Joshua Ness 0:00
Today, hopefully pretty good. Thank you everyone for joining us on your Wednesday afternoon afternoon for our conversation of Beyond 2D, The Rise of Immersive Commerce. My name is Joshua Ness and I am a Senior Manager at Verizon 5G Labs in New York City. We're excited to host this discussion is part of our 5G Labs virtual event series. We used to do a lot of our events in person live in our lab in New York and at our other lab locations around the world. But we have gone virtual these days. For those of you who aren't familiar with Verizon 5G Labs, we work with startups, academia and enterprise teams to build a 5G powered world using the practical application of emerging technologies. And part of that mission includes having conversations like this that address emerging technology as well as barriers to digital inclusion, to create opportunities for communities to come together and thrive and grow. If you're interested in learning more about our work, visit us at verizon5glabs.com. We also want to thank Alley for partnering with us to help make this happen. Alley is a community agency that unites rich and diverse communities around the country with corporate partners to provide resources and to be a catalyst to drive positive change in technology and in the broader world. Without further ado, I want to turn it over to our incredible panelists who are enjoying or who are joining us today. Hopefully, they are going to be enjoying themselves as well. We have first we have Sreenivas from Verizon Media. Sreenivas do want to give us a quick intro.?

Sreenivas Rachamadugu 1:29
Josh, thanks for that. I'm part of the Verizon Media team, part of the Verizon family. And I run commerce engineering for Verizon Media. Last year, our CEO Guru Gowrappanup talked about Verizon Media's aspirations in commerce. And in my role, I'm helping bring this vision to life. We are developing many more ways for audiences across all of our properties of brands to shop both on and off our sites. And also providing brands more ways to connect with these audiences. Not only has this time, not only has this come from increased amounts of commerce focused content, but also by changing the way content looks and feels as as, as people shop more through video, immersive commerce that we're going to talk about a little bit here, and also finding new ways to transact, such as shopping for groceries on partners like Walmart directly from their inboxes like the apple mailbox. Excited to be here.

Joshua Ness 2:29
Very cool. We're excited to have you. Also joining us is Neha from Obsess. Neha, what are you working on these days?

Neha Singh 2:37
Thanks, Josh. Hi, everyone. My name is Neha Singh, I'm the Founder and CEO of Obsess. We are an experiential ecommerce platform. So we essentially enable brands to create really visual, immersive, branded virtual stores on their websites. We are working with a large number of fashion beauty retailers also with some big box retailers. And really trying our mission is to reinvent the online shopping interface from, you know, something that hasn't really seen a lot of innovation for the last many years. And happy to be here.

Joshua Ness 3:13
Yeah, I think we're going to talk a lot about that today. Finally, Neil Redding from Redding Futures. How are you doing today?

Neil Redding 3:20
I'm doing great, Josh, thanks for having me here. It's great to be here. So as you mentioned, I Founded and CEO and run the boutique consultancy called Redding Futures where we help brands and businesses engage powerfully with the near future as we describe it, which pre COVID we talked about us the next three to five years, I think now, the near future is feeling kind of nearer than it used to. But the good news is that, like everything we're talking about, kind of broadly is about digital physical convergence, right. And we're going to get into a lot of that as it shows up in, in the kind of sub domain of that convergence that we're calling immersive commerce today. Also, I co created and co edit a publication on medium called Near Future of Retail it says nearfutureofretail.com and so a lot of the work that that I do, and that we see my co editor and I Tony Parisi that we see happening in the again, digital physical convergence as it shows up in retail, we cover on that publication again nearfutureofretail.com, so excited to get into it with all of you.

Joshua Ness 4:25
Yeah, it's gonna be a great talk, Neil, just a quick shout out to our friends at Augmented World Expo for putting us together for this talk. So we've done some really great work with them and super excited that we're connected on that. As we're, as we're diving into what immersive commerce means and where it's going, I wanted to give a quick primer on something that's going to come up in this conversation. And we're going to talk about how how immersive commerce is is has been evolving is going to continue continue to evolve. And one of the reasons why we're at 5G Labs are interested in this is because we look specifically at how 5G is impacting emerging technologies across industries. And for those who don't know, 5G represents the next generation of wireless connectivity, it's more than just a faster version of 4G. And it really is a reimagining of the network from the ground up with with much faster broadband, much lower latency, as well as the ability to to empower a lot of supporting technologies, things like edge compute, as well as industrial IoT or the Internet of Things. And so we're talking about allowing hundreds or hundreds of 1000s, or millions of devices in very small geographic areas, to be able to have access to very high, very high broadband, with ultra low latency. And that is going to unlock a whole new a whole new range of experiences, both for consumers and for businesses. And so as as we're having this conversation for everyone in the audience, I want you to be thinking about what does it mean, when 5G is ubiquitous because it's already here. And it's getting it's it's, it's across the country in one form or another. And it's only going to improve over time, both in its in the quality and the speed. And the and the in the reliability, as well as in its in its ubiquitousness across the country. And so as you're thinking about as you're listening to this conversation, I want you to be thinking about What does 5G mean for you? In the context of what you're working on, as we're having this conversation about this particular topic. So as we're diving into it, for anyone unfamiliar with with the term immersive commerce, I want to elaborate on some background about it. So I'm curious to everyone here, who's joining me today. How do you define immersive commerce? What is the value? What does that evolution look like? Neha, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

