"VR Shopping" Has Become A Trend. Jingdong Amazon'S "VR War" Is On The Verge Of Attack.

A phantom, the ghost of VR shopping.

CEO wandered in the heart.

In order to catch this Specter, the big business players seem to have switched from the first conservative wait and see to a new field.

In September 6th, Jingdong announced the establishment of the first "VR/AR industry promotion alliance" in the field of electronic commerce. The VR laboratory was set up and the APP "VR shopping Galaxy" was released.

At this point, both domestic Jingdong, Taobao, Gome, overseas Ebay and Amazon have gradually revealed their own development trends and plans for VR.

So how do we plan to fight the VR war in the TV platform? How long will it take for people to imagine the VR shopping?

Jingdong: establish VR industry alliance and launch "wolves tactics"

In September 6th, Jingdong held a VR / AR strategic conference in Beijing.

From the VR / AR conference, Jingdong intends to work together in these two ways: shopping APP "VR shopping Galaxy" provides a virtual shopping experience, product parameters, but also can use voice and gesture to pay.

The AR home decoration product plan allows consumers to see the effect of their home decoration directly through AR products in their home furnishings. Designers can also "enter the mirror" remotely, helping consumers to spot selection and design.

But the most impressive thing is Jingdong's "wolves tactics".

Compared with Taobao's virtual reality plan, Jingdong VR has been relatively low-key.

But at the press conference, Jingdong showed that it had been in virtual reality for a long time: announced the first VR AR / AR industry alliance of more than 30 upstream and downstream enterprises including Intel, HTC, NVDA and storm mirror.

In the next three years, we will cooperate with the storm mirror, and will sell 15 million VR heads. In addition, Jingdong will also cooperate with NVIDIA to purchase 18 million VR graphics cards in three years.

Jingdong's cooperation in this field is more likely to choose a popular storm mirror, which is likely to be solved through the popularization of hardware.

There are fewer people.

In view of the lack of VR technology for businesses, Jingdong hopes to provide a unified modeling tool for users to make unified standards of e-commerce applications and VR/AR content, and reduce the threshold of business participation.

These methods are actually aiming at the lack of application at the shopping end, the popularity of the shopping terminal, the lack of display capability of the sales terminals, and the disunity of the platforms, which have troubled VR shopping for a long time.

In the long-term goal, Jingdong even set foot in other fields such as VR besides shopping, and "unified VR, AR standard and content distribution platform".

Jingdong's high-profile Manifesto is no doubt a challenge to its old rival Taobao, but the momentum and potential of "wolves tactics" is also a fact that people have to face up to.

Taobao: the "Buy+" of the circle of friends is going online, but this may be the first step.

Taobao's best known is the "Buy+" of Taobao shopping month two months ago.

At that time, this experience had been brushing up friends circles.

There are reasons why "Buy + +" can be so hot: it provides "replacement of size / color", "Buyer show" and "store show" and so on. It is the first complete description of the VR shopping experience (though it is not yet mature enough).

In addition, compared with other VR shopping applications with only experiencer and merchandise interaction, "Buy+" also increased the role of virtual shopping guide and social networking.

According to the propaganda before Taobao, this month "Buy +" is going to go online, but with the actual shopping experience, there are still many problems in "Buy + +".

The biggest limitation is the limitation of the whole VR shopping: because there are still bottlenecks in the display and collection of realistic pictures, 3D has to be modeled instead of real objects.

Therefore, apart from color and style, the size, material and details can not be measured.

If we want to provide a more realistic and in-depth experience, the cost of the third party can not be borne by Taobao merchants.

However, Taobao may still have a hand in hand. After the establishment of an industrial alliance in Jingdong, Taobao may also introduce corresponding strategies, and Ali will not hesitate to invest in VR technology. In February, Ali had voted for Magic Leap's $794 million financing. If the mixed reality technology is really successful as Xuan Chuan, will it be the core technology after "Buy +"?

Gome: not the biggest, but probably the most reliable.

Gome's presence in this area may make you feel puzzled.

Its magnitude does not seem to compare with the first two.

This may ignore the fact that Gome's home decoration field, compared to clothing or other product categories, may be the most suitable VR.

After all, VR home furnishings have a real advantage over tradition. They are not only intuitive and immersive in virtual houses, but also can make great changes: change the structure of houses, switch wallpaper in one second, or change the furniture position solely to see the effect, which can only be achieved in the VR scene.

From this point of view, from the perspective of VR technology, Gome's VR home decoration may be the most reliable and most successful one in the electronic business platform.

In the way of playing, Gome has gone through a solid line of experience shop route.

In 2016, Gome will make VR a key development project, and build a VR intelligent experience zone under 97 stores nationwide.

Gome online relies on offline stores to build a comprehensive VR experience field integrating mobile VR experience area, PC terminal VR experience area and scene VR experience area, such as building VR experience hall with the storm mirror.

Today, Gome online has launched a home decoration VR system.

It is claimed that users can "freely change the design style and building materials, pay the deposit at the scene, monitor the decoration process in real time, and achieve the intermediate links of F2C."

Among the various electricity giants, eBay is the first to take action.

In May 16th, eBay, an e-commerce retailer, worked with Australian retailer Myer department store to launch the world's first virtual reality department store.

At that time, eBay also provided 15 thousand virtual reality devices shopticals to customers free of charge.

However, from May to now, eBay has not yet seen the next step in VR shopping.

Amason: recruiting troops

Amazon's VR strategy started very early, but Amazon is interested in VR, not Amazon.

This has also led to speculation for a long time whether Amazon is not interested in VR shopping.

However, this view may change. Last week, Amazon revealed its future trend through a recruitment message.

"In 2016, we will distribute Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR game head devices to publish entities and online augmented reality shopping experience, and land on Nintendo's next generation of games that are not yet officially released."

This can not help but make people expect, what will Amazon do in VR shopping?

Looking forward to VR shopping: the trouble is not just shopping but the limitations of technology.

To sum up, with the entry of giants, "VR shopping" is now in full swing.

However, it is not easy to realize the assertion.

In fact, the current VR shopping has been controversial, mainly due to the scarcity of users, as well as all kinds of bad comments such as "big investment", "poor experience", "platform miscellaneous" and so on.

But the more substantive problem is that, in addition to a few areas, home shopping, most of the categories, VR shopping can not provide more valuable reference to consumers than ordinary online shopping (for example, clothing, VR test platform claims to give all kinds of information, but even the most basic size matching problem can not be solved), 3D modeling rough polyhedron if the online games equipment is also understandable, if you want to be a real commodity reference, I am afraid many people will be deterred.

Zhao Gang, chief technology officer of Jingdong VR/AR laboratory, said that VR shopping applications should be open to users at least 2-3 years.

This is actually a very optimistic prediction.

The underlying reason behind this is that the biggest bottleneck of VR shopping is not only the design of VR shopping terminal, but also the limitation of the existing VR platform.

To achieve a comprehensive (instead of tasting) VR shopping experience, we must go beyond the highest level in terms of display quality, sensing technology, action interaction, and scene simulation.

The intervention of giants is not so much a truly useful VR shopping experience in the short term, rather, it is to attract exposure and make technological exploration and reserve.

From this point of view, it is only a giant horse race, or a "skirmish warfare". The real war seems to be only five years from now.