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Businesses United States

Walmart Is Putting 17,000 Oculus Go Headsets In Its Stores To Help Train Employees In VR (techcrunch.com) 27

Posted by BeauHD from the workplace-training dept.
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.
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Walmart Is Putting 17,000 Oculus Go Headsets In Its Stores To Help Train Employees In VR More

Walmart Is Putting 17,000 Oculus Go Headsets In Its Stores To Help Train Employees In VR

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  • Sounds good (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Patent Lover ( 779809 ) on Thursday September 20, 2018 @08:03PM (#57351900)

    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... [statista.com]

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )

      four headsets to each Walmart supercenter and two headsets to each Neighborhood Market in the country

      Didn't even make it to the 2nd line of the summary?

  • Previous article, Octopus, now Oculus, next is something on Oculyst?

    • I am actually glad you pointed that out. I had glanced on the page and read this article as Walmart Putting 17,000 Octopuses.. and was really confused (and admittedly interested). Glad to know it was probably due to my eyes seeing that second article title in the same glance, and I wasn't just having a stroke.

  • Already doing it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • Manna [marshallbrain.com]? Is that you?
  • 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

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