AT the recent National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show in New York, I attended a session titled “Re-imagining the shopping experience with immersive 3D and AR product media.” To retail companies, “3D” and “AR” don’t mean quite the same thing they do to display people but, nevertheless, it was an interesting talk. The talk was sponsored and developed by Adobe.
Traditional photography is meeting its limits. (Credit: Adobe)
According to Adobe and the main speaker at the talk, Jane Rawnsley, Head of Imagery Creative, at Wayfair, a home goods company, traditional photography is not serving the needs of modern retail, especially on-line retail. One of the main reasons for this is the number of images required per product, which has increased from about 3 in 2016 to 8 in 2019. The images are needed to give the consumer confidence that what he is buying is suitable, a special problem for on-line retail where the customer cannot touch, feel or handle the product.
Another need for additional images is when there are many options for a product such as a sofa. If a basic sofa has 10 choices of fabrics and each fabric comes in 10 colors, plus the wood frame comes in 10 finishes, and the marketing group decides that the sofa must be photographed from each of 10 angles to properly portray it, 10,000 photographs would be needed to depict every variation. This is impossible, partly for cost reasons and partly because it would require 1,000 sofa samples to photograph.
The solution to this problem is 3D computer modelling of products. 3D CAD models are nothing new and I first encountered them back in 2005 at Siggraph, and they were not new then. These 3D models are used by product designers – it would be virtually impossible to design a modern automobile without them. They are also widely used in the gaming industry, where it is impossible to photograph some objects because they don’t and can’t exist.
The retail industry didn’t want to use these 3D models before now, mostly because they were not photorealistic – every viewer could tell that the images in games were not real. For the car industry, if photorealistic images were needed, server farms could be used to render them, perhaps in hours or even days, not an acceptable solution for retailers. Substance Designer software is one of the enabling technologies allowing surfaces of virtually any material to be rendered photorealistically from any angle. Substance Designer was originally developed by the French company Allegorithmic, founded in 2003 and acquired by Adobe in 2019. This software was originally developed for the gaming industry and works with gaming engines and other 3rd party software such as Unity, Unreal Engine, 3DS Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Houdini and Autodesk VRED.
3D modeling of products provides photorealistic images for retailers. (Credit: Adobe)
Technology has improved to the point where the retail industry is embracing 3D models and virtual photography. Photorealistic images, i.e. ones indistinguishable from a photograph of a real object, can be generated in real time with modern graphics technology. Instead of needing 10,000 images of a sofa, a retailer now only needs a good 3D model of the basic object, plus information on fabric styles and colors and wood colors. When a customer needs an image with a particular combination of fabrics and wood colors, it can be rendered for him in essentially real time. Besides giving the consumer a better view of the product, it saves the retailer a significant amount of money. The speakers estimated that generating and rendering the 3D model typically cost about 1/10 of the cost of traditional photography.
These 3D product images rendered for 2D displays are not just useful to on-line merchants, they are useful for all retailers. Virtually all modern retailers have an on-line presence, even if the main sales are in a brick-and-mortar store, and the low cost of images from 3D models is important to them. For example, all car companies maintain websites that show the available cars and trucks and the options available. Even in an automobile showroom, the car companies often have kiosks showing available style, option and color combinations – it is impossible for a dealer to stock every variation on a modern car. Companies with both on-line and in-store sales can use common images in both their website and their printed catalog. For example, the speakers said that about 99% of the images in the Ikea catalog were rendered from 3D models, not actual product photographs.
Threekit used its VR software to put a small table in the middle of a NRF walkway, but nobody tripped over it. (Credit: M. Brennesholtz)
Once you have a 3D model of the product, you can use in in AR applications as well. For example, a consumer can image his room with a smartphone or tablet and the AR application can show how the product would look in various positions, styles or colors.
While Wayfair is an on-line retailer that generates its own 3D product models, they will also generate 3D models for outside companies. Other companies are dedicated to generating these models for others as their primary business. As can be imagined, these modeling and rendering companies were exhibiting at the NRF Big show and I visited several of them, including Threekit and start-up Hexa 3D. In addition, Adobe was there and featured their 3D design software, including Substance Designer, in part of their booth.
Photography is not entirely dead, however, even in the world of 3D modeling. When I asked the Hexa 3D rep what is the starting point for a 3D model, he said “whatever the customer gives us.” Most commonly this was a series of 2D photos of the product. If the Hexa 3D customer had a CAD model of the product, they could work with that, although most small retailers rarely had the complete CAD model. Hexa 3D could also work from sketches or other inputs. From any of these inputs, Hexa 3D could then generate photorealistic 3D models for rendering. – Matthew Brennesholtz
