In case you missed it, our Founder and CEO, Neha Singh, sat down with James Kotecki in the C Space Studio at CES 2024 to discuss how brands are utilizing Obsess’ technology, the current landscape of immersive experiences and what brands/retailers can look forward to with Obsess.
How Obsess is Bringing Gamification into Shopping
Obsess is creating immersive shopping experiences that put the consumer in the experience of the brand, in a whole 3D branded environment that brings gaming into shopping. Similar to online gaming, consumers can browse through the environment and navigate through them.
Q: A traditional flat screen, in VR/AR, or all of the above?
The majority of our users are on their mobile devices so that’s where we are mobile-first, mobile-optimized, and it’s all accessible through the web. It’s super easy to access, making VRvery accessible to users and to brands. Also, we launched on the Oculus Meta Quest and we are launching with the Apple Vision Pro.
Q: Walk me through what this experience would look like. If you are able to share a specific example or name—What am I actually experiencing?
We work with brands from a variety of verticals. We work with fashion brands like Dior, J.Crew, Ralph Lauren, Crocs. Beauty brands like K18, L’Oreal, Charlotte Tilbury. We work with CPG brands, we work with Disney.
To give you one specific example, we launched with Crate & Barrel recently. They created a virtual store that was based on their new flagship store that they opened in NYC in Flatiron. Essentially this is a fantastical version of that store, so you start with a bird’s eye view over Manhattan in the fall, go in and you have this photorealistic environment in 3D. You’re transported into a version of that store instead of seeing a grid of thumbnails of products.
You can actually go into the living room and you see couches, you can press a button to change the entire color scheme, and can change to see different products. Then you go into the dining room and there’s all the plates kind of flying off the shelves and creating this beautiful tablescape. You can click on any product and see all the details and add it to your cart right there. So it’s a very interactive experience. A lot of the experiences also have games, where you’re learning about the brand or products at every step as you experience the store and that engages customers even further.
Q: Are you the team actually digitally creating the look? That’s what Obsess is bringing to the table?
We provide the software platform this 3D rich technology runs on, on a web browser. We often also provide the services to actually create the environment. In some cases our brands might have their agencies do it or they might have their interior retail designers do it—otherwise we can. Typically we get creative direction from the brand though.
The Novelty and Utility of Immersive E-Commerce
The contextual piece virtual stores offer is hugely important; in traditional e-commerce consumers are devoid of context. Contextualizing e-commerce makes shoppers see things they weren’t looking for. We often see that our average order value from our virtual stores is higher than typical e-commerce because people might notice something that they weren’t necessarily looking for and then they purchase it.
The discovery-driven phenomenon was previously only in stores. In traditional e-commerce that doesn’t happen because it’s directed at the consumer.
Q: It’s interesting to think about because some people might think about VR as a space to get lost. It sounds like what you’re describing is a bit more nuanced and balanced, which is using those environments as a way to bring back to the real world, and how to create the real life reality of what you actually might want.
At the moment all the products in our experiences are all physical products, so what you buy is something real that you’re getting in hand.
Q: It may be brand dependent—creating something that seems like a store because you could theoretically create any kind of environment. Not every brand might necessarily need it to be a store, so how do you think about that psychologically and what are you aiming for there?
We want to enable brands to express their creativity in whatever way makes sense for the particular collection, for the particular season or brand. A lot of customers create completely fantastical environments that don’t look anything like their retail stores. We actually launched a virtual store for Taylor Swift that is a Christmas tree farm which is where she grew up and the products, you basically shop them off of it. We have customers who have created underwater experiences, you can create a planet if you want. Many of our customers in beauty want to talk about the science behind their products so you’re in a lab. It’s totally dependent on what makes sense and we can also test that with the data that we have—what works and what doesn’t.
What to Look Forward to with Obsess
We firmly believe the future of the internet is 3D because our real world is 3D. The reason we’re used to these flat screens is just because of limitations of technology.
But as chips are getting more powerful, PSUs process faster, our digital interface becomes closer and closer to the real world. All around us, it’s 3D and ultimately our digital interface will become very much like that. These are the starting points to that ultimate future
Q: What are you most excited about for what’s next? Obviously Apple’s technology is potentially the big one for the year, but is there a piece of technology or a thing that you are waiting to click into place to take you to the next level?
For us, the biggest sort of next big shift in this on the horizon is personalization. What it means in a 3D space, is that you can walk into a virtual store and it will greet you, you would have products based on your purchasing history, your interests have been by browsing other places. The complexity there is rendering this dynamically in 3D for every person. That’s the technology we are building now and that’s really ultimately our vision and whatever device you experience that on, we want the experience to be personalized to you. Today the experience that you get is the same as what everyone else is getting and that’s going to change.
Q: Another buzzword is AI here at CES 2024; how are you thinking about using AI in any interesting or novel ways that you want to highlight?
We have actually incorporated Gen AI in our production process of these experiences. In the cases where we are designing the experiences for brands, what Gen AI has helped us do is create options very quickly for brands. Doing all of that in 3D takes much longer. So now we can actually get that whole process down with the help of AI and finalize what the brand wants. That has actually cut down our production time and our go to market time for virtual stores.
The other thing that we are using it for is to create more content in the stores. We see from our data that the more content we can add to the experiences, the higher the purchase conversion rate is. One of our stores is a baby registry, there you can plug your due date and it’ll use Gen AI to find all the names that are most common for that date and things like that. So you can imagine the possibilities of what someone would have had to do manually on the brand side to produce that content, now it’s all automated and we can make the experience more interesting.
Q: Do you have other human characters like an AI shopkeeper that’s going to interact with me? Or is there a philosophy around that? Is that also brand dependent?
One of the ways that’s super successful and people really engage with, is having real people there as avatars who are shot on a green screen background. We often have influences or the brand designer in, introducing you and welcoming you into the experience and that gets super high engagement. Now what we are doing is creating more 3D avatars of influencers who can be in the space, AI sales associates who can help you answer your questions.
Click here to watch the full interview: Obsess’ CEO, Neha Singh, In The C Space Studio – CES 2024
Email us at contact@obsessvr.com or book a demo to see what Obsess can do for your brand.