Neha Singh 6:59
Yeah. So as I was kind of mentioning, in my intro, what we see as immersive commerce is really the next generation of the online shopping interface. If you think about today, almost all ecommerce sites, you know, once you get past the homepage, it's basically a grid of thumbnails on a white background, right. And especially as you go to your mobile device, that kind of interface across different brands and across different sites looks exactly identical. The only thing that's different is like a font and a color change, right. And that's not sufficient differentiation for brands, as a majority of their business moves online, as that's really the same interface that was created by Amazon 25 years ago to sell books, and then from books that got used by every brand and for every category, right? So immersive, the rise of immersive and VR AR and the capabilities possible today on a mobile device and what will be possible with 5G. All of these are enabling us to create a much more visual, much more contextual, online shopping experience. That hasn't been possible until now because of hardware limitations and network limitations. So for us, specifically, what immersive commerce means is we create 3D 360 virtual stores and these virtual stores can really, you know, look like anything, they don't have to look like stores, they are experiences that the brand can really use to manifest their vision, their inspiration for a particular season into the into the moment that the customer is actually shopping for it. So I have a quick video here that can kind of explain much more visually what I'm trying to say and it will just show a few of our recent virtual stores that we have created for brands for the holidays. And basically this first one...

Music 8:47

*Instrumental*

Video Voice Over 9:04
Darlings, that is so exciting. Welcome to my virtual gift shop in this amazing beautiful gifting Wonderland. Here we are together in virtual reality. *Instrumental*

Neha Singh 9:38
Yeah, so that's just to give you an idea of kind of what we are talking about in terms of immersive commerce, the quality of the video itself is lower, but the actual experiences are very high resolution. But essentially, it's giving, you know it's giving brands a much more visual discovery driven format, to their consumers to discover. discover their products, and all of this for us is happening on the web on mobile without requiring an app download, or requiring headsets. And that's a really important part of how, at this moment this technology becomes ubiquitous to consumers.

Joshua Ness 10:19
That's very cool. I like that video. It sounds the way that my dining room looks. I'm diggin it.

Joshua Ness 10:27
And I have some, some things I want to follow up with. And just a little bit around something you mentioned around hardware limitations. And I'm curious to know what you think, in the next. In our next topic about where hardware combined with advanced connectivity might unlock some even more significant aspects of what you're working on. Neil, moving on to you like how are you defining immersive commerce? And what does that evolution look like in your world?

Neil Redding 10:59
I do. Yeah. Thanks, Josh. I do have a visual, but I will just say, I mean, I love everything you're showing me. I think. I think as you've I've heard you speak elsewhere. And I think as you're alluding to here, this is all this technology and what it enables both in terms of connectivity with 5G, and also the the sort of personal technology, which will eventually I think, move on to our faces, right, and allow us to really feel like we're, we're truly in the spaces that are being presented as simulations. And as you said, I mean, they don't need to, they can start with physical stores. Because I think what we're what we're doing now, when we talk about immersive commerce is a lot of it is riffing on or, or an evolution that's, that's grounded in the physical store, right? Because we're all familiar with that. And we're using that kind of metaphor. But I think where we're headed is is potentially much more expansive or even fantastical kinds of spaces that that are not constrained by the cost and the physics, you know, of physical spaces. I want to show you one example that will just, I think, be a good bit of a good conversation piece. And let me know if you can see, can you see this as fullscreen? This work, okay? Yeah, so is full screen. So this is actually a minute, once again, well. So this is for a client, a furniture client that I'm working on, in collaboration with a startup called bit real. And what this is doing is this is on the web for a client called Hellman Chang. And I'm actually going to move so you can kind of zoom in here and you can see more of this on your screen. This is real time 3d rendered showroom. So it's not an actual children. This isn't Hellman Chang is a high end furniture retailer. And so this is grounded in and based on the sort of creative direction and merchandising approach that they apply to their showrooms. This is their actual furniture, it's all real time 3D and lit like a like a space. And the way you navigate it is very similar to game mechanics, like first person if you're in Fortnite or some other kind of game like that. And so this is exploring kind of hypothesis, of course, this will show you that you can take furniture items that you find in a showroom, and then bring them into your space augmented reality, most of you may have experienced with this. But this is exploring the hypothesis that people may want to be in a simulation of a showroom that feels like being in showroom, you know, but with the ability to walk around have a little bit of freedom to do that. And, and because we've been missing this, right, I think a lot of immersive commerce to my mind is putting allowing us to be in spaces with each other, you know, in these stores with physical products that we haven't been able to shop this way, but thanks to COVID for a while. The other piece of this, sorry, I've set on place and see if I can pause it here is really the ability like I was describing to pull out items that you discover in a showroom in the shop from the showroom into augmented reality into your own space. And then this is a little bit of a product here now I think but taking multiple products and starting to lay out your own room with photo real 3D models of products that you discover in immersive showroom. So this is another piece that we're looking at and and it's really a frontier, you know, like trying to make this work well. But we see this is where things are headed. Like being able to be immersed in a space project yourself into a space, be immersed in a simulation, but then also bring these 3D photo real objects into your own space and lay them out and so furniture is a great example of that. Hopefully that's a good or they say a good illustration to use as a rounding for some of the conversation here, Josh?

Joshua Ness 15:03
Yeah, that's really interesting. Are there any major retailers that are using that kind of technology right now? Like, can I go to Wayfair? And, and get in an AR representation of what a piece of furniture might look like in my room?

