“Clothes are the final word enabler of self-expression,” noted Resh Sidhu, global director at Arcadia Creative Studio, Snapchat — which is why the technology company is using fashion to prolifically propel the “Augmented Reality revolution” forward.

Sidhu’s session in the course of the summit, titled “Shopping Augmented: Your Wardrobe Lives Here,” focused on how “AR is changing the way in which we interact with the world” and is “transforming the buyer experience.”

Arcadia, Snap Inc.’s full-service creative studio dedicated to “creating Augmented Reality that focuses on delivering next-gen AR with revolutionary solutions,” allows brands “to push boundaries” through its technologies, in response to the corporate.

For Sidhu, Arcadia is the summation of her formative years experiences as a toddler growing up in inner-city London that involved a love of sci-fi (think “Star Wars” and “Back to the Future”), technology and playing dress-up. The confluence of this trifecta takes form at Arcadia, where Sidhu’s philosophy that “clothes can assist us imagine different versions of ourselves” becomes a digital reality.

Snap’s AR technologies have been in development for greater than a decade, and at present, through its immersive fashion experiences, users can try on latest outfits from the comfort of their very own homes, enabling brands to essentially give attention to the buyer experience. 

Sidhu says AR is utilized by 250 million Snapchatters each day; 75 percent of the worldwide population will probably be frequent AR users by 2025, and in response to a recent study from Shopify, there may be a 94 percent higher conversion rate when interacting with AR in retail. And, shockingly, two-thirds of people that try an AR experience before buying a product are less prone to return it, reducing environmental burdens.

“Do you ever remember Cher’s closet? That was 27 years ago,” Sidhu reminds us, of Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher Horowitz’s closet within the cult-’90s movie “Clueless.”

“Today, revolutionary fashion brands have understood the ability of AR to spark joy and leverage this technology to create tomorrow’s shopping experiences today,” Sidhu said.

Sidhu said “luxury brands which might be leading the way in which” with AR through experiences with try-ons, selection, sizing and fit. Fendi has used AR for sneaker and eyewear try-ons and product launches, and the success of it has encouraged them to include AR strategies into key collections moving forward, Sidhu said.

Christian Dior, which drove successful sales through Snap’s AR by allowing users to try on six different versions of sneakers, was promoted in Snap’s carousel, and thru Snap ads shoppers could buy products directly from Snap’s platform. Louis Vuitton leveraged Snap’s scan technology to acknowledge their logo anywhere on the planet, and used it for a launch that allowed shoppers to view their latest luggage collection at home.

“AR is immersive,” Sidhu said. “And by immersion, I mean that folks are paying full attention — they’re emotionally engaged. They usually commit this information to their memory. Such a interaction creates long-lasting memory structures, and it’s because we’re lively with it, and never passive with it, and we’re selecting to have interaction with AR.”

Or take its immersive partnership with Live Nation, which gave Snap a chance to resolve “real world human problems” with AR, because it created colourful interactive maps to assist guide attendees around concert venues and safety features corresponding to “Find Your Friend” that enabled users to locate friends at a show.

All this explains why “democratizing AR” is on the core of Snap’s interest in these technologies. “At Snap, we imagine in the ability of constructing the world a greater place by augmenting it,” Sidhu said. “Experiences like this shouldn’t be for the few — they must be for everybody.”