Virtual reality online shopping (vros) platform

Abstract

Since 1980, with the advent of the personal computer (PC), and the development of the Internet, the first “online shopping” appeared in the world. However, many limitations still exist in current online shopping. For instance, experience, environment, interface, or the screen size are entirely different from physical shopping stores. Here, we implemented a system prototype—Virtual Reality Online Shopping (VROS) Platform, which brought the physical shopping experience into the VR world by incorporating VR hardware—Samsung HMD Odyssey+ as the platform base. The VROS was created by the core concept of “home-hub”, which included five different spaces: living room, kitchen, farm, home library and walk-in closets. Different spaces represented as the entrance of shopping categories were connected to the different online shopping stores. The users were able to organize the shopping goods (no matter the user had or still on the wishlist) in the VROS home. To evaluate the VROS, we recruited two subjects to do the two-step experiments by using protocol analysis. The VROS is current an off-line system but is able to apply to real online shopping stores in next version, such as Amazon and eBay.