The Virtual Product Catalog
Real-time 3D could alleviate the real pain that comes with creating and delivering e-commerce content. Here’s a look at what some of the innovators in this space are up to.
Cynthia Maller has a problem. Several, actually. The director of creative innovation at Hayneedle, a division of Walmart, recently sat down with me to talk about how the company creates the original digital photography content for their customers.
“Hayneedle owns and operates its own photo studio, and we touch every facet of imaging, from conception to post-production — which is an advantage on many levels,” Cynthia began. “But, the lengthy time it takes to ship physical samples to our studio compresses the upfront time that we have to create engaging stories for our customers. 50% of the entire curation, creative and production process is spent simply waiting for samples to arrive.
It’s 2019. Waiting three months for a piece of furniture to arrive, just to place it on a white background and take a photo of it… is kinda silly.
“It’s perhaps too-strong language,” Ms. Maller continued, “but we are ‘held hostage’ by this piece of the production cycle. Samples are subject to damage in transit and/or deprecation for post-shipment issues. In addition, ‘real’ merchandise requires real storage space. So, I’m having to dedicate square footage that could be used to expand creative capacity. It’s 2019. Waiting three months for a piece of furniture to arrive, just to place it on a white background and take a photo of it… is kinda silly.”
Cynthia wants to change this. “The only way we can get surgically precise in conversion optimization is with infinite variables to test. That’s only possible with real-time 3D graphics.” Her team is looking at ways to make the image creation process virtual: start with “digital twins” — 3D models of the products; slice those to create silos, and ultimately, stage them in virtual showrooms; generate high quality still images and videos from those models; deliver interactive versions from the same 3D content. It’s a big, bold vision, but the pieces are coming together as we speak, for Walmart and the industry at large.
Virtual Products; Real Solutions
Cynthia’s problems are typical for creating e-commerce content today, which is why many leading retailers have banded together with top technology platforms and tool providers to create standards for representing products in 3D. Standards are absolutely necessary here — imagine trying to deliver the entire pipeline from content creation to the consumer journey without open file formats — but they only go so far. Imagine you could wave a magic wand and the standards were here right now. The big question then becomes: how does all this 3D content get created?
Photography has been around for a long time. 3D computer graphics, on the other hand, is much newer. Until very recently, creating 3D models required highly specialized skills and costly software; only the design, animation and video game industries could justify the expense of creating 3D content. Retailers and their suppliers not only don’t have the requisite skills to make 3D models; they also can’t throw Hollywood-sized budgets at recreating every SKU of every product and staging configuration, and the combinations thereof.
Thankfully, help is on the way. Several companies are taking novel approaches to solving this content creation problem. Below is a sampling of these teams and their different approaches, including scanning existing physical objects, converting from original 3D CAD designs, creating synthetic models completely from scratch, crowdsourcing content, and even generating models on the fly (programmatically) from configuration data. This list is by no means exhaustive, and new companies are entering the space all the time.
Lightbox
Lightbox offers an automated capture system to scan existing products, without the need to hand-create 3D models or convert existing CAD data. They also provide an interactive viewer that delivers highly photorealistic renderings compatible with mobile devices. While most solutions use 3D meshes to represent physical objects, the company is taking a unique approach called image-based rendering, essentially a series of 2D images that have been taken from enough angles to allow consumers to view the product from all angles.
Cora
Cora takes a pure CGI approach to create highly realistic models that can be delivered as a series of “spinnable” still images for web pages, or as full 3D models that can be used in AR retail applications. Cora employs a global network of 500 CGI artists to create the 3D content, and offers multiple services for retailers, including quality assurance, consulting and machine-learning based recommendations for optimizing online performance.
colormass
colormass allows manufacturers and retailers to create “virtual photoshoots” of products starting with just a handful of mobile photos, or via using a custom-built product scanner if the item is available to be scanned. Using a combination of these techniques and hand cleanup of 3D content, colormass combines 3D models of the products with pure-CGI virtual stages (rooms) and ray-trace renders the results to produce stunning imagery. Check out the image near the top of this section; it is all CG.
ARsenal by CGTrader
CGTrader has been around for a while, hosting one of the largest 3D artist marketplaces in the world. If you’re looking for 3D models for games and a variety of other uses, CGTrader is one of the go-to destinations. The company recently launched its ARsenal service, which taps into its strong community of 3D creators to source and validate hand-crafted 3D models for retail use. ARsenal connects retailers to their vast creative community to get the best 3D content at good rates, effectively crowdsourcing 3D content creation for e-commerce.
Marxent
Marxent has developed a 3D cloud platform that empowers both retailers and consumers. The company provides solutions for home furnishing, kitchen and bath, and boasts a customer list that includes some of the world’s largest retailers. Marxent also offers a design application that lets consumers and retail sales associates custom-design kitchens, powered by unique technology that automatically generates 3D content on-the-fly from data such as cabinet and floor dimensions.
This is just scratching the surface when it comes to creating 3D e-commerce content. For a deeper dive, check out this NFR story from the team at CGTrader.
Beyond Images
Today’s crop of solutions bodes well for the near future of retail. One or more of these techniques is bound to take hold. A few years from now, expect to start seeing the upside from the current period of experimentation. But it can go even further. Get past the fuss, time and expense of dealing with physical stuff to streamline production, and Cynthia Maller imagines a world where her customers have a more enjoyable, engaging and ultimately satisfying experience. Customers can configure their own furniture in virtual showrooms that they control interactively — maybe even before that physical furniture has been manufactured.
“Imagine if we didn’t have to wait months for samples to arrive, and that we would have assets for all variants of SKUs. We could create content with enough lead time to test and learn what the customer finds most useful and compelling.” Cynthia continued, “so goes inside, so goes outside: when we smooth out our content creation and store experience from an operational standpoint, the user experience will feel smooth and delightful for the customer.”
“So goes inside, so goes outside: when we smooth out our content creation and store experience from an operational standpoint, the user experience will feel smooth and delightful for the customer.”
Like most emerging technologies, real-time 3D is getting traction first by solving real pain points for real businesses. But once the industry gets past the near-term issues around producing images, retailers will be able to focus more on the creative side and employ 3D in novel ways to engage and delight customers. Properly constructed, the same 3D content used to create imagery can be delivered directly to consumers in ads, augmented reality try-ons, compelling online store experiences and personalized, user-configurable virtual showrooms. At that point, both the retailer and consumer journey will have been transformed in a way that has the feel of shopping in the physical world but transcends space and time limitations. And who knows? Shopping might just feel like shopping again, instead of just buying.
This is part of an ongoing series on the role of real-time 3D graphics and XR in the near future of retail. In upcoming posts, we will explore the use of real-time 3D for in-store/brick-and-mortar experiences, and behind-the-scenes merchandising and store planning.
