How Walmart’s new virtual world is advancing 3D commerce

When a retailer as large as Walmart commits to a niche category of shopping, perhaps it’s a sign that the category is growing up. This is experts’ takeaway from “Realm,” a virtual world that Walmart launched last week and plans to use for some of this year’s biggest shopping occasions, such as back-to-college and the holidays. Realm includes three shopping experiences, with each highlighting a different retail trend, featuring popular creators and including various games. Visitors to the shops can add products to their cart and purchase them in real life through a connection to Walmart’s website. Realm feels like an inflection point for 3D commerce, or the application of 3D and virtual technology to shopping experiences, said Ann Hand, CEO of game publisher Super League. Amid fallout and fatigue from the metaverse moment of a couple years ago, Walmart’s effort shows how retailers are evolving 3D commerce by incorporating other digital and physical touchpoints. “When you combine product placement and influencers and other best practices, you are able to optimize for more conversion,” she said. Realm comes amid a flurry of marketing efforts fueling the development of 3D commerce. Google last week enabled its core AI tool to easily 3D-render shoes in Shopping ads as part of a suite of updates for brands. Meanwhile, brands such as J.Crew and e.l.f. Beauty have launched shopping experiences on Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which many expect to kickstart mass demand for such devices over the next several years. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs And brands continue to experiment with shopping on social platforms that young users inhabit. Ikea this week announced a virtual store on Roblox that will staff real-life employees, represented by avatars—with real hourly wages. The effort resembles one of the most intimate pairings of digital and physical commerce yet seen from a brand. Walmart has also deepened its retail presence on Roblox. In April, it launched an experience in its Walmart Discovered world in which customers can order real items to be shipped to their physical addresses—and receive digital twins of those items inside the platform. The activation is, in part, meant to be a precursor to the “phygital” opportunities now available through Realm. More: Watch Ad Age’s Gen Z roundtable on gaming An evolution, but familiar Walmart Realm hinges on various elements: 3D products, influencers, immersive environments and gaming. While none of these features is necessarily new to retail, the blending of them into a single destination is meant to provide users a fresh kind of commerce experience. Realm “feels like an evolution, but also familiar,” said Justin Breton, director of brand experiences and strategic partnerships at Walmart. 3D commerce can look a lot of different ways, and it typically depends on the platform a brand uses, said Breton. One distinction that has become more important for a brand to make is whether to launch an activation on an owned-and-operated site or as part of a pre-existing platform, such as Roblox. Realm belongs to the former category, which allows Walmart to engage exclusively with users—as opposed to having to compete with other brand activations—and without distractions, Breton said. But as immersive commerce develops, pre-existing platforms are getting better at catering to brands’ real-world needs, such as targeting ads and driving purchases. Roblox recently rolled out a programmatic ad buying service, which is meant to draw users to a brand’s virtual experience—where commerce opportunities await—or to push them directly to the brand’s retail sites in order to buy products. In e.l.f.’s Vision Pro experience, users can shop for products and purchase them without having to leave the app—a feature not typically available in other extended reality headsets. More: How Ekta Chopra keeps e.l.f. at the digital forefront Brands also have more choices as to how to incorporate a social aspect into their immersive shopping experiences. Pre-existing platforms such as Roblox deliver a group experience, in which users and their friends can all go shopping together. While Realm is currently an individual, not a group, experience, the platform features popular influencers as a way to make users feel like they’re shopping on social media. These creators promote new trends via their own storefronts, which Walmart will update in accordance with back-to-college and the holiday seasons. Moreover, Realm is meant to be used on a mobile device “because that’s where social shopping is happening,” said Breton. In other cases, AI is helping to evolve 3D commerce. Google introduced 3D product listings several years ago, but this functionality is becoming easier and more common now with new developments in generative AI. Shoe merchants can now upload a few images and Google AI will quickly animate them into a 360 view of the model. Super League’s Hand said that her company is using AI to speedily generate 3D concepts for clients. This process is helping to show advertisers that 3D assets are no longer difficult to create, nor usable for only very specific instances. “On a flat screen, you can still have websites that aren’t static like [they were] in 2000,” Hand said, alluding to Google’s shoe-spin feature. Gaming’s growing role The value of 3D commerce lies in the depth of engagement it can offer a consumer, which is why brands such as Walmart are incorporating games into these immersive activations. “Video games have been doing socially connected experiences longer than any other technology,” said Brent Koning, executive VP and global gaming lead for Dentsu. Games have also long used 3D technology, making their appearance in such environments a welcome addition. The games inside Realm, which include obstacle courses and card games, are meant to “increase time spent in the experience and potentially bring people back,” Walmart’s Breton said. Some of these activities are also a way to offer rewards upon completion, such as submissions to sweepstakes with real-money prizes. Gaming’s use of 3D products are often in terms of virtual assets, which users can collect and sometimes trade. Brands are starting to figure out these items can go beyond mere virtual platforms, but actually facilitate shipping real items to consumers’ doorsteps, said Koning. He invoked as evidence Walmart’s recent commerce effort on Roblox, which allowed users to buy products in the virtual world and have the actual items delivered to them in real life. Read more: Stephanie Latham on Roblox’s immersive ad offerings While not quite the metaverse, Realm, Roblox and other platforms on which 3D commerce is taking place could offer brands a kind of interoperability for their virtual assets. This doesn’t mean taking avatar skins from one gaming ecosystem and porting them to another, but rather brands having 3D models for products already made, and thus allowing for an easier process of joining other 3D platforms. Super League’s Hand expects some parts of 3D assets to be transferable, especially as emerging technology such as AI makes the generation of these representations more seamless. When the best tools separate themselves from the pack, assets could be built with similar structure and therefore allow platforms to more easily adopt technical standards. As for Walmart, Realm is its immersive focus going forward. But the retail giant is keeping its eyes open for new places to bring its 3D products. “If there is an opportunity to leverage any element of what we built [in another platform], we would 100% double down,” Breton said. See Ad Age’s Tech Power List honoring marketing leaders

How Walmart’s new virtual world is advancing 3D commerce

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