Alibaba The highly anticipated VR shopping experience Buy+ was officially publicly experienced at the Taobao Creation Festival in late July; at the same time, the mixed reality company Magic Leap also debuted on the same occasion. VR, AR, MR, how will Alibaba plan the next generation of e-commerce landscape?
"So beautiful!" In late July, consumers who are conducting VR (virtual reality) shopping experience in Taobao Creation Festival could not help but exclaim at the realistic picture in front of them. Because when she wears a VR headset, it seems like she is really visiting a department store. You can choose the products you want and see the real try-on picture. However, this is just an experiment at the moment.
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picture from: Shutterstock
Alibaba established the new entrepreneurship laboratory GM Lab this year for the layout of new technologies such as VR, AR (amplified reality), and MR (hybrid reality). Zhuang Zhuoran, one of the heads of GM Labs and also the senior director of Alibaba’s mobile platform, understood that Buy+ is just an experience version and a demonstration of Alibaba’s future shopping experience.
In fact, according to his personal opinion, VR is actually the entertainment market such as movies and games; while AR and MR are more able to bring greater imagination and space to play in life and e-commerce market.
Therefore, in terms of future applications of e-commerce development, the cooperation between Alibaba and Magic Leap may be more visible.
Magic Leap is the most mysterious star in the hybrid reality field. The product has not yet officially unveiled and has received a $1.4 billion investment, including funds from Alibaba, the major shareholder. And that's why Magic Leap is willing to create an exclusive MR shopping demonstration video for Alibaba and made its first public appearance in Asia.
In the video played by Magic Leap, although consumers cannot see glasses or other wearable devices, from the description of Magic Leap marketing director Brian Wallace, we can know that unlike the large and heavy VR head-mounted monitors on the market, "let consumers wear them early in the morning and not take them off until they sleep." It is light and comfortable to integrate into ordinary people's lives. This is what Magic Leap needs to do.
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Magic Leap Marketing Director Brian Wallace: "Our goal is that consumers will wear it in the morning when they wake up and will not take it off until they go to bed."
From the demonstration video, we can see that through voice control, consumers can place various styling lamps in their own rooms in their own rooms, as if they really exist in front of them, and place an order one by one on the wardrobe of the room until they find products that match the size and satisfactory shapes.
Unfortunately, neither Wallace nor Alibaba disclosed when such products and services will be launched.
But Alibaba has shown its attitude that whether it is VR, AR or MR, they will continue to experiment and find the best solutions to achieve the ultimate goal of improving the consumer shopping experience. To do this, they also have to help sellers on the platform simultaneously, so that they can connect with new technology services with the least effort and the fastest speed.
"The threshold of VR is the balance between the number of users and user experience. If the number of users is not large enough, the platform is not meaningful; but the experience is not good, it is also meaningless." Zhuang Zhuoran believes that the current problem of VR is that the hardware devices that have been circulated in the market, such as Google Cardboard, or VR mobile phone cases that can be easily bought on Taobao , etc., bring not good enough; however, devices that can bring better experience, such as HTC Vive, are expensive, small in quantity, and are not popular enough.
"It will take some time for the entire industry to move forward," he said.
hardware problem is also one of the challenges that AR must face in the development of this stage. But Zhuang Zhuoran expected that when more and more dual-lens smartphones appear, the possibility of "space modeling" will become higher, and AR applications will also have the opportunity to explode.
As for MR, this answer may have to wait for Magic Leap and Alibaba to answer it for everyone.The threshold for
VR is the balance between the number of users and user experience. If the number of users is not large enough, the platform is not meaningful; but if the experience is not good, it is also meaningless. ~ Zhuang Zhuoran
Alibaba GM Lab
Established time│2016
Research project│VR, AR, MR (cooperating with Magic Leap)
Application fields│Video, shopping
Experimental works│Buy+ (cooperating with HTC Vive)
Breakthrough New Method: VR/AR/MR Business Imagination
After shopping in action, will the next mainstream platform be VR and AR? The appearance of the markets such as games, audio and video, and education has begun to change because VR and AR have begun to change. Will consumers' shopping habits be different in the future? What will the e-commerce industry look like?
