Creating Immersive Brand Experiences With AR

Specs can't sell on their own. AR and 3D fill in the gaps. Not everything belongs in a spec sheet. For industrial brands selling complex products, showing how something works can be just as important as 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 it does. That’s where AR, VR, and 3D come in. These tools aren’t just “nice-to-have.” When used strategically, they solve real buying friction: 𝗥𝗼𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝟯𝗗 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 Let buyers explore machinery from every angle, reducing back-and-forth with sales. 𝗩𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 Build trust by showcasing your facility, safety standards, and capabilities—especially useful for global buyers. 𝗔𝗥 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 Allow users to visualize how your product fits into 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 environment, improving confidence and cutting evaluation time. These immersive experiences don’t replace traditional content. They 𝘦𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 it, giving buyers the clarity and certainty they need to move forward. And they’re not just for the “fancy” industries. We’ve seen manufacturers, logistics companies, and even steel fabricators use 3D models to great effect. The results? → Better-qualified leads → Faster decision-making → Less strain on your sales team --- Follow Jeff Gapinski for more content like this. ♻️ Share with an industrial brand rethinking their sales tools.

Augmented reality is carving out a whole new landscape for retail, and Ian Curtis’s recent prototype is a great example of what’s possible. Using 8th Wall WebAR, he combined image targets with a second mobile device to create a more seamless, interactive shopping environment. What’s so exciting about this approach? - Instant Immersion: Customers can simply point their phone’s camera at a product image and watch it come to life with details, animations, or even virtual try-ons. - Enhanced Interactivity: By linking to a second device, the experience can shift from a solitary phone screen interaction to something more dynamic—like a tabletop preview of the product’s features or a live comparison tool. - Frictionless Decision Making: This kind of AR setup can provide instant specs, styling options, or personalized recommendations right where customers need them, helping turn browsing into confident buying. As AR tech evolves and becomes easier to deploy, we might see it pop up across countless retail environments - from showrooms and pop-up stores to home shopping experiences. Do you think in the future we could see this tech more easily available for general public usage? #innovation #technology #future #management #startups

Looking to build spatial experiences for brands? Here’s one approach: Last week we launched an augmented reality re-creation of the “Walmart Discovered” Roblox experience. As the creative world begins building more 3D, spatialized versions of 2D games and platforms, it’s helpful to unpack the creative strategies that make these new experiences work. Imagine jumping into AR versions of your favorite 2D worlds or games (for me that would be FIFA ‘12)—how would you do it? Here’s a quick blueprint of the creative process I used while leading the project with the wonderful team at Sawhorse Productions: Create an Experiential Concept What will people do in this spatialized experience? This sounds like a no-brainer but it’s super important to orient your creativity around the experiences you want people to have in your spatial world. The temptation is to just define it by the technology in use (“a web-based AR portal with interactive elements” or similar yawn-inducing jargon), but if you focus on experiences over technology you’ll make better decisions as you go and people will enjoy it more. This concept will often be written in more human language, it’ll travel better (for clients and others who need to explain the concept up the org chart or to external audiences), and you can use the concept in your marketing efforts, etc (we used the same concept for our promotional video shoot for example). For this project, our concept was simply “Step Inside Walmart Discovered.” Invite Spatial Exploration Just like creating a real-world environment, we want people to feel like they’re inhabiting a 3D space while taking part in our experience. For “Step Inside” we made a couple creative decisions that made the AR experience feel as real and spatial as possible. We created an awesome “entryway” that animates and invites the user to step in. We created a virtual space that puts the user at the center: the map was built to pull the user into the middle of the space and every element was easily in reach from that point. We also made everything in 3D. Every button, every piece of wayfinding, every interactive element was a 3D object—just as if this was a real space. The hypothesis is that using a lot of 2D menus etc breaks the spell a little bit and makes things a little less fun and novel. Connect Across Platforms People love the Roblox experience Walmart built. Our AR version is cool, too, but the Roblox experience is way deeper and more functional than a Web AR version could ever be. So we made it really easy for people to jump from AR into the Roblox app. It just takes one tap to go from “Step Inside” to the Roblox mobile app and see your avatar trying on one of the exclusive pieces featured in AR. Taking people to the full Roblox experience to see their new items in action is a great experience for users. Thanks for reading! And thanks to my awesome creative partners Nic Hill, Dr. Giovanna Graziosi Casimiro جيجي كاسيميرو, Thomas van der Heiden, Ely Santos.