6

Vision Four ‒ Robot Consumers

Retail still defines the face of America and indeed the whole world, and you can still see this yourself if you visit small towns or big city malls, whether in Chicago or Dubai. Soon, though, that face will radically change as tons of new technology is brought to all parts of the retail world, from robots to Spatial Computing glasses that consumers will use to shop in new ways. Here, we look at both the past and future for lessons about how deeply our culture and businesses are about to change due to Spatial Computing.

What Drives Consumers?

People buy emotionally, not rationally. That is what we learned while working at consumer electronics stores in the 1980s. What do we mean by that? Let's say you are a grandfather who is tasked to buy some headphones for his granddaughter for, say, a Christmas gift. He goes into a store, say, a Best Buy, and is overwhelmed with choices. He can't hear well, so he can't tell the difference between, for example, a Sennheiser or a Sony. The salesperson isn't much better at figuring out what will put a smile on the granddaughter's face when she opens her gift, either.

He remembers that he saw Beats on American Idol and that Apple had bought them, so he walks out of the store with one of those. Why? Because he knows that on Christmas morning that if she doesn't like the Beats, he can defend the purchase by saying, "Hey, if they are good enough for American Idol, they are good enough for me" and that, as Apple's premier brand, he feels good about that, too.

Now, those of you who understand headphones will know that Beats are hardly the best-sounding headphones out there. A rational person would do research on audio profiles and buy coldly based on which headphones sounded best for a particular budget, but that's not how most of us buy, which explains why Beats continues to outsell other brands.

As we talk to retailers, we see that they understand this, and are looking to more deeply figure out how to engage your emotions when you shop, which explains a whole raft of changes underway in retail thanks to Spatial Computing technologies. How do they change retail?

Getting Emotional

Well, these technologies are changing the consumer electronics that people want, which you can see by visiting the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January in Las Vegas, with its huge booths for devices that use Spatial Computing―from Virtual Reality to drones to autonomous cars to devices in your home that track you and products. These technologies are changing everything about the retail supply chain, store, and e-commerce experiences themselves. For the grandfather, though, buying a set of headphones will mean that not only will the headphones be different (already, Bose has augmented headphones that use new Spatial Computing sensors inside that know which way a wearer's head is aimed), but the way he buys them will be, and how they get made and delivered to him will be, too.

Augmented Reality is changing the media he sees. Soon, he will be able to watch American Idol on Spatial Computing glasses and walk around the singers and coaches. Even on current TV shows, we are seeing Spatial Computing technology used in shows such as "So You Think You Can Dance." Now, a few dozen cameras surround dancers so that producers can spin the view all the way around the dancers. Soon, that effect will seem as quaint as black-and-white TV. He'll be able to touch products he sees, and ask questions like, "Who made these?" or "Alexa, can you put these on my shopping list?" or "Alexa, what's the price on these?" or "Alexa, can you deliver these to my car?"

Speaking of cars, someday in the next decade, he might even ask his car to go pick them up, all thanks to Spatial Computing technologies. That is a bit further out, though, from getting the glasses, which will arrive by the mid-2020s. We cover more of those scenarios in Chapter 3, Vision One – Transportation Automates, our chapter on the transportation industry vertical.

Now in 3D

Already you can get tastes of how the buying experience is changing by using AR apps on your mobile phone. Before the late 2010s, you would have to go to a store to see how, say, a new couch would fit into your home. Now, you pull up an app and you can see a three-dimensional version right on top of your real home and see how it fits. You can even now use many apps to measure your room accurately to see whether that new couch would fit. Lots of apps from stores such as IKEA or Amazon already have these features as we write this book, with many more on the way.

We see a deeper meaning to three-dimensional visualization in retail, though: the act of looking at three-dimensional versions of products and experiences at home hits your emotional triggers far better than looking at grids of two-dimensional products. Amazon and other stores have seen increases in sales by converting their products to three-dimensional visualizations, and newer stores, such as Obsess (https://obsessar.com/), take it a lot further. With Obsess, you see sets of new products in a three-dimensional representation of a real home or office. No more grids of product results.

The result sells way better, particularly groupings of products like, say, art that goes with pillows that goes with a vase on a coffee table. You can instantly change how a room looks just by clicking a button and then you can see all the products that go together in that look. This dramatically increases engagement, fun, and the ability to sell groupings of products. There's a reason why so many companies are hungry for consumers getting Spatial Computing glasses, and this new kind of "virtual showroom" is a major part of it.

There are many other apps that let you visualize in some form of 3D before you buy, including Argos, VADO's Viv, to car companies such as Audi.

Photo credit: Audi. Audi has deployed over 1,000 VR showrooms in dealerships worldwide.

This virtual showroom also decreases product returns due to products not fitting right or not matching what the customer saw online. With AR, for instance, you can try shoes out on your own feet and see how they look. That's quite different, both emotionally and in reality, from trying to imagine a two-dimensional shoe and how it might look on your feet.

At Sephora, they are going further. Its Virtual Artist product came out of its R&D labs in San Francisco. It lets you try virtual makeup on your own face with your mobile phone. If you like what you see, you can purchase the real thing, and they were careful to make sure the colors match. This lets you play around with (and emotionally bond to, retailers hope) different looks and makeup styles without worrying what others are thinking about you before you buy.

Photo credit: Sephora. Illustration of "Sephora Virtual Artist" AR app.

"Since 2010, Sephora has built our mobile experiences with the store shopper in mind," Bridget Dolan, Senior Vice President, Omni Experience and Innovation, has commented. "Our customers are very digitally savvy, and constantly have their phones in hand when shopping in the store."

Finally, three-dimensional product visualizations will bring with it a new kind of virtual shopping, one that you can walk through just like you walk through a real-life mall, like the ones in Dubai and Minneapolis we visited to prepare for this book. One thing, though, is that when Spatial Computing devices arrive, you'll be able to "call up" your friend and walk through the virtual mall with them. Retail is about to see some deep changes due to digital twin technology that we talk about elsewhere in this book, and when we talk to people inside consumer goods companies, such as Red Bull, they are salivating to do new kinds of three-dimensional shopping experiences because they know that these will cause much deeper brand engagement and emotional attachment to brands, if done right.

The visual and emotional side of shopping is just the tip of the iceberg of change that's coming to retailers in the next decade. Let's dig into some of the other changes that are already underway with regard to Spatial Computing.

