Have you ever thought that one day, with the help of a VR headset, you are able to be teleported to a super shopping mall in another country. You can immerse yourself in the 3D real scene, walk through the product shelve lines, and choose your favorite products freely, and interact with the selected products. You can confirm the purchase “on-site” and wait for the parcel to be delivered to your door.
Since the Covid19 pandemic, online shopping has been increasingly common in the daily life, which provides the contactless shopping experience for consumers. Compared with shopping in real shops, the biggest problem with the online shopping is the size matching. For example, the clothes size does not fit, or the showing picture is not updated or authentic enough and what you get is different from what you see in the shopping site. Moreover, the cloth material may not comfortable, or looks bad when fit in your body. Normally the parcel is coming from another city or even another state, so it is time-consuming and troublesome to exchange or return the product. With high-immersive virtual reality (VR) systems technology booming in the consumer market, VR shopping applications are expanding rapidly. Will the virtual reality technology be a game changer?
China is No.1 in the term of the online GMV, and the biggest online shopping platform Taobao had ever conducted a Buy+ VR shopping campaign. It allows the users in China to visit famous shopping malls in US, Japan and Australia virtually from the comfortable coach at home.
Macy’s
This section is mainly for bags and luxury goods. There are 2-foot icons on the left hand side to guide consumers. There are many men’s and women’s watches, each with a label icon showing the brand and model. Stare at it for a while and details pop up in space.
In the middle is the 3D animation of the product, on the left is the name and price information, and on the right is the button to close or pay. After completing the transaction, a button to return to the home page will appear, returning to the VR model room just now.
Following this process, consumers are able to travel between the US, Japan and Australia several times within 10 minutes.
The biggest feature of online shopping is efficiency. You can browse hundreds of millions of products around the world without leaving your home, and you pick whatever you want. Through the panoramic video of the cutscene, it will take you to travel around the world, through the panoramic scene of the destination, it will give you the feeling of shopping, and through the rendering of the overall environment and atmosphere, the shopping fun will be enhanced. This is undoubtedly an innovative attempt, trying to construct a new shopping scene, integrating the joy of site-touring and the efficiency of online shopping.