Recent announcements from Snap and Apple at their respective developer conferences point to future connections between AR and local commerce.

Snap’s Local Lenses will let developers create geo-anchored persistent content that Snap users can discover through the camera interface. This will also include the ability for users to leave persistent AR graphics for friends to discover. The use case that Snap has promoted is more about fun and whimsy, including “painting” the world with digital and expressive graffiti. But the development could also include local storefront information.

Moving on to Apple, it similarly continues to show its AR aspirations. The latest is GeoAnchors for ARkit, announced at WWDC.  These evoke AR’s location-based potential by letting users plant and discover spatially anchored graphics that are persistent across sessions and users.