Amazon, Walmart Step Up Their AI, AR Efforts at Retail

Amazon and Walmart promoted their use of AI and augmented reality for retail and online shopping in blog posts last week, joining Ikea by offering a mixed-reality shopping experience that uses an AI app to help shoppers place furniture virtually in their home spaces (see 2206220007).

Walmart’s iOS app will get an AR feature in early July, allowing customers to view furniture and home decor items in their spaces with “a few simple swipes” on their smartphone, executives blogged Thursday. The feature will be available initially for 300 furniture and home decor items, with plans to expand to back-to-college items in the coming months.

A “View in your space” banner on AR-enabled items walks customers through the camera connection process so they can see items in their space, Walmart said. They will also be able to check item dimensions to see if items will fit in their space. The feature will be available on iOS phones initially; plans call for rollouts to Android phones and the mobile web, it said.

Walmart’s AR feature includes haptic feedback, allowing customers to feel vibrations as they maneuver 3D models; vibrations indicate when they are dragging items beyond room boundaries, it said. The AR tool also has accessibility features for customers with disabilities: Customers with limited mobility can place a virtual item in a room with gesture controls; vision-impaired customers can access voice-based instructions and descriptions.

In stores, Walmart is using AR to help customers find information about products on shelves by pointing their phones at the items. They can use filters to organize search by personal preferences, the retailer said. It gave the example of using the in-store tool to identify gluten-free products quickly. In the future, customers will be able to scan store shelves to see which items are "on rollback," clearance or part of a rewards program; they might be offered instant coupons, it said.

At Amazon’s re:MARS 2022 event in Las Vegas last week, Dilip Kumar, vice president-physical retail and technology, discussed how his team is using computer vision and machine learning to speed up the in-store shopping experience for customers in physical spaces, said an event wrap.

In a blog post, Kumar cited Amazon’s Walk Out technology, used in some Amazon and Whole Foods stores, which allows customers to make purchases without a traditional checkout scanning process. The company has made “ongoing inventions at all layers” that include sensors, optics and machine vision algorithms, he said. That has resulted in the need for fewer cameras, making stores more “cost-effective, smaller, and capable of running deep networks locally.”

Sensors and algorithms have evolved to detect a broad range of products and differences in shopping behavior in full-sized grocery stores, too, Kumar said. Amazon expanded the environments its algorithms can account for as it deploys Just Walk Out technology to third-party retailers, he said. Just Walk Out technology is available in more than 30 Amazon Fresh stores in the U.S. and U.K., over 25 Amazon Go stores in the U.S., and two Whole Foods Market store locations. It is also being used in sports venues and travel retail stores, he said.