City XR: Leveraging a Digital Layer of Opportunity

Psychic VR Lab is a firm distributing a range of XR tools for developers of various skill levels, including the STYLY developer platform for creating and distributing immersive content.

The firm works with many clients to deploy branded content worldwide. Moreover, Psychic VR Lab is involved in establishing AR metaverse content, as shown via other STYLY-based location-based events such as its NYC takeover last year.

Psychic VR Lab is spearheading its City XR initiative, leveraging the firm’s product portfolio to enable a digital layer which enhances urban environments with AR visuals visible via smartphones or glasses. The plans also include shared metaverse content that groups can enjoy together.

The City XR digital layer provides brands with a unique advertising avenue which allows marketing teams to place geo-tagged interactable XR content indoors or outdoors.

City XR to Provide a Digital Advertising Opportunity

The digital layer provides an innovative and creative space to help brands engage with audiences and re-invent the customer journey. According to Psychic VR Lab, the digital layer powered by the STYLY/City XR project reveals the “future” of
integrated media and technology.

The firm notes that many vertical clients can leverage the City XR digital layer, from retail to smart cities to tourism. Psychic VR Lab is working with end-users such as PARCO and J. Front Retailing to secure immersive customer experience services such as interacting with brands before purchasing an item.

Additionally, Psychic VR Lab showcased its City XR platform at AWE 2023. The event drew many eyes to the XR space following several important announcements and a significant industry presence. Following the event, Meta and Apple announced a new MR headset which promotes AR/MR immersive content. Therefore, the new devices are helping to popularise XR location-based content, which firms such as Psychic VR Lab are championing.

XR Today spoke with the CEO of Psychic VR Lab, Masahiro Yamaguchi, to explore the new digital layer of opportunity, which is ready and waiting for global marketing and brand teams.

We Built this City on XR

Psychic VR Lab is focusing on establishing City XR as a tool for leveraging branded opportunities within a digital augmented layer unused by many marketing teams. The firm is also developing use cases for location-based AR as an audience engagement solution. “Nobody has the same vision as us,” says Masahiro Yamaguchi.

Yamaguchi also said:

We realised that everybody is going in a very different direction while attempting to achieve the same goal: bringing AR into your life.

With Apple’s WWDC announcement, the XR space realised that immersive technology is “not just for video games anymore; there are ways now in which AR and VR can interact with your daily life.”

Yamaguchi added:

VR has gone from being purely interactive to being a consumable product. Whereas AR has gone from passive to interactive. So the two are very much converging into something that can affect every part of your life. Suchas getting directions around a city, or attending location-based digital experiences.

The CEO also noted that his firm’s vision is to create shared social experiences that are “not an isolated experience like the Apple Vision Pro.”. Yamaguchi added, “it’s more collective [than the Vision Pro]; I’m using entertainment as an example, but it goes far deeper than that.”

Yamaguchi also noted how following the impact of COVID on everyday life, the world’s perspective changed completely, and Psychic VR Lab is “bringing people back to the city again.”

The CEO continued:

That’s what City XR does; it creates new value based on the location, bringing that person[s] back to an outdoor space and adding new value using that new AR layer.

“AR is already here,” says Yamaguchi, who also explained that following Apple’s AR announcement, he believes the AR revolution has already started – “it’s already happening.”

Supporting Content Creation and Immersive Developers

The CEO also said that while creating the City XR platform is of fundamental importance, Psychic VR Lab believes that supporting XR creators is just as important as making the City XR service. No matter their background or skill level.

Yamaguchi also said:

We believe in a future where we use all sorts of XR headsets in our daily outdoor life. To secure this AR future, XR firms must provide practical case studies which show brands that they can succesfully create content and distribute it to smartphones or headsets – any headset.

The STYLY/City XR development platform supports interoperable immersive content distribution. The framework enables developers to deliver their creations to various individuals representing many types and brands of mobile AR-ready devices.

Yamaguchi added that City XR provides a browser-based creative software that allows the public to visit and interact with content, “this kind of future is not science fiction anymore”, Yamaguchi said.

The CEO also added:

So not just provide content, but also teach people how to create content so developers in a specific region can make immmersive content and send it to each other. I think that is a very important concept.

City XR: Accelerating Existing Marketing Activities

Regarding working with brands and different verticals, City XR provides the prospect “to accelerate already existing marketing activities” and enhance advertising opportunities by leveraging the AR digital layer, ready atop the real world.

Yamaguchi explained that brands use the City XR framework to enhance customer experience expectations in retail use cases. The CEO noted how customers waiting in line for a pop-up store had used the STYLY platform to interact with AR content related to the brand.

A brand can place AR visualisations of brand mascots and merchandise to “begin the discussion” around a brand ahead of purchase. At the same time, City XR can bring value when buyers are idle in a queue with branded interactive content. Yamaguchi said, “City XR also gives audiences an added experiential level when they’re inside waiting for a purchase.”

Yamaguchi explained:

STYLY provides a digital layer that goes over the top of the real world. So people with the STYLY app and an AR-enabled phone or headset can experience more than they would without that digital layer. We create a new value to a space nobody uses. For merchandising and marketing, brands can leverage “dead space”, such as an escalator or a corner of a building, inside or outside, for AR-based advertising.

Brands leveraging augmented visualisations can redefine a brand and set it apart from competitors. “Whether it is Gucci or a tomato,” customers can find it hard to figure out which brand best suits them and how AR placements can assist brands in connecting with their audiences.

Yamaguchi also added:

City XR will change the customer experience. We add on an immmersive experience and storytelling to let a consumer know why they need to buy a product or how a product can improve their life. When we started STYLY, we already thought people would wear XR devices all day and that it would change our lifestyle. For example, we listen to music every day, on a mobile computer while walking around outside. That was not possible 30 years ago.

To conclude, Yamaguchi said, “Psychic VR Lab believes that the world will start using XR headsets daily,” like how smartphones leverage music player applications. Yamaguchi added that before Apple’s WWDC showcase, “not many people believed that vision. However, “they saw the future after Apple announced the Vision Pro.”