Shopify is bringing Apple’s latest AR tech to their platform

Shopify is leaning on phone-based AR to make online purchases look a little more lifelike for users.

The Canadian commerce company announced today that they have added support for AR Quick Look, one of Apple’s new features from ARKit 2 which will be going live with iOS12 later today and will be available for integrations with the 600,000 merchants currently on their platform.

Merchants will be able to use the tools to upload 3D models of their products which users will be able to tap on the goods inside Safari to view in their real-world environments. While viewing goods like this was possible in the past iteration of ARKit, with this integration, users won’t need to download another app, they can check the products out in AR with a lot less friction.

Augmented reality has a lot of potential to change how e-commerce operates as users feel like they can gain better impressions of what the physical goods they’re buying will look and operate like in real life. With phone and tablet-based AR, the challenge is cluing users into the fact that these features exist while also making them more worthwhile than gimmicky.