Why You Need an AR Food Menu App and What it Takes to Build It

Why You Need an AR Food Menu App and What it Takes to Build It

AR, or augmented reality, is what the whole tech world is talking about now. Many businesses are already using it as a marketing tool and a way to appeal to their target audience. But how can you start using it for your restaurant business?

Well, it’s simple. Do you remember those difficult-to-pronounce words naming the dishes you see on a menu when you yourself are a guest at a new restaurant, especially if it’s the one offering an unusual cuisine? What about a traditional burger joint like Wendy’s or Whataburger? Have you ever wondered how big the burger you’ve ordered will really be? If you answer negatively, lucky you are! To most people, though, such situations may cause much discomfort and even irritation, resulting in an unpleasant restaurant user experience and reducing the chances of visiting the place again.

What can we do about it?

Food menus have always been a crucial tool to help customers choose dishes, comparing them, evaluating the portion size and price ratio, etc. But it often works like this:

The more attractive the picture of a dish in a menu is, the more likely a client is to order the dish. So, if the menu is designed in a form of a list of dishes, their ingredients, and prices, with no pictures at all, a client’s pre-dinner experience is likely to be less satisfactory.

Now, imagine that your guests will be able to enjoy a 360° visualization of every item on the menu at your establishment. Do you think they will enjoy dining out at your place? Of course, they will. Augmented reality brings value to restaurant customers and, as a result, revenue to business owners in many ways.

Take a look at the main benefits of an augmented reality food menu, both for vendors and for their customers:

1. Interesting dining experience.
2. The sole opportunity to explore augmented reality and play with virtual food can be a decisive factor for some people. But beyond that, people like to know what they pay for. With an AR app, you can offer your clients some valuable information about every menu item, e.g., a real size of a portion, nutritional value, a complete list of ingredients, and even some interesting facts from the history of dishes. It all gets particularly helpful for customers of restaurants offering unusual cuisines.
3.  
4. Customer engagement.

Such apps can be used to give customers an opportunity to leave feedback, let’s say, for a discount coupon or a complimentary appetizer. Besides, they may have a section with interesting content, such as live streaming of the cooking process.

3. More promotion options.
4. The app can be used to increase sales by promoting special offers, suggesting best dish combinations, or recommending beverages suitable to selected food. It works like cross-selling.
5.  
6. Market research.
7. Virtual menu apps can have multiple additional functions. For example, they can track which food items customers view more often, collect the whole viewing history and time spent on reading pop-ups about special offers, or suggest quick surveys to customers. Thus, they can become a useful analytical tool for businesses.

So, how do AR apps for a virtual food menu work?

Augmented reality appears on the screen of a tablet or a smartphone, overlapping the real-time image. Thus, AR app users can see life-size 3D models of dishes right in front of them before deciding on the order.

There’s a lot of work behind every visualization. Each dish is photographed from different angles multiple times, and modern photogrammetry technologies are later used to create very detailed 3D graphics. The results are truly amazing. 

Augmented reality app development isn’t limited only to designing 3D models. It involves many hours of coding to make the app have all the main features and functions as well as the additional ones catered to your needs. Indeed, application developers can include whatever functionality you and your business require.

AR app examples that work

Augmented reality is not a novelty, but common knowledge about it spread around the world with the release of Pokémon Go. Although this popular game has nothing to do with restaurants and dining, some restaurant owners have already invented a way to increase their profit with its help.

Monocle for Yelp is another way to use augmented reality for restaurant businesses. Statistics shows that restaurant businesses are checked for online reviews more frequently than any other businesses, and this app helps customers to do just that.

Source: https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/#Q2

See, AR can bring your customers’ ordering and dining experiences to a new level. Guys from KabaQ – a startup based in New York – are now showing restaurant businesses how to make even more use of that. As of summer 2017, their virtual food menu app had more than 150 dishes offered by 15 partnering restaurants. It’s fair to suggest that today’s numbers are bigger.

Every visualization is very detailed and realistic, which allows users to get exactly what they always want – to see what they pay for. The founders reveal that it takes approximately 100 shots to picture each food item and create its 3D rendering.

Source: Prnt Scr at 0:28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO-GodvY0OU

How much does it cost to build an app like KabaQ?

As a business owner, you surely want to know what kind of funds you’ll need to invest in building an app like KabaQ for your business. And here’s the kicker:

The rates for AR app development differ from contractor to contractor.

Whether you’re addressing an agency or a freelancer, you will most likely be charged per hour than per project. Thus, the final price will depend on the time developers spend working on your application. That’s how hourly rates vary across the globe:

Source: https://static.thinkmobiles.com/uploads/2017/04/AR-world-map-1024×497.png

The whole process looks like this:

1. Layout 50-200 hours

At the initial stage, you communicate your expectations and business goals to developers. It’s vital to share a detailed vision, explain what features you want your app to have, provide access to necessary data, etc. Once they get an idea of what you’re willing to have in the end, they start thinking on the best ways to give you that. They make a prototype and plan the work, which may take anywhere from a week to a month, and the cost may be from $1,000 to $5,000, depending on the complexity of the project. At the end of this stage, you will know the estimated deadlines and overall price for augmented reality app development for your particular project.

2. Design and development 300-1,000 hours

At this stage, your job is just to stay in touch so that the team could inform you about the progress and ask questions if they appear. Design and development involves all the coding, programming basic functions, and additional controls, developing UX and UI design, creating 3D models, and much more. For a virtual menu app, this stage may take from 300 and up to 1,000 hours, with the overall cost ranging from $10,000 and up to $30,000.

3. Testing, bug fixing, and deployment 150-300 hours

At the final stage, the app undergoes internal and external testing. Developers examine it for bugs and analyze it from a user’s perspective in terms of comfort and simple controls. Some fixing and improvements will be required here. After that, the app is ready for licensing and launch. The whole process generally doesn’t take more than 300 hours and is unlikely to exceed $5,000 in price.

Note that all the aforementioned numbers are not precise. Deadline and cost depend on many factors. Let’s say, if you want your AR app just to visualize the menu in 3D, it will cost you less than if you wanted your clients to be able to order through the app. Functionality and the number of food items on the menu matter the most.

So, should restaurants incorporate AR?

If you thought that AR is all about games and entertainment, now you know that there’s much more to it. Virtual menus have a potential to change the future of the ordering process for restaurant customers, improving their dining experience and eventually increasing sales.

As a restaurant business owner, you can get a full-blown mobile application where your clients will not only view life-size dishes (or maybe even customize them) but also see all information about the food, make orders, get access to informative or entertaining content, such as cooking lessons, log in to a personal account for loyalty programs and discounts, etc. If you’re ready to make use of augmented reality for restaurant promotion and building a loyal customer base, contact us to discuss the functionality, design, and other details of your project.