Home-improvement retail is a tactile business. And when making decisions about how to create a new store display, a common way for retailers to see what works is to build a physical prototype, put it out into a brick-and-mortar store and examine how customers react.

With NVIDIA Omniverse and AI, Lowe’s is exploring more efficient ways to approach this process.

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. 3D heatmaps and visual indicators that show the physical distance of items frequently bought together can help associates put these objects near each other. Within a 100,000-square-foot location, for example, minimizing the number of steps needed to pick up an item is critical.

Using historical order and product location data, Lowe’s can also use NVIDIA Omniverse to simulate what might happen when a store is set up differently. Using AI avatars created in Lowe’s Innovation Labs, the retailer can simulate how far customers and associates might need to walk to pick up items that are often bought together.

NVIDIA Omniverse allows for hundreds of simulations to be run in a fraction of the time that it takes to build a physical store display, Godbole said.