eBay appears to be making its first foray into virtual reality (VR) with an experiment on their tickets marketplace StubHub.
From tomorrow, if you’re buying tickets for the Final Four or baseball tickets at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, you can check out your seat in advance with a 3D virtual view. You can access the VR feature using the Stubhub app for Android or IPhone.
You can just use your phone or pop it into Google Cardboard or Gear VR for a more complete view. There’s a video of the experience on this page.
Marcus Shelksohn, StubHub’s head of product for mobile apps says of the new feature: “We didn’t want to do something just for fun or as a marketing gimmick. Being able to see what the view is like solves a real problem for customers. Are those seats that are closer to the court really worth the extra $50?”
And it looks like this is just the first VR feature at eBay. CEO Devin Wenig says VR is not a passing fad: “It is not a feature; it is a platform,” he said.
He believes the big win could be in categories with high priced items like cars, antiques, paintings and fashion, where buyers want a close up view: “The plan is to start to attack some of those more emotionally driven categories where the trust gap is hard to bridge.”
It will be interesting to watch where this one goes.
