Tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis offers one example of how virtual reality as an exponential technology will disrupt the current state of online shopping. Understanding radical technological shifts is a major advantage for individuals and businesses that want to stay a step (or 100 steps) ahead of their peers. And Singularity University’s 2015 Exponential Finance conference, happening June 2 and 3 in New York City, brings together some of the top future-focused entrepreneurs in every field — from finance, to law, to computing, to medicine — to share their discoveries and insights into what’s coming next, and how to turn it to your advantage. Tickets are going fast. Use the code BIGTHINK500 to lock in your seats now, at a $500 discount.
Peter Diamandis: Imagine a virtual reality experience where when you go into this virtual reality world, everything looks like it's real and you can navigate around it and begin to do extraordinary things in this high-fidelity world.
At home you will have yourself 3D scanned down to the millimeter. I then enter into a virtual world and I have an AI there that is my shopping adviser. It says, “Peter, what are you looking for?” And all of a sudden in this virtual world, everything I see is in my size, in the colors I want, recommended by this AI. And I can say, you know, "I’d love to see a fashion show." On a runway are avatars of me wearing all these different outfits walking by and I can say I want to see that one and that one. And all of a sudden I’m looking in a virtual mirror and I’m wearing that outfit and I can look around, see what it looks like. And I go, “This is it. I want that.” Boom, it’s produced, manufactured to my exact size probably using 3D-printing capabilities or robotic capabilities that afternoon in the local factory and delivered the next morning and it fits perfectly.
So that’s the future of the virtual retail store, if you would, and why I think virtual reality is going to do effectively a hundred-fold improvement over what the Amazon experience is today.