Amid the NFT (non-fungible token) frenzy, you might hear people talk about a digital artwork worth millions of dollars, a virtual piece of land being sold at a record price, and brands building their own retail stores on those online properties — things that haven’t physically existed.
“It is still early days for the metaverse,” Janine Yorio, Managing Director at Republic Realm, told e27. “However, we believe a convergence of fundamental shifts in technology, society, socialisation, gaming, and retail will provide significant tailwinds for mass metaverse adoption and development”.
The retail industry, in particular, is quickly catching on in a “retail metaverse”, blurring the boundary between our physical world and the future virtual society.
Disrupting retail metaverse with hyperlocal mapping solutions
Brands are expanding from their physical stores into the metaverse that allows customers to experience physical goods in the virtual world. Gucci, Vans, Adidas, and L’Oreal are all taking their baby steps into this space and creating brand awareness among younger users.
“This generation grows up doing things just like we interact on Zoom. They’re more accustomed to immersive experiences when they use the Internet,” said Yorio. “The companies that fail to adapt will be left behind because the next generation of consumers is going to expect to find new products and their favourite old products in these immersive environments.”
Imagine purchasing a couch in your metaverse store, and it is linked with a physical warehouse and a carrier that will deliver the product to your doorstep within hours. This sounds like a shopping experience in e-commerce.
But with the retail metaverse, instead of watching things through a screen and being frustrated with the real product’s quality that doesn’t match with how it is described on the e-commerce platform, you can step into the immersive 3D store and try things out without actually moving from your house.
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Case in point, the app that helps you plan a room layout and design with the exact size and feel of furniture via the support of AR/VR can be considered the initial version of this retail metaverse. What you are looking at on the app is just a few steps away from experience in the virtual twin of our actual world.
This no-boundary future will be made available with tons of complex technologies moving forward. Hyperlocal mapping solutions, with their ability to uniquely map out and address spaces with precision, hold the potential to enable direct interaction with physical places.
“You need to have a real-world metaverse, a replica of the planet because products and people still need to move from A to B,” said Xander van der Heijden, Co-Founder and CEO of UNL, a Singaporean startup providing micro-location and mapping technology. “Digitising locations, creating an infrastructure to interact with these places — what we’re creating is the real-world metaverse through the Internet of Places.”
Founded in 2018, UNL offers a library of plug-and-play geospatial solutions to help businesses build scalable, hyper-local services and applications. UNL enables direct interaction with physical locations by giving unique digital addresses to every geolocation and accurately linking data to locations to contextually represent real-world situations and events.
In simple words, its technology pixelises the physical world into a multi-resolution smart grid to give any location a digital and verifiable address — UNL geoID — similar to an IP address. UNL geoIDs uniquely map out and address spaces with up to 1×1 cm2 precision, covering outdoor, indoor and elevation.
On top of that, UNL goes beyond street names and postal codes to what it calls the “Internet of Places”. They are developing location domain name services to interface with these locations without using the initial numeric geoIDs.
For example, Starbucks at Orchard will still be named Starbucks in the digital world, corresponding with its location in the real world.
It, therefore, helps mobility companies engage with their workforce, vehicles, customers and products by validating precise addresses and locations where they need to pick up people or drop packages. The solution can also be plugged into any step of the retail industry’s supply chain, supporting the greater movement of goods from supplier to vendor to end-user, providing clients with delivery and navigation even within large buildings.
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Besides, its maps possess self-healing features that automatically collect data from different data sources (IoT, satellite, cars, smartphones, or end-user contributions), compare these data, choose the highest quality of data, and publish that.
Mounting demand in Southeast Asia
UNL is one of the first successful ventures from the Netherlands-based venturerock studio, a venture builder where Heijden also serves as a General Partner. However, the team decided to emphasise the Southeast Asia market as it recognised the biggest problems in the region are addressing and digital infrastructure.
“You’re talking about billions and billions in loss because of inaccurate addresses that result from the lack of last-mile information and data,” said Heijden. “We saw a huge potential in Southeast Asia, especially during the pandemic when companies can leapfrog existing stack and old legacy systems by adopting new innovative digital platforms, hence, move faster forward into the future of logistics.”
When the address is not accurate, the deliveryman starts calling the person to deliver the package. This costs them a lot of time and efficiency, which translates into a huge loss in revenue and profits.
These issues in the delivery space have already sparked demand from regional giants such as Grab or Gojek. These companies need to work with multiple third-party mapping providers as one often doesn’t provide 100 per cent accuracy. They then build their own internal mapping teams to combine these data and create their own data sets.
In addition, this kind of hyperlocal tech infrastructure can go beyond retail to support interactions in the whole economy covering various industries from entertainment to F&B and manufacturing.
The gaming sector, for instance, can utilise this immersive hyperlocal mapping to improve the player experience, a next level from what we did with Pokémon Go in 2016. For advertising and F&B, by creating an augmented reality, they can navigate people to collect tokens on locations, create 3D text sprinting around them, and then navigate them through to a restaurant to spend these tokens in exchange for coffee.
And suppose you still remember the “omniverse” that manufacturing giants BMW Group and NVIDIA are creating with its virtual factory planning. In that case, this technology will help engineers from all aspects of factory design collaborate in a shared virtual space. The entire factory can be simulated with hyperlocal details.
It’s not competition, it’s decentralisation
Now that the technology is said to accurately link data to locations to represent real-world situations and events contextually, how is this different from and better than an upgrade version of Google or Apple’s Maps?
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“When you generate data on top of the Google infrastructure, they own your data,” stressed Heijden. “If you contribute data to our infrastructure, you keep ownership of that data, and we enable stakeholders to monetise on those data.”
With this business model, UNL can create an underlining infrastructure for companies, consumers, and governments to create virtual private maps and public maps, contribute data, and then be rewarded for that.
“We don’t see Google as a competitor. We are just focusing on a different market,” he added.
This virtual private mapping architecture of UNL is also associated with the whole story of decentralisation, which will serve as a huge pushback against big players getting involved in the space.
Remember Republic Realm announced the launch of its shopping mall Metajuku on the Decentraland metaverse? Yorio said these elaborate virtual malls are being built in the metaverse and opening a window to a nascent industry called ‘de-commerce’ (decentralised e-commerce).
Kevin Indig, Director of the e-commerce giant Shopify, echoed this viewpoint. He believes that the metaverse will most likely encourage the decentralisation of e-commerce, which gives brands the ability to escape from uniform marketplace formats to virtualise their customers’ shopping experience.
Hence, the development of this industry hinges on every agent’s participation and engagement in the retail metaverse, not in the hand of any big-pocket players.
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