See It, Believe It: New Headset Will Let You Shop Supermarkets Virtually
Think back to your favorite make believe games when you were little. If you skipped past pretty, pretty princess to fill up a little plastic shopping cart with fake foods, you might be pretty, pretty excited about the latest world virtual reality is bringing you into: Supermarkets.
Virtual reality headset Oculus Rift spent most of last week’s Game Developers Conference hogging the spotlight or sharing it with Sony’s pending and competing Project Morpheus. And rightfully so. Tech bloggers wrote breathless reports of what it felt like to step into VR, to swap bodies with someone else, to feel truly immersed in a whole new world. But the below video, posted by creative agency Figure Digital, had us doing a double take this AM.
In it, users are shown walking through a 3D recreation of UK supermarket Tesco. The agency’s idea is to use virtual reality to give brands a way to share their message by creating a world that a shopper could visit from anywhere.
Would touring a supermarket virtually really enhance your shopping experience more than say, ordering groceries online, on an app or doing the aisle walk IRL? Probably not. But it could offer an exciting preview of a new store. You could use the headset to take a virtual tour of a “coming soon” shop for a whole different kind of comparison shopping when you’re filling up your cart at your old faithful market. “That virtual recreation of Future Foods had the organic, gluten-free frozen burritos I like — why doesn’t this crummy ol Whole Foods have it?!” you might find yourself thinking. You can pre-order Oculus Rift DK2 now for $350 and July shipping.
And, let’s think big picture here, people — what if you could play a virtual game of SUPERMARKET SWEEPS? Now THAT would be cool.
What would you want to do using virtual reality? Sound off below!