Neil Redding 15:14
You can. Yes. I mean, so Wayfair. Amazon is also doing this quite well, mobile augmented reality, sort of putting three dimensional objects furniture is kind of the easiest, because it has such a sort of robust, physicality. And it's easy to relatively easy to create the photo real 3D models that you put in, put in your space walk around and have the experience almost, it's almost visceral of like being with that object. So yes, it's a long Yes. Wayfair doing it well. And I think there's, like I said, there's Amazon. There's other companies that are doing it to the point where I think we're approaching a point where, where that kind of browsing experiences is expected. I think, you know, for physical objects like this, and I think for the coming few years, it's going to be kind of be taking that as, again, as expected as kind of baseline and sort of what can we do from there? So I think Obess doing what bitreal is doing in terms of putting people in the store, in a way that's immersive, is is kind of a next frontier. It's something that I think many of us are excited to explore that. On top of AR piece, you know, right.

Joshua Ness 16:26
Yeah, and Sreenivas rounding it out with you. I know Verizon is exploring a lot of immersive commerce. But how are you defining immersive commerce? And how do you see that that evolution has happened from from us in the telecoms industry, and from the media side.

Sreenivas Rachamadugu 16:41
Certainly, I think Neha and Neil have hit upon some of this, let me take a slightly nother perspective on this is the customer's perspective. So today, when when you as a customer are browsing on the web, or you go to a physical store, there are certain things you can do in each one of them. But there are very few places where you can do both of them. And both are required for you to actually meet your need. So for example, if you go to a physical store, and you look at a product, and you want to do some kind of price comparison, now you want to look at products from two different stores mix and match them, there's no real easy way to do that. And if you're on the web, with the with the with the majority of the web, still, using technology, like Neha pointed out, that was that's 25 years old, it's really difficult to bring that virtual into the physical, with what with the technology, the evolution in technology with first starting with LTE with the increased speeds there. And now with 5G and MEC, of the mobile edge, compute with the edge compute piece of it, technologies reached a point where we can actually serve the customer needs a lot better, we can personalize it for the customer, we can, we can actually allow them to interact with the object with with with the products without having to be physically there, we can allow them to combine the physical with the virtual. So what what the way we do it, the way we look at at immersive here is that combination of the physical and the virtual worlds, to be to enable the customer to have a commerce focused interaction and to be able to interact from that surface with minimal friction. The key thing here is focus on the customer need push the technology in the background. The the technology power set, but it's not in their face.

Joshua Ness 18:25
And does that have any implication for for advertising for for selling, selling ad, ad space on on those kinds of properties?

Sreenivas Rachamadugu 18:35
Absolutely. So Verizon announced Verizon Media Interactive Platform earlier this year, and that is one where we have the capability of enabling 3D enabled ads, and the things that Neil was talking about some of the things that like Neil showed, with some of the with with, with with the game engine pro and using photo real images to be able to have the people experience the space. Those are things that those are things that we have available on the platform. In fact, the 5G Labs, we did one very similar for a virtual visitor 5G lab in the prior office that used the game engine for other people to interact and actually have, bring in video conferences. And on the ad unit side, we'll go into our ad showcase later on here where we can talk about some of the things that we have done furnitures one we have done foot apparel, footwear, beauty are areas where some of these are available both his ad units and commerce units.

Joshua Ness 19:34
Very cool. Neil, going back to to your to what you were sharing from a consultancy perspective, where are we seeing? Or where are you seeing the biggest adoptions to this technology, whether it's across industries like furniture or beauty or shoes or things like that? And then we had we had a question come in from from Justin around in the audience around are these experiences able to be shared? And are we seeing a market for multiple people in are people in in different geographical locations, people to collaborate on that same web based showroom. And for me for a user to get other opinions on whether or not let's say a piece of furniture works in a room.?

Neil Redding 20:15
Yeah, those are great questions. So thank you for that. I'll take it in reverse order. I mean, the piece about social shopping, you might call it our co browsing is, is a super interesting one. And I'll say that without without announcing anything that I'm aware of it shouldn't announce I mean, it is it is coming. Right? Actually, I don't know. It's possible Obsess allows us as well. But I think there's there are, I think this is also part of the frontier of where things are headed the next few years being able to go shopping with your friends. I mean, to me, it's a it's part of what we've become very conscious of missing. Right, thanks to COVID. And thanks to the danger of being in physical spaces, like stores, we're just the fact that they've been inaccessible to us right, during COVID. That sort of being in those spaces being with people that we that we love having that sensory experience of the product. And, you know, I think, I think, but I'll pivot to your first question as well, sort of what what kinds of products, what kinds of industries because it's related to this, I think, you know, there are certain kinds of products that I think are much more worth more compelling to go shopping with friends, right? I think the kinds of product sets that Obsess is showing, I mean, this is just my opinion, but the the apparel, the kind of fashion domain, I think is is a is one where kind of being with your friends, having that full sensory experience, I think is super, super compelling. It's also I mean, Neha will know this the I, when I say to do full photo real, 3D rendering of that kind of product is really, really hard, right? It's almost just beyond the frontier of what's possible, certainly on a mobile device, you know, sort of simulating apparel, physically, furniture, since it's tends to be more static, it has a more fixed shape, you know, its its reflectivity, and its movement and all that it's just easier to render. This is part of the answer to your question, Josh, I mean, what, what I'm seeing is that housewares, brands, furniture brands, are really excited about much just being able to bring their products into augmented reality to all the way to people in their homes, so that people can start like putting more pieces of laying out their rooms and shopping that way for sets of furniture. But also excited about allowing people to try out being in the simulation on the showroom. Like I was saying earlier, this it's really a at the hypothesis stage right now, though, we're seeing a lot of furniture brands say yes to the opportunity to create a simulation of the showroom now, because after many months, and after many more months, and now an unknown number of additional months, like their showrooms are just not going to be as accessible to people. And so let's try out like allowing people to visit virtually and have that this sort of being mentioned kind of experience of being in a showroom, moving around as you as you want. So, so summary of that, I think furniture, I think hard goods, you know, these are definitely the kinds of brands and types of product categories that that make the most sense at this, at this moment for photo real 3D rendering, I think, I think Obess has shown, there are lots of other products, that's the mature that you can present in, in all kinds of ways. If you're not concerned about that level of, you know, that level of photo realism, but you want to do something that's a little more. That's just private. It's, like richer and a little bit more. I tend to say fantastic, fantastical, but feel free to correct me. They like it has it as a more as a fun feel it has a as a almost celebratory feel to it.

