SAi Launches Augmented Reality App for Signmakers

One of the killer apps for augmented reality is allowing customers to see what a product will look like in one’s home, office or other final location before it is actually bought. The IKEA catalog is perhaps the best example of this kind of AR application: point your phone at your empty living room and see how a particular piece of furniture will look in that spot. Likewise, SAi, makers of Flexi, the standard design platform for the sign industry, recently launched VirtualSign, an app that allows signmakers to see how a sign will look in an actual interior or exterior location. SAi had been teasing the app for the past couple of years and it finally launched in June.

“The idea came from our CEO [Mark Blundell] and he thought it would be really cool if people could see their sign with their phone before they actually printed it,” said Gudrun Bonte, vice president of product management for SAi. “We looked into the technologies and thought, ‘That’s kind of an augmented reality approach.’”

The advantage of the app is that SAi customers’ design files already live in the cloud.

“Most of our customers make their own designs in our software and we already have the ability for them to upload their files to their cloud account, so they’re stored in the cloud for other tools that we have,” she said.

At present, the AR component works within the Flexi platform. Once a designer has finished a sign and stores it on their cloud account, the VirtualSign app accesses all the stored files, displays them, the user selects the one they want to “comp,” and then they point their smartphone camera at the spot were the sign will be installed.

“The application will try to find vertical spaces,” Bonte said, “and the sign itself can be pinned down. Once that’s done, you can scale and rotate it, and once you’ve pinned it down, you can walk around with your phone, and it’s as if you’re walking around and physically being there.”

If the client isn’t physically with the signmaker,  the user can take a snapshot of the sign virtually in place and email it to them.

“The whole point of it is that it’s kind of a marketing tool,” Bonte said. “Before you actually print or cut the sign, you can tell your print buyer, ‘Do you want to see what it’s going to look like on your wall or on your popup banner?’”

VirtualSign is part of a suite of tools that SAi has been developing to complement and supplement Flexi.

“About four years ago, we started thinking about what else we can do to help our customers besides printing,” Bonte said. “What can we do to alleviate some of the burdens that our customers have?”

As a result, SAi has been steadily releasing tools that are linked to customers’ cloud accounts. One in particular is called Artwork Approval.

“That tool came from a survey we sent to our customers in which we asked them, ‘What do you hate most about your job?’” Bonte said. “The number one reply was ‘dealing with customers.’ Having to communicate with the customer was the biggest, trickiest thing.”

With the Artwork Approval tool, while the signmaker is designing a project in Flexi, they can click a "Send For Approval" button and send a comp via email to their customer, who can then annotate and make comments to it.

“They can go back and forth with different revisions until the customer hits the approval button, in which case they are ready to start producing the sign,” Bonte said. “So it’s taken away some of that over-the-phone communication and misunderstanding.”

Another tool called QuickQuote came out of the customer survey, as well.

“A lot of our customers didn’t really know how much they should charge for creating signs or prints,” Bonte said. “They would know how to charge for ink and media, but they wouldn’t think about the design time or the installation time.”

QuickQuotes is designed to make it easy to generate and send an accurate PDF quotation to customers.  SAi is working on some additional new tools which will be announced in the fall.

At present, VirtualSign is available only for Flexi users, and is available for iPhone and Android via, respectively, iTunes and Google Play.