The eTail Metaverse, immersive visualization to grow your target market

PRESENTER 1: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today for the ETail Metaverse, Immersive Visualizations to Grow Your Target Market panel. It's one of the last panels of the day, so we really appreciate your time. My name is [INAUDIBLE]-- excuse me. I work in the go-to-market strategy team for media and entertainment and I'll be your moderator for today. I have some great panelists lined up for you, which I will introduce in just a moment.

But before we start, I'd like to take a moment and just set some context because metaverse is a big word and so top of mind for many companies and individuals these days. And in fact, if you actually listen to the M&E keynote yesterday, you may have seen Diana Colella refer to it as metaverses, which is very fitting, I think, because there's definitely more than one metaverse.

For today, we are going to focus on the eTail metaverse, which is the applications of the metaverse to the retail domain. So we're going to talk about how technology can digitize shopping experiences and help enable purchase buying decisions. We'll try to stay away from digital currencies, or NFTs as related to cryptocurrency, but really focus on how retailers can create 3D-based shopping experiences for customers.

All right, so, yes, as I mentioned, some great panelists lined up for you today. They do this day in, day out. So please allow me to introduce-- and I'll go in alphabetical order-- Alexander Stern-- and you can-- yeah, there you go-- who leads Autodesk's manufacturing platform strategy, as part of which he helps define the go-to-market approach for our manufacturing industry cloud. Welcome, Alex.

Ben Conway, the co-founder and CEO of VNTANA, who has delivered the world's first mixed reality experiences for brands like Microsoft, Intel, Adidas, and Nike, and has been working in the mixed reality space for over nine years. Welcome, Ben.

Gabe Paez, founder of The Wild and head of product for XR at Autodesk, where he is leading the next generation of immersive visualization tools for the Autodesk ecosystem. Welcome, Gabe.

Jose Elizardo, territory solutions engineer for the Media and Entertainment division at Autodesk. Jose's a recognized visualization expert and industry thought leader, with over 20 years of product-related experience, helping our customers with digital transformation in the retail space. Welcome, Jose.

And finally, Michael Cody, who traded the Peloton for product design [INAUDIBLE] career pushing pedals as a professional road racer for one pushing pixels into products and is now Autodesk's technical solution executive, working with our manufacturing clients. Welcome, Michael.

All right, so I do have a few questions for our panelists today, but I'd also like to open the floor to you, our audience. So please, don't be shy and think of some questions you'd like to ask our panelists for the last 15 minutes of our discussion today.

OK, so let's kick things off. Many of you are coming from M&E, so you may have seen that Gartner has recently published their 2022 Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, which showcases 25 must-know innovations. Of course, metaverse was one of them. And the metaverse was listed as having another 10-plus years until it reaches the plateau of productivity or maturity.

And yet, we're already seeing forward fashion thinking brands, such as, for example, Balenciaga, that are reimagining the next generation of virtual catwalks by creating afterworlds, where players can take an interactive journey and explore the full collection that is modeled by volumetric characters.

And Balenciaga is not alone. We have Nike, for example, they've teamed up with Roblox to create the virtual world Nike World. And we also saw the first-ever Metaverse Fashion Week take place last year in Decentraland.

So my first question to the panelists today will be, how mature the eTail metaverse really is. To me, it seems like we're just in the beginning of our journey. But the retail space seems to be reaping some early rewards. Maybe as part of the answer, it will be helpful to define what exactly is the eTail metaverse? And we'll start with you, Alex, if that's OK.

ALEX STERN: Thank you. That's a very profound question, thank you. So you made a point that Diana mentioned that she considers there not to be just one metaverse, but actually several. And of course, this whole trend of metaverse hasn't exactly passed Autodesk by without us noticing. So we've been thinking about what the metaverse is and we've also come to the conclusion as a company that it's more than one metaverse.

So when it comes to the eTail metaverse, I think it depends on what you look at. We, at Autodesk, have defined the metaverse as a virtual immersive environment where innovators can collaborate. So it's about creating something. It's about creating. It's about assimilating and iterating on things.

