Picture this: A customer walks into a dealership and asks to see the red 2015 Chevrolet Camaro she knows is in stock. She already has an estimated monthly payment and interest rate, and she's been pre-approved.

She sounds like a customer who has done her research, but all she really did was scan a Camaro she saw in the grocery store parking lot a few miles away.

That vision could become a reality with Capital One's latest iteration of its Auto Navigator tool. The lender plans to launch the augmented tool in the next few months with consumers who have the Capital One mobile application.

'Always looking'

Here's how it works. A Capital One customer opens the Capital One app on his or her smartphone and scans a vehicle. In a matter of seconds, Capital One identifies the vehicle, and the customer's personalized finance information hovers above the car. Because the shopper is already a Capital One customer, the bank has financial information to approve the customer for a vehicle loan and estimate the payments on the vehicle, specifically for that person.

Then Capital One tells the customer which nearby dealerships have that vehicle or something similar, such as another model year or, in the case of the Camaro, the car in black instead of red.

"As consumers go about their daily lives, they're always looking for vehicles, even though they may not be actively shopping for vehicles," Curtis Campbell, managing vice president of product for Capital One, told Automotive News. "Oftentimes, when we see cars we are interested in, we don't have a lot of specific details that apply to us."

Much of the time, customers are discouraged by their financing offer when they get to the dealership, Campbell said. Payments are often higher than they expected, and many fail to realize that the cost of ownership is typically higher than the price of the vehicle.

"Dealers want customers to come into the dealership with right frame of mind, the right expectations," Campbell said. "One of the things dealers hate to have happen in the dealership is to come in with the wrong set of expectations."

Evolution

Capital One launched Auto Navigator, a cloud-based web application that enables customers to shop for and finance vehicles, in 2015. A year later, the lender added pre-qualification options and updated the application to include more than 3 million vehicles from 12,000 dealerships across the U.S.

Now, Capital One is ready to show Auto Navigator's augmented reality feature. The company will preview it this week in Austin, Texas, at SXSW (pronounced South by Southwest) and next week at the NADA Show in Las Vegas.

Technology

The feature will be powered by Apple's ARKit augmented reality framework and Core ML, Apple's mobile machine learning framework. Capital One also will rely on its proprietary models to identify and price vehicles, according to a company blog post. The feature is compatible with Android using ARCore and TensorFlow Mobile.

Apple's augmented reality framework enables Capital One to detect surfaces and planes to create a 3-D scene. Through machine learning, Capital One determines which vehicle a consumer is scanning. Then, Capital One's proprietary models personalize the offer so customers can see their payment information.