Retail Destruction? No, But Radical Change Underway

During the Fall of 2019, one of the biggest Fry's Electronics locations in Silicon Valley announced it would close. This retail store used to have dozens of checkout lanes and it often had long lines during its heyday in the 1980s. John Fry gave us a tour on opening day of its Sunnyvale store when it did its first million dollars of revenue in one day. Those days are long gone now.

Photo credit: Google Maps. The Palo Alto location of Fry's Electronics that will have closed as of January 2020.

We all know the reason why it closed: Amazon crushed it. The truth is that Fry's didn't change, but the competition did. It was disrupted, as we say in Silicon Valley.

Trying to Keep Up

Amazon and other online retailers, like B&H Photo, took away Fry's unique position of having everything from soldering irons to computer processors. Back then, it was "the place" to buy the stuff you needed to build the products that made Silicon Valley famous in the 1980s as a place to start a technology company. Now, you can get all those online and have them delivered to you, often within an hour or two and for a cheaper price.

Online is not only cheaper, it's better organized, and comes with reviews to help you choose between dozens of products and is better at reminding you of associated things you might also need. One of the last times we visited Fry's in Palo Alto, there was a huge set of shelves with dozens of drones. There was no help to choose. No salespeople nearby. If you did pull one of the drones off of the shelf, you might not realize what batteries you need to buy, or cases that will work, or even what other devices you would need to go with it. Amazon is different―it shows you all of these things when you buy a drone or, really, any product. The experience of shopping at Fry's is poorer in real life than it is online and online is getting better at an ever-increasing pace thanks to the move to three-dimensional product visualization.

Worse, Fry's didn't have two things that are keeping some brick-and-mortar retailers thriving, like Bass Pro Shops, which sells a variety of outdoor goods from boats to tents to fishing rods and guns: things you want to try physically before buying, and a showroom attitude that teaches you about the products you are buying. We predict that retailers such as Bass Pro Shops won't disappear in the next decade, but can imagine dozens of ways they will be changed as customers adopt more Spatial Computing. We can imagine a virtual stream where you can try out fishing rods and lures and see how they feel, and work, in the stream you are planning on soon fishing.

This goes way beyond the emotional triggers of changing how we can demo things, now that applications of three-dimensional visualization are becoming more interesting.

We can already see the early signs as we visit stores such as Amazon Go, which have no checkout counters. Or in Las Vegas hotels, where small robots deliver things to rooms. Or in warehouses that retailers own, like Kroger, that have hundreds of thousands of robots scurrying around, moving products on their way to both storage shelves and delivery vehicles. Or in the Amazon app, which has a feature where you can get more details by using your camera. Aim your phone at a product and it tells you more. Soon, Computer Vision features like this will bring new capabilities into your lives.

These changes will really be felt in retail stores as consumers move computing from two-dimensional screens to three-dimensional glasses or visors that bring virtualized stores into living rooms and offices, and even if that doesn't happen, three-dimensional product visualization is already changing how people can try on products, or see how they fit into their rooms in real life. All of a sudden, you won't need to walk into a store to see displays like you would see in today's shopping malls or grocery stores. These will show up virtually literally anywhere and be much more customizable and personalized.

Looking Ahead

We dream of a world where everyone is wearing Spatial Computing devices on their faces and where Spatial Computing technology also drives around robots, virtual beings, and autonomous vehicles, including drones.

These on-face devices will bring massively new visual experiences into people's homes, and the same devices, when worn by retail workers, can enable new kinds of service, new, more efficient warehouses, and new delivery systems that will get products to you via robots, drones, or autonomous vehicles.

If you have worked in previous versions of retail stores, like we did back in the 1980s while running consumer electronics stores in Silicon Valley, you can see the shifts. Back then, we didn't take inventory on computers. We didn't have cash registers that allowed people to pay via their mobile phones (heck, our customers didn't have computers or phones for the most part, either, apart from the rich executives or real estate agents).

Already, Walmart is training its employees with VR, a trend we expect to greatly accelerate over the next few years because the early examples are proving not just to be profitable, but lifesaving (the company claimed that the VR training saved lives during a shooting in one of its stores, which you can read more about at https://fortune.com/2019/08/20/walmart-ceo-vr-training-helped-save-lives-in-el-paso-shooting/).

In quite a few warehouses, we are seeing Spatial Computing devices and systems being used to make them more efficient. AR glasses can show you exactly where a product is in a huge warehouse, saving seconds on every trip. Things like dwell time, touching, and transaction data all help manufacturers build products that better serve consumers, and even design packaging that gets their attention on busy store shelves. Soon that will be augmented or, in fact, already is. Walk into a Lego store and you can see three-dimensional models of what is inside each box thanks to an AR system originally built by Metaio, which was later bought by Apple to form the basis of its ARKit platform.

Photo credit: Nathaniël de Jong. Nathaniël plays Bait! on Oculus Quest on his popular YouTube channel. This game lets you "shop" in two virtual stores, and then head out to a virtual lake and go fishing with your virtual gear. Soon, this kind of experience will be just a preview of the real gear you'll use on real trips.

As of 2019, if you want to buy something like a fishing rod from the huge retailer Bass Pro Shops, your experience at home is limited to searching on Google and poking around mostly two-dimensional images of rods and text reviews.

If you have an Oculus Quest, though, you might have played one of the new fishing games like "Bait!," which gives you a pretty good preview of what it's like to fish in real life. We imagine that soon, fishing rod manufacturers will give you virtual looks at their rods, just like the ones in Bait! Already the game has two stores, showing that the designers of this game already are preparing to disrupt Bass Pro Shops. After all, who wants to drive a distance to one of these stores, then wait 20 minutes for help, as we did when we visited? Not to mention the fact that we didn't get a good introduction into how to actually use the fishing equipment at the store, something that will be part of the experience when shopping in VR or AR.

Aspects of retail are changing their roles in several ways due to Spatial Computing. The store itself is morphing into something that serves you in new ways, while augmented stores will let you experience shopping in the comfort of your home in a way that will look and feel pretty close to real stores, and then the retailer can serve you via rolling robots or autonomous vehicles. Let's dig into how the stores themselves are changing due to these new technologies.

Variations on a Retail Theme

The camera functionality in Amazon's app is worthy of checking out and gives a good taste of where things can go in the future. What's funny is that when we ask people if they have tried it, even techie people, very few have. Yet it's been in the app for a couple of years, at least. What does it do? It lets you visually search. Google and others have competitor products, but because it's from Amazon, which has the most highly-developed retail store, it works better with the products there.

