Augmented Reality
Nick - Welcome to the Winning with Shopify Podcast. This is the podcast to help you scale your shopify store into a moneymaking machine. Your host is Nick Truman. He's a shopify expert and the CEO of Justascparker.com, a global specialist market marketing agency for shopify owners. Nick will be sharing his knowledge and interviewing the experts to help you thrive and build a business that makes you money. For exclusive offers, bonus content, and weekly episode reminders, join our mailing list@winningwithshoppy.com. Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Here's your host, Nick Truman.
Nick - Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Winning Shopify podcast. For anybody who's not tuned in before, welcome to the show. My name's Nick, and I've been hosting the show for just over two years now, and it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us. If it is your first time, please hit that subscribe button. Please leave us a little review on whatever platform you're listening to this on. It really helps us get the name of the show out there and it's possibly the way you found the show as well. If you've been listening to the show for a while. As you know, I say every week a massive thank you for tuning in again, for supporting us and for being part of this journey that we are on today. We've got a very interesting episode. We're going to be talking about augmented reality and how you can bring your web pages on your website, obviously, specifically Shopify Store, how you can bring those to life. Something I'm quite excited about, something I haven't touched on for a very long time now, probably too long, given how amazing some of the technology, both the hardware and the software, is becoming at the moment. Obviously, in August, we're having a bit of a jumble of episodes. We've got different guests every week talking about different things. And also, if you missed last week, I don't want to say go and check it out because it was just me, but I do want to say go and check it out because I was sharing some of my favorite tips. So check out last week if you haven't. And also, going back the last few weeks as well, we've had some phenomenal guests. Again, sharing some really cool information. Today I'm joined by a very special guest. His name is Gaurav and he's the founder and CEO of a company called Avataar. So Gaurav, welcome to the show.
Gaurav- Thank you, Nick. Thanks for having me. And it's a pleasure to be part of your podcast. I have been following it for quite some time and really like the content you present.
What does Avataar do?
Nick- Excellent. It's very kind of you to say that. And one thing to have a great guest and another one who actually knows the show, which is quite exciting. And as you know, the show, you'll know my next question, which is before we dive in, tell us a bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about Avataar as well.
Gaurav - Sure, Nick. In fact, I've been following your show to the extent that I did even more last week's episode that you did even without a guest. Excellent. Good stuff. But yeah, let me dive into a quick backdrop on me. As you introduced, I'm one of the founders at Avataar. Our vision at of Tank is to bring spatial depth to visual discovery experiences for the end consumer. While I play the role of Chief Product Officer at Avataar, I'm focused on utilizing the repeatable product-market fit that we have built with our partners to deliver higher ROI outcomes for our merchants, as well as a delightful visual discovery for the end consumer. This also flows in from the notion of us being a B2B2C company, where we are not only focused on the B2B but also on the consumer. For me personally, it's been over a decade in the consumer tech space, with a fair share of it spent at Avataar building and winning deep tech platform.
How is consumer behavior and decision making changing in ecommerce shopping?
Nick - Amazing. And there's so many different things we're going to be talking about today. So I'm going to dive straight into the first point and we're going to start with something that's not necessarily talking straight about the tech. We're actually going to talk about customer behavior and consumer behavior and how they make decisions. So why don't you give us a bit of an overview from where you guys are. I'm sure you've done lots of research on this and as you said, you're not just a B2B, but you are B2B2C brand as well. So your tech needs to work for consumers. Talk us through how consumers make decisions and where some of the complexity starts coming on.