So I think one part of the eTail metaverse is all about this creation and co-creation. And I think Nike came up-- there are some companies out there that think very much about how they can co-create things with customers, customize things. So this whole space for co-creation is one big part of the eTail metaverse, and that's very much at the beginning of the retail journey.

And then we have other metaverses. The company that named itself after metaverse, Meta, is focusing more on the social side of things. So I think that's the other big part of the eTail metaverse, that's more about go to market, about shopping, about showing things off.

So I think there are-- to me, there are these two parts of the eTail metaverse, the whole aspect of creation, and that's where I see Autodesk playing a big role, and then the customer facing go-to-market side of things.

PRESENTER 1: Great. And we'll come back to the creation aspect a bit later as well. Gabe, do you have any thoughts on this topic?

GABE PAEZ: Yeah, so I'd probably agree with that. I guess the other part of your question was around what stage we're at with this. And very much-- the company that I founded, The Wild, is in the space of enabling builders to come together, and evaluate, and review design, spatial design environments for the creation of buildings.

Now, those buildings are typically seen as physical buildings. You start with an idea and you move through a design ideation stage. Then you get to construction, then you get to the operations of a physical building. But I really see an opportunity much beyond that, an untapped opportunity in the creation of virtual real estate. And this is a big part of the metaverse.

And part of this is-- I see, essentially, the creation of new opportunities for architects and environmental designers, much in the same way that in the early 2000s we saw a real renaissance for graphic designers, with the advent of the internet and mobile devices. And all of a sudden, you have people who have spent their whole life studying layouts in print and their profession was revolutionized into new opportunities to create digital content and interactive content for the internet.

And thus, I see a very similar parallel happening here with architects and environmental designers. The ability, the skill to understand what a high-quality space-- number one, how to build it. But number two, what it's going to feel like to be inside of that space. How many people can comfortably be accommodated inside of this space. What the distance between our chairs should be. What this form factor of the elevation of the stage and so on.

These are concepts-- especially in retail, the psychology of spaces is a huge area that people build entire careers on. And now to have a whole new opportunity to create spaces, not to be built on the ground floor of a high rise in New York City, but to be built for the metaverse, is going to be game changing. And that's still just at the creation phase.

Then we're talking about how you actually deal with consumption and how we can create spaces that go beyond what is possible in a physical store, to be able to get at data and information. So that you can make an informed purchase decision, where you're confident about what you're seeing is exactly what you want.

And this is a little tangent, but one of the things that I'm really excited about, in terms of the potential for that consumption, is the ability to basically reduce the carbon footprint that right now we see in a traditional, like Amazon, or eTail type service, which is, when you don't have a high degree of confidence that you know what you're buying, a lot of returns and waste occurs.

Because like my mom once bought me a ping pong table years ago for my birthday. It turned out the ping pong table was like this big and she thought she was buying a full size one. These types of things happen all the time, whether you're buying shoes or a ping pong table. And to be able to move that forward in a meaningful way is going to be really game changing for online shopping.

PRESENTER 1: Great. Thank you so much. I'd like to dig a little bit deeper and maybe understand the nuances. So if a company establishes a website or a 3D ecommerce platform, is that the same thing as having an eTail metaverse presence or not? Michael, do you have any thoughts?

MICHAEL CODY: Yeah, so the idea of creating a shopping experience online where you would go to nike.com to buy some shoes is one aspect of how we used to think about shopping. The reality, though, now is that Nike is producing all of their spaces in 2D and 3D. And so now that they have an entire store layout, they've been designing their shoes digitally in Maya for 25 years.

So if you can think about the resources and ability for those creators to think digitally, it will change the way they think about what shopping means. And I think that's why they've taken the direction they have.

And then when you say, well, I want to shop now, well, how might I shop differently if my experience is now extended by this idea? Well, I'm comfortable with designing in 3D. I have 25 years of shoe designs in 3D. Now when someone says, design me a digital space. Someone's like, I've done everything over again, let's think about something differently. And now I have the resources, time, et cetera, to extend that.