Aim it at a logo, say the Starbucks logo on your coffee cup, and Amazon will bring up all sorts of merchandise with the same logo on it. Aim it at a friend, wearing, say, a black turtleneck shirt, and it will find you similar shirts to buy. Aim it at a product, or, particularly, a box, like that of a coffee maker, and you will find lots of coffee makers to buy.

When still at Amazon, Chris Hargarten, who ran the largest team of people categorizing all sorts of things, told us they tried to use techniques like these to make the shopping experience even better and faster. "We want users to go directly into the product page they want," he explained to us. That takes some work, given the millions of products and pages, and the visual search feature inside the Amazon app gives us all another vector to do that.

It isn't perfect, though. With clothes, it does usually get the style right, but rarely gets the brand right. We hear that over in China, the competitor for Amazon there has a similar feature that's much more accurate. We notice that in China, people use cameras far more frequently than in other countries. This leads us to a new point: if you have more users and even more aggressive users of your technology, you will have more data, and more data leads to more accuracy when you try to do things like figure out the brand of the suit someone is wearing that you like and want to buy for yourself.

The camera, too, could enable a new kind of "showrooming." This is what they call when people go into a local retail store, only to go online to buy the product they are checking out for, presumably, a cheaper price. Retailers hate showrooming, and with good reason; Fry's has been decimated by the practice, and so have lots of other retailers.

But do retailers fight back with technology of their own to help customers build highly customized shopping experiences that lead back to their stores? Very few have the capabilities to hire the software teams that Amazon has. We learned that about 10,000 people are working on the training of Amazon's Echo line of products alone. What kind of retailer can deal with that kind of technology investment?

Not to mention that Amazon is putting that kind of investment into the entire supply chain. Visit its warehouses and you will find hundreds of thousands of robots scurrying about, moving products from truck to truck for delivery to customers.

Amazon, Hargarten explained, is aiming at making every part of buying and receiving a product more efficient. To see how, let's walk back into B&H Photo in New York City.

When you walk in there, you have a few choices. Do you just wander around going aisle by aisle, looking to see what is there? Sometimes. We did just that because we enjoy consumer electronics so much, and it reminds us of stores we shopped at, or ran, in the 1980s.

Or, do you know exactly what you want and want to go straight to that section, like we did the time we needed to get another set of Rode Wireless Go microphones? Yeah, there's even a greeter/security guard at the front door who can direct you right to where you want to go.

The same applies online. Amazon tries to make it very easy for you to go directly to a specific product, and if you don't know exactly what you want yet, it also makes it easy to shop by category, like microphones in the B&H Photo store.

There are points of friction, though. One is that product visualizations are being converted to 3D, but they are stuck on small glass screens where you can't get a satisfying look. Ever try to see how a refrigerator would look in your kitchen by looking at a three-dimensional version on a mobile phone? We have, and the experience isn't satisfying at all.

The problem is that while retailers would love for us all to have Spatial Computing visors on our faces, we don't, and even the ones that are out there, like Magic Leap or Microsoft's HoloLens, are simply too cumbersome and don't have the software anyway to browse a three-dimensional store. Those days will have to wait for lighter, smaller, cheaper, and more capable devices. We predict that much of that will happen by 2023 or 2024, but even if it takes 5 years longer than that, we are already seeing a huge revolution in retailing thanks to sensors on mobile phones, three-dimensional imagery on mobile, and new kinds of stores that use sensors, whether from Amazon or Standard Cognition, which promise to get rid of slow, cumbersome checkout lines, making shopping a seamless, magical experience with much more human-computer interaction.

We think the changes are deeper than just trying to bring back brick-and-mortar stores. Everything about retail is changing, from how inventory is ordered to advertising, warehousing, delivery, in-store services, and customer expectations. All of this is being driven by the technologies that drive AR, autonomous cars, or robots. Cameras, Computer Vision, AI/Machine Learning, three-dimensional sensors, and more are changing literally every piece of the retail puzzle. A glimpse of this future can be had if you check out an Amazon Go store.

Amazon Go is Watching You

Going into an Amazon Go store, you feel something is different even before you enter it. First of all, you probably are there to check out the future of retailing, either because you heard about it from a friend or from media reports. Second, you have to load up an app just to get into the store. Third, as you enter the store you might notice hundreds of computers and sensors over your head.

Photo credit: Robert Scoble. An Amazon Go store in Seattle – a 1,800-square foot convenience store with no checkout lines. You just take a product off the shelf and leave and it automatically charges you. Note all the cameras and sensors in the ceiling, under shelves, and behind the walls.

Every part of the store uses Spatial Computing technologies to track everything you step in front of, look at, touch, or take. As you walk out of the store with items or even consume them in the store, you will be charged, and new AI is being trained for new product lines all the time.

If you look closely, there are sensors behind the walls and even scales under shelves, so this store is very hard to fool. It knows if you take a product off the shelf and leave it on another one somewhere else.

It is tracking every move you make through your mobile phone and the cloud computing it is connected to. No facial recognition is necessary. Of course, we won't be shocked if facial recognition is added in the future, so you won't even need to carry your phone anymore into these stores. Already in China, facial recognition is being used to let customers buy drinks from vending machines.

As you walk out, your mobile phone has a receipt of all the purchases you made and even how many minutes you spent in the store.

A competitor, Standard Cognition, makes claims that Amazon's stores are over-engineered, claiming it allows retailers to turn on the same kind of stores that Amazon does by using just standard video cameras. Dozens of them aimed at customers in its retail store concepts do pretty much the same thing Amazon does with tons of extra sensors.

Why are Amazon and Standard Cognition operating these kinds of stores? Well, for one, to cut down on shrinkage loss. Employees every year steal millions of dollars' worth of goods from store shelves and warehouses and shoplifting continues to produce huge losses in retail, despite putting tags on many products and sensors at doors. These kinds of stores will see far fewer shrinkage losses for sure.

A bigger reason is that these stores don't require checkout lanes, which means smaller stores can display more products and customers will be happier because they won't need to wait to buy, say, a banana and coffee for breakfast simply to check out. Yes, eventually, stores will see additional savings due to having fewer employees in the store, but so far it isn't clear how many employees can really be eliminated. Most 7-Eleven stores have only one employee at most times to cover the register anyway and these new stores still need employees to make sure the stores remain clean and stock is carefully placed on shelves.

