Walmart is using Matterport, a provider of thousands of virtual 3D home tours for property listings, to power an immersive shopping experience on the retailer’s website.
The collaboration marks a win for Matterport, thrusting its technology further into the mainstream.
In the home products section of walmart.com, homeowners and renters can roam a Matterport apartment tour that features roughly 70 items from major brands and Walmart’s own product lines.
The model leverages Matterport’s tagging feature, known as MatterTags, to allow consumers to click items to pull up basic information and then order them on Walmart’s website. The items include everything from a TV, sofa and butter dish to an ottoman, tableware and wall tapestry.
Real estate agents use Matterport’s 3D camera and software to generate 3D models of their listings, and have the option to add MatterTags to their tours to flag home highlights.
When asked if Matterport planned to let agents make items purchasable from their tours, Chris Bell, a spokesman for Matterport, said the company “wasn’t ready to announce anything more detailed about commerce or merchandising features to be deeply integrated into Matterport models.”
“But the Walmart example is a clear harbinger of where things are going,” he added.
Other providers of 3D home tours include GeoCV, NCTech and Realvision. In January, Zillow Group unveiled a free app that lets agents, brokers and real estate photographers capture 3D tours on their iPhones.
