Trivver and Niantic 8th Wall Partner in Retail XR, Highlighting That Unique Marketing Approaches Need Unique Platform Support

By Eric Abbruzzese | 3Q 2024 | IN-7517

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Trivver, a company active in Three-Dimensional (3D) data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), has officially joined the partner network of Niantic 8th Wall. While Niantic is best known for its location-based games like Pokémon Go, it has also been building foundational technologies for these experiences, as well as a broader Extended Reality (XR) enablement platform around machine vision, content creation, mapping, and more. 8th Wall joined Niantic in 2022 and brought WebAR and brand engagement expertise to the portfolio.

XR presents a compelling market for retail and marketing content, but requires novel thinking around monetization and user experience. Traditional advertising, as in banner ads and commercials, is especially disruptive in XR experiences and fails to utilize device capabilities. When moving into XR-tailored content, the mechanisms for leveraging those XR devices have been missing or buried under significant development requirements. The combination of Trivver and Niantic emphasizes a shift in monetization thinking, primarily through adding value to 3D models, while ensuring mass market applicability. WebAR is technically supported by 5 billion devices across Android and iOS, while also being cross-compatible with Extended Reality (XR) devices like smart glasses and Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. This combination of cross-compatibility with XR specialization is a key differentiator for the companies and one that is expected to be increasingly commonplace in the marketing space as XR grows among the user base.

The retail space is far from a new entrant into XR-in fact, some of the earliest productized applications of XR can be traced to retail through product visualization and virtual try-on with major companies like IKEA and Amazon active in this area for years. What is unique to this partnership is the combination of features on offer, rather than an outright novel application.

Trivver brings some granular data capabilities around 3D products, which can be immensely valuable in marketing, while being difficult to capture and track without an XR targeted solution. Trivver primarily works with something called 3D Smart Objects, which can be embedded in a 3D environment and automatically track key metrics. View time is a common metric in marketing and one that is expectedly supported. More unique is branding visibility and engagement level-the content is inherently 3D, so there is no guarantee of how exactly a product or piece of content is viewed. Having these measurements can be hugely valuable to ensure content visibility is as expected, and adjust parameters if it is not. The objects can be dynamically sized and placed into different virtual environments, saving production time. The company also supports seamless purchase capability and sharing to social platforms.

Niantic 8th Wall's role is mostly on the enablement and distribution side, providing worlds for these 3D objects to be embedded. Focus and expertise in WebAR means that the addressable base is large-far larger than the XR market on its own-and more easily scalable than purpose-built applications. While not directly related to the Trivver partnerships, Niantic's efforts in other areas like mapping, location-based experiences, and spatial compute could all be leveraged for retail and marketing content using Trivver's 3D Smart Objects and the associated metadata.

There are two main takeaways to keep in mind from this partnership, and others to come going forward:

Data are, and will continue to be, imperative. No matter the experience, the content type, or the end user, capturing metrics around usage trends and sentiment is highly valuable. There is a reason Meta is opening its Horizon OS and app store to third parties, and it's not only to grow the space and reap some revenue share-the data up for grabs are unique, and actionable in proven ways. Just as brands and advertisers scramble for user/viewer data for traditional media in whatever format it may be, so too will they want that data in XR. With the cost of creating content often higher for immersive devices as well, that data value extends even farther. This is evidenced by the existence of dedicated XR advertising bodies like the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which has over 700 members across brands, agencies, and technology companies.

Audience targeting is as important as audience widening. Much has been said around leveraging that data for targeted content delivery, especially in the retail and marketing domain. However, when it comes to XR, it can be as important to widen the possible audience as it is to target the best segments of that audience. The reality is that XR, for at least the next few years, will not on its own create a large enough addressable user base for brands to solely target for immersive content. By having cross-platform capability, the upfront risk is lowered through broad device applicability, while still offering the unique data and engagement opportunity present in XR when applicable. Specifically for Trivver and 8th Wall, these experiences are not locked into immersive devices, instead being cross-compatible with XR and non-XR devices like smartphones and computers.

Again, these are not novel takeaways for the marketing domain, but there are unique elements at play thanks to XR and some of the unique capabilities on offer. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of considerations either, which is nearly impossible to put together at this stage. However, there are some topics not included here that are guaranteed to be talking points in this space over the next few years-AI and data security. We are already witnessing AI make its way into nearly everything, and XR is no different. Over 50% of respondents in ABI Research's recent industrial client survey are beyond Proof of Concept (PoC) with machine vision and AI-enhanced devices-XR is following closely behind. One can argue that AI in marketing is also not new, nor will its application alongside XR be, with expected improvements in data collection and accuracy of targeted content using AI. Data security is of serious consideration with XR thanks to the nearly constant required usage of cameras. As XR becomes more ubiquitous, especially through streamlined smart glasses that are not immediately obvious as being an XR device, the usage and protection of those cameras and the collected content will be complicated. Any solution requiring those cameras and that data will have to be cognizant of potential restrictions to that data going forward.