The biggest reason, though, could be the AI training and visualizations that can be made by operating a physical store, not to mention that there are lots of places, like airports, that would benefit from the instant satisfaction of such a store, and one run by fewer people is very attractive to investors. At Facebook Oculus Connect 6 in 2019, executives walked through a volumetric scan of a real store and that gave us a glimpse of how we will shop in the future. We can pull up a virtual representation of a real store while we sit, well, anywhere, and start looking around. Obsess is already giving us a taste of that on mobile phones, but Facebook demonstrated that it will be far more real when we get VR or AR headsets in the future.

Amazon is using the data it is recording by watching real customers come into a real store to better know how to lay out virtual stores in the future and what affects buying behavior. So, it will have much better virtualized stores (and physical ones) in the future.

Standard Cognition founder, Jordan Fisher, explains that they are even using this data to train the computer to know if you are eating food at, say, a salad bar or a display of, say, berries. Be honest, you do try some once in a while, right? Well, now it can charge you as you try them. No more getting away with sneaking a berry or two as  a "free sample."

A similar revolution has been happening for retail logistics with regard to Spatial Computing, albeit in a less public way. Let's take a look at what's going on behind the scenes that will, in the coming years, revolutionize the way you receive your goods.

Spatial Computing for Logistics

Logistics is undergoing its own emerging mini-revolution when it comes to utilizing Spatial Computing. Companies like Seegrid, who make Vision-guided Vehicles (VGVs), help in reducing the high accident rates associated with human-manned forklifts. These VGVs use Computer Vision and sensing technology to know where to go on the floor and to be able to avoid obstacles in their way. Companies such as BMW, Jaguar, and Whirlpool, among many others, use Seegrid's VGVs on their warehouse floors.

Photo credit: Seegrid. Examples of Seegrid's VGVs that replace human-manned forklifts.

Another Spatial Computing warehouse helper is the GreyOrange Butler robot, which GreyOrange calls a "Decision Science-Driven Robotic Goods-to-Person System" for "automated put-away, inventory storage, replenishment, and order picking in fulfillment and distribution centers." GreyOrange Butler customers are mostly retailers with physical and/or online stores, in addition to apparel makers, third-party logistics providers, and consumer electronics companies. Potential competition for both Seegrid and GreyOrange logistics products comes from start-ups like Fetch Robotics and 6 River Systems, as well as larger established players such as Swisslog.

Photo credit: GreyOrange. GreyOrange Butler robots working inside a warehouse.

In terms of logistics' use of AR headsets, there has been some version of AR used in warehouses since at least 2008, though the overlay visuals used were in 2D versus 3D up until the last few years. Companies such as RealWear and Microsoft, with the HoloLens 2 headset, along with the now-defunct companies ODG and DAQRI, have catered to this market that we predict will have exponential growth within the next 5 years due to a fast-growing need for logistical warehousing systems.

Photo credit: ARM23. Example of an AR program for logistics using a Microsoft HoloLens headset.

Underlying this demand is an ever-increasing growth in online sales for a wide diversity of products.

Spatial Computing Delivery Methods – Robots, Drones, Future

Starship Technologies is a venture that was started in 2014 by Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, to address the "last mile" of delivering goods such as groceries, restaurant take-out, and packages. Their product is an autonomous electric robot that navigates city streets and paths using six wheels, Computer Vision, and a sensor suite that includes cameras, GPS, and an inertial measurement unit. It does not use LIDAR in a bid to cut down on costs to the customer.

We talked with Sean Eckard, Senior Manager of Business Development of Starship Technologies. He says it is "supreme in every way" to deliver things with a 50-lb electric robot instead of delivering things with a 2,000-lb car.

Funny enough, it isn't the technology we mostly talked about while we were with him. Rather, it is the regulatory approach that he's seeing from different cities. Some cities meet his company with open arms, recognizing the benefits that delivery robots will bring to their citizens: lower costs and more consistent delivery times, along with new jobs that come from companies like Starship. Others, however, refuse to consider letting Starship's robots roll down its streets, seeing them as too dystopian, or a threat to existing jobs, or a potential safety hazard.

Eckard says the job is harder for some of Starship's competitors since they made their robots bigger and uglier. Starship has overcome some of these objections, Eckard says, because of its fun low profile and attention to detail when it comes to pedestrian safety, which is mostly due to a ton of AI training on what to do around, say, kids or dogs. He says that is why they started on college campuses before going to entire cities. They wanted to have the ability to watch and train the robots in a constrained space, which also gains the trust of people using them.

Photo credit: Starship Technologies

Oh, and by going to college campuses, they assumed they would have a lot more trouble with thefts and abuse, which turned out not to be true. In fact, they are having trouble getting anyone at all to rip them off (and were actually hoping for more so that they could train the robots on what to do if someone carted one off in, say, a pickup truck). It turns out that even most criminals are smart enough to know that the cameras onboard are recording them, just the same as a new Tesla records someone breaking a window or doing other damage to the car.

Enough cities have signed up, though, as of 2019, to note that delivery robots are a trend and give us some insight into how retail will change due to them, along with the other "last mile" delivery technologies that are coming, such as drones.

It was Eckard's opening argument, though, that's going to be most interesting to watch: why are we driving cars around to go pick things up, or deliver them, when a 55-lb robot can do it just as well? One, presumably, that will take a lot less energy to move around, which means less carbon put in the air for each package delivered?

Climate change is, as of 2019, heating up as an issue, as it were. Where in 2018, 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg protested alone, by the end of 2019, she was joined by millions in protests around the world every Friday.

This increased pressure to do something about climate change will lead more companies to use these delivery robots, it seems to us, and make other changes as well to reduce the amount of carbon that they are putting in the air as they move products to people's homes.

Photo credit: Amazon. An Amazon Scout robot reported to have been built on the acquired IP of a company called Dispatch.

Amazon announced a very similar-looking autonomous robot (also called a self-driving delivery device, or just a robot) in January 2019, and is running small field tests with it on getting packages to customers in Snohomish County, Washington, and Irvine, California. It predominantly uses LIDAR as its remote sensing method, which Starship feels is overkill.

Some are definitely looking at the delivery robots as a way to completely rethink business.

Take, for example, pizza.

Alex and Julia Garden noticed that the average delivery took about 20 minutes; about the same length of time it takes to cook. In a bid to completely disrupt the pizza supply chain, they outfitted their Zume delivery vans with dozens of robot-controlled ovens. The pizza is cooking as it drives to your house. This reduces the capital, since they don't need an expensive kitchen and building to house it, and their pizzas arrive hotter than their competitors, literally coming out of the oven at your front door. Zume, alas, will no longer be doing these kinds of operations due to internal mismanagement.

