Virtual stores, showrooms and meeting rooms in XR with Hevolus
H-Store from Hevolus is for creating “phygital” (physical-digital) experiences based on generative AI and extended reality. With H-Store, any company can create their own metaverse spaces and design immersive, interactive, inclusive shopping experiences that are accessible through the web with any type of device.
(c) Hevolus
The goal of Hevolus’s H-Store – and the H-verse suite on which it is built – is to reduce the physical distance between client and consultant. In the Hevolus metaverse, clients can design and plan single buildings or entire cities with their architects or with Hevolus’s professional team. The result is a virtual space where users can walk as avatars, meet consultants without leaving home and view entire product collections in all their functional and aesthetic variants.
Overcoming high costs and space constraints
Every business that sells products faces the business reality of physical space constraints and the high costs of holding and showing inventory. Hevolus, based in Italy, set out to change that reality. H-Store is its approach to creating a mixed-reality store or showroom in which companies can showcase their products – with variants in color, texture and size – without space constraints.
H-Store is designed for building detailed exhibition and production layouts with established design flows. Architects, designers and planners can then visualize those layouts as if they were real and life-sized in the actual environment where they will be installed. With twenty years of experience, Hevolus has learned how to build high-resolution, highly detailed company layouts in a range of shapes, color and material. Customer benefits include lower environmental impact, the opportunity for virtual walkthroughs and cost savings in design and testing phases.
H-Store is one of the products in the H-Verse suite, along with H-Share (Content Management System), H-Prototype (production), H-Onboarding (human resources), H-Collaboration (human resources), H-Fair (sales) and H-Maintenance (after-sale). H-Store consistently impresses its customers with its contribution to business processes and its successful application in sectors as diverse as fashion, retail, manufacturing and automotive.
Making an impact with mixed reality
“The power of mixed reality lies in how quickly we can enable our customers to see a store they have only imagined until now,” says Alice Locatelli, digital marketing specialist at Hevolus. “They see it with their own eyes in a familiar environment. For example, we developed a project for one of the best-known manufacturing companies in the world. With H-Store they could clearly visualize product layout, shelf arrangement and vending machine placement before they started construction.”
In the H-Verse, store assistants can add products to the virtual space using drag-and-drop and editing tools. They can add as much content as they want, including 3D models (in any format – the suite converts 3D files), images and videos.
Customers cite benefits including lower inventory costs, more exhibition space, a never-closed showroom and private spaces where the shopping experience is shared among customer, sales assistant and friends and relatives.
Using Snapdragon Spaces Technology for image tracking
Hevolus chose to add Snapdragon Spaces to its Unity-based development stack to achieve a couple of important goals. First, they wanted to use pass-through cameras to enable XR scenarios, like anchoring holograms to real environments. Second, the hardware they envisioned for those scenarios included the Lenovo ThinkReality models VRX and A3 , devices supported by the Snapdragon Spaces Extended Reality SDK.
To integrate Snapdragon Spaces into their development stack, the engineers downloaded and installed the SDK, then loaded the package into the project as local files. Where necessary, they switched the platform to Android. Finally, they configured their development projects for OpenXR, with XR features enabled.
That allowed them to take advantage of the specific Spaces features, including the Image Tracking they needed for anchoring holograms to the real world.
MR experience highlights:
- Customer benefits. Users report that mixed reality helps boost customer acquisition by 50 percent, e-business revenues by 60 percent and e-commerce visits by 20 percent.
- Upending traditional constraints. Users can create and share custom spaces, populating them with 3D models to explore, interact with and experience together in real time.
- Shrinking the distance between buyer and seller. H-Store enables presentation of products in all sizes and materials, in an engaging, phygital customer experience.
“Snapdragon Spaces has been the cornerstone of innovation for our H-Store platform, providing the technological bedrock that allows us to bridge the realms of virtual and augmented realitis seamlessly. The ability to toggle from virtual reality to augmented overlay of digital elements onto the physical world has enhanced the H-Store experience. Snapdragon Spaces has been instrumental in enabling us to turn abstract concepts into tangible experiences, making the boundless potential of XR accessible to everyone.”
– Fabio Santini, CEO, Hevolus
Snapdragon Spaces is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.