Getting virtual commerce past ‘If you build it, they will come’

Lowe’s has an answer to the “If you build it, they will come” challenge of the virtual world: DIY. One side is about giving consumers new tools to accomplish their own projects. The other is a b-to-b approach. The home improvement chain recently launched Lowe’s Open Builder, which provides virtual and AR creators free 3D assets of real-world home and décor products to use in their own worlds. Josh Shabtai, senior director at the Labs, discusses the challenges of developing for VR and AR, and how skill building could be the killer app that accelerates virtual commerce.

Kate MacArthur: What are you aiming to do with Lowe’s Open Builder?

Josh Shabtai: In the “real” world, Lowe’s exists to help builders. When it came time to experiment in the metaverse, we thought it made sense to translate that value, and support builders of the virtual world. Labs developed an end-to-end 3D product pipeline, which powers Lowes.com’s 3D viewer and AR features. We saw an opportunity to make these 3D products available free to virtual world builders – and see what they create.

MacArthur: The average person today isn’t excited by virtual worlds, and they don’t see AR becoming a part of their everyday lives.

Shabtai: Labs has explored many different routes to identify what will make immersive tech palatable. We’ve explored use cases for both customers and associates: How can we help them access expertise in new ways? How can we help them learn in new ways? Can we make our associates even more effective at helping customers? We're very much in test-and-learn mode on these fronts but believe the appetite for these technologies will increase as use cases are proven out.

MacArthur: What do brands need to make virtual spaces where people want to be for in-store and virtual shopping?

Shabtai: Anything we can do to take the friction out of home improvement (i.e., you having to ask lots of questions) will make for a useful experience. We ran a project called Holoroom How-To, which was designed to teach you how to tile a bathroom. People who went through a VR experience, reinforced by a video at the end, had 40+% greater recall of all the steps needed to successfully tile their bathroom than people who just watched a video. You see this a lot in sports — muscle memory and visualization — and we think it can translate to everyday learning.

MacArthur: How do you see skills training evolving in virtual worlds?

Shabtai: I’m excited to see how skills training evolves. As hardware and software evolve, I expect to see new experiences that can make training more valuable, interesting and scalable. I love thinking about audio-only experiences that use our existing wireless headphones. For someone who’s trying to repair a dishwasher, how could we transmit step-by-step audio instructions based on what you’re actually seeing and the context of your home?

MacArthur: Many virtual tools expect you to use only their hardware and software. How does that get solved?

Shabtai: You're describing an interoperability problem that will likely be overcome by new universal file standards and protocols. There’s a not-too-distant future where everyone can have a virtual replica of their home and can interact with the space in a new way. Shouldn't that be transportable?

MacArthur: What has to happen for brands to integrate virtual spaces to get into that omnichannel experience?

Shabtai: If you’re going to integrate virtual spaces you must make sure they’re part of the flow of the experiences your customers are already having and that they make your customers’ lives less complicated. When we’ve deployed “spatial commerce” experiences like Measure Your Space, we’ve baked them right into our mobile app and the purchase flows our customers are already comfortable with.

MacArthur: How do you make spatial commerce easy and accessible for people?

Shabtai: For us, spatial commerce is a future in which the devices we already own sense the world around us, and seamlessly put that data at our fingertips when we need it.

MacArthur: What are the risks of experimenting out in the open for the whole world to see when you don't really know what you're going to get?

Shabtai: There’s an opportunity inherent in experimenting publicly: the ability to shape a human-centric view of how technology should integrate into our lives. Major tech companies currently drive much of the conversation around how they expect the world will use their products. There is an opportunity right now for retailers, for brands that are not inherently selling technology as a product or service to start shaping that vision in ways that start to make it more compelling and start to make it more useful and hopefully change the trajectory.