We can imagine they won't be the last business to completely rethink retail, delivery, or both thanks to Spatial Computing.

Photo credit: FedEx. An example of a FedEx's last-mile delivery robot, Roxo, the SameDay Bot.

Roxo, FedEx's SameDay Bot, is its answer to the last mile delivery issue. In August 2019, it completed a two-week test in Memphis, Tennessee, following its initial test in Manchester, New Hampshire, earlier in August. FedEx has been working with AutoZone, Walgreens, Target, Pizza Hut, Lowe's, and Walmart to adapt automated delivery technology to customers' needs. What makes Roxo a little different than the other delivery robots is that it can travel upstairs to arrive directly in front of a person's door.

Amazon's vision of 30-minute or less package delivery is encapsulated in its design for its drones. Its drone operation is run by Amazon Prime Air, a subsidiary of Amazon, and it is currently still under development. In the Summer of 2019, Jeff Wilkie, Amazon's Worldwide Consumer CEO pledged that Prime Air drones would be delivering packages "in months." Time will tell if this indeed has transpired by the time this book is printed. Our friends who have gotten a look at the Spatial Computing technology inside say that what's really fantastic is the paper-thin radar sensor inside that maps out the world in 3D and can fly to your door the same way your AR glasses will soon bring all sorts of virtual fun to you: through new technologies such as "AR Cloud" and Simultaneous Location And Mapping (SLAM). Already, consumer drones are starting to use the same techniques to navigate through trees or around obstacles.

Photo credit: Amazon. An example from Amazon Prime Air: a future delivery system designed to get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles, also called drones.

In April 2019, Wing Aviation, the drone delivery arm of Google's parent company, Alphabet, became the first American company to be granted FAA approval for commercial delivery. In addition to Amazon, Uber and UPS have applied for air carrier certificates from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to launch commercial drone operations.

Prior to having deliveries of goods come to you, Spatial Computing experiences could be used to visualize what furniture and other goods would look like in your living room and anywhere else.

In Your Living Room and Elsewhere ‒ Spatial Computing Marketing Experiences

We wrote this part of the chapter by talking into a microphone to produce text (elsewhere, we generally just used a keyboard). This is to get ready for the world that Amazon and others are bringing to us. Alexa listens to us and brings us whatever we want. "Hey Alexa, put a box of Cheerios on my shopping list." "Hey Alexa, can you deliver some Chinese food?" "Hey Alexa, can we watch Halt and Catch Fire?" "Hey Alexa, I want to buy some clothes."

Starting in the Living Room

Ubiquitous computing is already changing our living rooms. Robert Scoble says, about his living room: "I have a Google device listening to me. I have many Apple devices listening to me. I have a TV that listens to me. I have a Sonos soundbar and a Facebook Portal device that listens to me and, of course, we have Amazon boxes listening."

Soon, we will have three-dimensional sensors on our face and in our living rooms and new kinds of displays on our eyes, potentially replacing our television sets and computer displays. Hooray! There's a company called Looking Glass that has a flat display that gives you a three-dimensional look at a three-dimensional objects. And other devices or technologies have been shown to us that include three-dimensional contacts that don't need to be on your face. But it is the on-the-face wearable devices that are the most interesting. They also are the most controversial, because of the privacy implications of having a three-dimensional sensor that can literally see everything in your house. If you take it to the utmost, there are wearable devices that are going to remember where you left your keys. Or where you left your Pepsi, or how many bites of food you've taken in the last hour.

They also could know who has been in your house or how many times you've actually interacted with your children or your spouse. What music you listen to. What things you bought. What tasks you put on your task list. What things are on your calendar. What you're wearing on a daily basis. Or if you're wearing anything at all. They might catch wind of your emotion. Did you just yell at your children? Do you feel guilty about it? Did that cause you to buy some Ben & Jerry's ice cream? Soon Taylor Swift might start playing in your ears singing "You Need to Calm Down" and ice cream ads might pop up with messages "need a break?" because you are raising your voice.

By the end of 2020, we're going to be playing new kinds of board games. Already from companies like Tilt Five, there are AR glasses that let you play games with your family and friends gathered around a coffee table or a kitchen table. But we see the changes yet to come to the living room to be very profound thanks to these personalized viewing devices.

Already, we can use an Oculus Quest to watch movies on Netflix, or TV shows, music videos, or other kinds of content on our personal devices.

The children can watch SpongeBob while the adults watch something a little more racy. What does this mean for personal interaction? And what does it mean for retail?

A Personalized Experience

We are heading into a hyper-personalized world where Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and others will know a ton about our lifestyles, our family structure, and our favorite media choices. Adding to that, Amazon already knows everything you've purchased from Amazon and now, its member brands, such as Whole Foods.

As Jeff Wilke, Amazon's CEO of Worldwide Consumer, says, "We're going to see AI and Machine Learning embedded in all kinds of different products, so it makes personalization better. We just launched an enhancement to the iOS app that lets you screenshot a fashion look that you're interested in and find something on Amazon that matches."

So, let's go back to the three-dimensional store that soon will be shown to us in our living room. It can predict what you're going to buy next with some level of confidence. Planning a trip to Rome? It will suggest new luggage. Running low on groceries? It might suggest you look around a new kind of Amazon store where you could put pick out strawberries and Cheerios and your favorite coffee.

All to be delivered in an hour or less by a robot.

Many people will find this very attractive because heading to the store often means being stuck in traffic in cities or stuck in lines at grocery stores and this opportunity cost of time ends up being quite a high cost indeed.

Of course, as you use more of these services, they learn more about not just your shopping behavior, but everyone's shopping behavior. This is already how Amazon works and why Amazon is already beating the experience of shopping at a real store like Fry's.

These new three-dimensional stores that are going to be in your living room are also going to mean that marketers are going to have to think differently. Soon, we will be able to have conversations with virtual beings: things that look like real human beings and can actually have a pretty good conversation with you because they know everything about what you're buying. Magic Leap, for instance, has already started showing off a virtual being called Mica. We can imagine a world where you are wearing a Spatial Computing device and have these entities show up in your home to discuss things with you and help you out.

"Hey Mica. Can you help me buy a new camera?"

"Sure!"

She could ask the same questions I asked thousands of people in a retail store in the 1980s. "Would you like a small pocket camera? Or a big DSLR?" "Would you like to see a Nikon or a Canon?" "Do you know the difference?"

