Seamless Worlds: When Digital Meets Physical
My curiosity about phygital nature of a product/service
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Definition
Phygital is the concept of using technology to bridge the digital world with the physical world to provide a unique interactive experience for the user.
Looking from a further view phygital seems a mere word play combining ‘Physical + Digital’ for products or services having both mediums in their usage. But let’s deep dive into the actual use case scenarios, importance, and How it will shape the future of product design.
Use case 1
Manless kiosks
These kiosks from Mc Donald’s aim to improve the customer experience by having various of these across a mall or shopping centers to place the order digitally from these kiosks and collect it physically from nearby stores. This utilizes the waiting time to prepare the meal making the user walk to the nearest store.
McDonald's in India has seen an increase in sales and revenue after introducing self-service kiosks in many of their outlets. The kiosks allow customers to customize their orders, leading to higher average order sizes due to upselling and personalization options. This has resulted in a significant boost in revenue. The kiosks also streamline operations by reducing wait times and increasing customer satisfaction, which in turn attracts more customers, particularly during peak hours.
This combination has a good reception among users as it solves the problem of waiting time and reduces the mental load of waiting in a queue to place an order.
Use case 2
Smart Wearables
Apple is a pioneer in phygital interfaces, blending hardware with sophisticated digital software to create cohesive user experiences across devices. A notable example is the Apple Watch:
How they embraced phygital: The Apple Watch combines physical elements like the digital crown (used to scroll or zoom) and a haptic feedback system with the digital interface of watchOS, allowing users to interact through touch, voice, and taps.
Impact: It has set the standard for smartwatches, with millions of units sold globally. The Apple Watch has made health monitoring and smart assistant integration more accessible, making the phygital experience part of everyday life.
In this use case, Apple plays very micro physical interaction like with digital crown but with recent updates for health monitoring which makes it an ideal case as Phygital in Product design.
Use case 3
Spatial Computers
In the previous cases, a new physical entity is added to make a product or service phygital while in the case of Spatial computing domain screens are removed. The future of personal computers will take a drastic transformation if users get comfortable with AR glasses as a screen for long hours of usage.
Currently, Apple Vision Pro’s production is stopped and by the end of 2025 sources confirm its discontinuation. The major reasons were its high price and the strong tunnel vision effect (low FOV) for longer hours caused disorientation and headaches. Many users complained that using Vision Pro for 1 hour seems like looking at phones for more than 6 hours.
Products like Spacetop, Nimo glasses, or Meta glasses must focus on the Tunnel vision effect and weight of the glasses for comfortable usage for up to 3 hours at least
Infrastructure for the functionality of the spatial computing commonly used is AR/MR Glasses, which is a physical product to comply with our phygital product nature. Information and Interaction make the digital counterpart.
The Future
At the end of 2024 Retail, wearables and Personal computing are the three areas where I can see some promising startups and companies working to make the big leap in phygital products or services. Apart from these the following domains have great potential to explore:
Industry metaverse: Manufacturing machines will have the potential to become unmanned or remotely manned through phygital interfaces.
Digital twinning: Social media has become the digital version of ourselves. There were some explorations to create avatars in Metaverses but the real application will be creating our physical objects, products, or even ourselves a twin in the digital world.(remember Ready player one by Stephen Speilberg)
Spiritual cults: Shortly lot of meditation, yoga or retreat centers and even religious groups will create their metaverses to practice and preach digitally to give holistic experiences.