That's not a satire? The vibe of that is just so eerie, especially the transitions between departments. And the player literally having to aim and throw the jug of milk back to its place?
its like the shopper is totally powerless, worse than a robot, but a kind of trapped slave in the machine. You can almost see them looking at their hands like "what am i doing, what's going on?"
On first impression this struck me as, totally insane. The department transitions felt like I was living in the Wal-Mart matrix. After the omnipresent cyber-greeter mentioned the oil change, it felt like it made even less sense.
I started thinking, how could this ever make sense. I could see a setup where there are booths or something with VR headsets at the front of the store, and the rest of the building is a warehouse. This would eliminate the whole public store, except for the area with the headsets. Still not sure how much sense this makes. Or how much I'd want to put on a public use VR headset in a Wal-Mart. But it makes a little more sense then doing this at home.
*edit: I was really hoping they'd throw the milk across the store.
I think it more showcases that everything needs adapting to a new medium.
Amazon doesn't draw a 2D plan of a virtual shop and make you browse the shelves. Spotify doesn't pretend to be a tape deck. I'm not sure what a VR shop should look like, but it's almost certainly not a VR version of a real one, because a real shop is built around real world constraints and conveniences.
I think there are cases where VR shopping could make a lot of sense. Shopping for clothes, for instance. You can take your own measurements, put them into your profile, then test what it would look like. Shopping for furniture could also make sense if you could generate a quick map of your house. You can then see how the sofa will look like, and whether you'll get it through the door.
Right. From Microsoft Bob to VR supermarket, skeuomorphism is mostly a bad idea.
Another example like your clothes shopping: AR furniture shopping on the other hand, where you can visualize how a new couch would fit in your living room, is already quite useful.
Thats a little dated and you should really point to the kmart in vrchat to see how the kids are doing it but fwiw Shopify are doing a few interesting lab things with AR this is just one example there are several....
Did Walmart actually think this was worth their time, or did they fear FB would raise their ad rates if they did not at least make an effort on the metaverse?
It's a shame that people still consider that demo to represent the future of shopping. Nothing could be further from the truth. The VR shopping experience was actually a joke and the real output from the work was an interactive store design tool that helped save the company money by avoiding having to take aisles and whole zones out of commission during testing! The trouble was that, back in the '90s, if you had a good news story about VR and couldn't give them headset pictures or videos, they didn't want to know
I really like walking around a supermarket seeing what I might like to buy - shopping online is so boring, just relying on their useless algos to show me things I might not have thought of yet.
Same with most online shops. I want to browse damn it!
Man, this really makes the '90s look like a relic. Everything about it. The office space, short-sleeve point-collar shirts, wide floral ties... kinda miss it.
VR for grocery shopping doesn't make much sense, but watching the piece it appears that wasn't the actual goal here. They had been contracted to make a VR model of a store for the purposes of evaluating the layout etc (which does make sense).
Not sure why, but there's something deeply depressing about this. Likely a combination of the VR graphics style and the bleakness of the inside of the store. But it gives me _backrooms_ vibes.
There's something to be said about the corporate imagination when they can't even envision a VR shopping experience without a massive parking with zero utility.
I've always been highly skeptical of VR and as someone who was a teen in the 90's these demonstrations of what could be were a big reason why. I am sure there are really good applications for VR but this just isn't it. It's just not complicated to solve shopping convenience from the home. I think we have nailed it very well. The only thing that still needs work is AR. Virtually placing an item I am interested in somewhere in the home to try it out before I buy. (I realize that there are apps that do this now, but I feel like we have more work to do to really get the full benefit of it)
I like how they assumed that in the virtual Sainsbury's, you still have to stand and wait in line. I mean, it's not like some computer system is keeping track of the products you've selected into your cart or anything.
Anyway, perhaps this virtual shopping is the right solution for this day and age, when actually buying these products is just too expensive:
I distinctly remember waking past a Sainsbury’s (and in the north west of England) in probably 1992 or so with a few friends - Peter Allan, Paul Lea, if you read this say hi - and we were speculating that in the not to distance future that this is how shopping would be.
Weird how this video is just a couple of years after that, and also that 30 years later, it’s not!
In the 90s there was a sudden push to lay cable (TV and Internet). Suddenly large chunks of the UK could get copper broadband at home. It felt very exciting.
BT knew in the 70s that fibre would be the best way forward, spun up factories to manufacture it, made it cheaper to lay than copper at the time. By the start of the 90s they were ready to start rolling it out locally, presumably in a FTTP configuration since it was cheaper than copper.
Thatcher didn't like that BT had a monopoly on the UK network, a monopoly she created by privatising them. So it was deemed anti-competitive for BT to roll out fibre nationwide, since she wanted to encourage private American companies to start building networks.
Makes you wonder what our internet would be like today, perhaps as good as South Korea.
Almost certainly not in an FTTP configuration. BT experimented with that but the problem was that the ONTs were too expensive at the time to install one in each house. The way that they originally hoped to pay for some of the costs was by running television over the fibre (not internet access - the proposals did have some space for data but it was tiny by modern standards), effectively leveraging their telephone monopoly to become a cable TV provider as well. That's where all the talk about competition and US cable companies comes in. Having found and read some of the reports Dr. Cochrane seems to be rewriting history a bit to fit modern partisan politics.
In practice, BT did use something called TPON to run phone lines over fibre to some areas, but this was termiated in the street to analog-only narrowband over copper using hardware shared between multiple houses. This meant that people unfortunate enough to be in areas served by fibre often found they couldn't get anything faster than dialup well into the 21st century. In some cases BT actually ended up replacing this with plain copper runs back to the exchange so that customers could at least get ADSL.
wow, fun/interesting concept especially for the time, and at Sainsbury's of all places. Watching videos that old kinda reminds of me when I found this video from someone who mapped our small college in CounterStrike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wckshGR7uU, cool to see places you know in a game!
I could never set foot in a grocer again if online shopping didn't suck. I don't even need VR. Just give me side-scrolling pictures of entire aisles with clickable items and I'd be satisfied.
Details: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/sainsburys_looks_to_make_v...
Ran on an SGI Onyx: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx