L'Oreal: A Case Study of Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is the latest technological innovation that has the potential to change the face of retail industry. Many companies are taking the lead by creating AR-based apps that create a more personalized shopping experience for customers.

One such company that has taken a big dive into AR is L'Oreal. It's new revolutionary app called Makeup Genius is a complete game-changer when it comes to shopping for beauty products, as it allows you to try on pretty much any makeup or style virtually.

Essentially, this app scans your face and creates an image on your smartphone. It then allows you to try any of the 4,500 and odd products sold by L'Oreal to get a feel of how it would look on you before you go ahead and buy it. This app captures 64 facial data points and more than 100 different facial expressions to discern the shape of your eyes, lips and other facial contours, to place the makeup accurately on your face. You even have the option to save your selfie, share it with your contacts on social media and buy the products you used directly through the app.

Makeup Genius also comes pre-loaded with different makeup styles such as "Caresse", "So Timeless" and "Tropical," so you don't have to spend time picking individual makeup items when you're in a hurry.

So, what is the difference between Makeup Genius and other similar beauty apps available in the market today?

While the other apps use a static image of yourself to apply makeup, this app captures you in real-time because it uses augmented reality as the underlying technology. What this means is you can move your face, tilt it however you want and do any other expression to see how the makeup looks on you while you do all that! Its advanced facial recognition technology keeps the makeup in place even as you make all these movements.

Further, this app provides an accurate look of the makeup, regardless of your ethnicity. In fact, L'Oreal claims that this app works for women of all ethnicities, and in over 400 different lighting conditions to give you the most precise makeup.

Besides giving you a real feel of how you would look, this app also gives you the flexibility to find the products you want easily. With this app, you can scan an ad or an image to detect a color match in L'Oreal's products, so that you can have the looks of the person in that particular ad or image. So, if you want to try on the makeup of Megan Fox or Angelina Jolie, all that you have to do is take an image out of the Internet and scan it on this app. You'll get the same makeup choices within minutes and can try it on yourself within the next few minutes. All these aspects make Makeup Genius a ground-breaking app in the beauty world.

In fact, makeup doesn't get more fun and exciting than this!

Gary Herring is the President of The Albert Einstein Group, a product development, strategy creation, and manufacturing company where all of its roads end in retail. 

Augmented Reality Technology - How Does it Work?

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology that blurs the line between real and virtual world by giving us all the sensations of a real world within a virtual environment. With this technology, you can see, hear, feel and smell different things that are computer-generated, so as to give you an idea of how it would be in the real-world.

This technology offers unlimited potential for companies world over to better connect with their customers, and more importantly, to give them a feel of a product before buying it. It also creates endless possibilities to change the way we see the world, and interact with it.

Difference between VR and AR

Often, AR is confused with virtual reality, though they are much different from each other. Virtual reality creates a virtual environment where the user immerses himself or herself with the help of devices such as head mounted displays. However, with AR, users continue to live in the real world and are not immersed in a virtual environment. Rather, they get to feel and hear objects that are overlaid on objects in the real world. In other words, virtual reality replaces the real objects with artificial ones while AR enhances the real objects with appropriate artificial images.

How does AR work?

So, how does this technology work?

At the core, AR superimposes graphics and sensory enhancements over a real-world environment in real time. Though it sounds simple, there is a lot going on within this process of superimposition, as the final product should look and feel like the real one. The main catch is to generate images that are highly realistic, so that it is useful and beneficial to users. This is best achieved with smart algorithms that tap into the power of sensors such as gyroscopes and accelerometers that make it possible for the virtual images to stay aligned with the real world objects.

This technology is still in its nascent stages as more researchers are studying ways to use it more effectively in different fields. For now, it is available on smartphones with iOS and Android operating systems. The different features of these phones are used to generate AR experience for users. For example, the built-in GPRS feature in smartphones provide the location of a user, and accordingly, tags, images and videos pertaining to that location can be superimposed to give users more information on what they can see and do in that location. Similarly, the camera feature captures the face of a user, and a makeup can be superimposed on this face to give users a virtual feel of how it looks on them.

Besides smartphones, projection mapping is another AR method that is being explored. A case in point is the "Google Glass" that uses something called a prism projector to superimpose useful information and images on the real world of users.

Going forward, AR offers immense potential to change the way we see and perceive things as a society.  

Gary Herring is the President of The Albert Einstein Group, a product development, strategy creation, and manufacturing company where all of its roads end in retail.