On July 22, at the Taobao Maker Festival, Jiemian News reporters finally tested the long-rumored virtual reality shopping.

Buy+ is a project of Alibaba VR Laboratory GM Lab (Gnome Magic Lab). This laboratory was established in March and officially opened in June. A month later, Buy+Demo was officially launched. At present, Alibaba has not determined a partner for VR hardware equipment. The equipment used to provide experience on site is HTV Vive.

According to Alibaba CMO Dong Benhong, Alibaba’s VR team is affiliated with Taobao. The team currently has hundreds of people, involving multiple departments such as technology, marketing, and operations, and is led by Zhuang Zhuoran, the head of mobile Taobao technology.

At the scene, the average experience process for each person is about 10 minutes. This Buy+ presents two shopping scenes, namely women's bags and men's and women's underwear. Professionals will be on hand to provide guidance in all aspects including product selection and payment.  

Just put on the "helmet" and enter the virtual store immediately. The immersive visual experience can shield you from the noisy exhibition hall. With the controller device in hand, you can go shopping with your friends. View the bags in 360 degrees, communicate with the shopping guide robot "Xiaoyu", try different colors and sizes, let the model show the effect of wearing underwear, and even view the "Buyer Show" video, and then pay for the purchase after discussing with friends. In a few minutes, you can complete a VR shopping.

Professionals use their voices to call up the operation interface.

The picture below is the main interface that the reporter saw in the shopping scene. Click the right handle to instantly move to the position of the green aperture in the VR world; if red appears, it means that it cannot be moved.

During the experience, there will be a white shopping guide "Xiao Yu" who teaches you how to use the handle and it can talk. It can be interacted with via the handle. For example, you can wave the controller to greet it.

Follow the shopping guide's instructions. After walking into a bag, press the right handle to pick it up and view product details, buyer shows, etc.

With the left hand operation, you can put this bag into the shopping cart. There are a total of three products you can choose from for this experience.

Then it is to complete a virtual payment link, which is not connected with the actual payment process.

As far as the actual test results are concerned, the shopping experience of Buy+ has not yet reached the level mentioned in the video; limited by the display effect of the VR helmet, the pixels and clarity seen in the VR helmet are far less clear than the photos taken by the reporter. But the operation process is smooth.

Dong Benhong emphasized that many businesses are willing to participate in VR laboratory projects. Considering that the biggest problem with online shopping is that you cannot see the real thing, if VR shopping can really continuously optimize the experience and become a future online shopping trend, this problem can be effectively solved. But difficulties still exist, such as how to move hundreds of millions of products on Taobao to the virtual platform, which requires a lot of image and video effects processing. Alibaba said that in the future, it may only select hot-selling products and representative products to be put on the VR platform, and not all products will be put on the VR platform. In the Demo, a total of 8 products are on the shelves.

However, there is no timetable for when this kind of fully virtual shopping will be actually used.