Press Release: New Immersive VR Experience Powered by NVIDIA Holodeck
The latest announcement from Carmanah’s parent company, STRATACACHE, at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show & EXPO? It will debut virtual reality (VR) shopping, created by Scala Professional Services integrating the NVIDIA Holodeck™ immersive VR environment.
NVIDIA Holodeck is a VR platform that brings people together to build and explore creations in a highly realistic, collaborative, and physically simulated VR environment. STRATACACHE’s shopping experience leverages NVIDIA Holodeck to enable retailers to bring hands-on design experiences to flagship stores, all in a hyper-realistic virtual environment. Using a combination of virtual reality hardware and digital signage, retailers can deliver a white-glove experience of a high-end purchase, allowing the shopper to work with the collective expertise of multiple designers, no matter their location. The experience itself, as well as its components, can be scaled for multiple brick-and-mortar locations, and the inclusion of large-format displays attract and engage additional shoppers in the store.
“Whether for design or purchasing decisions, immersive VR is being successfully adopted by many industries,” said David Weinstein, Director of Virtual Reality at NVIDIA. “By incorporating NVIDIA Holodeck’s collaborative and photo-real environment into their solution, STRATACACHE will enable retailers to personalize the customer experience while improving operations.”
STRATACACHE has identified four key elements this experience brings to retail:
Pre-visualization for digital retail engagements: An immersive walkthrough provides a nuanced experience to clients as we engage and build out retail solutions. The environment allows for an acutely enhanced grasp on design aspects before final physical installation, such as scale, positioning, and impact. Design iterations and corrections can be implemented and tested more often and more deeply, aligning with agile workflows and best practices.
Sales engagement: The tool gives us the ability to provide prospective clients with tangible, extensive real-world examples of our retail digital expertise and solutions — this eliminates considerable travel time, cost, and scheduling restrictions, while optimizing design conversations.
Scalable interactive experience: The experience is flexible to fit the design requirements of any store or brand, scalable from a single kiosk equipped with a single headset, all the way up to a state-of-the-art VR theater, headsets, and digital signage experience. The high-end experience can include deeply immersive 3D environments and elements such as remote multi-user, voice, chat, and customized controllers and motion tracking, with outward facing displays attracting the attention of other customers, allowing them to follow along and see the power of the design experience.
Enhanced data visualization: Data such as floorplans, shopper metrics, and store overviews can be analyzed and then visualized in a more engaging, easier to digest 3D format, providing an impactful and realistic review process. For example, a traditional 2D heatmap of foot traffic flowing through a store could be visualized more deeply in 3D through VR, by inserting it directly over a floor plan, right alongside a more tangible representation of the actual architecture and inventory layout for a given location. Adjustments and physical measurements can be made and tailored alongside the data to discuss, test, and determine possible design changes or enhancements which may positive effect store flow.
“As the capabilities and level of realism in VR continues to mature, it’s incredibly exciting to envision all the possibilities for enhancing the speed, agility, and precision in collaborative workflows across numerous verticals,” said Robert Hall, Scala Director of Virtual Experiences.
ABOUT STRATACACHE & CARMANAH SIGNS
STRATACACHE provides scalable customer experiences, empowering retailers to learn deeply about their customers’ shopping preferences and behaviors, allowing for personalized shopper interaction. STRATACACHE’s solutions deliver consumer activation at the point-of-decision, generating new sales opportunities and enhanced retail profitability. STRATACACHE powers the biggest digital networks for the world’s largest brands.
Carmanah Signs, STRATACACHE’s global Lottery & Gaming Division, provides everything from digital signage software and hardware (media players, screens, tablets, networking equipment, and jackpot signs) to services (content creation, scheduling and distribution, network monitoring, and technical support).
Together, STRATACACHE and Carmanah Signs have over 2 million software activations and 145,000 wireless jackpot signs at retailers around the world, serving 50+ lottery jurisdictions and 500+ casinos globally. As an associate member of five global lottery associations, and an ongoing sponsor and content contributor to numerous lottery industry events, Carmanah Signs is the only digital signage provider committed to the lottery industry at this level.