Gaurav - That's a very valid question, Nick, because as all of us know right, we are in unprecedented times today. At a very human level, the world has been changing. Whether we look at economic, social, environmental, or even political angles, there is sort of an upheaval going across the world. The world as it stands today is not the same as it was two years ago. In fact, it's not even the same as it was two quarters ago. This definitely brings an inconsistency in consumer behavior from what they say to what actually they value and expect from organizations. To add to that paradox, today, two thirds of the consumers feel that this paradoxical behavior is very human and they're very comfortable with it to the extent that they want organizations to accept it while building for them. This disconnect becomes so evident when you look at some of the recent consumer studies, one of which states that 64% of consumers want businesses to work faster to meet their changing needs, while on the other hand, 88% of the businesses respond that their consumers are changing faster. Their businesses can keep up so this divide is clearly there. The relevance gap as we see it definitely exists in our own journey. We have also seen that. But before I touch upon that, I would also like to call out Nick over here that this paradox in the behavior of consumers have existed forever. It's not something new. It's just the times that we are in today have made the importance of bridging this relevance gap even more critical. But in our journey, we saw it first and very early in the phase. In fact, the first beta that we launched, we had a very high NPS of nine with their consumers through the customer reviews and the calls that we did. Still, our twelve week retention period was very low. What kind of eventually came out of the exercise that we did is even though the consumers are liking the platform, they're enjoying the 3D photorealism that we have put. They are struggling with the bandwidth issues which the platform brings along with it. That's where it also brought in compression as the second pillar of our evolution today. As we stand, the two key pillars of our platform are photorealism which is about creating highly realistic rendition of the products that we showcase to the consumer before they can make a purchase decision. And the second and equally important one being compression, which makes our experiences bandwidth friendly for consumers across the globe. And this is something which came from the consumers, which they were not actually stating it out loud, but they definitely needed it. So this is where the need for businesses to evolve comes in, in terms of tracking the insights from consumer behavior and responding to them as fast as they can so that the relevance gap is always reduced.
How is bandwidth and loading times impacting consumer experience?
Nick - Yeah, definitely right. There's loads in that. We're going to unpack some of those bits you just said and I'm going to ask a few more questions on some of them as well. First point I want to make is I completely agree with the consumers. I mean, I always use the word either irrational or just completely illogical. When we've looked at things like Google Analytics and Hot Jar and tried to work out what's the customer's journey being between sort of the first moment they hear about your brand to actually purchasing something, it's just completely irrational. 1 minute they're on the Terms and Conditions page and the next minute they're looking at offers and you're like, none of this makes any sense. And if you try and map out customer journeys and that sort of thing, you will find that every single customer journey through your website that's ever happened is pretty much unique. There's very few journeys that are similar in terms of every traffic source they've used, every page they've looked at, et cetera. And I think you're absolutely right, we need to embrace that and understand that. But I think it's quite interesting, those stats you shared about how quickly businesses are moving or how they feel like they're struggling to keep up in terms of the technology that their customers and consumers want from them. So you mention compression as an SEO. Guys, let's talk about that for a second. Compression, I mean compressing things so they load quickly. Bandwidth, they don't crash your Internet connection or take up so much bandwidth that it starts to break. How much of an issue do you think this is at the moment? Like it's 2022. We've got Shopify and Shopify Plus, and out of the box, they're generally really good fast web platforms. How much of an issue is this at the moment?
Gaurav - Well, it has always been Nick, and I believe it will always remain a critical aspect in consumer experiences. The reason being that no matter how fast we make the experiences to load, there's still an expectation from the consumer lens to make it even better. So that makes the importance of solving for compression up front for your platform, for your e store, or your website very critical. At large scale, what we see is that every extra second of load time could lead to millions of dollars of loss in revenue. And that's how critical compression, even in today's state is as we stand, at the cost of, let's say 5G are, which would soon be unfolding within front of us. But no matter how good the hardware becomes with the devices, or how fast the bandwidth comes up, the aspect of making it more seamless, even faster for the end consumer, will always remain. And that's the sort of journey that we all would always be more. So from a technology perspective where we are trying to better what we have today in terms of what we are building for tomorrow.
What is augmented reality (AR) and how does it align with shopper expectations?
Nick - Yeah, definitely. As an SEO person, I'm still staggered how often we're here talking about page speed. It's come up on probably two, possibly even three client calls up in on today alone talking about page speed. And then Google's changed the rules again with things like CLS and with the layout changes or LCP, where it's how long does the biggest item take to load on a web page? So Google is trying to make it easier for people, but it's interesting that you say that. It will never be fast enough for consumers. And I guess one way of looking at that is we started with 3G Internet on phones, and everyone was like, wow, this is so fast. And then we got four G, and it was like, okay, that's amazing. Obviously we've got 5G, which a lot of cities 5G is phenomenally quick. But things like ping speeds, which apologies if we're losing anybody here, given that this is getting a little bit technical. But even ping speeds and things are struggling to keep up, I think, as you say, even if we double the speed of all of that, we would then start trying to deliver more through the websites through the actual landing pages that people are looking at and the content they're absorbing online. So let's bring that into one thing that in terms of page speed is, if I'm honest, from a page speed perspective, it's terrifying. And that is the thought of adding augmented reality into your web page. So why don't we start by just what is augmented reality?
