Last spring, Acquia Labs built a chatbot prototype that helps customers choose recipes and plan shopping lists with dietary restrictions and preferences in mind.
The ability to interact with a chatbot assistant rather than having to research and plan everything on your own can make grocery shopping much easier. We wanted to take this a step further and explore how augmented reality could also improve the shopping experience.
The demo video above features how a shopper named Alex can interact with an augmented reality application to remove friction from her shopping experience at Freshland Market (a fictional grocery store).
The Freshland Market mobile application not only guides Alex through her shopping list but also helps her to make more informed shopping decisions through augmented reality overlays.
The first step in developing the application was to use an augmented reality library, Vuforia, which identifies pre-configured targets. In our demo, these targets are images of product labels, such as the tomato sauce and cereal labels shown in the video. Each target is given a unique ID. This ID is used to query the Freshland Market Drupal site for content related to that target.