March 19, 2025
Walmart is a lot of things. For better or worse, it’s the world’s largest company by revenue as well as the world’s largest private employer. The retail giant has also been an early mover when it comes to XR, actively exploring the technology to train its over two million employees, improve its 10,600+ stores and clubs, and compete with Amazon since 2017. Here are some of the ways Walmart has and is leveraging extended reality technologies.
2017
Following a pilot project at 30 of its training centers, Walmart put an Oculus Rift headset in each of its 200 Walmart Academy locations to help train an estimated 150,000 employees in management, customer service, and other areas.
Each training center received an Oculus Rift tethered to a PC and loaded with VR training content developed by Strivr. The VR instruction was entirely 360-degree video-based and included interactive on-screen cues prompting users to make decisions in a variety of situations related to management, customer service, and even seasonal events like Black Friday.
Experiences ranged in length from 30 seconds to five minutes and were intended to supplement traditional instruction for everyone from the “lowest-level bagger” up to store management.
2018
The following year, Walmart purchased 17,000 Oculus Go headsets for nearly 5,000 stores, sending four headsets to each Walmart Supercenter and two to each Neighborhood Market in the U.S. to allow for more frequent training.
Again, the VR training simulations were 360 video-based with onscreen prompts, but this time the headsets were standalone and the subject matter concerned new initiatives - new processes and products - coming to stores.
In this way, employees were ready for Pickup Towers - a new store feature for online purchases - as soon as they were installed in stores, having encountered them first in VR.
Around this time, Walmart also introduced VR for active shooter training. In August of the following year, Walmart’s CEO would claim VR helped employees navigate a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.
2019
Walmart rolled out a VR assessment program - again with Strivr - to test employees for promotions in thousands of its stores.
The VR simulations were designed to test how users perform in challenging situations, and the results were used to inform - not determine - whether someone was a good candidate for promotion, the idea being to use VR to help find candidates for management positions.
In VR, it’s possible to evaluate things like how someone responds to challenging situations, how they prioritize tasks, etc.--things that can’t be easily observed in a traditional interview.
Walmart’s larger goal was to identify high performers in order to cut back on the number of managers (i.e. the number of higher paid employees) in each store. VR served as just one “data point” in the evaluation process; putting on a headset wasn’t mandatory and Walmart assured the results wouldn’t be used to disqualify or demote anyone.
In one promising example, an employee who had been working at Walmart for 12 years was promoted to team leader and received a 10% raise after participating in the VR assessment.
2020/COVID Era
Walmart announced plans to turn four of its stores into test labs where it would prototype new technology initiatives, including an AR inventory app.
The idea was to use these stores to find solutions to not only serve in-store shoppers but also meet the needs of online shoppers in physical retail locations. In other words, how might a physical shopping destination also serve as an online fulfillment center?
Product and technology teams would be embedded in the test stores to iterate solutions in real time, then scale whatever worked. One solution was an augmented reality app designed to guide associates in the backroom to inventory ready to be put out on the sales floor–kind of like vision picking. In this way, products get onto shelves faster.
2022
2022 was a busy year for the superstore, including the launch of two immersive experiences in Roblox, more VR training, and the introduction of AR-powered virtual try-on within the brand’s iOS app.
This time, Walmart used Pico Neo 3 VR headsets to deliver future skills training content as well as virtual leadership and wellness courses developed by Strivr in an effort to upskill over two million employees.
Walmart launched the so-called “one global Walmart Academy” to foster career growth among not only its U.S. employees but also Walmart associates around the world. Employees could access the training via dedicated headsets or iPads in stores (no need to travel to a Walmart Academy) or download the Walmart Academy app for “bite-sized,” on-demand training while in store.
The content itself was designed to prepare employees for challenging in-store situations as well as specific unexpected scenarios. One scenario, for instance, involved accidentally dropping an item during an in-home delivery.
The same year, Walmart launched “Walmart Land” and Walmart’s “Universe of Play” in Roblox. These forays into the metaverse included a variety of interactive immersive experiences and games, and of course virtual merchandise for your avatar.
In Walmart Land, there was the music festival-esque Electric Island with an interactive DJ booth. House of Style featured a virtual dressing room and “Electric Fest” offered motion-capture concerts by popular performers like Madison Beer and YUNGBLUD. In Walmart’s Universe of Play, Roblox users could explore toy worlds, play games, and earn rewards.
In September of 2022, Walmart unveiled “Be Your Own Model,” a virtual try-on tool using technology from Zeekit, a startup the retailer acquired in 2021. The first iteration dropped in March, allowing shoppers to see clothing items on a model with a similar body type and coloring. From 50 models, shoppers were eventually able to choose among 120 models.
Be Your Own Model allows shoppers to try on more than 270,000 items across Walmart’s private brands as well as select items from national brands like Champion and Levi’s, not on a model but on their own bodies based on a scan of each user’s body.
The AR feature arrived at a time Walmart’s usual customers were scaling back their spending while consumers from households with incomes of $100,000+ were turning to Walmart for cheaper groceries. The tool would help conservative spenders make more confident purchasing decisions and hopefully encourage new customers to buy clothes in addition to groceries.
