Lowe’s Brings Digital Twins to Home Improvement

Lowe’s has unveiled what it calls its trade’s first “interactive digital store twin,” the house enchancment chain mentioned in a press release Tuesday (Sept. 20).

Debuting at know-how agency Nvidia’s GTC convention, the “digital twin showcases a future in which store associates can visualize and interact with nearly all of a store’s digital data, giving them superpowers to optimize operations and localize plans to better serve customer needs.”

As PYMNTS has famous, a digital twin is a digital model of a real-world merchandise. That can imply one thing like a non-fungible token (NFT) of a pair of Nikes to the brick-for-brick digital duplicate of Christie’s New Bond Street, London public sale home in Decentraland.

In the approaching weeks, Lowe’s will open up a portion of its digital 3D product catalog — used to populate its digital twin — to customers of Nvidia’s Omniverse digital world, serving to “them create new possibilities in their applications for retail and beyond.”

See additionally: NVIDIA Makes Its Omniverse Free to Creators

The providing was constructed by Lowe’s Innovation Labs staff, and the corporate mentioned digital twin is now reside in two shops. Per the discharge, it provides a digital duplicate of a bodily residence enchancment retailer that melds spatial knowledge with different Lowe’s knowledge, together with product location and historic order info, creating a visible bundle that may be accessed from quite a lot of gadgets.

“AI and digital twins are reinventing the retail experience for associates and customers, in person and online,” mentioned Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “Lowe’s, with Omniverse and AI, is at the forefront of shaping this future retail experience.”

Some of the areas Lowe’s is exploring with the digital twin embrace augmented actuality (AR) reset and restocking help, which lets staff — carrying an AR headset — see a hologram of the digital twin overlaid with the bodily retailer in AR.

“This can help an associate compare what a store shelf should look like versus what it actually looks like, and make sure it’s stocked with the right products in the right configurations,” the corporate mentioned.

Learn extra: Walmart Upgrades Virtual Try-on Experience as Retail Fitting Tech Scales

While Lowe’s digital retailer idea is perhaps new to the world of residence enchancment, PYMNTS analysis has discovered that some shoppers need VR procuring choices.

The “How We Will Pay” research, carried out with Visa, discovered that curiosity started spiking through the pandemic, with greater than 30% of shoppers saying they have been both very or extraordinarily all for digital simulation of clothes match. Additionally, 1.6% of respondents mentioned they have been utilizing this know-how to buy.

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