Believing Augmented Reality
Below are my views only and do not represent Finger Food Studios’ views.
My colleagues and I just returned from a business trip in Toronto. It wasn’t a typical business trip at all. In fact, we were all working a weekend gig — a retail job at MEC. We were invited into their new flagship store on Queen Street in Toronto to demo a new augmented reality application — one that would visualize 3D-scanned tents and augment them into a real physical environment utilizing ARKit on the iPad Pro. The premise and rationale behind the app are simple — rather than setting up 30 tents that would physically take up the entire store and take hours to set up, a customer could see all of MEC’s tent products on an iPad in full-scale and with high fidelity.
Other than the cool-looking, slanted division of the two images above, there really was no Photoshop involved in the above image. The left side is the
3D-scanned tent augmented onto a physical space, and the right side is a photo taken during the tent-scanning process. Our photogrammetry rig has scanned anything from a teddy bear, to a bicycle and a pickup truck (in case you’re wondering how we can fit a pickup truck into our office, we essentially work in a 24,000 sqft warehouse). Let me know if you’re interested in the technicalities of the scanning — I’ll connect you to the right people.
Anyways, let’s go back to the past weekend. The two days working at MEC brought back memories of working retail at Staples and The Source…memories that I once reminisced but was quickly reminded 2 hours in that it is no longer for me. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun. So fun, that I would do it again, but maybe next time I’ll wear shoes that are comfortable for 8 hours of standing and bring a stool for my aching back.
Seeing people use your product is something designers rarely get to experience, and I’m grateful that Finger Food sent the designers who worked on the project to witness it first-hand. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive…and almost weird.
People loved the experience. It was completely new to about 95% of the people we showed it to. They were astounded to find out that they could walk into the tents to compare headroom and floor space, and whether or not they could fit two bags into the vestibules. People were instinctively on their knees and on their backs to simulate what it would be like to live in the tents. The ones that were skeptical about the technology and laughing at their other halves for doing such ridiculous actions were quickly doing the same once they had the iPad in their hands.
As the event came to a close on Sunday night, I met my last ‘customer’. I quickly learned that he was a software developer, judging by the lingo he was using, and he gave some wonderful insight on what he thinks AR technology is heading towards. He was generally grim about it and didn’t see many applications in the market that had any use whatsoever. He ended his dialogue with “This is one of the best AR applications I’ve ever seen”. My heart skipped a beat as I was expecting him to drop a bomb and walk away. I took a sigh of relief and could not wait to tell my colleagues.
Our studio did something astounding. We got people interacting with an application without explicit instruction; we helped inform difficult purchasing decisions; we created buzz within the store and excited people to look for the ‘MEC AR experience’. Finger Food Studios has created one of the best AR applications that at least one person has ever seen.
And that’s something to write on Medium about.
