iWorld
Virtual shopping spree: How augmented reality on social media enhances the retail experience
Mumbai: Nowadays, convenience is paramount when it comes to shopping. Consumers want an easy way to try on clothes, visualize how furniture will look in their homes, and generally “try before they buy.” Thanks to augmented reality (AR) technology, these immersive experiences are increasingly prevalent across the retail space.
AR allows brands and retailers to introduce engaging new shopping experiences like virtual fitting rooms, digital try-ons, and color-matching for everything from paint to makeup to hair dye. By implementing AR, customers no longer need to physically try on items or second-guess how a purchase will look in their space. It eliminates the uncertainty of shopping.
Ultimately, AR reduces product returns, increases customer engagement, and fosters long-term brand loyalty. According to research by G2, 61% of consumers prefer retailers offering AR experiences. It is no surprise retail accounted for 5% of global AR usage in 2022, with that number continuing to grow each year. Snapchat even predicts nearly 75% of the global population will frequently use AR for shopping by 2025.
Brands worldwide are using AR to create targeted marketing campaigns, boost engagement, and deliver personalized shopping journeys. For example, Nike’s AR app Nike Fit lets users measure their feet to find the perfect shoe size and visualize how different sneaker styles and colors look on their feet. The app improves sizing accuracy by 60% and reduces returns by 50%.
Similarly, Converse’s Sampler app enables shoppers to virtually try on hundreds of shoe styles from multiple angles using their smartphone camera. This immersive experience has increased conversion rates by 30% and time spent in the app by 50%.
So, what are the key benefits of AR in retail?
Reduced Returns
Allowing customers to virtually try before buying dramatically cuts down on product returns and related costs for retailers.
Increased Engagement
Shoppers can experiment with makeup shades, try on eyeglasses, and visualize outfits without lifting a finger, keeping them actively engaged with brands and products.
Enhanced Loyalty
Delivering seamless, personalized shopping experiences builds lasting customer loyalty and repeat business.
Valuable Data
Brands gain insights into customer sizes, preferences, and behaviors to inform inventory and marketing decisions.
Boosted Sales
Customers are more likely to purchase items they can confidently preview in a realistic setting.
Leading brands are finding innovative ways to integrate AR into the retail experience across channels:
Color Matching
AR helps match paint colors, cosmetics, and more to a customer’s surroundings or skin tone by overlaying the shade onto a photo for an accurate preview.
Virtual Fitting Rooms
Brands like Gucci use AR to let shoppers virtually try on clothing items to find the right size, fit, and style from the comfort of home.
Interactive Displays
In-store AR displays allow customers to browse extended product catalogs, personalize items, and ensure a great fit or shade match.
Virtual Try-Ons
Similar to fitting rooms, AR lets shoppers virtually try on accessories like eyeglasses or hats before purchasing. Warby Parker’s app uploads a selfie to preview frames.
Space Visualization
Customers can use AR to envision how large furniture pieces will look and fit in a room versus relying on guesswork.
Gamified Engagement
Starbucks has used AR to engage customers by letting them scan cups to unlock animated scenes, encouraging brand interaction.
As this technology continues evolving, augmented reality shopping experiences are set to become the standard. Several companies are already implementing AR throughout the customer journey to deepen connections and redefine what is possible in retail.
The following article is attributed to Vosmos CEO Piyush Gupta.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