Especially when I'm in my store design and I ask the new store designers, hey, send us the latest Manhattan store layouts. And then, the marketing team's like, well, I just need the latest shoe designs. And all of a sudden, they have an incredible amount of resources with materials, layouts, everything baked in to just-- you can push that into 3D and now you've got goggles on and you're shopping.

Or you're doing something wild. And when you go to the register, there's a portal that takes you to Michael Jordan's house. And he plays basketball with you or something. Like, there's this ability to think completely laterally in wild directions. And I think that's where we see a website becoming more than a website. It becomes a true individualized shopping experience or a video game.

PRESENTER 1: And no pun intended with The Wild, right?

MICHAEL CODY: Yeah, yeah.

PRESENTER 1: Jose, would you agree with that?

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah, I would agree with that. Just to maybe extent on that a little bit too. Like, what's really exciting is that, just from a backend workflow perspective and point of view, creating content and building content digitally to fulfill a website, whether it's digital representations through videos and images or models for our experiences on websites, all of that lends itself super well to extend into building content for a metaverse to sell-- to set up shop in a metaverse to sell digital representations.

Whereas, a website, when you go on your website and you go on nike.com, you're buying content-- you're looking at content that represents the products that you're physically buying. You're physically buying shoes. You're looking at a digital representation of it or an AR representation of it. You're buying the actual shoe to come home to your house and put it on your feet.

You extend all that into the metaverse. You're buying digital representations, skins, avatars, microtransactions, all that kind of stuff. What's really great is that this is all just extensions of the same pipeline, the same workflow. Once you get into this digital workflow, digitization of products, and catalogs, and whatnot, extending into a metaverse, extending into-- setting up shop and setting up a retail shop in a metaverse, in a given metaverse, is really just an extension of what you're already doing. So all this stuff is just a continuation.

PRESENTER 1: Great, thank you. Anybody have anything to add?

BEN CONWAY: I think that something that's super interesting is-- we're going to talk about some examples today, but pretty much everything that you're seeing metaverse wise is barely scratching the surface of what I think people's broader vision is, like people like Nvidia's broader vision is.

So you've got an immersive space with multiple layers and it's basically gamified in a different way. Like, let's be real, Fortnite is one of the primary places where they're really investing to try and make it a metaverse, but it was a game before meta became meta and everyone started talking about metaverse. So it's very much gamified.

I think that having a grounding in the physical world is super interesting because we're going to get to a place where when you're building a model in, let's say, 3DS Max or something like that, and you're using materials, those materials will have physical properties that exist in the real world. And the metaverse engines will have simulation capabilities where they can actually mimic how something would act in the real world.

And I think that's really where things are trying to go. So I think that's going to open up some new possibilities when we start-- when there's actually like a-- there's a lot of talk about, like, oh, you could do all these crazy, new, different experiences, but there's also this idea of, well, what if you could just be anywhere that actually exists in the world and replicate what that experience might look like? That opens some other interesting possibilities too.

PRESENTER 1: Yeah, thank you. And you touched upon my next question, actually, which is a bit more futuristic. If we are indeed 10-plus years from when the eTail metaverse will reach the plateau of productivity or maturity, what does that plateau of productivity look like? So what does the eTail metaverse look like 10-plus years from now? I don't know if you wanted to continue?

BEN CONWAY: Sure. I don't have an answer to that question, of what it actually looks like 10-plus years from now. I think that we're still working out what some of those killer applications will be. But I do think that there's going to definitely be some-- like the idea is-- we're talking about making a more informed purchase, but to make a more informed purchase of a physical good, not just the digital good. Because we're all still going to live in the actual world.

There's going to be some really cool stuff coming out with-- anyone who has put on a VR headset lately and has been transported to another world knows how kind of freaky it is. It's really pretty amazing. And that's only going to get better, and better, and better.