Neha Singh 24:05
Yeah, I think in terms of categories, that's a good question. I feel like this year has been a learning for us from the categories that we were originally targeting would be the best for this experience. But it has really expanded a lot more. And ultimately, I think this is for any brand that wants to create an experience and that could be across any different category. And that's why we're working, you know, all the way from like telecom to, you know, Party City, Sam's Club, like these big box retailers in addition to luxury fashion brands. And I think yeah, another kind of piece that Neil was talking about, related to the photorealism and the fantastical versus the real. I totally agree that right now we are sort of in the beginning stages. So a lot of the experiences that are being created are more based on actual stores and actual showrooms, and we already have a lot of experiences that are starting to go beyond that, but they are, stay grounded in some kind of physical space. It doesn't have to be a store, or a showroom. But like we have, for one of the Sam's Club experiences, we recreated a house from the National Lampoon's Christmas vacation, we have another experience we launched recently. That's like a ski chalet. But I think that grounding is not bad. It's actually good because it even for consumers, it gives them something familiar, and makes it very intuitive to navigate. And then of course, yeah, over time, I think we will see that expanding to all kinds of fantastical, I think ideas and inspirations and especially in Fashion, kind of what the inspiration that goes into every collection will really be able to be brought out in these experiences. And then lastly, about the social aspect. Yeah, that's definitely something that we are working on. And that's an important part of the real life shopping experience, like going shopping with your friends, or even if it's not your friends, or other people in the store. And actually your purchase decisions are influenced by what they might be looking at, or which part of the store they're in, right. So right now we are doing this at I would say not like at a mass level, but where we have a few players in the space and the sense that we are often. For example, one of the use cases is for VIP customers of luxury brands, they're the selling process is very one on one. And so we have the the sales concierge and the customer who are in that experience, or the sales concierge, and a couple of customers who are together in that experience. And that has actually been really, really successful, especially over this period, because it's really given the sales teams like a tool that they can use that's much more effective. versus just you know, if they were to show them like a regular ecommerce website like here, as they are in those virtual appointments, they are taking them through these virtual stores and virtual showrooms. And they are able to give a much more visceral feeling to the collection. And that's actually resulted in a lot of growth for us, that particular use case. So that's kind of a smaller form of social where it's fewer people. And then I think over the next few years, you'll see that expanding to friends and more people.

Joshua Ness 27:22
It's interesting when you're talking about both Neha and Neil that we, as users, we find that adoption requires a physical grounding in the virtual space. So we're talking about still needing a an experience of building a showroom or still needing the experience of building a physical structure that we then enter in the virtual space. And I wonder, this is definitely not something I want to dive, take down the rabbit hole. But I'm wondering how long that's going to be the case? How long are we as users of product or the services going to require that familiarity, ready to branch out something more serial. And then just on a personal note, I'm gonna need you to send me that National Lampoon's Christmas vacation house so I can live out my dream of having a grizzled family Christmas thrugh virtual reality.

Neha Singh 28:14
I'll do it. So it's so cool. Love the movie, you love the experience, it has *inaudible*

Joshua Ness 28:21
100%

Joshua Ness 28:22
Sreenivas I was wonder if we can dive a little deeper on like base building on what Neil and Neha were just talking about, about what something you mentioned, which is pushing tech into the background. And I think one of the reasons why Neil was talking about those types of goods, or those types of, or those types of industries where he's seeing adoption is because those are the ones where it's easiest to push the tech into the background and just showcase hey, here's this thing that you can try and that you can use. And so how do we ensure that immersive commerce is giving additional value to customers and not negatively impacting the shopping experience with a bunch of new things they have to learn or figure out?