If Facebook founder Mark. Mark Zuckerberg's prediction is correct. In the future, we will all move towards the world of VR (virtual reality)/AR (amplified reality). So what will e-commerce look like in this future world?
Regarding VR, the current market's understanding of it is mostly in the world of gaming and audio-visual, bringing an immersive experience of its experience; while AR is mostly in the role of marketing auxiliary tools in physical retail or physical fields. Both seem to be able to connect with e-commerce, but how deep can this link be? What kind of connection will it be in? It's still a big question mark at the moment. In this regard, Wang Yizhi, senior industry analyst of the MIC e-commerce group of the Zi Ce Association, believes that "AR is more related to business, and VR applications are particularly suitable for entertainment and learning. From the perspective of e-commerce, I prefer AR to VR."
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head of GM Lab of Alibaba Innovation Lab and senior director of Alibaba Mobile Platform Zhuoran actually has a similar view. However, at this stage, Alibaba is still unwilling to make a conclusion on any technological development.
In fact, Alibaba is more optimistic about AR shopping within, but the first service launched is the VR shopping experience Buy+, which cooperates with HTC Vive. But they did not forget to emphasize that this is an experiment, which does not mean that they will definitely promote VR shopping in this form in the future.
And Alibaba's platform has such a large number of products, VR can be used as a new consumer entrance. "One more entrance is good, it will not harm the mall." Wang Yizhi said that in Alibaba's vast ecosystem , even if he finally found that the effect of shopping combined with VR is not significant, his research and development results in this technology can still be transferred to other fields such as audio and video, learning, and tourism.
In addition to Alibaba, it is understood that in Taiwan, more than one industry operator wants to try to combine VR with online shopping, but most of them are still in a very early stage of development. Moreover, unlike Alibaba itself, which already has a comprehensive layout in e-commerce, such as logistics, gold flow, and commodities, and also has abundant resources, it is likely that a single Taiwanese businessman will find it difficult to drive the development of VR or AR shopping, and the cooperation of the entire industrial chain is needed.
However, in this industrial chain, Taiwanese sellers who play a key role often regard VR and AR as a very distant existence. Although most of them already have a basic understanding of these two technologies, they generally have reservations about whether to use them.
In fact, from the development of the Mobile App until it has been widely accepted and adopted by Taiwanese merchants in the past two years, we can know that Taiwanese sellers are not the pioneers at the forefront of the trend, but often play the role of technology followers.
"From the mentality of Taiwan's e-commerce, living is more important than anything." Wang Yizhi believes that before seeing specific successful cases where VR and AR can really bring huge revenue, Taiwanese sellers should rather choose a safer approach, invest their money in advertising, warehousing and logistics that they can evaluate their returns, or more promotional promotions, and use traditional means to attract customers.
And in fact, even if the seller is really willing to try this new method today, there are indeed many technical difficulties to overcome.For example, regardless of the future application form, to achieve realistic effects and really be able to use virtual stereoscopic images to determine whether the product meets the actual space size, sellers must do one thing, which is 3D modeling of the product.
After all, unlike the current e-commerce websites, you can easily upload the products to the shelves by uploading text, photos, or videos. How to build a VR and AR product database is still lacking a simple, efficient and low-cost way at this stage.
In fact, this is one of the directions Alibaba is working hard on. Zhuang Zhuoran said that in the future they will establish standards and reduce the cost of merchants in product modeling through software research and development. In the future, they will turn the work that stores need to do in developing VR and AR into infrastructure that can be easily accessed on Alibaba's platform.
And everyone knows that from early desktops to laptops, to current smart phones, every platform conversion will bring opportunities for a market reshuffle. Whoever runs the fastest this time, who can set standards first, and who can start building an ecosystem first, may be the winner of the future generations.
TIPS
AR may have a greater influence on the e-commerce market than VR.
product 3D modeling may be the first problem that merchants have to face.
This is not something that one manufacturer can do, and it requires the cooperation of the entire industrial chain.