Gaurav - Sure. Let me start with what it has been in the past. So what has augmented reality being looked at? Initially, it's a toy or a gimmick in terms of experience for consumers to look at. But the latest study from even shopify that you would look at now from being a toy or a gimmick, augmented reality along with 3D has become the way shoppers want to evaluate products before buying them. Now, uplift of augmented reality over video is also now well documented and proven to the extent that videos over a 2D image can get you an uplift of 60% in terms of conversion, AR has proven to get you a conversion uplift of 94%. And above that's the higher confidence that a buyer gets by looking at a product in a and it's also leading to lower return rates, so eventually creating a win win for all the parties in the ecosystem. AR is a technology. If I were to just double click on that aspect, it allows the consumer to interact with the product, to try on the product on themselves, or try out the product in their physical environment as they are in currently, as well as personalize it with variants and color choices before making a purchase decision. That's the pain point that AR has been working towards solving. And it has been successful in that journey as well to the date. Because as we stand today, there are 71% of consumers out there who say who would shop more often if they get a while. There are 60% who say they prefer retailers with their experiences on their store or website. And this last one is slightly mind boggling. But I was also surprised when 40% of the consumers ended up saying that they are ready to pay more for a product which they can customize in AR. So that's where the power and journey of AR starts today and the part that it has traveled from being a toy or a gimmick to something which has become an integral part of our purchase behavior online.
How is AR relevant for merchants today, use cases and results
Nick - I mean, one thing I love, and not enough for guests to do this, if you've been on the show before and you're listening to this, bring more stats. These stats are phenomenal. And I think that, for example, 40% of people said they would spend more if they could customize the product using AI. As you said, that is absolutely staggering. I guess the next question, which is probably quite an obvious one, is we're talking about augmented reality and AI. Give us a use case. What kind of shop would you use it? How would they use it? What would this actually do? What would it look like to the consumer?
Gaurav - So the page shop and merchants are today already using it. They are upgrading their product experience from the first world to the images and videos to a life size interactive 3D experience. One which user can look at in the web viewer itself or using AR and the camera device place that product in the physical environment and that's where the try on and try out both aspects coming, but where the journey today starts. In most of the cases for end consumer is on the product page. When they land upon a product page for a particular item that they are looking to purchase they see the images and videos being complemented with this 3D experience which they can activate. The 3D experience works across both laptops and mobile so if they are coming from even a laptop they can experience the 3D part of it and if they are coming from mobile they can also take that product to their own environment where try on their own self. So if you are talking about fashion, accessories, jewelry, beauty, footwear, those kind of categories, a consumer today can try on those categories on themselves, see how the item fits on them, how it looks on them. To look and fit is obviously one important aspect that they are solving and then make a purchase decision. Similarly if you go to other categories like furniture. Durables. Home decor. Sports and equipment then the consumers can look at the tryout aspect which is taking that product again starting the journey from that product page but not taking that lifestyle 3D product to their own environment like a sofa in your living room to a refrigerator in your kitchen. See how it fits over there. How it goes with the decor and then make a purchase decision for themselves.
How are consumers responding to shopping in AR?
