VR, AR, And MR: Not Your Grandfather's Retail

January 2017 Innovative Retail Technologies

By Steve Brown, Futurist and CEO, baldfuturist.com

Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) are changing retail as we know it.

Retail, as many have observed, hasn’t really changed that much in a century. A hundred years ago, Harry Selfridge brought us retail theater, and Piggly Wiggly popularized the self-service model. Since then, we have seen the emergence of department stores, malls, big box, memberships, and the mighty Amazon. But the vast majority of shopping is still goods-on-shelf retail. We pay with plastic — or our phones or watches — and we order some of our stuff online, but in-store retail looks much like it always has.