Mica can warn you that some of your product choices are not in line with your new intentionality. You could tell Mica, "Hey, I want to lose 10 pounds within the next month," and Mica could tell you that it's not a good idea to buy that Ben & Jerry's ice cream that it "knows" you want to buy.

Facebook and other big companies are already planning for such a world years in advance. We've caught wind of design documents for this kind of future world. The designers inside these companies are already thinking about how your buying behavior will change thanks to these new technologies in your living room.

Steve Conine, co-chairman and co-founder of the online retailer Wayfair, says, "My belief is, at some point in the not-too-distant future, every home in America will have a three-dimensional model tied to it. If you give us access to it, we can use that to show you styles and designs in that space that look amazingly good."

That's for the near future and the farther-out future. Let's now go back to what is currently happening with regard to Spatial Computing. In this case, we will focus on how some major select furniture and accessories stores are using AR, and, in some cases, VR.

The VR World

In 2016, IKEA came out with its Virtual Reality Kitchen Experience, where potential customers could browse the IKEA catalog to place items around the virtual kitchen, open drawers and oven doors, fry and toss around meatballs, and make pancakes. The app was developed for the HTC Vive and released on Valve's Steam game platform. The experience was not widely known, however, as an article published in the Financial Times in April 2018 made it appear that this experience was a new one.

In December 2017, for the opening of its newest store near Dallas, IKEA partnered with media and technology agency Wavemaker to offer VR games and experiences to potential customers entering the store. Close to 300 people played a "pillow toss" game or hung out with a virtual panda. With this, IKEA was able to test what types of VR content would attract potential customers. This is part of a larger effort to test and learn what kinds of investments should be made with regard to IKEA's stores, logistics, digital capabilities, and services.

Photo credit: IKEA. Advertising for IKEA's "Place" app. IKEA updated their app in Fall 2019 to allow for placement of several digital furniture items in a room.

With regard to its mobile AR app, IKEA has collaborated with many partners, including ad agency 72andSunny, to help prospective customers better visualize IKEA furniture in their homes and to foster strong consumer loyalty.

In September 2017, IKEA launched its AR app, IKEA Place for Apple iOS devices. Over 2,000 products—nearly the company's full collection of sofas, armchairs, coffee tables, and storage units—were available to view and place. In contrast to the catalog AR app IKEA launched in 2013, the placements were more stable, staying put to the floor, and in their proper measured proportions. Also, in 2013, there were only about 100 products versus the more than 2,000 products currently available to view and place. Also, the products appear with about a 98-percent accuracy in scale and true-to-life representations of the texture, fabric, lighting, and shadow.

As of March 2018, the number of IKEA products in IKEA Place available to view grew to 3,200 with the AR app now available for Android mobile phones. Also available now for both the iOS and Android versions of the app is "Visual Search," which allows users to match photos of furniture they like to similar or identical IKEA products through the app. For the IKEA Place app, you need an iPhone 6S or above with iOS 11 or an Android phone with ARCore.

IKEA's VR strategy has not been as clear as its AR strategy. Wisconsin's first IKEA opened on May 16, 2018, in Oak Creek, Milwaukee. As part of the store's opening festivities, visitors to a pop-up event close by in McKinley Park could participate in a VR experience that displayed an IKEA showroom and designs, as well as some of its latest products.

As the world's largest retailer, Walmart is also a company competing on multiple fronts. Its culture is nearly the opposite of Amazon's, having begun in the U.S. South, and building significantly on a foundation of price-sensitive rural shoppers.

Photo credit: Walmart. Two screenshots from the original Spatialand (now spelled "Spatial&") app. With this app, consumers could try outdoor products in a Yosemite National Park VR experience.

Yet Walmart transitioned well into the online space, where its website is the third largest after Amazon and Apple, better than all of its traditional shoppers in terms of visitors and sales. Its e-commerce business, which accounts for 3.6 percent of its U.S. sales, has incurred much expense to grow. Its website has about 100 million unique monthly visitors, versus 180 million for Amazon.com. However, recent reports indicate that despite significant and continuous online growth, investors remain unsatisfied that it can stop Amazon's relentless rise.

Walmart keeps trying and expanding, showing it is unafraid to take risks with new technologies, particularly AR and VR. In 2017, it acquired Jet.com, an online shopping network often compared favorably with Amazon. Marc Lore built Jet.com and came on board as head of Walmart's U.S. e-commerce business in September 2017 following Jet.com's acquisition. In the third quarter of 2017, Walmart's U.S. e-commerce sales grew 50 percent year on year. However, for the fourth quarter of 2017, those sales were up only 23 percent year on year, which was a great cause of alarm for the company and the investment community as it showed weakness during the holiday season.

Making an Impact

To devise new technologies that have an impact on the way people shop and thus hopefully increase sales, Lore created an in-house start-up incubator called Store No. 8, named for the store that founder Sam Walton had once used for experimentation. The incubator currently holds at least four start-ups. The focus so far has been on VR solutions. Spatialand (now spelled "Spatial&"), the VR start-up that had been funded by Store No. 8, was fully acquired by Walmart with the founder, Kim Cooper, and about 10 employees joining Walmart. Other Store No. 8 start-ups include a personal shopping service run by Rent the Runway founder Jenny Fleiss; an initiative for a cashier less store like Amazon Go, run by Jet.com co-founder Mike Hanrahan; and Project Franklin (no other details provided), led by Bart Stein, the former CEO of Wim Yogurt.

According to Dave Mayer, president of shopper-focused design firm Chase Design, "there are two types of Walmart shopping trips: replenishment, in which a customer runs out of a given product and is likely to buy a familiar brand again; and discovery, in which consumers know they've run out of a given product but aren't loyal to a particular brand."

"When you compare digital to physical, physical is still predominant when it comes to discovery … no one has found a way to make discovery easy online," he said. "What's attractive about VR is its potential to create immersive experiences in the digital realm that will open up and enable browsing."

In other words, if you go shopping in VR, you won't just see a single product―perhaps you'll see a whole suite of brand names for that product, and you might discover something new.

We have heard that two California units will be working closely together on innovations to digitize Walmart product lines. In our brief research related to this project, we gained some sense of the strategic imperatives taking hold. We heard that the Labs' top priority in immersive technologies is to prioritize three-dimensional scanning for millions of SKU units and that centralizing operations for this to occur is paramount. However, we found out from multiple sources that ideas from Silicon Valley are being stalled by decision makers in Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Yet, Walmart is still actively hiring for the immersive industry area, as evidenced by job postings for recruiters, projects managers, and engineers.