Nick - And I think that's the amazing thing, isn't it? The fact that you can actually see for example yourself wearing the product even though you're still there just with your phone, you're not holding the physical product itself. I mean a couple of great use cases that I've seen over the years one was unlike an art website where you could use your phone and actually move your phone with a camera on using their application you can move it around the room and you could actually see artwork on your walls to then decide what size it needs to be. What colors you want to go for and therefore what sort of picture or piece of art you want to put on the wall. And also seen a very similar thing as well with sofas where you can take a picture of your current sofa and then this website would start putting new sofas in its position so you can see what they're going to look like and I guess probably the biggest use case that I've seen that's worked incredibly well is that there are quite a few brands in the US and UK now in other countries as well. That they sell glasses. And you can actually try on the glasses. You literally just take the glasses off your face. Record a very short video where you literally just look to the left. Look to the right. And then any pair of glasses you click on it will show you that same video wearing different pairs of glasses from their website to show you how they're going to sit on your face and on your nose and see what the actual sizing is like. The colors. How big the lenses are. All this sort of stuff. It's incredibly powerful. It certainly has a tool. And I guess a really big question then is this all sounds great, but there have been great things in the past and consumers haven't actually used them. So when you guys are using your tech on sites, do you find that consumers are using it? Are there any stats to support an uplifting conversion or an uplifting engagement, given that that has happened?
Gaurav - Totally, Nick. We have seen great traction with consumers in our journey till day to first click on some of the stats out there. So in terms of sales conversion uplift, what we have seen is that ranges between 120% to 50%, just in the matter of a lift that we have delivered for our partners, depending on the category in the context. In terms of engagement, we have seen four minutes to seven minutes of sessions that a consumer has had with every product that they have interacted with, which had three DNA enabled, even in terms of the product page to cart visits. We have seen 60% and more uplift in that happening, as well as reduction in return. So we have been seeing value being created for merchants as well as for the end consumer throughout the funnel at each stage, wherever we have integrated our CDR experiences.
How can AR merge physical and digital divide?
Nick - Nice. Again. I've said this already. I'm so excited to see this technology more on sites because it literally brings the digital and physical worlds together and I think that's one of the most exciting parts of this. Are there any particular scenarios you've seen that have been incredibly powerful? Like, are there any particular clients you guys have got that using your tech that you're finding they've done something really clever with it that you could share with us?
Gaurav - So the aspects of the physical and digital coming together, Nick, is a very important one. And let me build on that to also give you the example, which has kind of also taken this into the next level from the experiences today. But Phygital as an aspect of the capability of augmented reality is a very strong one today. We have always been talking about the offline online divide, or in terms of what a physical store do or what a digital store can do or cannot do in either aspect where we are focused on today is the physical part where we combine both physical and digital journey for the end consumer. So it's about depending on the context where they are giving them the experience of arises that irrespective of whether it's in the offline store or on the online store of the merchant. So just in similar aspect with one of the large marketplaces in the US in the electronic space, what we have built is not only the 3d/AR experiences for their consumers on the website, but also now powering their physical stores where the consumer could come in and then start seeing an infinite aisle of products being showcased. Something which the retail space has always been placed as one of the constraints that you cannot ever have enough of sell space to stock all the products that you want. But with their experiences, what we have solved for in the physical space is providing an infinite isle or a selection of products for the consumers walking into that store similar to what they would have got on the online store of the marketplace. So that's where we have seen a lot of potential being unlocked for the end consumers by bringing in this context of the space that they are in and helping them solve for that context.
Is contextual reality a reality now?
Nick - I think that's amazing. I did walk into one shop and it was a little pop up store about a year or two ago and I remember going in and they were just sort of three or four IMAX, like Apple imac computers in the store and that was it. And I sort of thought what is this? So I kind of walked in and said what kind of shop is this? And she basically the lady there basically said oh, we've got millions of products and you can find them all on this computer. You order them and then we either post them to your house or we bring them into the store and you can pick them up tomorrow. And I said well why'd you do that? And she said well it's much cheaper for us to store everything outside of London. Plus what's the point of us bringing all the stock here and having it all out where it's going to get dusty and dirty over time and then we're going to lose that stock. It's quite a lot of waste. So instead of doing that, we order it in. You can try it on when it arrives, if you don't like it gets put back in the bag, back to the warehouse and then we never have any waste. And I thought it's a really interesting way of doing it, exactly as you said, within reason. They essentially have almost infinite stock, which I think is quite exciting because there's other use cases for it as well. I think for example, when you look at if you want to buy a sofa they could say well look, these are five sofas, all different sizes and different colors and then you can choose the color you want, the size you want, the design you want, the fabric you want and we've got all the different swatches and then we will make that sofa for you. And I think again, it's quite a nice way of actually kind of packaging it all up rather than just to choose between those five sofas. You might need 200, 300 different sofas if you had every design, every color all set up, a lot of which would never actually get purchased. And so I think in this day and age we're trying to reduce waste. I think it's a really interesting model actually, which is very cool. Where do you think things are going then? And certainly in terms of augmented reality and getting people to buy through these kind of shopping channels that are a bit more inventive online, do you see that becoming more of the norm? Do you think there's another evolution coming that is going to outdate this at some point?
