The past 18 months have continued to test and push nearly every industry to change and adapt to our increasingly digital world. The digital landscape has taken over and the 3D internet is coming.

Today, the internet as we know it has gone through a basic 1.0 version, a social 2.0 era, and is now entering the 3.0 or 3D era. Think about your online shopping experience for a moment — you start by browsing .jpg images of a product, you click on the 2D photo to buy it. It’s a stale experience.

In the web3.0 world, you can move around the product, zoom in, swirl to see the back, zoom out and click to see the product in your very own living room via AR (augmented reality). And there’s another trend that we will attempt to unpack here — cryptocurrencies and why it matters for brands who will sell virtual products in 3D.

Cryptocurrencies are a new asset class on the rise. A token, most notably Bitcoin is a digital asset that you can buy while it’s cheap, and then sell while it’s going up. However, not all tokens are created equal. Non-fungible tokens (NFT) represent an entirely different purpose. NFTs will revolutionize cryptocurrency itself by creating unique tokens on blockchain networks.

What does NFT stand for? Non-fungible token, or NFT, is set to revolutionize the way cryptocurrencies are used. It’s a digital asset on the Ethereum network that is used to represent ownership of anything from tangible to virtual or even both. Think of it like a stock representing your product on a blockchain network.

Selling Virtual Products

The Intersection of 3D & NFTs begins to form this perfect combination of digital assets and the physical world. Instead of a 2D photo of an item you can own the 3D asset as well, and with NFT’s that 3D asset can now be used in the metaverse.

You can buy the virtual hoodie in 3D and that digital purchase now sends you a physical hoodie. This reversal in transaction order allows brands to explore on-demand manufacturing and ways to only produce a product when it has been purchased. The ability to be more efficient in production and eliminate waste from excess manufacturing.

What is the Metaverse?
If you haven’t heard the latest trend in technology, there’s no doubt that NFT’s and the metaverse are the biggest topics in the tech space now. Roblox, Decentraland, Sandbox & Digital Village are all new platforms working to build virtual worlds. Brands like Burberry and Adidas have virtual shopping experiences that are beautiful to walk through — the key word being experience. These are more than digital assets, the ability for a user to walk-through a virtual space with AR capabilities changes the game completely.

Companies like ReadyPlayerMe and RTFKT are allowing users to build ready-made and interoperable avatars that I can now wear with my NFT’d virtual sneakers. I own them in the metaverse. The next step is the Virtual try-on of these digital assets where you and your phone’s camera become the avatar and the garment remains digital.

How Threedium Supports Brands
Over the last few years, Threedium built a web-based 3D model viewer with powerful sharing and management functions. Through our platform users can annotate the 3D model, edit the background, and save different positions of the model. The model can be shared either by embedding it on your website or through a private web ready link.

This 3D engine is helping brands turn their physical assets into 3D models that can be embedded and used on their website. The ability for a user to swirl around the product eliminates the need to scroll through dozens of 2D flat images to find the front or back of the product. It is literally in their hands when it is in 3D. It is no longer a stale experience

Fast forward to today and the world of NFT’s and the metaverse are on a collision course with the mass adoption of crypto currency and large global brands like Diageo and Adidas making plans to build their own virtual shopping experiences. We are helping to bring 3D products to life inside of our increasingly digital world.

The Roadmap
Threedium is right at the intersection between the physical, digital and metaverse world. Our aspiration is to continue building a world-class low code/no code 3D Engine that will allow any brand, or agency or individual to build the 3D Internet. The ambitious goal over the next 12 months is to provide our users with ability to:

• Turn volume of images into 3D/AR Digital Twins at lightning fast speed
• Upload 1000s of 3D Files and textures in minutes and publish them equally fast across different placeholders through our Scalable RestAPI.
• Design powerful new immersive PDP pages to elevate product display across eComm and Metaverse with zero coding, zero modelling required
• Build advance 3D product configurators with simple logics and ability to integrate seamlessly across any CMS.
• Launch beautiful and highly engaging 3D Display ads readily distributable via any Ad Exchange.
• Publish any digital twin with an attached smart contract on any selected Blockchain, having the ability to mint it in NFT Marketplaces or utilising a Physical/Digital POS transaction.
• (This is a slightly longer — term goal) But we are assembling a team of top notch engineers and 3D experts to create an unparalleled distribution system which will allow full interoperability and portability of all your digital assets across the web, the metaverse and the NFT Marketplaces.

The day is not that far when you will be able to turn your hoodie images into an Immersive Hoodie display, prove its authenticity, sell it physically and digitally, use it to dress your avatar anywhere on the Metaverse or even yourself through an AR Experience through your device. Brands that solve for this now will have a head start in the both the physical and digital worlds.