Augmented reality sales and presentation tools for pharma, education, entertainment and manufacturing. AR brings products, stories and data to life. Mainly used with tablet, phone or AR glasses.
From mechanism-of-action visualisations to congress booth activations, AR sales aids replace traditional diagrams and images with something users can reach out and explore in three dimensions.
Over a decade of AR delivery using Vuforia, ARKit and ARCore. Every build is tested on target hardware under realistic conditions. WebAR technologies are also utilised for broader accessibility.
Close collaboration with marketing teams from day one to ensure clinical accuracy and brand compliance before any build begins.
AR content built and optimised for target hardware, with marker or markerless tracking validated under realistic lighting and environmental conditions.
Tested across the target device range. Tracking reliability and performance validated before final sign-off.
The pitch for AR in pharma is usually message retention, and that is true enough, but it is not really why these work. A rep gets about five minutes with a physician. An AR tool puts something on the table the physician has not seen before, and that buys a few more minutes of attention. That is the whole mechanism.
So the useful question is not whether the AR looks impressive. It is whether a rep who is not technical can get it running first time, in a corridor, on an iPad that has not been updated in a month. Most of the design work goes there.
I have built five of these for pharma field teams, across osteoporosis, cardiovascular, respiratory, ADHD and severe asthma. Every one shipped with a non-AR fallback, because there is always a room where the lighting is wrong or the marker has gone missing.
A printed marker the physician lays their own arm over, with the augmented bone appearing on top. It steps through healthy bone, then osteopenia, then mild and severe osteoporosis. Using their hand rather than a generic model is what made it land, and it cost nothing extra to do.
An interactive heart model and a cutaway artery, showing plaque accumulating over time until the vessel occludes and then the events that follow from it. Built for a field team talking about elevated LDL-C, and distributed inside the client’s own app ecosystem rather than the public store.
The tool tracked drug particles down through the large and small airways, with the AR lungs registered onto a physical printed model so the rep could walk the iPad right around it. It also ran off a flat card marker where the model was not practical. It shipped in seven languages off one build, and scaled up for congress with three printed models on the stand.
Read the case study →Instead of one linear app, a deck of marker cards the user picks from, so the conversation goes wherever the physician wants it to. It shipped as two versions off a single build. One carrying the clinical data for the rep meeting, and one as a leave piece for the physician to use with the patient. Both reported analytics back, and that shaped the next round of content.
A booth centrepiece in severe asthma, where an abstract chrome sculpture about nine feet tall was the physical anchor and the iPad added the story around it. HoloLens was the first suggestion but the budget did not support it, so we used environmental recognition and extended tracking instead. Once the content triggered, a delegate could walk a two metre square while it played out around them. Three iPads on plinths ran continuously, so people could have a look before committing to a demo.
There are three ways to anchor an AR sales aid, and the choice affects cost and reliability more than anything else in the brief.
A flat printed marker is the cheapest and by far the most reliable. It works in bad lighting, it prints onto a leave piece, and if one goes missing you email another. The limitation is that the content sits on a flat plane.
A 3D printed model is the most memorable. Somebody picks it up, and the AR registering onto a real object is the thing they describe to a colleague afterwards. It costs more, it has to be shipped, and somebody has to look after it.
Markerless and environmental tracking gives the most freedom, because the content sits in the room rather than on a target. It is also the most sensitive to lighting and surfaces, so it wants a controlled space like a booth rather than a corridor.
Most briefs assume markerless, because it sounds like the best one. In practice a printed marker with a fallback path is right more often than not.
Three things make an AR build go quickly.
The approved science first, in whatever state it already exists. A storyboard, a mode of action film, an existing deck. I would rather work from something that has already been through review than write something new that has to go through it.
Any 3D assets you already own. Most pharma clients have more 3D than they think, usually sitting with whoever produced the last animation. Reusing it can save a fortnight.
And a decision on devices early. iPad only is straightforward. Adding Android adds a full QA pass, and it is much cheaper to know that at the start than in week seven.
Get in touch to discuss your project. I will aim to respond within 24-48 hours with an honest assessment of what's possible, how long it will take and what it will cost.