The Digital Roadmap To Immersive Luxury Experiences

[Featured image: The New Face]

This article was originally published in The Interline’s DPC Report 2024. To read other opinion pieces, exclusive editorials, and detailed profiles and interviews with key vendors, download the full DPC Report 2024 completely free of charge and ungated.

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For nearly a decade, brands and startups have collectively poured billions of dollars into crafting immersive experiences, only to yield – I would argue – less than stellar results . From branded websites to metaverse platforms, the dream was clear enough: a future where consumers would shop for real-world products in captivating virtual environments. Yet, here we are. While the video game industry soars towards $350 billion, and in-game purchases (many, or even most, of which are cosmetic in nature) surpass €50 billion, all using the same paradigm of real-time interaction and immersion, no one seems to have cracked the code for building immersive e-commerce experiences for real products.

Which begs the question: does fashion actually know what it wants to accomplish with these kinds of experiences in the first place?

The Broken Promise of Immersive Commerce

In 2021, McKinsey and other consultancy giants championed a bold thesis at the height of the metaverse frenzy: The internet is transactional; immersive experiences will make it relational. The idea was simple: by mimicking in-store experiences using real-time 3D environments, populated with digital representations of their products, brands could build deeper connections, enhance desirability at both the product and company level, stand out from a bloated marketing crowd, and boost conversions and sales.

In theory, this made sense. Data shows that better customer experiences lead to higher revenue and loyalty. It stood to reason that replicating the same strategies that worked in physical stores to grow that loyalty could also work in virtual ones.

But while they might serve as good marketing exercises, why does it seem as though real-time, immersive environments haven’t actually driven much traffic, let alone sales?

The answer is as straightforward as it is brutal: the experience, in most cases, just wasn’t good enough. WebGL—the once-heralded tech stack behind the majority of web-based real-time rendering —was, in my mind, simply not fit for purpose. Its graphics quality, lagging a decade behind consoles like PS5 and Xbox, left consumers underwhelmed, and a lot of the experiences built on top of it also fell short of expectations in usability. Consider this: 60% of gamers consume luxury products. This is a relatively captive market. But why would these savvy, visually spoiled customers, who have extremely well-codified expectations for interactivity, engage with a branded experience that felt archaic compared to what they enjoy daily on consoles and PCs? Is that the level that luxury expectations should be set at?

And even for consumers who didn’t already live at the high watermark for real-time graphics and controls, the same nagging questions dogged many virtual stores. “Why doesn’t this look more realistic? And why is it so hard to navigate?!”

Behind the scenes, brands and agencies have been grappling with frustration at the platform and raw technical level, interrogating both perspectives to determine why those questions have proven so hard to answer. 

From their perspective, countless hours and resources have gone into projects that failed to deliver sufficiently on their primary ROI As someone who’s spent a lot of time decoding and working to answer the same queries, I can take a stab at breaking down why these efforts fell flat, which is a critical step prior to figuring out what should happen next to put real-time 3D endpoints, environments, and experiences at their rightful place in the digital product creation ecosystem:

1. Aesthetic and interactivity benchmarks missed

The subpar quality of WebGL-driven environments couldn’t capture or hold consumers’ attention. Navigating these clunky experiences felt more like using Google Maps’ street view than exploring a PS5 game.

2. Misguided platform strategies

Many brands trusted third-party platforms to deliver traffic that then didn’t materialise at the scale they expected, or that offered little direct control over the experience itself, or over where the transactional side of things actually took place. 

3. Mismatch of Audience and Platform

Platforms like Roblox – fashion’s favourite media crossover success story – have found success by hosting branded experiences, but their primary audience—58% under age 16 (as of December 2023)—doesn’t align with luxury brands’ target markets. While collaborations like Shopify x Roblox hint at potential, the long-term value remains unproven. Similarly, Fortnite integrations are successful when the brand’s audience overlaps with the game’s demographic and fits with its approach to storytelling. This kind of calibration is essential – and it places some limits on brand freedom.

With a different hat on, I would argue that  startups in this space raised too much money, too soon, for a technology that simply wasn’t ready and without always having the right market fit and positioning. Fashion, in general,  was right about the opportunity—but timing is everything, and what we’ve seen from immersive 3D experiences to date has, in my opinion, been too early.

So, what now? 

Allow me to make a prediction. In ten years, e-commerce will split into two paths: Convenience and Discovery. 

The Convenience path will cater to informed shoppers who know what they want, using voice assistants like Siri or ChatGPT to streamline purchases with zero clicks. When people talk about the frictionless, “endless aisle” appeal of online shopping, where anything you want is a tap away, this is the logical destination.

The Discovery path, on the other hand, will mimic the joy of in-person shopping, where customers explore immersive, engaging experiences online, seeking inspiration and unexpected finds.

In my experience working at The New Face, we believe the right approach to reframing and updating the concept of immersive experiences is to start from the assumption that every brand is a storyteller waiting for the right canvas. Whether they’re showcasing a unique lifestyle or promoting exceptional savoir-faire, brands need more than pictures and text to captivate audiences. It’s time to meet consumer expectations with AAA graphics that rival what gamers experience on consoles—because the market expects it, but also because it’s technically achievable to a standard it hasn’t been before.

Thanks to pixel streaming, this is no longer a dream. This technology enables brands to deliver state-of-the-art visuals to any device, bridging the gap between brand storytelling and the gaming world. The real-time rendering is done on the cloud, and an extremely low-latency video feed is streamed to the user’s device, with their control inputs being pushed back up to the cloud with similarly super-low input lag.

This is the foundation of what we’ve set out to build – giving brands a viable way to balance heritage and brand value with a straightforward web plugin that brings immersive, PS5-quality visuals and experiences directly into websites and apps.

Once dismissed as costly, pixel streaming is now economically viable, supporting thousands of concurrent users while delivering ROI-positive e-commerce results. And we’re not stopping there. Our goal is to extend beyond the web to gaming platforms like GeForce Now—where Harper Collective, our first project, will soon be live, tapping into a 25-million-strong monthly audience of gamers who are primed for immersive experiences and have hours to engage.

As well as testing and validating the limits of the technology, we have also monitored and researched the results. We can see first-hand how these new, real-time immersive experiences drive organic traffic to brand websites, addressing a major challenge: online differentiation. 

In real life, if you’re interested in experiencing a Prada bag, you’d visit a Prada boutique—not a department store like Printemps. Yet online, customers flock to platforms like Farfetch because brand websites often offer an undifferentiated experience, making the frictionless transactional route the preferable one. By creating unique, immersive experiences, brands can stand out, enhance customer engagement, and generate compelling social media content that drives organic traffic—ultimately reducing reliance on costly paid ads and lowering cost-per-click spending.

This isn’t just a step forward; it’s a game-changer—for brands, web navigation, for the long-term value of digital product creation and 3D assets, and for e-commerce as a whole.