How restaurants enhance their customers' experience with AR and VR?

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have taken over almost every industry and keep expanding. Brands and companies are utilizing AR and VR for delivering rich and unique customer experience, which make a great difference in front of competitors
For few years now, AR and VR made their way through the food industry. The F&B sector have seen the potential of these emerging technologies and understood how it could positively affect their business and marketing.

However with high initial development costs, only a few companies and restaurants have been successfully utilizing Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to boost their business.
Here is a selection of few examples showing how these new technologies have been integrated into F&Bs.

1. Entertain Customers with AR and VR-based Games

Everyone hates to wait at the restaurant. This is even the number one reason why a customer will not revisit your restaurant. Putting a VR headset on every table allows customers to dive into another world while their food is being prepared, immensely increase the customer experience and their interaction with the venue.

AR helps restaurants to elevate the brand experience and educate their consumers about what they stand for. For instance, more than 50 restaurants around the world have installed Skullmapping’s project Le Petit Chef, an AR dining experience that displays 3D projections onto customers’ dining tables. A tiny chef entertains the guest by hauling ingredients around the table and demonstrating how their meals are prepared. This brief immersive experience happens while their actual meals are being cooked in the kitchen.

2. Educate Diners

New York-based burger chain Bareburger is one of the first companies to use AP apps. KABAQ

Nowadays, customers are becoming more and more health-conscious. Rather than merely its name, they like to learn everything about a dish, for example, its calorie content, ingredients, allergens and others. Using an AR app allows customers to go through all the information on your menu by selecting dishes individually.

3. Delivering Unique Experience

*The VR Cocktail and Baptiste & Bottle. Image credit: Neil Burger*

With the increase of “Experiential Marketing”, a process to make customers “Experience” products they are going to buy; restaurants are investing in VR to create the ultimate customer experience!

Restaurants such as Baptise and Bottle in Chicago , allow a customer to dine at virtually anywhere in the world using a VR headset. As the guests take a VR trip, the cocktail is created tableside and is poured into customized glassware for the occasion. When the patron returns from the VR trip, the drinking begins. If you would like to know what happens next will cost you a trip to Chicago and the Conrad Hotel…

Augmented reality completely changing the way we perceive restaurants and how we experience them. However there’s so much to do and explore before AR can take over restaurants. For now, all we can do is wait and hope for tech-savvy restaurateurs to explore this technology.