What Are The Benefits of Shopping in Virtual Reality?

It’s okay to just…go to a store.

Messing around with virtual reality is neat. Putting on one of those bulky headsets and moving your head around in awe like a baby while reaching your hands out to touch things that only you can see is a fun way to experience something new — like eating a scant handful of mushrooms and walking through the park for a couple of hours alone. Virtual reality is excellent for gaming, art and escapism, but why on earth would you want to use it for shopping?

Amazon Job Offer Hints at Plans for Virtual Reality Shopping Apps

Regardless of what I think, Amazon is reportedly hiring for a Creative Director, Virtual Reality who will “envision the future of Amazon’s VR solutions and guide our creative and technical teams to produce compelling, world-class experiences.” The candidate selected will have “a point of view on how to use the VR medium to tell a story about any product at Amazon to the customer” and will be expected to create “simple and seamless shopping experiences,” ostensibly in VR — just like you always wanted, I guess?

I suppose the idea of wandering through a VR Amazon storefront is appealing and the novelty of reaching out my hand to “touch” a giant box of cat litter and “add” it to my “cart” would be fun for a while. Is shopping something that needs to be gamified? Online shopping made shopping easier, but replacing actual reality with its virtual equivalent and allowing users to spend money that way feels frankly, a little ridiculous.

Shopping in a store — touching physical items, whether it be apples or new jeans or something dumb from Best Buy that you might not need but want anyway — is a crucial part of being alive. The consequences of buying something in a store are immediate and fast-acting. Money is concrete. The things you buy are yours to have immediately and the physical act of buying something in person lets you feel those consequences for better or for worse.

Online Shopping Is the Devil, and I Won’t Do it

Who is VR shopping for, anyway? You have to own a headset, which is either very expensive or relatively affordable. If the experience integrates somehow with Amazon’s pre-existing app, then VR shopping is for anyone with a smart phone, a Google Cardboard and the will to buy economy-sized rolls of toilet paper in virtual reality instead of in front of their computer during their lunch break, like everyone else.

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