With regard to AR, it is not clear when Walmart will ramp up efforts there. There is a clear verbal mandate within the company to provide something meaningful in that area; however, as of today, there has not been much movement there. There has been a Super Hero AR app that was launched within the stores as part of an Angry Birds retail and gaming marketing integration, as well as The Avengers AR in-store experience.

According to Sarah Spencer, Walmart Director of National Media Relations, "Walmart is committed to creating engaging and fun experiences for their shoppers, across multiple channels of engagement…The Super Hero AR app is part of an ongoing "retailtainment" initiative for Walmart. In March 2016, we launched the Angry Birds retail and gaming integration, and now The Avengers AR in-store experience are examples of how Walmart is integrating technology and gaming directly into the retail shopping experience."

As the world's largest online retailer, Amazon's strategy and culture have always been to use technology to become more efficient and improve customer experiences. It has been lethal to competitors on virtually every consumer-facing front. As always, Amazon moves successfully in multiple directions: it has expanded successfully into B2B with AWS, a wholly owned web services subsidiary. It is building brick-and-mortar stores and has acquired Whole Foods, the supermarket chain: now it is buying large goods producers to lower grocery costs for consumers. On another front, according to job postings, Amazon is creating statistical three-dimensional models of human bodies, which it will then match to images and videos of people via Deep Learning algorithms and other tactics. That will have a "wide range of commercial applications" for Amazon customers, the company says in the job ad.

Among the company's many competitive assets is that it probably has more data on what people buy than any company on Earth, and with the addition of Amazon Echo, it now has a friendly device that people talk to—and in doing so, provide massive amounts of additional data on a growing number of the world's households.

Like all major IKEA competitors, Amazon has an AR application called "AR View" for both iOS and Android; we tried it for a few minutes on a Pixel phone and found it to be pretty similar to IKEA Place. Amazon's many thousands of items to view is welcoming. If the current app was the end-game for Amazon in AR and VR, IKEA could comfortably remain the leader of a small, but aggressive pack of competitors. But Amazon's historic long-view strategy would make that possibility unlikely. Where they are headed, we can only guess, but we speculate that a future iteration of AR View will include headset applications. Even more significant is that it will eventually link Echo to AR View. It does not appear that Amazon will be utilizing VR for retail purposes, with earlier indications pointing to its interest there solely for the entertainment industry.

In a few years, pattern recognition will be able to predict what consumers will need next, whether that is another quart of milk or a new couch. Alexa could actually suggest that it is time, and suggest they look at AR possibilities of an 84-inch couch that would fit properly in a certain space, then show colors that would match the curtains behind it. This could all happen before a family even considers shopping for the couch online or in a store. While competing with Amazon on this level, we also see an opportunity for partnering elsewhere via AWS, Amazon's B2B web services subsidiary.

Photo credit: Irena Cronin. A chair sold on Amazon being viewed through the company's AR app, "AR View" (iOS version).

AWS' Amazon Sumerian is a non-technical platform for creating AR or VR applications without programming. Imagine that we have a room hosted by an AI-enriched host avatar. The rooms are easily filled with three-dimensional objects and, from what we can discern, the room can be as large or small as developers wish to make it. Perhaps this could be a furniture showroom. The host can be a sales representative who shows online shoppers selections from any chosen category. Sometime in the near future, haptic technologies could be added on, perhaps in the form of a glove. Then, shoppers could actually feel textures and surfaces.

A "No Install Needed" AR World

In late 2016, Amazon began planning for what AR and VR should look like for AWS customers, with a preview debuting at AWS re:Invent. They then bought Goo Technologies, a bankrupt Swedish company. Goo Create, its three-dimensional creation platform, became the foundation of Sumerian's Integrated Development Environment (IDE). One of the biggest benefits of a scalable cloud infrastructure is to be able to dramatically reduce latency, a feature that is very important for quality presentation and manipulation when using mobile AR apps. Another huge benefit is that you won't need to load up a new app just to, say, see some functionality in a shopping mall.

With regard to open standards, Sumerian supports several of them: WebGL, WebAR, WebVR, and the emerging WebXR framework that brings AR/VR apps universally to all devices and browsers across platforms.

Photo credit: Wayfair. Advertising for Wayfair's "View in Room 3D" app

In many ways, Wayfair Furniture is the cultural opposite of Walmart: It prides itself on having its engineering team at the core of its organization and credits engineers for "creating customer experiences that we would enjoy ourselves."

Founded in 2002, it fits the classic start-up model. Two high school pals go off to college together and fall in love with technology. They start on a shoestring with a single home furnishings boutique, then another, and another. They consolidate into a single online home-furnishings superstore, go public, and become one of the most successful retailers in modern history.

Today, they offer over 10 million products from over 10,000 suppliers and yet the two founders who continue to head the company see Wayfair as a tech company, rather than a home furnishing merchant.

They are sometimes credited with inventing the term "v-commerce" to replace the older "e-commerce" term because the concept of a virtual store for real shoppers is what they say they are all about. We point to this because we believe it gives insight into their corporate culture and priorities.

Accordingly, the company has been early to introduce AR over VR apps. Since 2018, Wayfair has partnered up with Magic Leap to test out new AR experiences for its customers. Wayfair Next, the company's lab, has been aggressive in working on evolving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional renderings in catalogs and online. It introduced an app with the ill-fated launch of Google Tango for the Lenovo Phab 2 phone in 2016 that allowed shoppers to see how a piece of furniture fitted and looked in their homes.

While that attempt was limited, it came back to be introduced as the "View in Room 3D" app that was launched with ARKit at the same time as the IKEA Place app. While it did not receive the coverage and favorable reviews that IKEA Place received, it was generally perceived as a quality offering with a broad selection of three-dimensional rendered items for sale. As with other competitors included in this report, Wayfair introduced an Android version of its AR app based on ARCore in early 2018, following its iOS ARKit version introduced in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Wayfair has also been quick and aggressive on all popular social media platforms, where 71 percent of all consumers say they are influenced on buying decisions. Understanding that visual product representations are extremely important to marketing and sales, it has made Instagram a top priority and achieved its greatest growth on any social platform there.

Photo credit: Houzz. Advertising for Houzz's "View in My Room 3D" app.

