US home-improvement retail chain Lowe’s is working with Nvidia and Magic Leap to create interactive store digital twins.

With tens of millions of weekly transactions across its more than 2000 stores, Lowe’s helps customers achieve their home-improvement goals. Now, the Fortune 50 retailer is experimenting with high-tech methods to elevate both the associate and customer experience.

Using Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise to visualise and interact with a store’s digital data, Lowe’s is testing digital twins in Mill Creek, Washington, and Charlotte, North Carolina. Its ultimate goal is to empower its retail associates to serve customers, collaborate with one another in new ways and optimise store operations.

“At Lowe’s, we are always looking for ways to reimagine store operations and remove friction for our customers,” said Seemantini Godbole, executive vice president at Lowe’s. “With Nvidia Omniverse, we’re pulling data together in ways that have never been possible, giving our associates superpowers.”

With its interactive digital twin, Lowe’s is exploring various novel augmented reality use cases, including reconfiguring layouts, restocking support, real-time collaboration and what it calls X-ray vision.

Wearing a Magic Leap 2 AR headset, store staff can interact with the digital twin. This AR experience helps an associate compare what a store shelf should look like with what it actually looks like, and ensure it is stocked with the right products in the right configurations.

Store associates on the ground can also communicate and collaborate with centralised store planners via AR. For example, if a store associate notices an improvement that could be made to a proposed planogram for their store, they can flag it on the digital twin with an AR sticky note.

Lastly, a benefit of the digital twin and Magic Leap 2 headset is the ability to explore X-ray vision. Traditionally, a store associate might need to climb a ladder to scan or read small labels on cardboard boxes held in a store’s top stock. With an AR headset and the digital twin, the associate could look up at a partially obscured cardboard box from ground level, and, thanks to computer vision and Lowe’s inventory application programming interfaces, see what’s inside via an AR overlay.

Home-improvement retail is a tactile business. When making decisions about how to create a new store display, a common way for retailers to see what works is to build a physical prototype, put it out into a brick-and-mortar store and examine how customers react.

With Omniverse and AI, Lowe’s is exploring more efficient ways to approach this process.

Just as ecommerce sites gather analytics to optimise the customer shopping experience online, the digital twin enables new ways of viewing sales performance and customer traffic data to optimise the in-store experience. Visual indicators and 3D heatmaps that show the physical distance of items frequently bought together can help associates put these objects near each other. Within a large store, for example, reducing the number of steps needed to pick up an item can be critical.

Using historical order and product location data, Lowe’s can also use Omniverse to simulate what might happen when a store is set up differently. Using AI avatars created in Lowe’s Innovation Labs, the retailer can simulate how far customers and associates might need to walk to pick up items that are often bought together.

Omniverse allows for hundreds of simulations to be run in a fraction of the time that it takes to build a physical store display, Godbole said.

Lowe’s also said it would soon make the more than 600 photorealistic 3D product assets from its home-improvement library free for other Omniverse creators to use in their virtual worlds. All these products will be available in the Universal Scene Description format on which Omniverse is built, and can be used in any metaverse created by developers using Omniverse Enterprise.

For Lowe’s, the future of home improvement is one in which AI, digital twins and mixed reality play a part in the daily lives of its associates, Godbole said. With Nvidia Omniverse, the retailer is taking steps to build this future, and there’s more to come as it tests new strategies.