Interactive shopping experience through immersive store environments

Abstract

In the era of high competition with E-commerce and online shops, brick-and-mortar retail industry seeks new opportunities to enhance shopping experience through engaging technologies. Even though retailers are applying their omnichannel strategies to attract more shoppers through technology-driven solutions including websites, mobile apps, and so forth, we find that these technologies are somewhat basic and do not represent the "disruptive" innovations. Along with these current technologies, retailers should leverage their store physical real estate, and transform it into immersive store environments (ISEs) that allow shoppers to navigate in 3D store aisles through rich media interface ported onto networked devices. Therefore, we propose our own study of what ISE use-cases are most desirable by customers and retailers in such contexts; we describe the implementation of our cloud-based interactive shopping interface for ISE, before discussing the promising results of its deployment in a "real-world" store. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.