What you need to know
- Apple has added new AR shopping tools to several shopping websites.
- Users can now see virtual, AR representations of products from Home Depot, Wayfair, Bang & Olufsen and 1-800-Flowers.
- They are built into Safari and include links for quickly buying items.
Apple has added new AR shopping tools to several outlets including Home Depot, Wayfair and Bang & Olufsen.
As reported by CNET:
Home Depot, Wayfair, Bang & Olufsen and 1-800-Flowers are the first companies to build extra links and buttons into Apple's pop-up AR tools on iOS. The added features were announced last June at Apple's WWDC conference as part of one of many improvements to Apple's iOS augmented reality toolkit, but shopping experiences hadn't started incorporating these extra features until now.These AR shopping tools don't require an app. They show up in Safari and link out to tools that use the camera viewfinder in a mode called AR Quick Look, which lots of apps already use. The added buttons in AR amount to links that are a faster shortcut to a shopping cart, or a store locator, or in the case of Home Depot, to chatting with customer service. It also allows anyone to drop Apple Pay buy buttons into an AR window.
Quick Look is a handy feature that lets you see a 3D representation of a product in situ in your home before you buy it. The feature doesn't require app downloads, but rather is available from within Safari. Not only that, it also features links with faster shortcuts to shopping carts and store locators, so you can quickly access the page you need to buy a product once you've viewed it in AR. There is even the option for vendors to add Apple Pay buy buttons to the AR window, streamlining the process even further.
This new support for some big-time retailers shows that the use of AR in our online shopping is becoming more and more prevalent, and may soon be part-and-parcel of our day-to-day online retail experience.
Stephen Warwick has written about Apple for five years at iMore and previously elsewhere. He covers all of iMore's latest breaking news regarding all of Apple's products and services, both hardware and software. Stephen has interviewed industry experts in a range of fields including finance, litigation, security, and more. He also specializes in curating and reviewing audio hardware and has experience beyond journalism in sound engineering, production, and design.
Before becoming a writer Stephen studied Ancient History at University and also worked at Apple for more than two years. Stephen is also a host on the iMore show, a weekly podcast recorded live that discusses the latest in breaking Apple news, as well as featuring fun trivia about all things Apple.
