A two-and-a-half-minute clip with the caption, "This is how Walmart envisions Shopping in the Metaverse," was published on Wednesday by Homo Digitalis. I think that vision is pretty bleak.
The clip shows you walking through a virtual reality recreation of your grocery list. There are virtual reality pasta sauce, virtual reality wine, virtual reality gallons of milk, all pointed out by the Walmart associate projected onscreen. It is basically like non-metaverse shopping, but something is not right. The store is completely empty and there is a sound of shoppers around you. The groceries are so low-poly that they barely look like food. Your shopping cart flies off into the parking lot at the end of the video.
It is eerie. Some people who watched the clip compared it to a retail purgatory, while others called it insane. The kind of online shopping we have right now is superior to this kind of haunted experience.
If you ask Walmart, they will tell you that it is not, but that it is more social andimmersive than simply browsing through products on your phone. The video that was featured in the original is from five years ago.
Walmart first showed this short at the South by Southwest Festival with the help of a digital marketing and product development company. It is not safe to say that Walmart is not really succeeding now, even though it is an open question. The empty virtual reality offices and empty virtual reality malls that we have seen so far don't feel particularly new or exciting.
The fact that Walmart's outdated video was promoted by a random account on the social networking site, and the fact that so many people took that as fact, really hammers home how outdated some of these ideas are.
Walmart had a blast from the past that was sent out on social media, but the Information released a new report claiming that the company had scrapped plans to roll out a new software OS. More than 300 people worked on that OS inside the company, which was dubbed XROS.
The Facebook Reality Labs team shows no signs of slowing down. Reality Labs is still working on a highly specialized OS for its devices, according to Gabriel Aul, the company's VP of Engineering.
He added a link to Facebook's job portal with the quip, "We are growing this team, not shrinking it." Come join us.
The metaverse will be just as good now as it was in 2017: that is the conclusion of the recent ad campaign by Oculus.
