Shop furniture in the Metaverse at JD.com and Alibaba

Does the new sofa fit into the living room? And the chairs to the sofa? And the wall color for the cover? In China, these classic questions about buying furniture have long been answered in the Metaverse. JD.com has developed a digital platform for the Metaverse where customers can discover furniture and decorative items in a virtual environment. The platform works with over 1,000 furniture manufacturers to be able to present 3D models for over 100,000 products virtually.

The Alibaba subsidiary Tmall also uses the Metaverse to create virtual showrooms in the Metaverse in cooperation with offline furniture retailers. Customers can view the products in Tmall’s virtual Metaverse store, but they can also display them directly in their virtual homes. Anyone who creates their house as a digital copy of their real dwelling in the real world can try out directly in the metaverse what a piece of furniture would look like in their own living room. The boundaries between reality and metaverse are becoming increasingly blurred: because most of the 3D models are not just an image of their real templates, they can also be bought as NFT and placed in the digital houses in the metaverse.

Digital furniture for digital houses

In fact, in this example, trade in real goods follows trade in digital products – and not vice versa. At the beginning of the Metaverse hype a good two years ago, “land” ownership in the virtual world was a coveted commodity: Over 500 million US dollars were spent on land in the Metaverse in 2021. In 2022 the price dropped significantly, but a large number of virtual dwellings continued to be created on the various Metaverse platforms.

And all these houses want to be furnished appropriately – so it wasn’t a big step to the first furniture NFTs. But once there is a 3D version of a real product, it is not far to the sale in the real world. To do this, JD.com, Tmall and Co. bring manufacturers and retailers on board who would not be able to gain a foothold in the Metaverse without the support of these platforms.

They are also supported by the Chinese government: In November 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published a plan to integrate VR technology into industrial applications. This plan envisages a market volume for the VR industry in China of over 350 billion yuan by 2026; 100 new companies with a strong focus on the metaverse are to be created for this purpose. The furniture stores in the Metaverse are just a first step.