Exploring a Virtual Retail Experience
A new product journey that uses more-accessible platforms.
“Wow. Ok. Now I get it.”
That’s the response you’ll usually get from someone experiencing high-end VR for the first time. VR has an immediate transportive effect that’s hard to describe, but when you try it, you get it. Since the launch of the Vive and Rift, the number of these experiences has exploded. The best examples are games and interactive storytelling titles, and the immersive quality of VR is still potent after hours of play. However, eventually the initial novelty wears off, leaving many people with the follow-up question:
“So what?”
So what if virtual worlds provide novel entertainment, what else can VR offer? Can people be productive in VR? Are there user needs that only VR can satisfy? Is Virtual Reality a legitimate service channel? We wanted to find a Virtual Reality product that addressed user needs beyond entertainment in a way that was only achievable in a virtual environment.
In thinking about what products could capitalize on VR, we searched for a product from an industry that benefits from giving users access to objects and environments they couldn’t usually access. Of all of the examples we explored, the retail industry has by far the most potential for interesting exploration. VR enables companies like IKEA, CB2, and Dwell, to immerse customers and readers in an interactive and highly personalized furniture shopping or explorative experience.
We found opportunities between what retail customers need and what VR does well:
- Furniture is hard to buy without seeing it in person. VR puts those objects in front of people, allowing them to pick up, inspect, and customize them.
- Some retail stores, like IKEA, are less accessible compared to other chains because there aren’t as many of them. VR transports people to out-of-reach environments.
- Retailers already use detailed computer-generated environments to showcase products in their catalog and could easily repurpose those environments for VR.
There’s a lot of untapped strategy and execution potential with VR that allows retail customers to do something that isn’t possible with other channels:
- Websites allow users to browse entire collections of goods, but can’t quite translate the experience you’d have with a product in a physical store.
- Catalogs provide a detailed representation of products working together in well-designed rooms, but remove the ability to customize rooms in real time.
- In-store experiences are the best way to see a variety of products in detail, but they are not accessible to everyone, and customization is limited to what’s on the showroom floor.
- Mobile VR headsets are a low-cost and accessible entry into VR that can create a robust shopping experience but can’t provide high-end features like room-scale sensing, complete immersion, or detailed controls that sophisticated VR tech like the Vive and Rift can.
So what does a VR experience look like that capitalizes on these opportunities in interactivity and execution? We came up with a concept that combines the product selection and customizability of a website; the curated arrangement of furniture found in the printed catalog; and the ability to closely inspect goods in the store into a VR experience that’s accessible by nearly all retail customers. Our concept uses a Google Cardboard-like device to transport customers into a 360º rendering of a customizable showroom where they can explore, customize, and buy home goods.
The benefit of Virtual Reality is to simulate an experience or environment you couldn’t otherwise experience. However, creating these 3D environments is expensive and time-consuming. Retailers could capture 360º photos of the computer generated environments they already feature in their catalogs to achieve the same level of immersion without the investment. Creating a realistic environment is a good foundation for an immersive VR experience, but how is the entirety of this interactive shopping experience shaped?
The customer receives a cardboard headset in the mail with their retail catalog. Organizations like The New York Times have already launched broad campaigns to distribute this inexpensive VR platform as a way of promoting their new, enhanced experiences. Cardboard is the perfect way for retailers to introduce new VR capabilities to their customers.
Retail catalogues already do a great job showing a wide variety of rooms to inspire change and encourage purchasing multiple items that work well together. To extend this shopping experience, you can use a retailer’s mobile app to scan a room from the catalog and enter that environment in VR.
The VR app puts you in the middle of that 360º environment so you can get a realistic feel of the room. Being immersed in this environment, the shopping experience becomes more realistic and tangible, ultimately helping you evaluate a purchase.
Moving around in VR can be tricky. More sophisticated VR systems like the Vive and Rift have external sensors that can track you around a room, allowing you to move within a “playspace.” In Vive and Rift titles like Job Simulator, you can walk up to three-dimensional objects, look under counters, open drawers, and reach out and grab objects that react with the same kinetic response as the real world.
With mobile headsets like the Cardboard you don’t have that sophisticated positional tracking and controls are limited. Because there’s a single “action button,” we have to keep controls simple and interactive elements clear.
A persistent location marker indicates areas to teleport to within the space. Gaze-based interactions (where you aim using your head and the central reticle) are used to control the reticle position that follows the position of your head. You can hold the reticle over the location marker and wait for it to timeout or click the action button to immediately move locations. Once positional tracking technology becomes more available, simplified methods like teleporting are a good and accessible alternative.
One of the biggest opportunities for furniture retailers is customization. Most catalogs and websites showcase products as a collection in a composed room, but they’re unable to communicate essential qualities like texture, scale, and color. Alternatively, the in-store experience allows you to get up close to view these details, but you lose the mix and match capabilities you have online. While home retailers have so many different avenues to showcase their products, VR is the best platform to make changes to a space while immediately experiencing it.
Designing for complicated interactions, like selecting and customizing objects, are dependent on the application and hardware available. Systems like the Vive and Rift have intricate controllers, making it easier to interact with complex menus incorporated in the environment. In Magix Home, furniture can be directly manipulated using one-to-one controls that directly mimic real-world movement. Changing the color of a chair is done through simple gestures that feel like a layer of functionality added to your hands.
When using headsets like the Cardboard, complicated tasks are best experienced using full-screen menus. With interactions limited to the user’s head movement and a single click, having a generous amount of space in a separate view helps the user navigate large amounts of content.
Saving the changes you make to a customized room is a complex and hard effect to achieve that is best served as a menu function. In situations where there’s no one-to-one, real-world precedent for VR actions, we still need the ability to navigate abstract graphical user interfaces in VR.
Vive titles like Tilt Brush shows us how virtualized GUIs help users complete complex tasks (like saving a drawing) that don’t have a physical parallel in reality. This approach is great for tasks like checkout flows where users need an abstracted interface.
Without a controller though, mobile VR headsets often use “head-turn menus” to activate a menu’s appearance — the user looks down to trigger the appearance of the home and save buttons.
It’s no surprise that having to add items to a cart and enter a 16-digit credit card number is difficult to do in VR. The “add to cart” metaphor stands out in high-end VR experiences — with the ability to directly interact with objects in a 3D space, you can turn abstract concepts from the web like “add to cart” into something concrete and meaningful.
Budget Cuts takes advantage of this capability by turning an action we would expect to solve in a graphical menu into a concrete virtual parallel where you mimic the process of placing objects in a bag. The interaction is similar the “add to cart” metaphor found in online retail, but motion tracked controllers enable a more satisfying interaction that feeds off muscle memory.
Due to mobile VR’s limited interactions, the purchasing process is currently better suited for an application outside of VR, like a mobile app. After you save a room in VR, you can access your list of customized rooms on the mobile app. In the app you can view specific items from the room and add them to your shopping list to complete your purchase.
Fully immersive VR is still a niche technology today, but over the next three to five years we’ll see a surge in technological innovation that physically condenses VR systems into a more affordable and accessible solution. When that happens, not only will more people have access to these virtual worlds, we’ll be fluent in them. In the meantime, companies can use today’s technology to extend real world experiences to new, virtual experiences their customers can actually take advantage of.
Originally published at medium.com on May 4, 2017. Special thanks to Steven Bennett, who co-wrote this post.