And now, if you start adding real-world physics, and you've got some haptics that are involved, with some of the things that you're wearing so you're getting sensory feedback, I think that that's going to be a different kind of category of shopping, along with what's happening with real-time game engines, like Unity and Unreal, and how realistic things are going to look. It's going to be pretty wild. But I don't know what the actual experiences themselves will look like.

PRESENTER 1: Thanks. Speaking of The Wild, I don't know if Gabe-- sorry, Alex, go ahead.

ALEX STERN: I was just going to say, I personally feel almost too old to be able to predict that future. And my children aren't old enough to tell me what the future of the metaverse is going to be. Because, as you said, I think we're just scratching the surface of all the possibilities.

My guiding star is-- and I have read the book, the story, Ready Player One. That is still a reference for me what the future of the metaverse will look like, where I think the oasis in the film or the book is a space where you have this wild mix of popular culture and trends. And all society is coming together and they form new trends. They form things that people want to consume, both in a digital as well as a physical way.

And then you're able to consume these things in a digital way. But you can also buy something, which is then shipped to your house, your actual physical house, so like he does with the haptic suit. I forget what it's called, sorry. So for me, it may actually be out a little bit further than 10 years. But sometimes, it's surprising how fast these things happen once you reach a certain tipping point.

I have thought about the future of VR a few years ago. And I went and bought the Sony VR, the whole shebang-- Playstation. And I started playing it and I was blown away. This was in 2017. And I hadn't played any games, because I'm just too busy, not because I don't like them, since the '90s, I think. So that was a giant leap.

And I thought, well, in 2030, it's going to be indistinguishable from reality, which I think that's kind of the ultimate goal of a lot of these virtual worlds. It will be a little bit further out, but in any case, I think the Ready Player One example is, for me, a good guiding star of where things could go and how we could prepare for that potential future.

GABE PAEZ: So I would just add on that. At the risk of really predicting it, I do think that there are a few specific tenets of the metaverse in 10 years that will manifest. And just to start with, I would say, number one is that it will be social. I think, first and foremost, the metaverse will be a place where people connect with each other. And so the idea of it being an isolated experience is not accurate. It will be a place where people come together and join together.

And the second one is that it will be connected. And this is something that we really don't have now, like doesn't really exist, but will exist when it becomes to that plateau. And connected, I mean similar to the internet is very connected. You have URLs that stitch you between websites and they connect points in the internet.

We need to be able to connect points, socialized, in the metaverse. So that we are on this panel and we can go into one space, or application, or metaverse, whatever you're going to call it, and we can go to another one. And maybe one of them is retail, and one is a game, and one is work, and so on and forth.

The third piece, which I think is key, is that it will be hybrid. So a lot of people look at the metaverse as being virtual reality and a virtual place that I go. What I mean by hybrid is really the vision of XR, or extended reality, that augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, these will be seamlessly one idea, which is a connection to your digital content that is immersive.

So if I want to be physically in this room and see the people that are here physically, I can go into a more of a mixed reality mode. If I want to be away and totally virtualized, I'm in virtual reality. But these aren't discrete technologies. These are-- it's a continuum. And it's up to you how virtualized you want to be. And so, I think that idea of hybrid is important.

And the last one I would say is that it will be seamless. And by seamless, I mean a seamless experience of reality that will feel as real as-- that's why I don't like this word, real world, or real, reality, like real reality, a lot of people call it. What is real? I don't know, it's very-- if somebody insults you via text message, they're still insulting you. That is a real insult that you just got, even if it's virtualized, right?

And it will be seamless in the sense that the reality you experience will be maybe virtual, maybe physical, but it's all very, very, very real. OK?

PRESENTER 1: Fair point.

ALEX STERN: You mean real in terms of the actual experience that you then--

MICHAEL CODY: Yeah, emotions.

GABE PAEZ: Yeah, it's a part of your human experience on this-- in your life.

ALEX STERN: Exactly, yeah.

GABE PAEZ: Yeah, and I think that's an important thing to settle in.

ALEX STERN: Ultimately, reality is what your brain puts together from all of these inputs, right? So, yeah.

JOSE ELIZARDO: I've never thought that way, but the emotional experience is just as real as any other emotional experience.

