Harnessing the power of Web3, Samsung presents a glimpse of what the future of the storefront looks like for brands great and small.
You no longer have to bring your physical self to New York City to experience Samsung’s NYC flagship store location in between the Whitney Museum of Art and Chelsea Market in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
Samsung 837X, alluding to the company’s physical location at 837 Washington Street, opened Thursday in the metaverse on gamified, blockchain-powered virtual platform Decentraland as Samsung 837X on a limited-time basis. The opening included a dance party by DJ Gamma Vibes from the physical location with mixed reality elements that included metaverse guests in the action, a first for the company.
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Once you enter the Ethereum-based Decentraland on your desktop, your avatar will appear outside 837X. Once you walk into the lobby, you’ll have the option to enter one of three parts of the virtual store:
- “Connectivity Theater” will deliver Samsung’s latest news from the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas through Jan. 8. On Thursday, the company unveiled plans for a foldable laptop, a tablet, speakers and a smartphone concept as part of its presentation entitled “Together for Tomorrow.”
- “Customization Stage” is the place to dance and vibe out metaverse-style.
- “Sustainability Forest” highlights Samsung’s partnership with Veritree, including a pledge to plant two million trees by Q1 of 2022 as part of the fight against climate change.
“The metaverse empowers us to transcend physical and spatial limits to create unique virtual experiences that could not happen otherwise,” Michelle Crossan-Matos, Samsung Electronics America’s senior vice president of corporate marketing and communications, said in a statement. “Innovation is in our DNA.”
Samsung said it will try out this concept in other forms, but it hasn’t been shy about experimenting in the Web3 landscape. As part of its new lineup of MICRO LED, Neo QLED, and Lifestyle TVs, the company unveiled a new NFT platform for its televisions’ Smart Hubs. There, users will be able to find, buy, and trade blockchain-powered collectibles on a dynamic marketplace.
Just in this week alone, Samsung has made multiple, distinct inroads in the metaverse and NFT spaces, making it a Web3 player to be reckoned with as we begin 2022.
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