Walmart started out as your traditional retailer, relying on its brick and mortar stores to sell its goods to customers. However over the years as technology started to afford shoppers different ways of shopping, we’ve seen Walmart start to adapt its operations accordingly, whether it be turning to companies like Uber and Lyft for deliveries, or adopting the use of machines in place of cashiers.
Now other areas we’ve seen Walmart interested in is virtual reality (VR), where previously the company had started to use VR to train some of its staff at the company’s training centers. Now it looks like Walmart is expanding on that program by distributing the Oculus Go VR headsets to its stores across the US to help train more of its staff.
According to Andy Trainor, Walmart’s senior director of Walmart U.S. Academies, “The great thing about VR is its ability to make learning experientia. When you watch a module through the headset, your brain feels like you actually experienced a situation. We’ve also seen that VR training boosts confidence and retention while improving test scores 10 to 15 percent – even those associates who simply watched others experience the training saw the same retention boosts.”
Walmart won’t be the first to use VR to train its staff. Last year Google experimented with the idea of using VR as a training tool, where they found that using VR was more effective compared to just watching videos.
Filed in . Read more about Oculus, Virtual Reality (VR) and Walmart.