GABE PAEZ: Yeah, absolutely.

BEN CONWAY: And this is not to the question, but it's a point that I want to bring up because we're talking about 10 years in the future. And I think that when people think about what's going to prevent us from having these sorts of experiences 10 years in the future, they think technology barriers. And I don't think that's actually what the problem is going to be.

I think walled gardens are going to be a really big problem, like not having open standards. Like you're talking about seamless and being able to connect to different points, and it's going to take a lot of collaboration from a lot of players.

One thing we say all the time is our view of the world, even with some competitors, is a rising tide floats all boats right now. There's so much work to be done. There's so much that needs to happen. So I just think that that's an important concept for people to keep in mind, is the interoperability and the collaboration it's going to take for this actually to come together because it's so many moving parts.

PRESENTER 1: And I'm glad he mentioned that. One of the topics I wanted to discuss was open standards. I don't know if you guys know, but Autodesk is a proud member of the Metaverse Open Standards Forum, and a lot of our efforts at USD and open standards align with several creative companies and individuals. So I wanted to ask, and you started alluding to it, what will be the impact of open standards on the metaverse? You started alluding to it. I don't know if you have anything to add.

BEN CONWAY: It's just there was a really great panel on it yesterday, talking about it. But if we look at just USD, just we'll talk just 3D models, being able to pack all of the information in a way that is transportable across different DCCs-- the creation programs, basically-- is so impactful because different specialists can add value throughout the chain and have what they need to have, depending on what sort of experience they're looking to deliver.

So just getting that right is extremely important. As far as the Metaverse Standards Forum goes-- we're a part of it too and there's many people that have joined on. I think many people have joined on to market their services mostly, but I think we're going to get something more useful soon. I think that it's still being laid out about what are the big problems that we need to solve?

But a lot of people need to have a seat at the table. Because there's an inherent pull-- there's an inherent pull. If you've got an engineering team that's developed something like this and views the world in this way, you're probably going to promote that, even if it's not in the best interest of the progress of the metaverse.

MICHAEL CODY: I'd also maybe add too that the work that we're doing with Fusion form of flow, with the cloud information model, the idea is that we're taking this-- we're moving past the file type. And so while USD is an open standard in terms of file types, at some point we are connecting with hardware. And that will at some point need a file type.

As we move away from file types and just into data world, that idea of flow, extracting data from multiple sources, and connecting it into a layer that, let's for the sake of this conversation call it on the molecule level, rather than something is more tangible to us in a physical world. As we move into that environment, pulling data from multiple sources and funneling it into something like USD, I think the work we're doing there will actually contribute more to open standards.

Because it creates, from an engineering and hardware standpoint, a way for us to take three verticals of a software company, like Autodesk, and funnel it into USD, and say that no matter what you're creating, whether it's a shoe in Maya, a house in Revit, a fake Earth, and solar system, and universe in another tool, you'll be able to extract the properties, the data you need, whether it's colors, textures, et cetera, and move it that way.

And I think we'll see more people that are in this space creating ways to take the data, funnel it into a open standard. Because at some point, without a walled garden situation, or at least some standards on creating what are physics, what is reality in these places, no matter how I design my shoe or my house that I sell online, or I sell as my avatar, I have to have some level of commonality. Otherwise, the thing will just explode, fall apart.

PRESENTER 1: Yeah, I definitely agree.

GABE PAEZ: You get into an interesting part on it, even when you talk about items that can move between the places in the metaverse. And sometimes that is the avatar itself. And this is a very interesting space right now, that there's a lot of positioning on how you will be personified in the metaverse.

And then your clothing and all of these things, how we personify adorn ourselves in the physical world, understanding the open standards that are required to carry those between experiences and clouds, potentially, this is a big challenge that our whole industry has in front of it right now.

And I don't really have anything good-- or I don't have a good answer for it, other than to say this is a big challenge. And for us to really have the vision be fulfilled of truly an open metaverse, we're going to have to find a way to carry these goods and these personas through experiences.

