Mark Schauer, Director, R&D Studio @ 84.51°
Virtual reality, once the darling technology poised to be the next significant way that people engage with each other and with businesses, continues its maturation into a viable channel even as the hype has faded away. Here we’ll briefly look at how the technology is evolving and at how Kroger and 84.51° envision grocery retail in VR.
Virtual Reality Today
Virtual reality is amazing. You remember the first time you put on a headset. VR can instantly transport you to real or imaginary places, creating a truly immersive experience. It erases the geographic distance between people, allowing old college friends to watch a movie together on a virtual couch, or potentially even shop for their groceries side-by-side. VR is also endlessly dynamic and customizable, allowing true personalization for each experience.
So, what’s the hold up? In a classic chicken-or-egg scenario, consumers will not buy VR hardware until there are experiences that they feel justify the investment. And the same is true for content creators; they aren’t going to create content until there is a large enough user base to warrant the cost of creation. For consumers, the first-generation VR setups could easily run $2,000 after considering the cost of the powerful PC required to power the experiences. Because of that cost, VR has been limited to a niche segment of gamers (there are cheaper alternatives like Google Cardboard, Oculus Go, and Samsung VR, but those I would call passive VR, where you are mainly just observing a 3D scene — not really being fully immersed).
The cost barrier, however, is about to change as VR hardware manufactures like Oculus and HTC are rolling out a new generation of hardware. As mentioned above, first generation VR setups required a powerful PC as well as tracking stations to accurately and quickly track the user’s position in 3D space. The new generation of hardware is self-contained — no expensive PC, no tracking stations… just a headset and two controllers. They use inside-out tracking, meaning the headset itself has cameras that scan the space around it to identify the user’s precise location. And instead of shelling out $2,000, Oculus’s Quest, for example, starts at $400 and will be available to customers basically now.
So, is VR back on the fast track to being in everyone’s home? No, not yet. But as the price of admission drops, a path to success becomes clearer, and as a retailer we can start to ask, “what does commerce, specifically grocery retail, look like in VR?”
Kroger VR
While some might imagine pushing a virtual cart down a digital aisle in a Kroger store, the truth is it could look like whatever the shopper might like. Brick and mortar stores have come to look a certain way because it makes sense in the physical world. However, in a VR shopping experience, a consumer could browse for wines in a vineyard in Tuscany. In the next minute, they could be shopping for fresh seafood at Pike Place Market in Seattle. Or Game of Thrones fans might walk around the market within King’s Landing. Why not? With VR, customers get to choose how and where they shop.
Each interaction could include real or virtual experts with in-depth product knowledge to help educate and guide the user’s shopping experience. This would also give brands the opportunity to instruct the potential buyer on any peripheral information that might further inform their purchase, including social missions, ingredient sourcing, nutritional information or multimedia demonstrations to show the shopper exactly how and where the product is made. Instead of a small label on the product, brands could now offer a fully immersive experience to communicate product messages.
And most importantly, every VR experience can be personalized to the individual consumer. Using 84.51°’s rich data and insights, customers will shop for the products we know they’ll love in whatever personalized environment they choose. We won’t show them a thousand products when we know they care about ten.
Conclusion
As the cost of entry continues to drop, virtual reality becomes a more viable channel for customers and retailers. And with VR’s unique set of capabilities, it could become another way for Kroger customers to shop, complimenting the in-store and traditional digital experiences.
