Credit by Tony Parisi
The near future of retail will feature interactive real-time 3D models of products in search results, digital ads, mobile apps and AR/VR — changing how products are discovered, explored and purchased online.
The Benefits of Real-Time 3D for Shopping
Now that you’ve gotten a taste of what’s possible, let’s drill down into why this medium is so powerful for the shopping experience.
1. It’s More Engaging.
In a world where brands are increasingly fighting for attention to cut through the digital clutter, 3D provides higher production value and more interactivity. From a visual and interaction standpoint, it’s effectively “gamifying” the shopping experience. The last couple of generations of consumers have grown up on video games, CG movies and interactive devices; the shopping experience needs to match the digital world they inhabit.
2. It’s More Informative.
The ability to interact with any part of a 3D model means that the shopper can explore it to get more information about a product on the spot: for example, see the interior workings of a coffeemaker simply by pinching to get an “exploded” view (rather than scrolling through more images), or tap on a specific part of the machine to get more information (versus opening another page to see technical specifications).
3. It’s More Intuitive.
The world is 3D; people move, think and experience in three dimensions. As the technology to power 3D has become ubiquitous, computer interfaces are generally following suit. When it comes to a product catalog, why scroll through a series of images to see different views, when you could interact with a photorealistic model that you can see from any angle and at any distance?
4. It’s More Useful.
By displaying a 3D model in augmented reality, you can see how it would fit into your house, or in the case of clothing, how it would look on you or match your wardrobe.
On the consumer side, this is going to open up a world of product try-ons, try-outs, interactive product explorers and virtual showrooms. Additionally, AR allows allows buyers to measure their living space just by pointing the camera.
For retailers and manufacturers, an enhanced shopping experience promises to not only increase sell-through, but reduce returns and save shipping costs, as buyers will have a greater chance of getting things right the first time. The additional level of engagement also suggests new data opportunities, as these 3D services can learn the ideal viewing angles, the most-explored product features, and the best configurations and combinations within collections.
Early Experiments
With the advent of ARKit and ARCore, consumer augmented reality is accessible on a billion mobile phones and growing. This boom in immersive technology has encouraged retailers to experiment with representing their products in 3D for a variety of use cases.
Shopping apps.
IKEA and Amazon have both released AR apps that allow consumers to see products in their homes before buying. Nike has introduced an AR feature into its app that allows customers to measure and try styles before buying. Online platforms like Shopify and Wayfair have demonstrated shopping in 3D using Apple’s AR QuickLook feature, where a 3D model shows up in the Safari browser and with a swipe, the user can drag the product into the real world, putting a blender on a kitchen counter or a motorcycle in their driveway.
Social networks.
A year ago, Facebook demonstrated “3D posts”, allowing 3D objects to be placed in the newsfeed: in a similar fashion to Apple’s AR QuickLook, virtual models of for-sale items can be brought into the real world with a gesture. Leveraging its amazing computer vision technology, Snapchat allows its users to try on glasses, hats, makeup etc. on their own face. Both of these social platforms provide the ability to not only advertise within the experience, but also purchase directly as part of the flow.
Advertising platforms.
My employer Unity powers an advertising platform that shows ads within mobile games, including AR ads. Brands have been piloting with us to engage consumers in new ways via AR; for example, smartwatch maker Fossil ran a campaign that lets you explore the various features of the watch, change styles and colors, and finally, try it on using AR. Verizon Media has run several AR ad campaigns in its owned-and-operated properties; for example, they ran an ad unit with The Home Depot during Christmas of 2017: click a link in the Yahoo! Mail interface, and a Home Depot-sponsored Christmas tree shows up in your living room, complete with blinking lights.
The foregoing represent amazing innovations, but until recently, they have all been trapped in walled-garden ecosystems that run only on a specific platform, created with dedicated tools targeting only that platform. None of the 3D content is searchable online, shareable between apps, or able to be repurposed between tools and applications even within a single organization. This limits reach, creates undue friction throughout the value chain, and makes what could be an amazing return on investment cost-prohibitive to deploy at scale.
Next Steps
Process-wise, the exploratory group is at the drawing-board stage, engaging in a rigorous and formal process to establish requirements and fully understand the scope of the problems to solve. But the overall goal is as we’ve outlined here: to make shopping in 3D an everyday thing.
Get Involved!
If you’re a retailer, supplier, tech provider, content creator or anyone who services clients in these roles, we’d urge you to start preparing for this near future today.
Start working to digitize your products now.
Experiment with ways you can use 3D and AR to tell your brand’s stories and show off your products in the real and virtual worlds.
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