What Is a Product Configurator?

Product configurators use technologies like OpenUSD and generative AI to create photorealistic, 3D digital twins of products to improve design, personalize advertising, and facilitate collaboration.

Product configurator software uses a set of configuration rules and logic in an interactive interface, allowing users to customize a product or scene according to their preferences.

Configurators, available on a website or application, can display products in 2D or 3D views, powering detailed product visualization. Users can change their experience by selecting options such as size, color, material, or components. Each choice can unlock additional customizable products or features relevant to the previous selection. As users make selections, the configurator updates the display in real time. This helps designers, engineers, and shoppers see what the final product will look like, aiding in decision making.

Workflow diagram showing the process of generating images and 3D models of a classic Coca-Cola bottle with a fried chicken dinner using prompts, AI models like Edify Image or SDXL, and NVIDIA Omniverse™ Cloud. Outputs include 3D, image, and video formats.

Configurators can transform the sales process by enabling creative teams, designers, or customers to interact with 3D digital twins of products in real time.

3D product configurators enable companies to develop and deliver engaging experiences and content at scale, using entirely digital environments. This helps address collaboration challenges among design teams and empowers sales teams to enhance customer experiences.

This brings more interactive experiences to customers, addresses collaboration challenges of design teams, and helps sales teams connect with customers effectively. By using 3D product configurators, companies can:

• Improve product experiences: Enable customers to interactively view and personalize products in 3D, featuring true-to-life representations. This helps boost engagement with the product, strengthens brand connections, and removes friction from the purchasing process.
• Hyper-personalize advertising: Develop solutions and workflows that automatically create web content by utilizing real-time inputs and a variety of predefined asset options. For instance, AI-enabled configurators can produce on-demand cinematic representations of unique products from a single dataset, incorporating factors like region, language, and user preferences to tailor content for specific audiences.
• Accelerate content production processes: Develop applications that enable non-3D artists to easily create and personalize impressive 3D content for marketing initiatives and more.
• Reduce costs: Cut expenses and shorten content creation cycles by repurposing extensive datasets. Implement generative AI to handle repetitive tasks, freeing up teams to concentrate on sales processes and customer engagement.

Configurators are already making an impact in retail, fashion, design, and automobile manufacturing and sales.

Product configurators can be a powerful tool for customized advertising, allowing brands to personalize content for target markets at scale. Marketing and advertising teams use configurator solutions to quickly modify aspects of content that may resonate with the intended audience. For example, a car commercial can be quickly modified with a configurator solution to have the landscape, car color, and vehicle accessories that are hyper-personalized to a certain buyer type.

Configurators can also be embedded in digital ads, allowing potential customers to interact with the product directly before they make a purchase decision. By developing a product configurator solution, companies can offer shoppers the opportunity to engage with products featuring various accessories, components, and styles in different settings.

For high-ticket items that entail carefully considered purchase decisions, product configurator software can be especially useful. In one case study, CGI studio Katana developed a product configurator application, COATCreate, enabling vehicle manufacturers to stage marketing assets 10X faster by leveraging product digital twins. COATCreate also allows users to view and customize the digital twin while wearing an Apple Vision Pro headset, unlocking real-time, ray-traced extended reality experiences.

Consumer packaged goods companies can also localize experiences with the content creation abilities made possible by configurators. Working with global marketing networking partner WPP, Coca-Cola is rolling out configurator-based digital twin tools to help it personalize imagery across 100+ markets, delivering hyperlocal content with speed at global scale.

Product configurators can elevate the ecommerce experience with personalized visual content for shoppers. Plugins to integrate configurators on popular platforms such as WooCommerce and Shopify are helping break down barriers to next-level ecommerce experiences across digital spaces.

• Personalization: Configurators offer the functionality to tailor products to specific customer preferences and needs. A configurator allows them to select colors, materials, and other features according to their preferences.
• Visualization: Seeing a real-time visual representation of customized products helps shoppers make informed decisions. They can see exactly what they are ordering, which reduces uncertainty and increases satisfaction with their purchase.
• User engagement: The interactive nature of product configurators makes the shopping experience more engaging. Customers enjoy the process of creating something unique, which can turn a simple purchase into an enjoyable activity, thereby increasing ecommerce conversion rates and overall customer satisfaction.
• Speed and convenience: Configurators streamline the decision-making process. Customers can make all of their choices in one interface without needing to consult sales reps or browse through an entire product catalog. This can significantly enhance the shopping experience and ensure consumers are well informed by the time they reach out to sales teams.
• Increased confidence: When customers have control over the design of their product and can see the outcome before purchasing, it increases their confidence in both the product and the retailer. This trust can lead to higher satisfaction levels and repeat business.
• Up-to-date product information: A product configurator linked to an ecommerce FAQ offers an interactive method to address shopper questions regarding their unique product specifications, ensuring they receive the most precise information.

Enterprises must confront several challenges to ensure successful deployment of product configurators that deliver enriching user experiences.

• Complexity of configuration logic: Designing backend logic that handles all possible customization combinations can be highly complex, especially for products with numerous options. Ensuring that all combinations are valid and that the configurator doesn't allow incompatible choices requires careful planning and testing.
• User interface design: Creating an intuitive, user-friendly interface that can handle customizations without overwhelming the customer can be a challenge. The interface should guide the user through the customization process in a logical, understandable manner.
• Performance: Using high-quality images and 3D models to show product customizations in real time, configurators can be resource intensive. Computing power sufficient to ensure that the configurator loads quickly and runs smoothly under varying usage loads on all devices is crucial to maintaining a good user experience.
• Data management: Managing the data involved in customization, including user inputs, default settings, and final configurations, can be complex. Data must be stored securely and be easily retrievable for analysis and customer service purposes.
• Costs: Owing to the advanced programming skills needed to integrate systems while leveraging advanced graphics and 3D models, building a custom product configurator can be a significant investment.

Developers can build interactive, photoreal, 3D product configurators with generative AI, OpenUSD, NVIDIA Omniverse APIs, SDKs, NVIDIA NIM™, and other plugins.

When aggregated into OpenUSD, computer-aided design (CAD)-accurate data can be fetched from design teams faster and delivered to marketing teams for use in campaign asset creation and digital experiences.

The rendering capabilities of Omniverse and NVIDIA RTX™ allow for rapid creation of articulated product configurators and enable developers to integrate real-time ray-traced rendering into their solutions. These technologies are crucial for rendering photorealistic digital twins of products, ensuring that the visualizations are both accurate and visually appealing.

By implementing generative AI models, such as NVIDIA Edify, configurators can adapt to user input to dynamically adjust output based on real-time interactions.

NVIDIA Iray® is a physically based rendering technology that produces photorealistic images for both interactive and batch rendering workflows. It enhances product configurators by generating lifelike visuals with accurate materials, lighting, and reflections tailored to user customizations. Advanced plugins developed by integration partners enable Iray functionality within popular 3D content creation tools like Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, and McNeel Rhinoceros.

With NVIDIA NIM microservices like USD Search NIM and USD Code NIM, configurators can access extensive virtual asset libraries and generate Python code to rapidly develop and iterate on 3D content that is relevant and tailored to specific audiences.

NVIDIA’s Graphics Delivery Network ensures that configurators can deliver high-quality, real-time viewports embedded into web applications, allowing consumers to interact with product configurator software on nearly any device.

These tools help developers build configuration processes for complex products across industries.