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Walmart Is Putting 17,000 Oculus Go Headsets In Its Stores To Help Train Employees In VR (techcrunch.com)
Walmart is reportedly planning to send Oculus Go headsets to each of its nearly 5,000 stores so that more of its employees can get instruction more often. TechCrunch reports: The big box giant will begin sending four headsets to each Walmart supercenter and two headsets to each Neighborhood Market in the country. That may not necessarily seem like a ton to train a store full of employees, but at Walmart's scale that amounts to about 17,000 headsets being shipped by year's end. The move is the evolution of an announcement that the company made last year that it was working with STRIVR Labs to bring virtual reality training to its 200 "Walmart Academy" training centers. Those training sessions were done on PC-tethered Oculus Rifts, the move to Oculus Go headsets really showcases how much more simple standalone headset hardware is to set up and operate.
Now their employees can practice getting their food stamps in virtual reality.
According to Statistica, there are almost 12,000 Wal-Marts worldwide: https://www.statista.com/stati...
17k handsets, is almost 1.5 per store. I don't know the distribution of them. That point is vague.
The interesting part is the fact that Wal-Mart is experimenting with VR, specifically Oculus. The amount is actually underwhelming, in a relative way.
Previous article, Octopus, now Oculus, next is something on Oculyst?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I really don't see the point of this. VR is pretty much dead.
People keep saying that. It keeps not being true.
really seems like a total waste of everyone's time. who needs a VR headset to learn how to work at Walmart?
Maybe it makes it look like you're actually at Target?
So, My auntie works as an assistance manager at a walmart. During their training there is already (at least the location she trained at) VR Gear to train with. They use the gear to view various locations in the store. They managers connect to the cameras and look around, and apparently there is some voodoo magic with the cameras that make it appear as though you can see through things. It was a cool setup.
It's the modern light gun, except more people owned light guns and light guns didn't make people vomit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Manna? Is that you?
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just train people in real life with other real employee's? Someone's obviously brainstormed this into thinking VR is far better then actual real life experience. Another example of trying to force technology into a problem that never existed in the first place.
How so? Even the highest-selling headsets have barely sold a couple a million over a multiple year time period. The whole thing is stillborn.
And yet, we don't have it.
For I have no idea how long, we've all been told that Real Soon Now we'd have VR. While people are working on it, it thus far remains vaporware.
Here are some VR training apps for use:
https://jobsimulatorgame.com/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/452490/The_Cubicle/
Umm, some people have been saying VR is a revolution and a "game-changer" for more than half a decade now, and "it keeps not being true".
VR is a shit gimmick. Some apologists say it's the price that holds it back, others say it's the big uncomfortable helmets, and once those problems are solved it'll suddenly be a raging success. But the fact of the matter is that it's just nothing fucking special. Once the novelty wears off after about twenty minutes, all you're left with is a blindfold.
And that's why so few people actually buy it for themselves it after the initial "ooh"s and "aah"s are done, aside from a rare few almost religiously zealous evangelists who keep trying to convince themselves that "anyone who doesn't like it must not have tried it" (LMAO, guess again), perhaps out of a need to justify the investment in their setup.
No, if it was actually that great, it would be worth the money and effort, like so many hugely successful products have been in the past. But it just isn't.
VR is shit.
This sounds like it could be the beginning of the Manna program described many years ago by self-proclaimed futurist Marshall Brain on his web site. Pretty soon they could be wearing the things at work, every day, all day while a computer program monitors their locations, assigns tasks, times them, and collects feedback. Be afraid, be very afraid (although that won't help because it is probably inevitable).
Congratulations Walmart Employee! Your shift is now only two hours long
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?