customer experience and train employees.
AR and VR both leverage digital information, but use different interfaces. AR solutions leverage software on smartphones or heads-up displays such as smartglasses to overlay digital information, including images and text, atop physical objects in the real world. Conversely, VR is about immersion, with users typically strapping on headsets loaded with applications that replace the real world with a virtual environment.
While AR experiences are relatively more mature, VR is encumbered by costs and challenges with implementation and integration within business processes that hinder its ability to scale, says Forrester Research analyst Thomas Husson on a recent podcast. “Both technologies have been around for quite some time but they are just starting to enter the broader consumer space,” Husson says. “Both technologies are going to be quite disruptive, but … it’s going to take several years for these technologies to scale and become mass market.”
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Yet CIOs, intrigued by the potential for AR/VR to fortify consumer service and employee productivity, are piloting these emerging technologies. A few IT leaders shared their AR/VR business cases and experiences with CIO.com.
AR games and virtual shelf placements
Kimberly-Clark, a consumer packaged goods provider whose brands include Cottonelle, Kleenex and Huggies, is piloting AR/VR solutions to boost consumer loyalty and more rapidly plan store layouts with its retail partners, says Renee Pearson, global director of innovation. “It’s about identifying the right use cases that will deliver a unique personalized experience for consumers,” Pearson tells CIO.com. “And it enhances our ability to collaborate and turn around the expectations of our retailers and customers in a much faster time period.”
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Renee Pearson, global director of innovation, Kimberly Clark
Kimberly-Clark worked with a retail partner on an AR game that enabled children to seek and find Halloween characters that would appear on signs located in store aisles, says Manish Rege, Kimberly-Clark’s global director of IT services and business partner. Prompted and assisted by store greeters, consumers downloaded a special app with the AR game on it before starting their shopping trips. The idea, Rege says, was to occupy children while mom or dad filled their shopping carts.
“We thought of this as a way to elevate the retail experience,” says Rege, adding that 97 percent of the shoppers who tested the AR app said they would try the app again. Rege says that while he would like adoption of such capabilities to happen more quickly, he recognizes that the market adoption will evolve as quickly as the consumers drive it. He expects AR adoption will improve with the addition of Apple’s AR toolkit on iOS 11 and similar capabilities in other hardware and software products.
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Manish Rege, global director of IT services and business partner, Kimberly-Clark
Kimberly-Clark is also using virtual reality technology to help plan store layouts, including product and shelf placements, in conjunction with retail partners, Pearson says. It’s a departure from the CPG company’s traditional method of inviting retail partners to “physically recreate a store” in centers. Changes to such physical mock environments previously took days; the CPG company does it much more quickly with VR. “It’s gone from 100 percent physical travel to 100 percent virtual, where we can do it remotely, and investigate and test multiple scenarios quickly,” Pearson says.
Pearson says that Kimberly-Clark is also looking into how to leverage AR to enhance employee productivity for machine repairs and maintenance in its manufacturing plants and mills.
Key observation: Pearson says the AR/VR pilots require close collaboration between Kimberly-Clark’s IT and business teams, signaling a shift in which IT is becoming more aligned with the business to bolster consumer engagement and user experiences. “It’s not just, ‘Tell me what to do with technology,’ but, ‘Let’s come together and be true partners as these business processes become more tech enabled,'” Pearson says.
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Source: ITWORLD