Sreenivas Rachamadugu 28:58
I think that's a very key observation. They're very key observation that just so if you look at it from like, any technology, like data in different industries, and different use cases have different adoption curves. So if so, if you look at the area that we are, we are seeing from an ad tech platform perspective, dynamic product ads, in terms of shoppable video or AR enabled native transactions, where the barrier to entry and a barrier to experience is a little bit lower, which is when for the user, what we're seeing a significant amount of adoption there. In fact, I don't know if Mel cannot show up, throw up the page that shows some of some of the AR ads that that we have that does some of that we have done for some of our customers. And we can put a link to this for folks that are interested in it. What you'll see here is a wide range of partners that are actually experimenting with immersive commerce experience as part of their ad units. So here, you will see that we are partnered with several retailers to really allow them to allow their customers to visualize their products within their current environment itself. And this ranges from furniture, to small electronics, things like one of the things that's popular is like seeing what the Christmas tree looks like, right in time for the season, that that you can actually place in your current environment and take a look at. From an from an adoption perspective, if you look at it across the board, yes, like you could go through that. And here you can even decorate with arguments to see what the tree would look like. These kind of things really allow the consumer here to complete their that their desire that transaction here by without having to worry about whether the product fits in their space and having to worry about the overhead of return. So essentially, the most of that friction in that decision making. So this is where this is what I mean by taking technology, the background to help with that in that process. If you look at if you look at categories of beauty, furniture, footwear that we have talked about, I think beauty is a place where adoption is actually spreading. And I think those of you who wanted to this space would have seen the the announcement from Kohl's and Snapchat, where they do actually built a lab to make it to make it easier for them to sell beauty. The other piece of it is you look at shoes, personal accessories, jewelry, hair accessories, what you're seeing here is a lot of technical success, but people haven't yet we haven't yet figured out what the business models are. And there are several being that that are being tested. Other things like apparel, electronics, layouts, these are areas where people are experimenting, and the adoption is still very early stage. And I think Neil and Neha hit upon the value of that experience. And also some of the some of the areas where customers have to get used to it. And the and the things that are out there and adoption cycle.

Joshua Ness 32:08
That's really interesting. You talked about barriers and how especially how, how the the the implementation of the technology could in some instances create barriers. I'm I'm curious Neha as someone who's actually implemented some of this stuff, like one of the barriers, I assume is is things like hardware, there's something that we mentioned before, like, how much do or how are you managing this with obsessed with with things like 3d commerce cloud? And and where do you see hardware being the the weak link in the chain, if you will, as a barrier to adoption? And how do you see that changing and evolving? I have my own opinions on that. But I'd really love to hear what you think.

Neha Singh 32:50
Yeah, so I guess a couple of things. One is like, first of all, talking about VR headset hardware and pushing that aside really quickly to say that that just doesn't have enough adoption yet. For it to be something at scale. So that will happen in the future, of course, but focusing more on mobile hardware, which is very, of course the majority of consumer traffic is. So there are obviously still a lot of limitations on how much of the real time 3D rendering that Neil was talking about can be done on mobile at the moment and how photorealistic it can look and, and the performance implications of that. So as we know, like consumers will leave a page if it doesn't load within like three seconds, right. And if you've seen a lot of kind of games, especially browser based or immersive experiences, they often have really long load times, they're clunky. And that's all because of hardware limitations, and how much on GPUs can process you know, can render graphics basically. So and then the same thing goes for network because obviously, these are very heavy assets, like now we are going from image to video to complete 3D, and 360. So these are very large files. And network is obviously a big factor there. So for us, we have focused on basically enabling today's hardware and network specs. And then as we add that, that does mean like cutting back on some of the functionality that we would ideally like to have, but it's just going to be too slow to load or, you know, too clunky to use. So our focus has really been on making something that can really work now. And then as 5G comes along and rolls out more, more broadly. And each new generation of iPhones and Androids of course make this like more and more powerful so we can keep enabling that. That's just our strategy. But yeah, I would love to hear other's thoughts on that as well.

Joshua Ness 34:52
Yeah, I think with with hardware, like like you were saying right now that the adoption just isn't there for true virtual reality and augmented reality. But I think as 5G continues to to to be available, it can we have more ease of access to things like edge computing resources, I think the the form factor and the adaptability of those types of hardware should improve. And I think, in almost a side point, I think that would be good not only for the shopping experience of the public at large, but I think immersive and inclusive commerce, using proper AR and VR and those types of technologies, if they're built right can probably also serve people with things like sensory or mobility, or cognitive disabilities as well, along with things like social and informational shopping, and addressing those needs of the customer. So it could be that developing these new types of immersive experiences could in fact, open up the customer base of some of the other players in the stakeholders in this space. I know that with Verizon specifically, we try to distinguish Verizon products in that field. And I'm sure Sreenivas can speak to this as well, by making ensuring that what we offer is fully inclusive. And I'll be interested to see in curious if anyone else has any thoughts on that. But I'll be interested to see how these experiences grow with hardware evolution and how it potentially opens up more accessible experiences for for the general public.

Neha Singh 36:27
Yeah, and just a quick add to that. That's a really good point, actually. Because Yeah, one of the main things we tell brands is this is actually increasing accessibility of your physical real estate assets. Right. So if you have created a store in like one big city, and you have customers all over the country, all over the world, who would have to fly there, which, of course they can't right now. Like, it's actually increasing the audience reach of these brands, so much more to now enable these experiences for a broader set of audience. And then on the other side of kind of the benefits of this in general, like, they're huge implications for sustainability. You know, with these experiences already, what we're seeing with some of our customers is that they are creating, you know, completely virtual showrooms with completely virtual products that haven't been produced physically yet. And it's saving so much, you know, cutting out so much waste, because they are not producing those samples physically anymore. buyers are not traveling to fashion weeks, you know, twice a year or more than that. And going to all these showrooms in person, and they are able to do all that virtually. And as Neil said, In the beginning, this was probably something that was going to happen in three to five years. And this is all kind of very quickly happened this year. So I think there are many broader kind of implications and benefits of this technology beyond just kind of the consumer experience that we're talking about this far.

