Night at the VR Shopping Museum

Artificial reality technologies, such as virtual reality, are thought to help firms to be spatially experienced in a virtual environment and to build stronger relationships between the customer and the company. Are you ready for the future of e-commerce?

In recent years, with the increasing popularity of online shopping, e-commerce companies have entered a technology race to provide customers better shopping experience. However, shopping on the internet without physical interaction still limits the communication of the customers with the brands, and the desired connection between the customer and the brand is not always established via a two-dimensional screen.

Artificial reality technologies, such as virtual reality, are thought to help firms to be spatially experienced in a virtual environment and to build stronger relationships between the customer and the company. For this reason, many brands are seeking opportunities to benefit from these technologies.

Pasilobus is proud to stay at the cutting edge of technology, and we are conducting many side projects on Virtual and Mixed Reality applications. Today I would like to share a small experiment we did to summarize recent developments on online shopping in the Virtual Reality industry.

E-commerce VR Museum Project​

E-commerce VR Museum is a mobile VR application designed for developers and investors in the e-commerce industry. It is a small-sized museum exhibiting five VR shopping applications with information posters and videos. The user should follow the waypoints to walk around the exhibition area.

If you would like to see how this VR experience works, you can give it a try from the video below by using your cardboard.

Companies we are featuring in our museum are Shopify VR, Buy+, eBay, IKEA VR and The Apartment by The Line.

Breakdown of Final Piece​

The e-commerce VR museum starts with an info canvas with start button on it. This canvas aims to let the user know about the experience. At first, I left the info canvas there without any start button. There was just info text on it. But then I added a destroy script with a start button to interact with the user. It is better if the info canvas disappears after the user read it once.

After the info canvas disappears, the user can navigate around with waypoints appearing in front of them. There are five info panels and videos about different VR shopping apps that the user can learn about them during the experience. There is no specific order in the exhibit, but it is encouraged to walk from left to right following the waypoints in that order.

The floor materials are chosen to mark the info panels in the exhibition. Thus the user can recognize where there is content available to view.

There are also some shopping carts placed around the exhibition area to match the environment thematically to the content.

Conclusion​

This project is just a glimpse of the future of e-commerce in VR. A night at the VR shopping museum shows the user the possibilities in the industry and makes them think about what is next. You can watch all the experience from the video below.

Next Steps​

This is just a small experiment to shout out some advancements in the VR industry. Later on, we plan to improve this museum and publish it as a resource that the VR community can refer to. There is a lot to be discovered in this exciting space :)

See you until the next project!

PS: We are working on something very exciting so stay tuned!