Tesco demonstrates augmented reality with Kishino

As you have no doubt gleaned from the media by now, Tesco is taking augmented reality seriously as a great way of bringing a great experience of our products and services to customers.

Until now, a lot of augmented reality has been marketing led. The experience you get when you use your smartphone or iPad with the Blippar app and point the camera at our ‘Price Drop’ logo you’ll see what I mean. I include the logo below so you can try it on your smart phone with Blippar right now:

The first thing I thought of when I saw augmented reality in action was to consider how it might help customers visualise the size and shape of our products better. This is particularly true of products you can’t see fully-formed such as toy construction kits (for example, lego and airfix models). It’s sometimes difficult to visualise the size of a fully formed kit when its in pieces in a box and all you have to go on is the photo on the box cover.


Here is what you get if you hover an iPad 2 over the image above (click for larger version):

Augmented Reality can also solve a slightly different problem - how about TV sets where you wish you could turn the TV around so you could see what sockets are available on the back?

Problems solved - R&D and marketing teams worked with Kishino (formerly Total Immersion) who are trialling a list of TVs and construction kit products on a web page at:

http://www.tesco.com/augmented-reality

Congratulations to the team at Kishino who have done a great job - and even produced a video demonstrating how it works, available on Youtube:




So go have a play at the web address above and let me know what you think!