Neil Redding 37:50
Yeah, yeah, I love what you're saying. I would add, add one little piece to that, which is, there's a specific, actually medical furniture retailer that I've been working with recently that their standard practice has been shipping this $10,000 chair to prospective customers and like, so the shopping experience is like shipping it to the respective customer, they see if it works, and then often they ship it back. Right. So it's not just like, you know, returning a standard Amazon, you know, delivery of like a big, heavy, expensive chair that they often have to return ship. And so it's obviously really expensive and time consuming and all that but like, being able to do that browsing experience, like have an immersive showroom and and also have this AR experience is a huge advantage to them. They save huge amounts of money and time. And as you're pointing to, like shipping costs, shipping waste packaging of the stuff. So yeah, and I think just like the whole and the obviously it's a very mixed bag, great for cities, but the fact that people aren't going back to high rise office spaces in New York, for example, you know, to work at all kinds of negative cascading side effects. I mean, some of the benefits as the I was pointing to our distance, no, we're learning to live past distance, right, we're making distance matter less and less. I've been giving a talk recently at the pointy end of distance, a lot of what we're talking about here is really out that they just like here, but zoom, we can make the fact that we are all in different places less relevant, we can actually have this conversation and to be physically present. We're doing that also for physical objects and physical spaces, right? Everything we're talking about heroes allowing us to cross distance, to be with each other to be with spaces to be with things and I think that as a lens is super interesting. One of the things that if we had hours, you know, I'd love to talk about too, I think immersive, immersive commerce here, you know, just just to be super avert about it. We're kind of narrowing it down, I think for the sake of this conversation to the visual largely right. Or sort of putting yourself in what seems to be a physical space via simulation. But I think you know, each of you have touched on, you know, the possibilities of the ways commerce and transactional possibilities are showing up in all kinds of contexts and ads context in social media feed contexts, like we've seen Instagram over the past year, like, you can buy things. Even if you didn't intend to, it's like a very impulse kind of driven thing, but like, and sensors and physical spaces, I think, are gonna have a huge impact, even much more than they have in recent years going forward. So the idea that the whole world is this is what I think we mean by digital physical convergence, right? There could be sensors that are collecting data that is used to, to populate and inform machine learning models that could start to have personalized algorithmically delivered experiences across all kinds of touch points, digital, physical. So all that is just a way of like shorthanding how excited I think I am. And maybe you guys are as well, for the next few years for me, this decade, I think it was going to see huge transformation across all these realms.

Sreenivas Rachamadugu 41:06
That's very interesting. And just I like the way you framed that question up for, for me, let's riff on that a little bit. So let's ask the question, What does what's the intent here of a merchant? What's the intent of a shopper? And how does technology and this digitization enable us to deliver those intents in a in a in the most efficient manner? If you now look at that, if you ask that question, all of a sudden, what you find is when you're able to take the physical into the digital and bring the digital into the physical, as Neil said, physical distance doesn't matter anymore. So think about going to a store, looking at something, maybe a piece of exercise equipment, and having a question about it and being able to reach the expert, irrespective of where you are. You can't do that in a physical store. You could do it in a in that converge physical reality, look at a piece of equipment and ask the question, does this fit in my flat? you're able to do that today. Previously, you had to buy the equipment or take measurements, come back, measure it and hope it fits. Look at it from the perspective of I have two girls, as you can see in the background here. shopping with them is fun, because I'm the dad holding all the dresses they want to cry on. Just imagine if you could now try a particular you could try a particular dress and look at the various patterns without having to physically carry through that. What does that mean in terms of the merchant in terms of the amount of their operational efficiency, think about what this means in terms of shelf space inventory, talking about endless aisles, not just in the physical, but not just in the digital, but in the physical. Now think about being able to do customization personalization of any kind of good and having it delivered. Technology is enabling all of this. When we talk about immersive commerce, to me, it's it's taking all of these technologies to be able to answer that question for the user, irrespective of where they are, whether they are in an in a space, whether they are reading an article about that piece of particular product, whether it's an email that they get in the email box, whether they are in a virtual store, or whether they're in a physical store, it's all about helping that customer complete that transaction with minimal friction.

Joshua Ness 43:27
Yeah, and I think that also holds true on the on the buyer side as well. Now, you mentioned the sustainability angle. And I know that that is also something that startups are beginning to address. A good friend of mine, Tracy Wong, runs a company called Voor 3D that addresses exactly that. allowing people to align buyers and in folks on the back end as a fashion retailing to be able to do to do what both now you and Sreenivas you said to be able to, to get as close as possible to those types of products and be able to make purchase decisions, either wholesale or retail. So I know that that's definitely something that's happening in the marketplace. As we're as we're coming up on the last few minutes, I want to talk a little bit about where we're going, and what some of the considerations are, especially as 5G becomes more prolific. Neha, I wanted to ask you about things like multi sensory shopping experiences and enabling those virtual in the virtual space, as consumers are seeking out these personalized experiences, and they're expecting that personal relationship with brands, I'm wondering how, how the how you see immersive commerce plays a part in that.

