How Oracle’s XR Lab Uses MetaVRse Engine for eCommerce and IoT

“Building from MetaVRse is 3 times faster and 2 times simpler than building for Unity. Being natively oriented towards WebXR, MetaVRse lets you have instantaneous preview – without the need for a beast machine to run and compile your creations. And as the engine is designed for creators rather than engineers, with simple scene configurations, it only took me a few lines of code to embed Oracle technologies within the experiences created with MetaVRse.”
– Sikaar Keita, XR LAB Leader @ Oracle

Digital marketing and ecommerce are in an explosive growth phase, with AR-enabled experiences poised to drive over $36 billion in retail sales by 2024. But digital marketers are often left in the dust, as the demand for VR/AR developers is at an all-time high, growing over 1400% in 2019 alone. Recently, Oracle XR Lab co-founder Sikaar Keita has been experimenting with the web-based MetaVRse Engine to create product showcases, advanced ecommerce prototypes, and IoT sensor integrations.

3D/XR for Digital Marketing

Enterprise often struggles to find a foothold in fast-moving spaces, says Sikaar, so “we’re trying to see how big, more mature companies like Oracle can have a place within the XR industry.” This is what motivated him and his partner Wojciech Pluta to found the XR Lab at Oracle, along with his main role in driving customer experience and digital marketing efforts.

Just about every physical product on Earth has a detailed 3D model that is essential for the industrial design and manufacturing process. The challenge for digital marketers is to leverage these 3D models in ways that don’t require extensive coding knowledge. External development agencies can produce slick 3D and XR experiences, but digital marketers often get left behind, unable to tinker with the code or learn complex design software.

“Building real-time 3D experiences was something that was new to me a year and a half ago, and I started by playing with WebVR and WebAR,” says Sikaar. “I was building everything from scratch, just with A-Frame, typing code for every single interaction. With very limited capabilities, to be honest. Building an experience in A-Frame takes literally hours, and it’s really coding heavy to get to acceptable results.”

“With A-Frame, I will never get to a point where I can easily edit something that someone else will develop. I am not a developer – my goal is to understand things and get my hands on stuff.”

MetaVRse vs. A-Frame and Unity

Sikaar was one of the early beta testers for the MetaVRse Engine, our web-based 3D design and publishing tool built on the low-code/no-code philosophy. This was a game-changer for Sikaar, who found that the MetaVRse Engine did intuitively what other platforms required workarounds for.

“There were a few things I really wanted to try in WebXR, and I had a very clear idea of how I would build it in Unity. What was really game-changing was all the visuals. I can see all my modules, I can see them with renders, I can move around. That was something I’ve been badly missing.”

Sikaar has already used the engine to design a handbag storefront, complete with A/B testing. Providing potential customers with a three-dimensional representation of the product they’re looking to buy – enhanced by the ability to see it in real space – makes it possible to connect with a product in ways that are impossible with flat, lifeless images.

Connecting MetaVRse to Business Intelligence Tools

Included in his many trials is the ability to connect the Nike shoe configurator MetaVRse Engine via web, to the Oracle Infinity business intelligence tool capturing every click a potential customer makes and recording all the data.  This is unprecedented data now available for marketers and executives.

MetaVRse and the Internet of Things (IOT)

Hear more from Sikaar on the latest episode of the XR for Business Podcast, hosted by MetaVRse CEO Alan Smithson.