Gaurav - Well, definitely yes, Nick. As we stand today, there are over a billion people globally who have already interacted with Air on their mobile devices and to the extent that we have had 100 million plus of AR shoppers already in the ecosystem so in terms of the evolution happening, I think the infection has already sort of dawned upon us and that's what we are looking at. To the extent that today, even from an end consumer reach perspective, our platform supports 3.5 billion devices globally which even just two years back, end of 2019, early 2020 would have been a much smaller fraction of it. So when in this infection, Nick, happens when both software and hardware come together at the same point and this is what has happened, fortunately for AR as well over the course of last two years in terms of the hardware evolution, of course the chipsets that the mobile devices have been able to support, these GPU intensive experiences that an AR and a 3D experience needs. And similarly on the software side, with the evolution of BA and the more streamlined experiences for the end consumer, we are now able to deliver this to so many devices for the end consumers. That's why we are seeing the uptake and the uplift for AR also happening, without which probably we wouldn't be having this conversation today, right? But just maybe to add to that what is also health beyond the hardware and the software evolution is also how the ecosystem over the last two years have evolved, especially in the post pandemic worlds. We have been seeing that tailwinds with consumers needing more innovative solutions, solutions that can help them while they are at home or helping them make the right decisions in the context they are. So that also has helped these face a lot and it has helped with a lot that we are today talking about contextual, reality and when we talk about contextual reality from a task perspective, what we are building on is making sure that whatever the user is looking at, wherever they are, we are delivering value for them. And when I say that, of course the physical aspect does come into play, but it's more about helping consumers make the right decision and that's the value that we are trying to unlock in this equation. Now, what we are doing, just as one of the examples in the contextual reality bracket is allowing a consumer to carry their homes along with them. So let's say if you are going from one store to other, just extending the example of purchasing a sofa in the offline ecosystem, you could today carry your living room with you. And when you look at any physical sofa, you would be allowed to use the virtual version of that and place it into the virtual living room that you're carrying along with you and then make a very informed decision as to how this so far would look in my space. Instead of you having to visualize that, how this physical one will sit in the living space that you have now because you are carrying the virtual space along with you and you have a virtual version of that product also to interact with. That's the power that we are bringing under the whole umbrella of contextual reality for the end consumer in terms of solving their pain points.
How can AR/AI be used in fashion?
Nick - Definitely. I think it's really exciting actually. I've always looked at augmented reality as just being there's a product on the website and you can walk around your house and see what it would look like in your house. But I think you're just given a completely opposite example of that. Actually taking the house with you I think is really exciting. I think certainly with a bigger, more considered purchase, it's such an important thing. A lot of people have said over the years, I've never bought certain items on the internet. I think the glasses example I gave is a good example of that. I want to try them on, I want to see how it's going to look. And I remember a lot of people years ago saying that they would never buy items of clothing without trying them on first. Yet here we are. People buy clothes online all day, every day. It's absolutely phenomenally. Big industry and something that the high street, the physical shops have had to get used to and fully understand. Going back to the closing example, give us a bit of an overview as to how that actually works. Because obviously with clothing there are so many different sizes, especially with different genders, different types of products. If a man is going to buy a new suit, you've got chest size, waist size, arm size, heights, neck size, all this sort of stuff. How does augmented reality, how does your app work with all those different measurements?