PRESENTER 1: That's right. Anything to add?

MICHAEL CODY: Yeah it's going to be interesting. I don't know why, when you talked about this I was thinking about Raji's Rajiverse at OTC this year. And then I was thinking about Star Wars at the same time, where you're like the communication of holograms and how your represented in that form. And that creativity is monochromatic.

And then there's this idea of, well, what if Raji goes to a tech conference and she wants to wear what she wants to wear in her conference, but they say, well, you can't do that? And she has to go buy more digital clothes to look the way she needs to look?

And we need our perception to be part of our influence or our words fall short, right? If I was dressed in a suit made out of spaghetti or something, I don't think you guys would take me very seriously right now. But if I'm dressed in normal clothes, you know.

PRESENTER 1: The idea-- the idea with the open standard is to allow for that suit to be transferred between the various metaverses.

MICHAEL CODY: Absolutely, and that's that open standard model, I think, that we'll have to decide on somehow.

PRESENTER 1: I know, Alex, you are working on this a lot as well. I don't know if you have anything to add on this topic?

ALEX STERN: Well, yeah, I was just listening intently. Very good points were made. When I look at the metaverse, I think we're in a place that the internet was at some point in the early '90s. And, of course, the creation of standards and standard protocols enabled it to really take off.

And I think that what needs to happen is the metaverse needs to show what kind of value it brings, beyond socializing, perhaps. Because well that is important from a user pull point of view as well. But for industry, I think that there's a lot of value in the metaverse.

We talked a lot about sustainability, about general business outcomes that the metaverse can help with. And once companies realize that, I think there's going to be a stronger pull effect to speed up those standards. And I think the next thing that needs to happen in addition to standard is also some kind of regulation. But I think in reality, it's going to take off before we have any regulation, just like the internet. And that's going to follow a bit later on. But that's another story, maybe for another panel.

PRESENTER 1: Yeah, somebody else.

ALEX STERN: We could talk about this as well.

PRESENTER 1: Matthew Baldwin.

ALEX STERN: So, yeah, I'm excited to see what companies like Nvidia are doing, driving this. And they're very much appealing to businesses to say, look, there's a real case for the metaverse for your factory and you have some very concrete bottom line effects. And with that, they feed their PR machine and they create a strong pressure on this whole ecosystem that is emerging and to metaverse to get their act together. So yeah, I'm watching it unfold and quite excited.

PRESENTER 1: And I'm glad you brought in an example, because I'd like to get maybe a few case studies or use cases from the team here, as to how our customers are using the retail metaverse today. So are there customers that are already reaping some benefits? We talked about some brands in the beginning. Any other examples that you can offer from today, maybe Gabe, or Alex, and Ben?

BEN CONWAY: Sure. So I've got-- you mentioned Balenciaga. And I think that some of the stuff that's getting the most hype-- Nike is probably the exception-- maybe Nike and Adidas, because they actually are doing the hard work that needs to be done for them to scale up metaverse experiences.

PRESENTER 1: What kind of hard work?

BEN CONWAY: Well, they're digitizing everything. Like that is-- that's just basically what needs to happen. You need to have a digital version of every product that you're going to sell if that's what you're going to be doing. There could be-- they've obviously done a lot, with like the acquisition of Artifact. There's different versions of it. There's kind of cartoonized versions of some of their products. But there's also digital versions that are going directly into Roblox or going directly into Fortnite-- very different specifications, by the way.

But customers are-- there's not a lot that I think is actually happening, except for a few major players. VF Corp is one of our clients and they own North Face, Timberland, Dickies, Vans. They've been doing a ton, but they have a massive team that is building virtual versions of every product before it actually ever makes it into prototyping. And so they're able to take advantage of some of these opportunities as they come up. And they're riding the wave of it.

They've had enormous success with Vans in Roblox. They're making real money from it. And they're getting huge brand awareness with the next generation of consumers. So I think they've done a super good job. Timberland has done some stuff in Fortnite with Unreal Engine. And that's more-- it's more of a marketing play, honestly. They're not making-- it's not driving a lot of actual revenue, but they're just showing the creativity of the brand.

