Augmented Reality - Where does reality begin and end?

Augmenting reality by overlaying useful information (such as happens with a service such as Yelp) is only the beginning.

But the core difference between these services and professional retail deployments (which will vastly improve the shopper's experience) lie in who is providing the content.

The simplest example: Wikipedia pages are written by users while Corporate Websites are obviously written by the Corporation.

Brick and mortar retailers are in danger of allowing their shopper's augmented reality to be written by shopper's rather than controlling their message themselves. Input from shopper's is inevitable (whether retailers like the feedback being posted or not) but retailers undoubtedly have an opportunity to influence the shopping experience IF they commit to the retail floor as their greatest conduit to the shopper.

Bricks and mortar is THE key differentiator between Online and Offline retail. Yet, rather than embracing their physical relationship with shoppers retailers continue to decimate the shopping experience by focusing on cost-cutting rather than shopper experience.

Today retail efforts could spawn their own FAIL BLOG channel. It should be interesting to see which companies embrace Augmented Reality - which will rapidly become Reality in the financial sense of the word.

In the beginning the internet was ignored creating opportunity for firms such as Amazon. Today retailers have the opportunity to use technology to remind shoppers why they visit physical locations but every shopping season which passes without this embrace is one more generation of shoppers learning to live without buildings.