Augmented reality adds sparkle to wine

GEELONG digital marketing expert Dave Chaffey has left the agency he owned in partnership with TV presenter David Koch to race to market with a new augmented reality product which aims to transform the way consumers interact with their wineries.

His new tech start-up, Third Aurora, has released the Wine Tales app which uses augmented reality to give people a deeper engagement with the wines in front of them and a link to the wineries, creating a potential new sales channel.

Wine Tales has launched with only a handful of Geelong region wineries connected to the platform but Mr Chaffey expects that numbers will grow quickly due to the platform’s affordability and accessibility.

He said that while augmented reality had been around for a little while, the cost had been prohibitive to all except the biggest players.

“There’s an obvious culture shift towards embracing artificial intelligence and augmented reality, but it has largely been inaccessible due to the high expense,” Mr Chaffey said.

“We have set about changing that by creating an application that is not only free for consumers, but affordable for businesses, and it is opening up all kinds of opportunities that have previously been unavailable to small and medium-sized businesses.

“We’ve created a technology that allows a winery to manage the entire process itself — just as they would manage a Facebook page.

“So it’s really like DIY augmented reality where wineries can swap over their content in a heartbeat, without the high expense and without building a kind of dependency on an agency.”

Mr Chaffey founded Third Aurora with son Luke after realising they could connect the augmented reality technology to data.

“We contacted Kochie 10 days later and said, ‘We’re out’,” Mr Chaffey said of their exit from KBB Digital.

Mr Chaffey said with nothing else like their platform at the price point, it was a case of racing to market.

The first winery, Moorabool Valley winery Austins & Co and its 6ft6 brand, was signed up less than a month ago.

Mr Chaffey hopes to have 100 international wineries on the platform by early June.

He is also planning other applications of the technology.

The Wine Tales app, which is free to use, can be downloaded from Google Play and Apple Store.