Lowe’s partners with NVIDIA and Magic Leap to create digital twins and utilize AR in its stores

In Augmented Reality News 

September 21, 2022 – US retailer Lowe’s has recently announced an innovative partnership with spatial computing company Magic Leap and NVIDIA. Lowe’s has implemented an interactive store digital twin in which store associates can visualize and interact with almost all of a store’s digital data in the physical store environment. Such interaction will provide the ability to optimize operations and localize plans to better serve customer needs, according to the company.

Built by its Lowe’s Innovation Labs team, Lowe’s digital twin is currently live in two test stores, one in Charlotte, NC, and one in Seattle. The digital twin is a completely virtual replica of a physical home improvement store, created in NVIDIA’s Omniverse environment.

Omniverse enhances enterprise 3D design and digital twin workflows with real-time collaboration and true-to-reality simulation. It fuses spatial data with other Lowe’s data, including product location and historical order information, and pulls all of these sources together into a visual augmented reality (AR) package that can be accessed through a Magic Leap 2 device.

Magic Leap 2, the company’s small and lightweight enterprise AR device, allows users to wear the device comfortably for hours at a time. Additionally, Magic Leap 2 offers a 70° field of view and a level of image quality and text legibility that make it particularly useful in retail and enterprise settings, according to the company.

“The digital twin solution is an excellent example of the value our Magic Leap 2 platform can provide to enterprises,“ said Peggy Johnson, CEO of Magic Leap. “Magic Leap 2 delivers to users the ability to interact with critical digital content and data in their physical environment, empowering them to do their jobs more efficiently and in ways that weren’t possible before.”

The ability to integrate and interact with digital content in a physical environment opens up countless possibilities for innovating how retail associates work. With Magic Leap 2 and the digital twin, Lowe’s associates can see a hologram of the digital twin overlaid atop the physical store in AR.

This can help associates 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. Associates can also gather and view information on obscured items on hard-to-reach shelves. Instead of climbing a dangerous ladder to gather information on a cardboard-enclosed product held in a store’s top stock, they can look up at a partially obscured cardboard box from ground level, and determine and view its contents via an AR overlay.

Additionally, Lowe’s will be able to benefit from the improved collaboration and the digital twin’s ability to enable new ways of viewing sales performance and customer traffic data, optimizing the in-store experience with 3D heatmaps and distance measurements of items frequently bought together.

For Lowes, Magic Leap and NVIDIA Omniverse come together to help shape the future of retail and will provide insight into how to make home improvement as frictionless as possible and tailored to the individual character and flavor of each customer.

For more information on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, click here. To find out more about the Magic Leap 2 augmented reality headset, click here.

Image / video credit: NVIDIA / Lowe’s / YouTube