Augmented Reality is taking center stage with its growing applications. Some incredible developments have come from the AR revolution in eCommerce and retail to its adoption by fashion, retail, and now in more critical business operations like design, manufacturing, maintenance, hospitality, medical, and defense industries. As per ARtillery Intelligence reports, by 2023, the AR active device count was 1.4 billion, which increased to 1.73 billion in 2024. It clearly shows the widening AR applications and people’s appreciation of the technology.
Businesses are embracing the valuable benefits of AR applications in their internal and customer-facing workflow, and the users are loving it. This blog will guide you through the various business segments adopting AR in their business applications and explain how they use it to benefit from it.
What is Augmented Reality?
Augmented Reality is today’s technology. It allows creative people to amplify how they create digital content. Rather, it allows you to overlay digital content in the real surroundings. The content could range from two-dimensional text and images to audio and three-dimensional models.
It does a great job of supplementing real-world objects and places. Thus, it finds applications in a plethora of sectors and can solve endless problems, including education, healthcare, design, manufacturing, and defense.
Applications of Augmented Reality
The simple yet fascinating aspects that an Augmented Reality app development for a business has is incredible. Its addition to a business can benefit it in various ways. eCommerce and retail brands have enhanced how they present products to potential customers through AR apps. The manufacturing sector employed it to add efficiency to their workflow, and the training modules have become ten times more effective and whatnot. Let us look at these remarkable applications in detail.
Augmented Reality applications in education
Education is fun with visually appealing drawings, graphs, and charts. Further, it became better with videos and audio. For instance, science labs came with videos that illustrated how to conduct experiments. But what beyond that? Well, it is Augmented Reality. Imagine if, instead of watching an experiment or a video tutorial in 2D, it could be recreated in 3D and AR. Or when children can see the planet, the sun, the moon, and stars in the solar system in 3d as they appear in real surroundings instead of imagining it or seeing it in books. Similarly, you can recreate any process and things that children could otherwise see only in books or read about them, which limits how well they can grasp a concept.
Augmented Reality applications in healthcare
The healthcare industry is also moving beyond AI, and now they are leveraging AR in various aspects, including medical training, during lab procedures, and in the surgical rooms. Undeniably, like how AR amplifies classroom education, it can amplify medical training. Soon-to-be doctors can leverage its benefits, such as visually outstanding and engaging content that uplifts their interest in the topic and amplifies their knowledge retention. Lab procedures and equipment-based output like X-ray, ultrasound, and other processes that involve visual aspects can be amplified and be a lot more effective.
Augmented Reality applications in design and manufacturing
Design goes beyond paper sketches or drawing stuff on computer screens. Imagine ways a 3D designer can leverage their skills other than seeing their work in AR, overlaying 3D content in real-world surroundings to solve problems. The design also extends to prototypes. Manufacturing industrial objects, equipment, automotive components, cars, and real estate projects begins with designing prototypes. Say an automobile brand plans to roll out a new car model. The designing process for the same can go on for months and cost a lot with repeated iterations when you have to build prototypes again and again multiple times after every feedback from scratch. You can overcome this by recreating models in AR, replacing physical models with 3D models, and presenting them in the real-world environment via AR instead of actual physical models.
Augmented Reality Applications in Medicine
The medicine industry is always about dealing with chemicals, conducting lab experiments, failing, running trials, and manufacturing. A lot goes on before a medicine comes to market. Just like AR enhances education or makes hospital operations and workflow more impactful, it can greatly help the medicine-making workflow. It makes the lab work error-proof and efficient. Also, it streamlines medicine education by making medicine studies insightful and engaging. You could recreate lab experiments or a chemical procedure process flow in 3D and AR instead of just illustrating them through charts, graphs, and text. It helps students look through and follow the experiment up and close so that it remains with them when they have to perform it physically.
Augmented Reality Applications in eCommerce and retail
The revolution AR has brought to eCommerce is absolutely remarkable, from how people can view products in AR on their favorite eCommerce and retail brands like IKEA and Wayfair to how they can leverage the idea of virtual try-ons to shop confidently for clothing, fashion, cosmetics, footwear, and eyewear brands. AR has been a game changer for eCommerce brands and retail brands, positively impacting crucial metrics like improved customer engagement with the brand, higher sales numbers, and lower product return.
Augmented Reality Applications in Navigation
From AR in navigation, companies that benefit the most are the high-end luxury car brands that are compelled to provide something new and innovative now and then. Besides, AR also makes navigating much safer, providing value that people have embraced. Heads Up Display (HUD) in high-end luxury cars like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and AUDI are incomparable today after the addition of AR to the legacy HUD display system. AR navigation is also handy in allowing people to navigate complex indoor places. It overlays visual digital content, probably arrows and text messages that guide users towards an object in a retail store or packed inventories. Walmart uses one to make navigation easier for store visitors and staff.
AR application examples
View in Your Space and Virtual Try-on are notable examples of how augmented reality apps have made their mark. Retail brands like IKEA and Wayfair have leveraged the “view in your space” feature to boost their marketing campaigns with enhanced visual and product display in 3D and in the customer’s space. Today, people can just go on the IKEA website, pick a piece of furniture, and see how it would fit in their living room, dining area, or outdoors. On the other hand, eyewear, footwear, clothing, cosmetic, and makeup brands leverage the virtual try-on feature to woo their customers. Today, you can go to the Nike store and leverage its virtual try-on feature to see how its shoes fit you without putting them on. Or you can virtually put on makeup without putting it on with virtual try-on apps from brands like L’Oreal, Maybelline, and Lakme. Another notable example to recall would be the enhanced HUDs in luxury segment cars from Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW. These are some of the notable examples worth considering for deciding how you want AR to improve your business.
Augmented Reality applications challenges and future trends
Any new technology might struggle during its inception. Similar is the case with AR. However, it is likely to be loved by all just the way people embraced AI for its capabilities. As we move ahead, let us look at AR application challenges and future trends in detail.
Challenges
Inventing new technology and molding it to fit into various applications is a lot of work that also takes a lot of resources. Thus, integrating new-age technology like AR can be costly for many. However, experts are making the technology more affordable daily with low-code, no-code technology, and other fast and efficient approaches. Another aspect that is becoming the talk of the town is digital fatigue, which is how people are investing too much into technology and must realize the need to take a break. It might pose some challenges to AR adoption. Giants like Meta, Apple, and HTC have developed groundbreaking headset technology. While they are working on the cost barrier and inventing devices that are also affordable, digital fatigue is still a challenge.
Future trends
Gen Z’s obsession with looking out for new technology and embracing it has led to the success of AR applications in numerous ways. And it will continue to widen over time as more industries realize its benefits and count on it to improve their business, replacing legacy technology and systems with AR. eCommerce was one of the first to adopt AR. It has expanded to retail, fashion, design, education, and whatnot. Still, there remains room for its adoption in industries that still shy away from embracing new technology. Healthcare and defense are areas that have started to realize what wonders it can do, and it will only get stronger with time.
Conclusion
Augmented Reality is the next big thing after Artificial Intelligence (AI). And just like how AI has made its mark, the adoption of AR is picking up, thus finding applications in almost every industry, simplifying jobs or making them more exciting. Whether replacing the legacy design method, further amplifying the already fun education and training modules in the classroom, medicine, and healthcare, or elevating the online shopping experience. So, if you want to add Augmented Reality to your business and simplify workflow or integrate it into your product to make your customer experience exciting and confident, sign up for the PlugXR platform. Or book a free demo now!