Apple could enhance the use of AR for personal shopping and support - with product demos in your living room

Apple expands personal shopping and support with augmented reality (symbolic image: Bing AI)

Using devices like Apple's Vision Pro, the tech giant aims to provide its customers with a more personalized, interactive and informative shopping and support experience. Recently obtained patents reveal Apple's plans to broaden its utilization of augmented reality.

Nicole Dominikowski (translated by Nicole Dominikowski), Published 11/21/2023 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 ...

With the help of devices like Apple Vision Pro, Apple could change the face of customer support and personal shopping. The company is developing the use of augmented reality, which includes streaming a 3D image of a sales associate directly into a customer's living room. This will allow for interactive and real-time presentations of Apple's products.

So far, the tech giant has applied AR to simulate selected devices in the living rooms of potential buyers, so that they can get an idea of the actual dimensions and proportions on their own desks, for example, and thus make a better purchase decision.

A newly granted patent titled "Guided Retail Experience" shows how Apple is combining AR with its current online chat system. Rather than a text field, a video transmission of the Apple Store Personal Shopper could be utilized, with the sales person could appear in a video chat window or be projected into the user's environment using AR.

Detail from the patent showing an Apple Store Personal Shopper

Conventional electronic consumer experiences allow a user to browse and purchase products online with an electronic device, such as a laptop or desktop computer, tablet computer, or smartphone. [However, online] shopping can lack the instantaneous feedback, answers to questions, suggestions, demonstrations of products, and human connection of an in-person shopping experience. Additionally, the user is unable to fully interact with the online representation of the product and, therefore, cannot truly experience a full demonstration of the product while in a remote environment.

- Apple

The "Guided Consumer Experience" patent, filed in 2021 and granted recently, emphasizes the user's view of the new product in its surrounding environment. Apple further clarifies:

This allows a user to remain in a remote environment while having an interactive shopping experience with the salesperson, who can provide relevant products, make suggestions based on the interaction, and facilitate full demonstrations of various products and services in the CGR environment. The salesperson can cause a product, or a collection of products, to be displayed in the CGR environment, and the user can interact with the products to perform a demonstration of the product with or without input from the salesperson. This all provides the user with a retail experience that is in a remote environment such as the user's house, but with the benefits and capabilities of an in-person shopping experience.

Apple has not announced whether and when it will put these patents into practice. Nonetheless, the patents illustrate that the company is still enthusiastic about using AR as a technology for its retail and support services.