E-commerce is no longer online only. Many online activities can be translated to offline purchases. Online-to-offline, or O2O, is big in China. AR is one of important traffic entrances of O2O. For example, Starbucks applied AR for its new Roastery store. The customers use the phone to explore at coffee store to gain knowledge about coffee and baking machines, playing interactive games, order the coffee、cookies and bread directly. The customers can enjoy “one-stop” experience. The technology behinds this project is 3D recognition and tracking technology. We also invented a method to make annotations automatically with point cloud processing.
Another successful example is “Pokemon Go” Style augmented reality game “Catch the cat” we created in 2016. Virtual creatures are TMall Dolls. They are located around real-world environments by the computer program. The players can catch them to get the Coupon. Coupon is a very useful to guiding of O2O. Nearly 1 billions people played this game and became the most popular interactive marketing activities of Double 11 since 1999. The AR system is stable and reliable. It stood the test of super high flow.
