The Digital Thread: Connecting Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and 3D

Digital Product Creation (DPC) in fashion and retail has come a long way, transforming the way we think about design, product development, manufacturing, and forging new links between them all. But as the industry has focused on using 3D and DPC tools to align different departments, another digital thread has also been coming together – connecting 3D to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

That’s a thread I’ve seen develop first-hand. So let me tell you how I became part of the DPC community in a different way to most designers and developers, and why my work experience – which included managing the DPC strategy roadmap and developing the 3D pipeline for a large mass manufacturer – has led me to the conclusion that the power of 3D assets lies as much in bridging different experiences and mediums as it does in helping different teams work better together.

Five summers ago, I started a dream internship for a Fortune 500 company as a Global Learning and Development Intern in HR. Not exactly the typical place that brands find their intake of 3D and DPC professionals!

At the end of my 3-month internship, I was tasked with presenting an internship project to my department. The only direction I was given was to create a unique project to train employees in a different way. I brainstormed and hit on the idea  of both streamlining and transforming the way the company trained its high-turnover individuals:seasonal store employees. The plan was to do this in a way that retained the corporate store learnings from season to season (typically they’d get reset during the annual churn) and to allow new associates to be upskilled as quickly as possible, because they worked during the company’s most profitable times of the year, and downtime spent training would directly translate into time lost on the retail floor.

I spoke to long-tenured store employees and asked them what skills were in the shortest supply and were the most critical to success during the holidays. The answer was merchandising and in-store consumer engagement. At the time, these skills were being taught afresh every season, in an ad-hoc way – without any real visual, structured learning, and without a real yardstick to measure skill mastery against.

This was the key: I realised that the issue was not just the method, but the medium. So I hit on the idea of challenging both, and I decided to try using 3D assets and environments to create both augmented and virtual reality experiences to train employees in the most immersive way I thought possible.

“How hard could this be?” I thought. “Surely there are off-the-shelf tools that will make it straightforward to build immersive experiences, so I’ll self-teach these technologies and build out an immersive training experience!”

In practice, it wasn’t quite that easy. But over time I built a prototype to gamify VR as a tool for  teaching in-store merchandising training more effectively, which led to a 60% increase in retained information over traditional methods. After that, I was asked to stay on longer as an HR intern to expand on this concept , which led to us later developing a VR tour around HQ to attract new talent.

Again: not exactly the typical route to digital product creation, but hopefully you can see where this is all leading!

Eventually, I got the opportunity to present both the training project and the headquarters tour to the company CEO. In a short presentation, I needed to quickly cover how these digital, immersive experiences could be more cost effective, more scalable, easier to remotely deploy, more customisable, and quite a lot more.

Back then, I believed this was the right direction for the talent-facing work the company needed to do, but I fully expected the CEO to tell me “we’re not a software business” – which is something I know a lot of people in fashion have heard before when they’ve had the opportunity to pitch new tech-enabled and tech-adjacent ideas.

After the presentation ended, though, he offered me a job which I grew into a career – and that wound up being the seed that turned into a full DPC strategy at the company.

Creating Digital Product Creation In Reverse 

Unlike a lot of organisations, where DPC initiatives begin (and sometimes end) in design and development, we had the challenge and the opportunity of working backwards. We’d already tested and proven the idea of putting people into immersive, real-time experiences where 3D assets stood in for real products, so now we needed to figure out how to scale the creation of those digital products in away that served all the brand’s audiences: product creators, suppliers, and the store planners, associates, and even consumers all the way downstream.

Digital product creation is a huge undertaking for any organisation. And we quickly realised that the only way for a large company with multiple brands and different product categories to succeed was to lay a scalable foundation.

By moving from HR and into design and development, the fledgling DPC team  also found ourselves in the middle of a digital transformation and change management journey, since we were suddenly not just training people, but  changing everyone’s way of working.

That realisation was also an important unlock in the way we thought about both designing and prototyping digital products, and the technology ecosystem we wanted to build. We wanted to be agile and future-proof, so that meant building a scalable, interchangeable pipeline that wasn’t contingent on specific file types or tied to individual vendors.

We also thought deeply about what happens to digital products once they’re created, and this was where we took the learnings from the immersive experiences we’d created for in-store teams and new hires, and thought about how those different mediums could change the way other people in the value chain worked.

Virtual reality, it emerged, provided a platform for immersive, lifelike experiences that could add an extra layer to the design and prototyping phases: if you’re working with 3D garments or accessories, why not view them in the most hands-on way you can get without making a physical prototype? 3D itself, of course, was the engine that drove the creation of those digital products, but we set out to really push the envelope on realism and customisation – not just so our in-house teams could see new styles, but so our customers could bring them to life in shopper-facing AR experiences at home and in-store.

In my experience, brands and retailers tend to think about these different mediums as separate projects – possibilities that get opened up by 3D assets, but that aren’t treated as part of DPC. Instead, I think it’s going to be important for fashion to take advantage of all three together seamlessly to create a stable pipeline for your entire value chain.

