Store Digital Twin

We’re building toward a future in which our associates can visualize and interact with nearly all of a store’s digital data, thanks to the digital twin.

In partnership with NVIDIA, Lowe’s Innovation Labs took its first public step towards realizing this vision, leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse to build an industry-first, interactive replica of a Lowe’s store, a prototype that showcases a future in which digital twins, AI and XR are part of our associates’ daily lives.

Watch the Announcement Video from NVIDIA GTC

What it is

A digital twin fuses spatial data with product location, historical information, and data from advanced in-store sensors.

Currently live in two stores, our first-of-its-kind digital twin represents a leap forward for home improvement. Our associates can not only visualize and interact with a Lowe’s store in 3D, but can interact with nearly all of a store’s data in new ways, across a range of devices.

From desktop computers to Magic Leap 2 augmented reality (AR) headsets, this interactivity opens up numerous possibilities for Lowe’s associates.

Split view of a Lowes Home Improvement store aisle on the left side and its Digital Twin on the right side.

A few of the areas that Lowe's is currently exploring with its digital twin include:

AR Reset and Restocking Support

Wearing a Magic Leap 2 AR headset, Lowe’s associates can see a hologram of the digital twin overlaid atop the physical store in augmented reality. This can help an associate compare what a store shelf should look like versus what it actually looks like, and make sure it’s stocked with the right products in the right configurations.

Heads-up display from the MagicLeap2 AR headset showing an associate information about store aisles and product details.

AR “X-Ray Vision”

Associates can gain the ability to gather and view information on obscured items on hard-to-reach shelves with “X-ray vision.” For example, under normal circumstances, an associate might need to climb a ladder to gather information on a cardboard-enclosed product held in a store’s top stock. With an AR headset and the digital twin, the associate could look up at a partially obscured cardboard box from ground level, and, thanks to computer vision and Lowe’s inventory application programming interfaces (APIs), determine and view its contents via an AR overlay.

Lowes Home Improvement store associate wearing MagicLeap2 AR headset.

AR Collaboration

With access to a Magic Leap 2 AR headset, store associates can do more than just view the digital twin – they can also update it and collaborate with centralized store planners in new ways. If a store associate notices an improvement that could be made to a proposed planogram for their store, they could notate that on the digital twin with an AR “sticky note.”

Closeup view of Lowes Home Improvement store associate wearing an AR headset used to assist in visualizing the Store Digital Twin in realtime.

Store Visualization and Optimization

Just as e-commerce sites gather analytics to optimize the customer shopping experience online, the digital twin enables new ways of viewing sales performance and customer traffic data to optimize the in-store experience using 3D heatmaps and distance measurements of items frequently bought together.

Woman wearing MagicLeap2 AR Headset viewing a simulated 3D store experience.

In-Store Simulations

Using historical order and product location data, Lowe’s can also leverage Omniverse and Lowe’s Innovation Labs-created AI avatars to simulate how far customers or associates might need to walk to pick up items often bought together. Associates can also test changes to product placements within Omniverse to find optimal placements for products to enhance customer and associate experiences.

Digital simulation of customer shopping experiences within the Lowes Home Improvement store for Digital Twin.

Our digital twin was created in NVIDIA’s Omniverse Enterprise environment.

And, as part of our commitment to helping builders of the virtual and augmented worlds, we’ll be expanding our Lowe’s Open Builder program to release photorealistic 3D product assets – used to populate our digital twin – to Omniverse developers in the coming weeks.