Neha Singh 44:35
Yeah, I mean, I think pretty much as you know, as I was saying, immersive commerce is not only going to be kind of provide all the functionality that you could get in a real store but really go beyond that into things that were not possible in the retail store. In terms of like multi sensory I think obviously the most difficult one of that is touch and and fragrance and or smell, I guess for for fragrances. And I won't really go into that because I think that those areas are still in very, very early stages of research and development. So it's probably five to 10 years until we will see that. But in terms of all of the other sensory experiences that you get by being in a store, like our, you know, our experiences include sound, and of course, the visuals, and it's really, and I'll send you the Sam's Club link later, but that's one of the most immersive, immersive experiences. So I think you will see, with 5G, basically, we'll be able to do so much more real time that it would become more dynamic. And I think there was a question in the chat as well about personalization. And, and the network speed and hardware are both actually key to that, because, again, the personalization, a lot of it is about the real time rendering, right. So as opposed to personalization on a normal ecommerce site where you can see the Amazon recommendations for you. And it's very easy. If you're trying to personalize an entire immersive experience and render different things for different people, you definitely need to get into real time 3D. So of course, you're starting to see that now. But over time, you will see that across more categories, where as he was pointing out, it's for fashion and apparel, it's much more difficult to do those simulations right now. And it really will become these experiences will become a point, as Sreenivas was mentioning about being able to get those questions answered. Anytime that you want really integrating the sales associate and you know, in a real store, sometimes you feel intimidated by the sales associates who keep who are like either hovering around or they they're annoying and asking you what do you want. Whereas in origin story, you can go to them only when you want. And actually, that's one of the you know, that's one of the reasons for luxury brands, they're also trying to experience right. So that aspect will be brought in, I think someone brought them brought up live live shopping on the on the chat. And that's also really interesting. So really becomes for us, the way we see it, it becomes a hub for all these services and all these all these actions that are needed by the consumer to be taken on their path to purchase. And it becomes a much more seamless and intuitive experience versus right now we are in a very kind of artificial construct of, of shopping online.

Joshua Ness 47:23
I'm curious about the trade off when it comes to that. I know that one of the the benefits, of course from this comes from Justin in the audience one of the benefits from this talk, what you just described is personalization means adapting the experience to each individual user, based on preferences. But I'm wondering Sreenivas you indicated that you had an opinion on this about the benefits of this versus the threat or the concern of loss of privacy?

Neha Singh 47:51
Yeah.

Sreenivas Rachamadugu 47:53
Yeah, I think I think we've got whatever we do here we'll have to be with we'll we'll we'll have to be in a bit of privacy first position. So one of the things that you'll see is brands that are going to get traction here are ones that are built on trust and innovation, those are two key things that are required. From a consumers perspective, the consumer will share the data with with with the, with the merchant, as long as they understand how the data is being used. It is and it's being used to add value to their experience, I think that's going to be the key thing. So we could imagine a world where and you have where I could have my personal wallet with all of my personal information that I carry with me that I securely exchange to personalize my experience, just for that particular transaction. We're not talking about we're not talking about that here today. That will require us to have the edge compute and the and 5G deployed, and that it really come to life at that point in time, where you could actually for that particular experience, exchange the data, have that personalization, do the transaction very securely. And and essentially take that data back with you. Now the advantage you get with that it's Yes, there's a cost, but the value to the user and the value to the merchant is so large, that that can those savings can be then used to subsidize the cost of delivering that experience. We're going to get there, it's going to take a little more, it's going to take a little more advanced, there's going to be some technological advancements that need to occur, there's going to be some penetration of existing technologies that need to occur, and we will will absolutely get there. But the key the key thing I want to underscore here is this has to be viewed. And adoption will only occur when there is value to all the stakeholders that are engaged here. Otherwise, it becomes a gimmick. And what we got to be careful about is when we do these experiments, we got to keep an eye on that value to the consumer because it's all about them.

Neil Redding 49:55
Yeah, I love what you're saying Sreenivas and, you know, the consulting that we do at Redding Futures. I mean, it's, if we take a step back here, I mean, this conversation, I think, rightly, as an immersive commerce conversation as focused on shopping as an explicit experience that takes place in a physical space that we've noticed store. Right. And so, but of course, you know, as Neha was pointing out, we've had 20-25 years right of shopping in other ways. And so one of the one of the q&a questions was asking about some of the VR but also voice assistance, you know, and other kinds of ways that software can automatically increasingly in a personalized way fulfill on things we want, and but building on what you're saying, Sreenivas as we start to solve that sense of trust, which doesn't exist, right, between many customers, and many, many brands and platforms, but shopping, we're putting more basically, sort of the fulfilment or the connection of people with things they want and need, right? Like, not every, not every connection of people with things they want to need needs to be something we understand the shopping, right? I mean, increasingly, these things can happen automatically, they can just be fulfilled based on algorithm acknowledge and personalization, right, that so shopping, I think, is something that can become more intentional, more experiential, more entertaining, whereas things that you know, like, you're not going to create an Obsess store for paper towels, right? Or, you know, basic things that you need for your kitchen. I mean, but not you couldn't, but it seems like it's not as not as interesting. Right? So the point is that, when we consult anywhere with clients, you know, we try to look at what are the moments throughout your customers or prospective customers days, and you know, sometimes they don't have visual bandwidth because they're driving or they're doing something else they need to visually focus on so that you can present something visual, but could you engage with them via voice or some other way? Right. So I think increasingly, this decade, we're going to see these sort of ecosystems of touch points that have different ways of engaging with people in different contexts in their lives. And I think that's another interesting lens to apply to this conversation.

Sreenivas Rachamadugu 52:09
That's a great lens, Neil, because as we look at the spectrum of things that we buy, from the essentials, all the way to the experiential, where it's where it is almost entertainment, the the kind of needs and the technologies that will support it are going to be different across that spectrum. fair point.

