It’s one of the most under-appreciated science fiction films of the past decade, but Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (also the most expensive independent film ever made) subtly depicts a compelling vision for the way tools like augmented and virtual reality devices may intersect with the future of online shopping.
The scene takes place in Big Market, a massive inter-dimensional marketplace consisting of more than a million shops. In reality, it’s located in a giant empty desert, but it can be accessed by visiting shoppers through their head-worn AR glasses. Take a look for yourself.
Aside from showcasing how augmented reality can transform our relationship to physical land in unpredictable ways, even barren desert landscapes, it showcases what an almost fully “online” shopping experience might be like if you could physically walk through it in three-dimensional space.
While we’re far from a Big Market existing in the real world, I’ve just experienced what is perhaps its closest precursor entirely in virtual reality using my own Oculus Rift headset at home. It’s called Virtual Market, and right now the fourth edition is currently underway in VRChat, one of the most-used social VR applications today.
What It Is
Virtual Market 4, or V-Ket 4 for short, is a Japanese expo that spans 36 separate worlds contained within the VRChat ecosystem. Its primary purpose is to sell virtual apparel and avatars, like if shopping for a new “skin” in Fortnite took place inside a sprawling virtual mall. Given the scale of the event, it’s also drawn the attention from big brands to create an almost CES-like feel.
For those who don’t know what VRChat is, think of it like a modern Second Life, full of user-built online virtual spaces. To date, VRChat is by far the most popular and used social VR application, which had millions of downloads and tens of thousands of concurrent users at its peak in 2018 and is now seeing even more growth during the pandemic.
In early 2018, a collection of popular twitch streamers began broadcasting as avatars from inside VRChat to their thousands of viewers. To get a sense, one notable example involved two beloved twitch celebrities who staged a sort of ongoing reality show culminating in a mock wedding in front of their fans. As a result, and aside from games like Beat Saber and Half-Life Alyx, VRChat became the closest thing to a “killer app” the VR industry has ever seen. VRChat is now carrying the baton handed off by Second Life toward realizing some of the vision of a true online “Metaverse.”
In concept, V-Ket 4 is one of the more remarkable activities I’ve seen during my time writing about VR, but in practice we’re clearly far off from a truly rich social experience in VR.
The most astonishing aspect is the scope and scale of the event. According to the official press release, V-Ket 3 hosted more than 710,000 people, and this time more than a million visitors are expected to participate over the course of 10 days (making it the largest social VR gathering ever). 40 companies, many of them well-known multinationals including Audi, Netflix, Panasonic, and Sega, will be exhibitors as well. Presumably (and I was unable to contact a press representative at the time of writing), the majority of these visitors will be from Asia. I also do not know the number of people who will attend in 2D, since VRChat also works on desktop without a VR device.
As Kent Bye, a popular VR podcaster, points out as well, V-Ket displays some of the most complex and intricate virtual world architecture you will find anywhere in social VR.
What It’s Like Inside
V-Ket 4 kicked off at 7pm San Francisco time the evening of Tuesday April 28 (11am Wednesday in Tokyo), and will run for ten days. At the start of the event, I was ready to spawn into “Parareal Tokyo,” the flagship virtual world made to imitate the real streets of Japan’s capital. I noticed on the dashboard that more than 2,000 people were already in the space—but since each instance of the world is capped at 30 users, there were more than 65 copied versions of Parareal Tokyo running at once.