Reference

Spatial Commerce Glossary

Key terms in spatial commerce, augmented reality, AI 3D technology, and ecommerce visualisation — defined for retailers and developers.

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2.5D Visualisation: A clever blend of photography and spatial modelling that lets you move furniture inside your real room photo. Not quite full 3D. Not flat either. The sweet spot.

3D Gaussian Splatting: 3D Gaussian Splatting is a real-time 3D scene representation technique that models a scene as a collection of 3D Gaussian functions (ellipsoidal splats) fitted to data captured from images or video. Each splat encodes spatial position, orientation, scale, opacity, and view-dependent color via spherical harmonics. By rasterizing these Gaussians onto the image plane, the technique enables high-quality novel view synthesis at real-time rendering speeds, making it a powerful alternative to implicit neural representations like NeRF.
3D Product Rendering: A photorealistic digital image of a product, generated from a 3D model. Looks like a photo. Costs less than a photoshoot. Works everywhere.

AI Design Assistant: An AI-powered tool that helps shoppers style their space — suggesting products, layouts, and combinations based on their room and preferences. Like having a designer on call, 24/7.
Augmented Reality (AR): A technology that overlays digital objects onto your real-world view through a phone or tablet camera. Point. Place. See if it fits.

Conversion Confidence: The moment a shopper stops wondering and starts buying — because they can see exactly how a product looks in their space. Doubt is the enemy of the add-to-cart.

Fit Confidence: The certainty a shopper feels when they know a product will look right and fit properly in their space. The feeling that turns browsing into buying.

GLB & USDZ: GLB and USDZ are the two dominant file formats used for delivering 3D models and Augmented Reality experiences on the web and mobile devices.

HD Render Mode: Imersian's one-click feature that generates a photorealistic, high-resolution image of a product placed in a room. Studio-quality output. Zero studio required.

Immersive Shopping: A shopping experience that goes beyond browsing — letting you interact with, place, and style products in your own environment before you buy. Less scrolling. More deciding.
Interactive Product Visualisation: The ability for shoppers to rotate, zoom, place, and style a product in real time — before it ever arrives at their door. Confidence, built in.

Magic Eraser: Imersian's AI-powered room decluttering tool. Upload a photo of your room, and it removes existing furniture automatically — leaving a clean canvas for new products. No Photoshop required.

Neural Radiance Fields | NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a technique that uses a neural network to represent a 3D scene as a continuous volumetric function. Given a 3D coordinate and a viewing direction as input, the network outputs the corresponding color and volume density at that point. NeRF's key capability is photorealistic novel view synthesis — generating new camera perspectives of a scene from only a sparse set of 2D input images.
Neural Reconstruction: Neural reconstruction is the use of neural networks to reconstruct the 3D geometry, appearance, and structure of real-world objects or environments from 2D images, video, or sensor data. By learning continuous scene representations, these models can synthesize novel viewpoints and recover detailed surface information from sparse or unstructured inputs. Neural reconstruction underpins technologies such as NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) and 3D Gaussian Splatting, and is widely applied in digital twins, product visualization, and immersive commerce.

Occlusion (in 3D): In Augmented Reality, occlusion is the ability of digital 3D objects to be realistically hidden or obscured by real-world physical objects in the user's environment.

PDP (Product Detail Page): The page on your ecommerce store where a single product lives, with its images, description, price, and buy button. The most important page in your store. Make it count.

Real-Scale Placement: When a product appears in AR or a room preview at its actual physical dimensions — not guessed, not approximated. A 3-metre sofa looks like a 3-metre sofa. Every time.
Room Reconstruction: The process of digitally mapping a physical room from photos or video, so products can be placed inside it accurately. Your room, made interactive.

SKU Sync: The automatic matching of product variants in your store to their corresponding 3D models or visual assets. Change the colour in your store. The 3D model updates too.
Spatial Commerce: Spatial commerce is the integration of 3D visualization, Augmented Reality, and spatial computing into the retail journey, allowing consumers to interact with products in a true-to-scale, three-dimensional context.
Spatial Fit Detection: The ability to detect whether a product physically fits in a given space — based on room dimensions and product size. Know before you order. Return less.
Spatial Technology: Software that understands physical space — dimensions, depth, surfaces — and uses that understanding to place digital objects accurately in the real world.

Theme App Extension: A Shopify feature that lets apps add functionality directly to your storefront theme — without touching your theme code. Plug in. Switch on. No developer needed.
True-to-Scale: When a product is shown at its exact real-world size — not stretched, not shrunk, not estimated. What you see is what arrives. No surprises.

Visual Commerce: Shopping that lets you see products in context before you buy. Because imagination is great. But certainty converts.
Visualise Before You Buy: The ability to see exactly how a product looks in your space — before you commit. Because a great photo is not the same as knowing it works in your living room.

WebAR: Web-based Augmented Reality (WebAR) allows users to experience 3D content directly through a smartphone web browser, eliminating the need to download a standalone application.