Find Your Virtual Intelligence

The coming convergence of virtual reality and artificial intelligence offers enormous opportunities—and huge potential pitfalls—for enhancing the customer experience.

- Dan Tynan

When car shoppers walked into a Cadillac dealership in Greenwich, Conn., this fall, in addition to the usual collection of gleaming Escalades and ATS Sedans, they found an HTC Vive virtual reality headset.

By donning VR gear, would-be buyers entered a virtual showroom where they ould check out the Caddy of their choice without ever climbing behind the wheel.

Luxury carmakers like Cadillac are the first big brands to use virtual reality as a marketing tool, but they’re hardly the last. Over the next few years they’ll be joined by others across a wide spectrum of products, driven by huge advances in immersive technology and artificial intelligence.

To experience virtual or augmented reality today you need to strap on clunky head gear or peer through your smartphone camera. In a few years, VR and AR will be built into everyday objects like eyeglasses and be coupled with AI.

The result will be an explosion of virtual environments that respond in a more human and compelling way, along with copious opportunities for brand marketers to use this technology to make stronger connections with consumers—if they don’t creep them out first.

VIRTUAL SHOPPING 

VR is already being embraced by the biggest retailer on the planet.

Walmart is looking at VR to enhance ‘the contextual shopping experience,’ says Katie Finnegan, principal and founder of the retail giant’s innovation arm, Store No 8. At its Innov8 showcase in Los Angeles last October, Finnegan’s team demonstrated a VR app that allows shoppers to try out camping gear in a virtual Yosemite.

“You can see the tent in the environment in which you’ll use it,” she says. “You can unzip the opening, get inside, lay on the ground and say, ‘You know what? this is too tight,’ then swipe your hand to try another tent.”