Building upon its history of innovation, Lowe’s unveiled the home improvement retail industry’s first interactive store digital twin at NVIDIA GTC. Leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, this 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. Also, in the coming weeks, Lowe’s will open up part of its virtual 3D product catalog – used to populate its digital twin – to Omniverse users, to help them create new possibilities in their applications for retail and beyond.
“We’re thrilled to pioneer retail digital twins and elevate experiences for both our associates and customers,” said Seemantini Godbole, Lowe’s executive vice president, chief digital and information officer. “Through emerging technology, we are always imagining and testing ways to improve store operations and remove friction for our customers.”
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Built by its Lowe’s Innovation Labs team, Lowe’s digital twin is currently live in two stores. The digital twin is a completely virtual replica of a physical home improvement store, created in NVIDIA’s Omniverse environment. It fuses spatial data with other Lowe’sdata, including product location and historical order information, and pulls all of these sources together into a visual package that can be accessed on a range of devices. From desktop computers to Magic Leap 2 augmented reality (AR) headsets, this interactivity opens up numerous possibilities for Lowe’s associates.
“AI and digital twins are reinventing the retail experience for associates and customers, in person and online,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Lowe’s, with Omniverse and AI, is at the forefront of shaping this future retail experience.”
As part of today’s news, Lowe’s announced that it will make a selection of photorealistic 3D product assets available to Omniverse developers in the coming weeks – the same assets that are used to populate its digital twin. Just as it has supported builders of the real world for more than 100 years, Lowe’s wants to help builders of virtual and augmented worlds create new possibilities with 3D representations of the items it sells. Developers will be able to access the Lowe’s Open Builder library in an upcoming Omniverse update.