What is Virtual Reality?

Virtual reality is a technology that enables users to experience a virtual world in an immersive way, as if they were actually there.

This technology has developed rapidly in recent years and found a wide variety of applications in various fields, from entertainment and education to medicine and retail, among others.

Using Virtual Reality for merchandising :

In the world of merchandising, virtual reality (3D) is used to test customer paths at different points of sale by analyzing packaging, planograms, point-of-sale materials and point-of-sale displays. This kind of tool also makes it possible to centralize data, enabling teams to collaborate more effectively. This makes it easier to roll out innovative new concepts and facilitate their implementation.

Find out more about merchandising and the different merchandising strategies used in the retail sector in this article.

Virtual Reality and Education

3D is a very powerful tool, offering educators an innovative and effective way of teaching students. Students can learn in a more interactive and hands-on way, which enhances knowledge acquisition and stimulates learning. What's more, the integration of modern tools such as these enables schools to become more competitive and thus attract more students to their establishment.

Here's exactly what virtual reality brings to education:

Promotes immersion in learning: one of the main advantages of virtual reality in education is the ability to create an immersive environment in which students can immerse themselves and experience real-life situations in a safe, controlled virtual environment. For example, merchandising students can turn their project into reality by creating the design, merchandising the products, implementing their project in a virtual environment and finally developing the marketing of their concept. All on an easy-to-use platform.

-Improves knowledge integration: active interaction in a virtual environment can enable students to learn more effectively. The ability to interact with and explore learning content in an immersive way can help students better understand and memorize course concepts. Indeed, it's a well-known fact that we generally retain 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 50% of what we see and hear at the same time, and 90% of what we do ourselves!

-Saves time and resources: this technology can be used to create virtual learning environments enabling students to learn anywhere, anytime. This means that students can access real-life learning cases without having to travel to stores or waste time on internet searches that don't always lead to results.

-Stimulates student interest: 3D in education can also stimulate student interest in learning. The technology can make learning more fun and engaging for students, which can help maintain their attention and engagement in the course.

-Preparing students for the digital world: it's clear that the professional world is becoming increasingly digital, so students need to be trained in these tools to prepare them for the evolution of their future profession.

-Facilitates collaboration and teamwork: students can work together on projects and explore learning content together in a virtual environment.

Have you ever heard of Nantes-based business school Audencia's initiative to use virtual reality to enrich the learning experience for its students? Teachers have come up with the ingenious idea of harnessing this innovative, fun technology to boost student engagement. Thanks to this approach, students can immerse themselves in a virtual environment, simulating a store, where they can put their merchandising knowledge into practice in an immersive way.

Since the start of the 2023 academic year, a number of establishments have adopted Retail VR 's Education Edition solution to professionalize their merchandising courses: theIUT de la Réunion, the BTS La salle de Lille and theICSSA de Niort.

Focus on Education Edition

Retail VR specializes in 3D merchandising.‍ We have long been convinced that virtual reality applied to merchandising courses is an advantage in student learning. ‍ Armed with this conviction, we have designed and adapted dedicated learning modules to enable teachers and students to create virtual stores online in a simple and intuitive way. 

The Education offer is based on the Retail VR software suites that our retail and industrial customers use on a daily basis. We offer a very simple planogram tool that facilitates learning, enabling students to create from scratch planograms, plvs and furniture applicable to all target sectors (mass retail, fashion, pharmaceuticals, food, cosmetics, etc.), making it easier to understand micro-merchandising techniques.  

In addition, students can work on setting up virtual points of sale, boutiques, concept stores, corners and showrooms of all sizes, this time using macro-merchandising and visual merchandising techniques. These fully immersive stores are used to enhance the learning experience for students, who can work on point-of-sale design projects from A to Z.

The Education Edition program provides pathways and activities for each of these skills:

-Develop and continuously adapt product and service offerings

-Organizing retail space

-Enhancing the performance of retail space

-Setting up sales communications

-Evaluating sales actions

Our commitments to teachers : 

- An excellent teaching resource: students can learn business, merchandising and financial management skills by creating and managing their own virtual store.

- Create customized virtual stores: teachers and students can add products, set prices, create promotions and more. 

- Use software that's easy to learn: requires no technical skills and can be used by teachers and students alike. ‍ So, convinced?

Our Virtual Store solution enables your customers to immerse themselves in a more emotionally powerful shopping experience that generates higher conversion rates.