Gaurav - Well, fashion has. Been the most difficult segment, Nick, I would say. And that's why we started out with fashion. We took the toughest battle up front and started building for that because once you have sold the equation for the fashion consumers, you have actually solved it for all the other verticals as well because the bar is the highest in the fashion category. Now in terms of the product evaluation and I'll come to the try on after that. But in terms of product evaluation, when you look at fashion apparel specifically, there's a lot of physics involved in it. Body to cloth physics, clock to cloth physics, how the motion would work as you kind of drape the cloth, how the gravity and the density would work out. So we had to solve for all of that upfront in terms of capturing the actual laws of nature and applying that to the AR experience that we are building. Now, when it comes to the try on aspect, what we also realize is that there's a concept called Uncanny Valley which exists which is making the experiences look easy if there's very close to being real, but not exactly real. So that's where I would say the concept of human nature stands today. We are slightly in that Uncanny Valley zone where getting the right of that in terms of the body shape, in terms of the aspects that you would want to see, the technology is not there to support that part. But having said that, we are also building nerve tech which we unveiled earlier this year just in fact couple of months back at AWE, where we are enabling neural radiance field power tech to create human holograms and life size form and create a highly photorealistic rendition of the aspect that you are looking at. It could be the fashion apparel or any other product that you want to build along with it. So we have been taking a very different approach to solving this problem, Nick, because we understood also in our journey that Uncanny Valley is an aspect that we don't want to dive into and try to solve it when it has existed for decades and there is no real technological solution today which can solve for that. So we kind of evolved beyond that using our nerve tech which can solve for fashion apparel in a very different way for the end consumer.
How does Avataar work with platforms like Shopify?
Nick - Nice. I've used asos’s app a couple of times where you can put in they might have changed it now, but you have to put your measurements in and then they had lots of different models and they would use AI to put products on those models. They would choose a model that had a similar sort of size and fitting to yourself. But yeah, I think as you say, I mean actually making a hologram and stuff like that is unbelievable. I mean that is a completely different level to anything that's been available to date. And I think bringing it back to kind of ecommerce and Shopify. It's just amazing. The fact that you'd be able to actually try on clothing created, guess what's, what you guys call Avataar, but create an Avataar of yourself to then be able to put products on that, whether that's your body, your house or anything else, or even using augmented reality to look at. A lot of car brands use it, for example, so you can have a proper Walkthrough 360 video while somebody is driving along in that car to see what all the different lights look like and what the sounds are and all that sort of stuff. It's amazing seeing where this sort of stuff is going and going back to what we're talking about, the trends and what's going to happen next. It'd be interesting to see if people actually start wearing headsets, because that's always been the way VR AR has sat people wearing headsets and having that kind of experience. I think a lot of people are slowly getting used to the fact that you can do that from your desktop computer or your mobile phone as well, which is very exciting. And then most importantly, let's talk about Avataar. So you guys obviously have a Shopify app. You integrate straight into shopify. Tell us more about Avataar. Where do you guys come into this process? If somebody is currently running a Shopify store and they're thinking, right, I want to add some augmented reality, some VR, what's the sort of process of getting started with you guys?
