I used to own a domain, 3tail, that I wanted to use as a VR shopping launch point. I used that as my pitch for Startup Weekend a few years back. This year, however, Alibaba built their own.
VR retail has a lot to recommend it from a personal point of view. First, you don’t have to leave your house. Second, you don’t have the same windowing of selection that occurs on a normal webpage. Vision and attention are intrinsic to human perception and experience, and VR is the first platform that harnesses vision and attention as its native mode of interaction. You can browse at a store in a way that you simply can’t on the web. Adding omnipresence and search to the retail experience can theoretically make your retail experience orders of magnitude better.
With Alibaba on the trail, I don’t imagine I’ll ever need to build 3tail. There were already a lot of projects that took this space on, though, which is why I don’t own the domain anymore. If Ali doesn’t hit this right, someone else will, and that’s gonna be cool with me.