The World’s Largest Deployment of Web AR

The Challenge

Saatchi Art came to RPR with two clear challenges: 

“How can we improve buyer confidence, increase loyalty, and drive sales lift with Augmented Reality?”

How do we scale Augmented Reality to 1.4million works of art–the largest online catalogue of art in the world.  

Jeanne Anderson, General Manager of Saatchi Art, claimed that through surveying customers, “70% of art buyers are hesitant to purchase because they can’t see the artwork in advance.”

Why it was significant

The View In My Room feature is one of the largest Web AR deployments to date for an ecommerce site.

• Saatchi Art’s website features 1.4M original artworks from over 94K emerging artists 
• SaatchiArt.com sees over 2M visitors  each month from 110K countries
• Since Spring 2019, Saatchi Art has seen a significant shift in its customer behavior, with mobile web users outpacing desktop. 
• In Q2 2020, Saatchi Art’s mobile transactions grew 100% year-over-year.

How does it work?

In three simple steps, users can now easily visualize and purchase artwork in their home to ensure it is just right before purchasing.

1. Users select the art they are interested in online and are presented with a “View in My Room” icon. 

2. When a user taps the “View in My Room” icon they can virtually place the art on their wall using augmented reality. 

3. Users can then take a photo of the art in their home or tap to add the art to their cart to purchase.

Technical

Within the View In The Room experience, RPR developed several first-of-its-kind WebAR features including: 

• First-of-its-kind production-grade deployment which augments content onto a vertical plane in WebAR
• Architected to ingest over 1.4 million image files in a way that processes and displays individual artwork metadata into the AR front-end.
• Includes the world’s first WebAR proximity indicator, which analyses the user’s position in the 3D scene and warns users when they are getting too close to the wall. This was developed to improve the performance when tracking artwork on walls that are often markerless.
• Designed with scalable 3D canvasses based on artwork dimensions to add perceived depth to 2D artwork
• Acts as a seamless extension of the existing Saatchi e-commerce website
• Each art piece is dynamically scaled based on the artwork’s metadata and deployed into AR with the approximate real-world dimensions of the physical artwork.