Founded in 2010, by a Silicon Valley couple who became frustrated with trying to find useful information online to help them with home renovation, Houzz is a community of home improvement people, architects, contractors, furniture, and home accessory providers.

It started on the iPad and did not get to Android until 2013. By then, the community had helped more than six million people. Houzz is focused on helping buyers and makes most of its money through commissions from selected vendors and from its online marketplace.

It began to go international in 2014. Today, it has localized versions for the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, India, Ireland, and New Zealand.

Since its start, the online-only community platform has been prolific with innovative products, most of which are not currently on AR or VR, but have the potential to be used in that way moving forward.

These include:

• Real Cost Finder: An interactive tool that helps users plan home renovations and calculate total costs based on data collected from the Houzz community
• Site Designer: A free website-building and publishing tool for home professionals
• Houzz TV: This is essentially videos on room designs that we assume will be immersive in one form or another
• Sketch: A feature that lets users upload their own photos or choose any from the platform to add products from the Houzz Marketplace and see how they would work in rooms being redesigned
• Visual Match: A visual recognition tool that uses Deep Learning technology to analyze more than 11 million home photos on Houzz and drag and drop two-dimensional versions into the "View My Room 3D" app

Each of these items would clearly work better in AR than they do currently. Based on Houzz's embrace for emergent technologies, we assume that development work is already going to upgrade one or all of these.

As is the case with every company mentioned so far, the Houzz "View in My Room 3D" AR app for iOS and Android does essentially what IKEA Place does, and from our testing of it, it works quite well, offering over 500,000 images rendered in 3D. Houzz's focus is on AR, not VR, though an earlier version of "View in my Room 3D" was also available to be viewed in VR.

Photo credit: Lowe's app for The Mine. Lowe's high-end luxury furnishings operation.

In March 2018, Fast Company named Lowe's the most innovative company in AR, VR, and MR (followed by Houzz and Wayfair). They cited an ongoing campaign of using internally developed immersive technologies to make all aspects of home and office improvement easy and accessible. The publication specifically cited Lowe's Measured app for the iPhone, which essentially turns handheld devices into digital tape measures and lets users share a visual measurement of the height of a chandelier or the distance to the hot tub in the backyard with friends on social media. Almost simultaneously, The Mine, Lowe's high-end luxury furnishings operation, acquired and renamed in 2017, introduced Envisioned, a shopping app that lets anyone browse a catalog of furnishings and then digitally superimpose items in their own homes using AR. Unlike competing apps, iPhone users can view furniture objects in the spaces they will occupy at home from 360-degree perspectives.

The retail Spatial Computing experiences discussed here are helpful when trying to make a decision as to whether or not to buy something. They tie into our view that in the future, physical retail stores will eventually be non-existent, except for, perhaps, those that sell high-priced luxury and/or unusual items.

The Past and The Future

Much of the future of retail has its roots in what exists today. People will continue to have a need or desire to buy something, whether it be a pear, a pair of pants, or a sailboat. It also seems that the need and urge to buy things in stores traverses time. Going back a few thousand years, archeologists have found remnants of stores that were set up in Ancient Greece and Rome. Currently, we still have physical stores where people go to buy things. Going back to the early 1900s, there were some mail-order catalogs where you could order items. The Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog was a very prominent example. Sears, Roebuck and Company had actually started in 1892 as a completely mail-order company, with its physical retail stores only opening up starting in the 1920s.

The idea of ordering something without having to go to a store and having it delivered directly to you is certainly not a new one.

Photo credit: Sears, Roebuck and Company. Early 1900's Sears, Roebuck and Company Household Catalog.

The clothing company, J.Crew, from 1983 to 1989, existed only as a mail-order company. The modern incarnation of the mail-order company is one that places its full catalog online exclusively, such as Amazon. More commonly, hybrids exist where physical stores, physical catalogs, and internet sales all contribute to a company's revenues.

Commonly heard, though, are stories of companies who want to have a much more fully fledged and thriving digital presence above all, such as Nike and Walmart. This is just the start of the digital model fully eclipsing the physical model when it comes to retail operations.

Photo credit: Los Angeles Public Library. Pedestrians crowd the intersection of Seventh Street and Broadway, Downtown Los Angeles, circa 1937.

It used to be that the downtown areas of major cities were where people would congregate to go on regular buying sprees and have their fill of social interaction. Retail tasks would need to be planned for and lists were made so that nothing would be left out―each trip made was usually coordinated and well thought out.

The downtown areas of major cities thrived on this constant influx of retail buying power. Whole industries and businesses grew around it―movie theaters, restaurants, and circuses, to name a few.

Photo credit: Public domain. B. Altman and Company department store in New York City, circa 1948.

Department store buildings were made so large so that they could accommodate the vast variety of different objects for sale, as well as the large number of prospective incoming shoppers.

Most of these large behemoths have ceased to exist, though Macy's Herald Square in New York City is still standing since 1901 (albeit some of the original space has been leased out to other companies).

It appears that these days, the large spaces for retail are its logistics spaces―non-public warehouses that hold items in a very organized and project-oriented way. Spatial Computing appears to be getting a major toehold not only in warehouse and packaging logistics, but also along the full arc of retail fulfillment, which includes the sampling of goods via three-dimensional visuals followed by the ordering of them―all done digitally.

Photo credit: Amazon. An Amazon logistics center in Madrid.

The future of retail belongs to those companies that seamlessly and transparently offer Spatial Computing systems that allow for frictionless retail fulfillment. When goods are received faster, something resembling joy could ensue.

Photo credit: Apple. The glass window design of the Apple Park building that is prescient of the AR glasses Apple had leaked will come out in 2023.

One company that is due to capitalize on this is clearly Apple, with its devoted loyal customer base. When Apple's AR glasses come out, as it is rumored they will in 2023, an "army" of people using their Spatial Computing technology will be ready to purchase retail goods seamlessly, using eye-gaze selection and voice commands. The days of going to a physical store are truly numbered.

Will Anything Remain the Same?

As we look at all the changes coming to retail in general, we see that Spatial Computing will bring major changes to the supply chains that feed goods to stores, to the stores themselves, to the experience of using the stores, either in physical locations or at home, and to the distribution networks of trucks and robots that will bring goods to our homes and offices. There are lots of changes ahead―ones that are keeping many an executive up at night. These changes might seem fairly mundane compared to what's potentially coming to healthcare―all hitting in the 2020s. Will anything be the same again? "No" is our prediction, as you'll discover in the next chapter.