Shop till you drop in the metaverse, says Adobe

You could be doing your weekly grocery shop in the metaverse, says Adobe.

Adobe is holding its annual Summit event in Sydney. The Summit explores the digital marketing side of its business.

Don your VR glasses. Get out your shopping list. And head down the aisle in the metaverse to buy your groceries. That’s one vision of supermarket shopping in the future.

Adobe, famous for Photoshop and a suite of other digital development products, is helping its customers create the 3D environments for a range of new experiences that could populate upcoming virtual spaces in the metaverse.

Adobe head of product marketing (APAC), Jeremy Wood, sees gaming and customer shopping experiences such as buying clothes and supermarket shopping in virtual stores as attractive propositions.

Adobe this week is holding its annual Summit event in Sydney which is exploring the digital economy and personalised customer experiences. That includes the metaverse and Adobe as a provider of creative tools for VR experiences.

Elements of the metaverse have existed for years. More than a decade ago Second Life operated a virtual online economy using its Linden Dollars as currency. The US start-up Altspace VR began hosting shared virtual reality experiences seven years ago which included people around the world getting together in virtual classrooms to learn Spanish.

Last year Facebook (now Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave these concepts a new lease of life, branding them under the collective title of ‘metaverse’, triggering a frenzy of marketing hype and serious development afresh.

Mr Wood said Adobe was already helping designers build the shapes and forms that comprise the metaverse. He said developers were using the Adobe Substance 3D and Aero applications to build metaverse-type experiences.

Adobe head of product marketing (APAC), Jeremy Wood.

The Substance 3D set of Adobe apps let users design, build, paint, build and assemble 3D assets while Aero was an augmented reality authoring tool for AR experiences.

He said users could bring multi-layered images developed in Photoshop into Substance 3D to create 3D versions. You could build one side of a shoe in 2D in Photoshop and Substance 3D could mirror the design on the other side.

“Before this (metaverse) came around as a terminology, businesses were playing around with 3D,” Mr Wood said. “The gaming industry is already well in front of us.” But he said shopping in the metaverse could be “pretty compelling”.

“I could put on goggles and walk into a department store and try on some clothing and transact without leaving my living room, but I know that size will be a perfect fit because my avatar was already measured for me. That might be a pretty compelling,” he said.

He also mentioned building design, where a prospective homeowner could walk through their proposed home with furniture picked out from their local store.

Virtual home inspections was a concept that REA Group explored several years ago in collaboration with free-roam VR experience developer Zero Latency. Customers could walk through a home that was still on the plan and yet to be built.

Adobe is collaborating with The Coca-Cola Company, Epic Games, Nascar, nVidia and others on 3D content creation, e-commerce and portable immersive experiences.

A comedy night hosted in virtual reality (aka the metaverse) six years ago by AltspaceVR. The avatars are of people at the event.

Adobe is also working with customers to improve digital experiences in the real world.

President of Adobe Asia-Pacific Simon Tate said Adobe was helping clients such as banks and government departments create compelling digital experiences.

He said the pandemic had highlighted the need to improve the digital experiences offered by government and Adobe was involved with that.

“If you think of online banking, all of the major banks across Asia Pacific when you jump on their website and do online banking, that‘s us,” Mr Tate said.

“Adobe is powering their websites and all of the microsites and all of the assets, including all the digital creative assets on those sites.”

He said four of Australia’s five major banks ran on Adobe software. “We are in effect that first lens, the first piece of glass into the experience that the brand is offering their customers.”

Adobe Summit examined using personal data effectively to enhance customer experiences.

“We kick off a customer journey that says to the bank, this user might be interested in an investment portfolio, because they checked out the investment microsite yesterday and they spent three minutes looking at potential effects, moves or minerals or whatever,” Mr Tate said.

He said personal data had to be “ethically sourced and used”.

Adobe said it was partnering with Coles to leverage Adobe’s real-time customer data platform to deliver Coles a single view of customer data.

It said Anaplan, FedEx, OneTrust, PayPal, Walmart and The Weather Company were joining Adobe’s tech partner ecosystem.

BMW Group and Nike are among others companies now connecting with Adobe personalised experiences.