Gaurav - Sure. And your spot on Nick, in terms of the trends that we are seeing. If I could just add a little bit more onto that while kind of bringing in of that context as well as we all have seen, and as I was mentioning earlier, it's proven that the uplift three DNA is there, but still not every retailer, not every merchant has been able to adopt. It is also because it needs a certain level of tech expertise as well as the content to support and go into these experiences. So that is the first aspect that our AI and computer vision platform has worked until date in terms of solving is bringing the self service part to both demand and supply. What it means is that on the demand side, where the merchant and the tech integration piece fits, we are building out of the box product for Shopify and for other headless ecosystems as well, which is like a single click app on their marketplaces. So any merchant can come today, download our app on Shopify Marketplace and go live with 3D experiences, start publishing those experiences on their product pages just at the click of a button. There's no coding part required. It's a no code platform that we have brought to the merchants and at a global level, for merchants who cannot even fathom the thought of building these complicated experiences, we have packaged this whole solution and brought to them. Now, when it comes to supply, again, the self service part is very critical to bring in scalability, to bring in consistency in terms of photo realism that the consumer is looking for. That's where our turnkey solution comes into play. As I was referring to earlier. Which can take any existing 2D image or a 2D video of a product and create a life size 3D out of that. That allows any merchant to just use our app. Take images or videos of their existing product and start creating 3D product out of that without the need of any external partner. Any 3D experts in the mix to create that. And it's a matter of minutes, so you get the product in a matter of 20 odd minutes using our tech. So the 3D product, which is well used to take days and sometimes weeks for an artist to build nerve tech can build that in a matter of 20 minutes straight in a fully automated solution. So that is the first aspect, the first critical thing that I see in the ecosystem involving the self service part which we need to solve on the board demand and supply. And second, what we are focused on is as I was mentioning earlier about contextual reality which is sort of an ascendance of the digital experiences in the ecosystem which is making camera your home page. So that whatever you see, you can just dive into the context where you are and start exploring the product that you're looking at in the context that you want to make the purchase decision, just helping the consumers to make the right choice leading to lower returns and an overall much better experience out of it. And third and equally important one is what you were also touching upon making in terms of the AR glasses. Right? So we are at the cusp of the Web 3.0 era, in the metabolic era it's more commonly called. So how we see it is that AI classes over the course of this ticket would become mainstream. Now, whatever form these variables come to life, what it will ensure is that the AR experiences become persistent around the consumer. Because if, let's say you are having available like an air glass on it's, like always, like it's always on in that context that you can at any point start interacting with an experience and it kind of blends into with your physical environment. So that's the third trend I would say that we would see and that's what Avataar has been working on.
Nick - Amazing. I feel like we could talk for hours if we had the time on this. I think one of the really exciting things you mentioned actually is someone can start using your tech very quickly and I think one of the dangers I've certainly always had in it, it used to be the case with video, but things have changed with video is in the olden days when video first came out. And when I say the olden days, I'm talking five or ten years ago, not a million years ago, but when video first came out, it was a real challenge to get videos shot and actually shoot a video, edit a video and get it ready. It costs thousands of pounds, whereas now we're all walking around with basically film studios in our pockets, on our phones. And I think the fact that you've just said as well with augmented reality, when I first looked at things like VR and AR, we certainly looked at it in the property space a long time ago where you could actually see a new development and walk around it purely virtually before the first brick had even been laid in the actual development. But even then, I mean, that would take weeks, months, sometimes even years to actually build that piece of software to show that building. And obviously when you're building a building, there's a lot of money at stake. It's incredibly valuable. There's millions of pounds worth of homes that are going to be sold or office space, and therefore there's the budget for it. So I think being able to just pretty easily just connect to Shopify app into Shopify and within sort of 20 to 30 minutes to help us make this stuff work, I think is phenomenal. I think certainly deserves a lot of credit.
Gaurav - Thank you for the kind words, Nick. It's been years of effort that we have put behind making this platform and bringing it to the end consumer via the merchants across these headless ecosystems.
How can an ecommerce merchant access Avataar app?
Nick -Lovely. Well, it's been great having the show today. If people want to find your app or want to come to your website or reach out to you guys, what is the best way for them to do that?
Gaurav - So, as I said, we are live across Shopify and few other headless ecosystems. So on their marketplaces they can just look up after that's Avataar we are apart with an additionally. So they can find us on those marketplaces or of course, they can come to our website, which is uptan AI, and we have all the links to the different integrations that we provide to me.
Nick - Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. So it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us.
Gaurav - It's been completely my pleasure, Nick. And as I said at the very beginning, thanks for having me. It's been a very fun conversation with you today and learned a lot from your perspective.
Nick - Thank you so much. I've certainly learned a lot about AR and VR today. I think it's incredibly interesting space. And for anybody listening and tuning in at home or wherever you are right now, thank you so much for joining us.
Back again next week. And as I say, August is being a bit of a jumble of different episodes, so I don't actually know the exact topic for next week because I think Byron's got three or four different options in the tire right now, so we'll be back again next week. I can't tell you what weird, but I'm sure it's going to be amazing. So thanks for listening. We'll catch you again soon. Thanks for listening to today's podcast. You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter for exclusive offers@winningwithshopify.com. And don't forget to check out our Facebook group by searching for winning with Shopify on Facebook. Over and out. Bye.