Taking DPC Upstream 

Let’s consider the supply chain perspective. When used all together, these technologies have the potential to streamline production processes, reduce lead times, and minimise the risk of costly errors. They also can empower your vendor factories to experiment with prototypes and concepts more freely, without the need for physical prototypes. And while everyone talks about collaborating with their partners on another continent through solutions like PLM, there’s no substitute for doing it in a real-time, immersive way.

This isn’t just theory: in the use cases I helped develop, we used 3D to create digital twins of physical products in partnership with our  manufacturers – which translated into higher efficiency and lower production costs. Then we used the product measurements to build an AR app to scan bodies and create 3D avatars of the individual, and suggest sizing.

We also used 3D prototypes created by our manufacturers for sales meetings when the physical prototypes were not available in time. We actually used VR to educate leadership and to demonstrate first-hand  how we could run sales meetings through these immersive experiences, without needing to bring real prototypes and real people into the same space. And in turn, that secured more executive sponsorship that  gave us the funding to continue developing our DPC strategy, and to extend the use of VR into sharing new SMU lines with smaller retail customers.

Unlike a lot of fashion brands, we also had the added benefit of being largely vertically integrated – where a majority of steps in the global supply chain were wholly owned. This translated into a significant edge during COVID, since it allowed the organisation to switch out parts and build elasticity into its production capacity – to keep costs down and to stay agile.

But the first-party supply chain was also  where we saw one of our biggest opportunities for greenfield processes – challenging the foundations of the way we worked, and re-evaluating best practices. If we allowed these processes to be replaced with 3D, VR, and AR, we could enable even greater vertical integration, allowing us as a retailer to be successful by owning design, product development, and manufacturing in-house.

Confining DPC to design and tech design, in my experience, internally limits informed decision making. But using the output of those processes in VR or mixed reality changes this. The relatively simple act of taking a digital asset out of the design and development box and placing it – and the people who need to interact with it and influence its route to market – into a shared, 3D experience  can break down silos and get everyone closer to that fabled “one source of truth”.

And again, this isn’t just wishful thinking. We saw the use of AR and VR not only shorten the production cycle, but also provide better control over the quality of the final product.

As an example of the same principle deployed elsewhere upstream: in our distribution centres we used AR glasses to help guide picking of orders. To do this we created a virtual map of the environment, including all digital objects such as aisles and product locations on those aisles, that was laid over the real warehouse environment. Using the location and sensors on the AR glasses, we projected directions to the location of the items needing picking, then the user would have to scan the product and place it in the shipping bag. The result was quicker pick times, lower initial training time, and less room for error.

Building A Vendor-Agnostic Ecosystem 

I’m aware that I’ve painted a very positive picture of the ideal vision for extending the value of 3D assets into new mediums and new experiences, but that wide-scale adoption of VR, AR, and 3D in retail is certainly not without its challenges.

It was, to put it mildly, a struggle to find comprehensive solutions to integrate these technologies seamlessly into our supply chains. And this is something I know a lot of brands, retailers, and their partners are finding: the leap from digital design to a true digital twin, and an all-digital, end-to-end workflow is not going to be an easy one to make, whether you’re approaching it through the lens of design and development, or the creation of immersive experiences for your different stakeholders.

Technology vendors will need to play a critical role in this transition by offering adaptable and open platforms that cater to the diverse needs of retailers and brands – especially in cases of mass manufacturing and multi-category businesses, where the value chain is made up of a broad spectrum of different vendors and suppliers, with different specialisations.

I think the mandate from industry is clear. Organisations want the simplest solution, and they want the ability to extend the capabilities of that solution without needing to start from scratch with new RFPs., They also want to work with open APIs rather than needing bespoke integrations, and they want  file types that are cross-compatible. Organisations want no hidden costs, and technology should give them the most control and visibility over their supply chain not through brute force, but by making it as easy as possible to onboard upstream users. Critically, a multi-vendor ecosystem must be compatible with all forms of reality – augmented, virtual, mixed – to extend that digital thread further through the ecosystem  and to help break down silos.

Technology vendors who work  to enable cross-functional collaboration, and who offer customisable solutions, can empower retailers to harness the full potential of the digital thread and achieve a competitive edge. Those are the vendors that organisations are choosing to partner with to form a strong, standardised and scalable foundation for DPC.

As a case in point: I’ve seen the strides that Browzwear has made towards open standards and APIs, and that position has helped them to become a strong partner for a lot of organisations, because they’re not just building their own functionality (like the line-sharing capabilities in their StyleZone solution) but also taken an open stance to integrations and interoperability so that their own products fit into the wider DPC landscape.

And there’s a lot in store on the horizon of that landscape, such as AI-driven design, blockchain integration for transparent supply chains, and even more immersive customer experiences. Retailers that keep an open pipeline and can evolve quickly to digital changes, stand the best chance of  staying ahead in the digital revolution.

As the retail industry continues to transform, harnessing the power of VR, AR, and 3D in digital product creation is not just an option; it’s a necessity for success in the 21st century.