By: DEEPA SEETHARAMAN Source: WSJ.D
John Griffith tries out a virtual reality system at the Oculus booth during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this month.
One day, you may be able to buy a car or a home using virtual-reality goggles sold byFacebook FB -0.16%.
At its annual developer conference this week, executives discussed how commerce and virtual reality would help extend the social-networking giant’s reach. In interviews, executives said they were already contemplating how to make shopping possible in a virtual world.
“You have all the pieces you need to create these amazing experiences where I can buy content, I can buy other things, I can connect with other people in real time,” Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said in an interview on Thursday. “We have all the pieces of this puzzle and we can put it all together rather than just sell you a headset or sell you a social experience.”
Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled an initiative that would allow users to buy items through the company’s Messenger app. Those features could be adapted for Oculus VR, the maker of the Oculus Rift headset that Facebook bought for $2 billion last year, Schroepfer said.
It’s unclear if consumers will embrace shopping via Messenger, and the company hasn’t even started to sell Rift headset. So far Facebook has sold more than 100,000 Oculus developer kits.
But Facebook is already studying how to enable and safeguard purchases made through Oculus, Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan said in a separate interview. ”Virtual commerce” is possible in video games like Minecraft and developers for Samsung ‘s005930.SE +0.47% Gear VR headset have built “virtual experiences” that gamers can pay for, Schroepfer said. In those cases, though, the goods themselves are virtual, and not real.
There are already some signs of how the goggles may be used to shop. Real estate developers can use them to give potential buyers “a sense of what is it like looking out of the window of [apartment] 23F,” Schroepfer said. Oculus could be used similarly in the hotel industry.
“You can imagine certainly real estate, probably cars — any high value items where people really want to get the sense of what it’s like, you will definitely see that,” Schroepfer said. “But part of the fun of this is that it’s new so we have no idea.”