Next up and just in time for the holidays, Walmart launched View in Your Home, letting shoppers view more than 200 TVs in their homes before buying.
It’s important to put these developments in context: Around this time, Walmart was expanding into more “fashion-forward merchandise with higher price tags.” The company was growing its collection of private brands while also trying to compete with Amazon in the digital realm.
2023
Walmart continued to build on its AR solutions. iOS users gained the ability to view multiple items in their space at once as the Walmart app’s catalog of AR-supported products grew to more than 7,000 items, including furniture, electronics, and more. Shoppers can quickly swap out products to compare thanks to the “Similar Item” feature and purchase a room’s worth of items with a single tap.
The company next expanded virtual try-on to the beauty category, collaborating with Perfect Corp to incorporate its hyperrealistic AR makeup filters for over 1,400 products across 20+ brands. Users can try multiple shades of blush, eye shadow, etc. in a matter of seconds, eliminating the need for physical product samples–a bonus for the environment.
2024
Walmart kicked off 2024 showcasing a new virtual showroom-slash-“social commerce app” at CES. Shop with Friends uses the same AR and AI tech as the above tools, allowing users to create and share virtual outfits with their friends.
Walmart also partnered with Unity to integrate immersive commerce into apps, games, and virtual worlds, opening a new monetization channel for developers and bringing Walmart merchandise to over three billion people “where they already are,” i.e. in games (as opposed to creating a separate virtual store).
Millions of Unity developers can use Walmart’s commerce API (not all that dissimilar to Amazon Anywhere) to sell physical goods within their projects, including real-time 3D experiences, and earn affiliate fees. Users can buy Walmart products without leaving their app or game to pick up later in stores.
In addition, Walmart expanded virtual try-on to eyewear and hair color products.
In Spring 2024, Walmart returned to Roblox to sell real-world goods. “For the first time,” Roblox users were able to buy a physical product without leaving the virtual world.
Walmart Discovered allowed Roblox users to check out real-world items chosen by user-generated content (UGC) creators who partnered with Walmart. Moreover, purchases of select items came with a free digital version for your avatar. Walmart curated the product selection to appeal to Roblox’s younger, tech native user base, selling hoodies, tumblers, and even fitted caps based on designs of top Roblox creators.
In May, the company launched Walmart Realm, its own 3D/virtual ecommerce world where you can shop for “digital doubles” of select products sold at Walmart stores in a variety of fantasy environments. Walmart, at least in part, hoped to gain insights from the platform to guide its future immersive commerce strategy.
Later that year, Adweek highlighted Walmart’s use of AR and AI to shift its products and services to meet changing customer demands, what the brand calls Adaptive Retail. To that end, Walmart developed Wallaby, a generative AI platform trained on decades of Walmart data, to answer customer questions and streamline product returns.
In addition to this new AI-powered customer support assistant, Walmart developed a Content Decision Platform, essentially a predictive engine for personalized shopping experiences (including personalized home pages) that’s set to roll out in the U.S. by the end of 2025.
Walmart has also been experimenting with AI to quickly generate accurate 3D product models for AR shopping. Retina is the company’s “full-blown AR platform” that creates “tens of thousands” of 3D assets and powers all of Walmart’s AR shopping experiences.
2025
Most recently, Walmart launched another ecommerce experience to sell real-world goods, this time on Zepeto, a digital avatar creation platform with a user base that’s reportedly 70% Gen Z and “skews female.”
Though smaller than Roblox and Minecraft, Zepeto’s focus on virtual identity translates to a higher propensity among users to spend on digital goods. Since October 2024 when Walmart first dropped virtual recreations of items from its No Boundaries brand on the platform, Zepeto users have made 1.3 million digital purchases and created 1.87 million pieces of content using No Boundaries items, according to Walmart.
Now, Zepeto users can order real-world versions of the Walmart items tried on/worn by their avatars through a virtual Walmart storefront within the app. What’s more, select physical items in Walmart stores will come with a free virtual version for Zepeto.
Beyond selling products, this ecommerce integration is a learning opportunity for Walmart. Data from Zepeto - like which items are most often featured in UGC - provides insights into the next generation of consumers: In the first “drops,” for instance, Walmart learned that virtual items with graphic designs performed better than traditional items.
Conclusion
Watch this space! Walmart shows no signs of slowing down its testing/adoption of XR in pursuit of “hyper-personalized, convenient, and engaging shopping experiences” across its stores, websites, apps, and third-party platforms.
*Behind the scenes of the above public-facing immersive experiences - at least in part - is Walmart Creative Studio. We heard from Cynthia Maller who built Walmart’s 3D Creative Practice from the ground up at the Augmented Enterprise Summit in 2022 and 2023. Learn how Walmart went from having virtually no customer-facing 3D capabilities to an arsenal of 25,000 digital twins and 5,000 unique 3D environments in just five years. Cynthia will share her most recent work at Walmart this September in Dallas at the 2025 Augmented Enterprise Summit.