And I do think there is a bit of a land grab for this audience. I had a conversation earlier today and it was talking about-- I think I'm going to mess of the stat, but it was like Gen Z and Alpha-- is that the other one that we're looking at? I think, is the other generation. some may have four times the spending power of Millennials.

And I don't know where that came from, but he works at Amazon and so they've got some good insight into who's buying stuff, as the biggest retailer in the world. But you're getting those eyeballs today and showing that just because your dad wore Timberland's, Timberland's can still be cool, is, I think, a pretty interesting use case.

JOSE ELIZARDO: So even on-- the apparel space is booming for sure. And even in the furniture space, we have folks like IKEA, who have completely-- and less on the metaverse, but more on the digital retailing side of things, folks like IKEA have completely digitized their entire catalog. Everything you see on the website is all 3D. It's all made from 3D models, rendered.

And those models make their way into augmented reality experiences, which can eventually make their way into a metaverse. Target, Wayfair, these are all companies that are leveraging 3D content creation tools to create digital twins, basically, of their entire catalog, to then use for whatever purpose they want.

And that's the beauty about this whole thing, is you start from 3D and then from there you can expand into anything-- creating virtual photo shoots. You can expand into augmented reality experiences and even into the metaverse. So, yeah, the furniture space is really starting to take off too with regard to this stuff.

MICHAEL CODY: Yeah, and between VF Corp and IKEA, you can imagine the idea if I'm trying to engage with a market that doesn't engage with my products, like malls, or walking down store-- like, there's a Vans store that I went by earlier, and I was like, I love Vans, and Andrew is wearing Vans, and I think about Vans now. But my kid might not think about shoes like that. And it's probably because she gets second-hand shoes from our friends.

But if someone's going to go sell to her, they're going to be like, well, they don't come from a magic brown box once every two weeks from our friends, they come from somewhere else. So how does Vans engage with a kid, to say, hey, these are shoes, or this is cool, this is an experience?

And so the shoe-- the digital shoe design that they already are doing today to get an idea across, it exists. And they move it into website for marketing. And then they took that marketing and made it into cooler marketing. And then at some point, they're like, well, we have to put it somewhere, so why don't we put it in Fortnite? And now, that guy is going to wear the Vans shoes that I saw Andrew wearing. And now you're like, OK, now that placement, that creation of a digital asset is actually driving the consumerism and then also the capitalism.

You're not going to make a digital thing-- maybe you buy it digitally, but also, if someone still needs to make-- if we're still talking about physical things, and what eTail will be in the next-- our transition-- until we stop wearing shoes, or whatever we end up wearing in the future, there will be a transition of some type of hybrid environment that you kind of were indicating earlier. And we'll have to engage with that. And so as we see people building, and designing, and crafting these ideas, we're going to let people ask the question, how might we?

JOSE ELIZARDO: I really-- to the point you just made about how the metaverse and selling content on the metaverse, digital representations, it's really just to feed into actually selling and buying things in the physical world. It's just another promotion, another avenue of marketing.

MICHAEL CODY: Yeah, there's no mall that we hang out at anymore. Someone might hang out at a mall. I don't hang out at a mall.

JOSE ELIZARDO: It's fascinating.

PRESENTER 1: You can hang out in the virtual mall, right?

MICHAEL CODY: Does it still smell like Auntie Anne's, and popcorn, and Yankee Candle?

PRESENTER 1: Well, that's one of the shortcomings, right, of the metaverse today, there's no smell and no touch. Gabe, do you have any examples, maybe, from the engineering-architecture space?

GABE PAEZ: Yeah, so most of the today applications of the metaverse that I've seen through our lens, of creating tools for the building industry, is very much in the building of physical retail stores. And this is a process that is very inefficient in the traditional way of doing it, where these large retailers will prototype-- like they have physical warehouses where you build a store for shopping testing, and just for doing merchandising for shelves, and so forth, physically in a warehouse that will never see shoppers.

