Improving sales conversion by placing products directly in your customer’s space with Mixed Reality

Anthony Uitz, Senior Program Manager, Wednesday, 8 December 2021

Showing products in a customer’s environment helps sales teams have better conversations about how a product might fit into a space, including how it impacts lines-of-sight and egress. By using Mixed Reality (MR), you can visualize products at real size in context of the physical world to close deals that would not have happened with just images or videos and differentiate your company from its competitors.

Mixed Reality Sales App — Mixed Reality Product Gallery App

Since we announced the Power Apps Mixed Reality controls being generally available earlier this year, they have been used to digitally transform business workflows in physical space using the hundreds of millions of MR-capable mobile devices already in users’ hands. Today, we are focusing on how to use these MR controls to land larger opportunities faster, increase customer satisfaction, and optimize brand performance – without the need for a specialized team of 3D / MR content creators, developers, and designers.

Our camera measurement control enables filtering a product catalog to the ones that will fit into the customer’s space. Our view controls show what the product looks like in real size. These virtual visualizations in physical space can also be captured, saved, and sent over email / Teams for post-sales processes like product installation.

To jumpstart anyone looking to take advantage of MR for their sales workflows we are sharing a sample app, recent feature improvements, and how low-code can take your consumer packaged goods and sales solutions to the next level.

Power Apps Mixed Reality Sales Sample App

The sample app demonstrates how to display a product gallery, filter that gallery using the camera measurement tool to only products that will fit into the space, view the products, and see photos captured during the MR experience. It is available for download on our Github that also contains sample 3D content and images that can be used with our MR controls.

Our documentation (download, Github) covers how to install the sample app and what the app does in more detail.

Power Apps MR Sales Sample App — The product gallery, camera measurement, and product viewing screens of the sample app

Mixed Reality Features for Sales Scenarios

For helping your sellers meet their customers’ needs faster, we’ve improved the MR experiences with better support for different content pipelines, easier onboarding of users, and additional capabilities to build buyer confidence in your products faster.

Bring content from anywhere

Images with depth – 3D content isn’t required to leverage MR, by passing an image (jpg, png, etc.) to our controls along with dimensions, salespeople can visualize products to have better conversations around product appearance and fit.
Support for OBJ and STL file formats – often used across industries in a variety of 3D modeling and CAD software for 3D mockups, printing, and prototyping of real-life objects, these formats are now natively supported by our MR controls so you can go directly from your favorite 3D content creation tool to Power Apps.
CGTrader 3D model library connector – CGTrader is one of the largest 3D content repositories that you can now use out-of-box in Power Apps to bring in thousands of free and paid models.

Intuitive, delightful, and immersive placement experience

Placement ease-of-use features – smoother panning, safe areas to prevent accidental movement, better translation tracking with user input, and increased selectable area on models all make the placement experience feel more polished and easier to control.
Selection and off-screen indicators – indicators help users find where they placed models and what actions they are taking on the model, which enables anyone to use these mixed reality capabilities with minimal training.
Shadows – programmatically generated shadows reduce the cost of creating 3D content and ground the model, making the overall experience more immersive.

Shadows make products more grounded in the environment

Additional capabilities for driving deals

Local content caching – up to 300 MB of models you have loaded before are cached to your device, allowing you to instantly load them for future experiences even when you don’t have a reliable internet connection.
Asynchronous file download – content is now downloaded as the MR experience is launched, making it faster to start placing models and images.
Model scaling (coming week of Dec 13th) – changing the scale allows for easier placement of large models and for small adjustments to seeing how the product fits.

Scaling — Model scaling helps product placement

Learn More

Here are a couple of resources to see more information about our Mixed Reality capabilities:

See more details about the Mixed Reality controls in our documentation
Follow a step-by-step tutorial to build a sales-oriented mobile MR Power Apps app in our MS Learn module
Read about our technical architecture in our blog

Going Further

While we showcased a sample product sales app with MR / AR (augmented reality) capabilities, this solution can quickly and easily be taken further using low-code:

Differentiate even further by having your solution custom branded and deployed to your internal company app store with Power Apps native mobile apps
Build unified sales and service solutions by integrating your CRM / ERP data – like opportunities from Dynamics 365 Sales and work orders from Dynamics 365 Field Service – through any of the hundreds of pre-built connectors or your own custom connector
Bring territory management and other location-based capabilities into your solution with our mapping controls
Empower salespeople on the go with offline app support
Infuse intelligence using our out-of-box AI Builder controls, AI Power FX formulas, or bring your own AI model

As always, we would love to hear from you on how we can keep improving our mixed reality features. Please leave your feedback and comments in the Ideas Forum with the ‘mixed reality’ label, so we can keep track of your thoughts and requests.

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