Joshua Ness 52:29
Hmm. And I know that as we're as we're, as we're coming here to the end, the and just to build Sreenivas, I know that Verizon Media, and Verizon at large is, is taking that very seriously. Even just this past week, we launched Connect ID, which is a way for brands to eliminate the need for things like third party cookies, and empower consumers to share their pieces of their identity, and other personal information with the brands that they trust. And to pursue that personal relationship. That way, Neha, closing it out, I wanted to actually go to something from that we got from the, from the audience. And this was something around things like analytics of immersive experiences, things like heat maps, on where someone lingers or looks or things like that. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that, as a function of being able to continue to personalize that experience, using the real time analytics and data that is processed at the edge and carried over 5G something where we're able to take in not as a not as a way to, to view these analytics after the shopping experience, but actually put them to work in the middle of the of the experience, something that really only is possible with 5G and edge computing. And I'm wondering, where your thoughts on that? And do you see that, that evolution coming?

Neha Singh 53:51
That sounds super cool. I think that would be amazing if we can actually do real time analytics, processing and customized to the experience to that. And I can think of so many, like immediate use cases, for example, like sometimes in our stores, like people get lost, you know, like, they don't know where to go, because again, you're seeing it on your device, and especially when we are recreating a real store. And if we could, in real time know that okay, this person is we again, we know that we obviously collect all that data, and we can look at it afterwards. And we can look at it in analytics dashboard in real time, but it's not that we are changing the interface, you know, based on that. So I think that will just make these these much more effective. And then of course, for for the retailers. This data is you know, it's so valuable. And even just from the all the data we have right now because we have launched like more than 60 virtual stores. It's really interesting like the the patterns and the insights and us being able to use that data or segments of that data to customize the experience by category by customer. By device, you know, like, if we know that certain devices are older, like we were talking about that older GPUs serving them different things, or based on the network speed, like there's so many possibilities of how this could, this could evolve. And then eventually, the goal being that the experience really becomes something that's very tailored to you. And tailored to your preferences, both in terms of how you navigate how the space is, and the actual products.

Joshua Ness 55:28
Yeah, yes, please.

Sreenivas Rachamadugu 55:31
I know that that's that's that would what Yes, that's pretty interesting. Because now if you start if you leapfrog here a couple of years, and think about the the edge compute that's going to be available and think about the fast last mile connectivity. And it could be it could be it could be 5G, or even with Wi Fi six, the the things that we can do right now with the NML, start get very good start starts getting very interesting. And we're already customers that we have announced that we're doing this with people like cooler screens, where you can now build learning models, and push those inference models to the edges, and really start doing those real time analytics. And, and do and actually communicating those insights as something that's actionable, either to folks on the floor there or to directly to the, to the customers. So these things are, the interesting is some of these things are not futuristic, some of these things, we are already doing them, probably not as much in the not not yet as much in the retail space. But I think that's I think that's fast coming both in the virtual environment. And in the physical environment, I would actually say that it's much easier in the virtual environment, because all of your data is readily available. So it's just a question of having that available. Having that available to the game engine. If you use if you just go back to the example that Neil was using where that was, there was an experience that's probably running inside a Unity engine, or those, those are things that we could actually do today.

Joshua Ness 57:00
Neil, do you see that? Are you starting to see the clamoring for that kind of instant customization in the market?

Neil Redding 57:10
I think so. Yeah. I mean, like I was saying, but I think they'll let you know, the way we lead conversations when we're talking with clients, or even prospective clients about what's possible is, in the coming three to five years, I think, you know, as I was pointing to think *inaudible*, 5G. And I think if we start thinking now through the lens of let's look at all the different moments throughout our perspective users or customers day and sort of what do they really need launch? What are the opportunities to interact? You know, when should we leave them alone, when should be anticipate that they want to interact in some way or want to fulfill, you know, a desire to buy something or see some content or whatever, but he's, I think we're really going to see personalized digital ecosystems around brands and businesses, you know, start to flourish next few years, I think it's a real frontier. And honestly, I think, you know, 10 years from now, the way software integrates with our lives is going to be dramatically different than it is today. Right. I mean, I think we've all grown up using technology, where are we still, almost everything we have to do for us, we have to tell it exactly what to do. You know, and I think it's it's going to less and less be the case going forward. So long. Yes. Right, Josh?

Joshua Ness 58:33
Yeah, no, I think it's I think we're on the cusp of of some really great innovations in this space. Thank you, Neha. Sreenivas, Neil, for this, this amazing discussion. And and a special thank you to everyone in the audience for joining in. This conversation has been recorded and will be available. I think tomorrow if anyone wants to share this content with their communities. And we do encourage that. We'll be back here tomorrow at 2pm for our monthly Mind the Gap event where we highlight the voices of entrepreneurs and technologists who are championing inclusivity representation and progress for all women in technology. This month, we have the pleasure of sitting down with the CEO and Founder of Popcom, an amazing entrepreneur named Dawn Dixon, as well as Cat Schmitz, a Product Designer and Professor of Design at NYU and Cat Schmitz. And we're super excited for that conversation. And to hear about the work that they're doing in in the in the design space, especially especially as it comes when it comes to retail. Again, if you'd like more information on the topics that we talked about here today, or if you want to learn more about 5G and what it means for your business. Go ahead and visit us at verizon5glabs.com and get in touch you can also see our full roster of events from now all the way through a delegate the end of January. So thank you so much for joining us and everyone. Have a great afternoon. Thank you.

Neil Redding 59:52
Thanks all