And this is very-- very normal, very typical. And then you iterate physically on the fixtures, and the layouts, and the signage. And so it's a place in a physical store where marketing and product, and even the architect can converge on a design.

So what we've seen with our product, The Wild-- and Adidas was our very first customer and this is where I saw this play out. And this was years ago, also. This is like not a new thing that we're just seeing this happening in the last year.

No, this has been happening over the past five to eight years, of really seeing this start in pilots, like, let's try to do this virtually, going to, wow, this actually works better than how we do it today, to actually adoption, and seeing that adoption uptick. To where, I would say, this is actually a mature way of working at this point. It's not some future, 10 years from now, we will be validating retail designs in virtual reality, quite specifically.

So that's super exciting, that a lot of this stuff we're talking about, this isn't like 2050 stuff. This is happening today, in 2022.

JOSE ELIZARDO: And the same can be said exactly for products. Exactly what you're describing is exactly the reason why creating digital representations of products is so much more cost effective. Creating a photo shoot to photograph all these products that these companies sell is super-- not cost effective. It costs a ton. It's not good for the environment.

You replace all that with digital workflows, it costs a fraction of the price. It scales super well. It doesn't get stale. Next year, you have a new color wave-- color wave for your product line. You just replace that all in 3D. Imagine doing all that with a real photo shoot. And this is not-- like you're saying, it's not-- this isn't not today, this has been done for years already. So it's not-- it's not new tech.

PRESENTER 1: I want to go back to the comment you made about hard work, because companies have to do the hard work to create all these digital images. Do you feel that the creator economy is going to help companies in their journey to the retail metaverse?

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah, I have some thoughts on that. So I think-- actually, I want to flip that question more on itself a little bit. So retailers today have-- are challenged. They need to create content to sell their products. You to take it back to the beginning.

I'm a retailer. I'm a product manufacturer. I'm a marketplace owner. I sell goods. I sell products. I sell them in a store. People walk in. They touch them. They look at them. They buy them. They go home with them. You put that online, or in a metaverse, or whatever other context, it's a complete different paradigm. How do you convince someone to buy something without seeing it, touching it, feeling it, smelling it? That poses a completely new challenge to everyone who's trying to sell something, right?

And so this need to create innovative, more immersive ways of experiencing products through augmented reality, through interactive configurators, through virtual reality, even on the metaverse, it's an arms race right now. Every retailer is out there trying to figure out how to do this, and how to get their products, how to increase buying decisions, how to make it easier to make a buying decision understand this product.

And so we're in this-- I call it the content boom, the digital revolution, whatever it is. You need to create these representations, these digital twins, as Ben was saying earlier, of your products. And so, yes, tapping into the maker community is-- today, we talk about bursting to the cloud-- for those of you who know rendering, we burst to the cloud to get cloud compute capabilities. When you have a big shot to deliver or whatever it is, you leverage cloud compute to burst-- I see a future where we're bursting to humans. We're allowed to get a whole bunch of people to come in and help with this new catalog we have to-- we have to digitize.

But it's not just the maker community. I think to solve this problem, this content problem-- that's only going up, it's not going down. This burden of creating content to sell your products is not going down. I think it's really three things that are going to solve that. Tapping into to more artists, hobbyists, contract workers, which we already see that. Folks like Wayfair, Target, IKEA, they can burst up to 1,000 people capacity at any given time.

But it's really other technologies, like automation. What VNTANA is doing right now, with automating the process of creating these lightweight models that are web ready, there's a lot of manual work that goes into that. When you have tools like VNTANA, and other tools that are merging to facilitate that process, and streamline that process, I see a lot more of this technology emerging.

And the third is AI, of course. We see AI as-- you can already basically create your own story with your own person, dressed as any different number of ways, through AI, which we just saw last week emerge. What's stopping that from being used in product to create variations and color waves of products? Here's my phone, put it into the system, and create me 10 color waves of this phone without me having to do anything. So AI, automation, and bursting to humans I think is what's going to help retailers get past this.