You’ve probably seen that Walmart metaverse shopping video from 2017 making the rounds. It perfectly captures corporate America’s default approach to frantically show that it’s ready for “the metaverse,” davidzmorris says. Spoiler: It’s not ready.
Facebook’s “pivot to video” destroyed businesses that went along. The metaverse could be a repeat act.
A clip has been tearing its way around Twitter this week, showing a Walmart-branded demonstration of shopping in “the metaverse.”This article is excerpted from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full
newsletter here.Reactions from Twitter users have been, in a word, brutal. The demo was “worse than current online shopping in literally every way,” one said. At the most basic level, it would destroy the main benefit of shopping online: not having to navigate store aisles and shelves.
To be clear, this isn’t a new clip: It was producedfor SXSW in 2017. Nonetheless, the video does capture the default approach as corporate America works frantically to show that it’s ready for “the metaverse.”On the surface, the entire premise of this sort of nonsense is that people will enjoy and use inferior metaverse applications just because … 3D is cool, I guess? Certainly, there’s no attention paid to what users actually want or need out of an online shopping experience. On the most basic level, why would you go to the trouble of designing a virtual Walmart that looks … exactly like a physical Walmart? Shopping in a real Walmart is fairly awful. If you’re in a 3D virtual world, maybe take advantage of the literally limitless possibilities to redesign the experience. headtopics.com
Source: https://headtopics.com/us/facebook-walmart-and-how-companies-shouldn-t-set-up-in-the-metaverse-23303099