Verizon welcomed visitors to its new Destination Store this past week, a first for the West Coast, with a grand opening in Santa Monica, California. The new store design is loaded with tech and gives customers a hands-on lifestyle shopping approach, with something for everyone to pick up and experience.

VRScout took a tour for the opening of the store, exploring what Verizon is calling interactive “lifestyle zones” ranging from fitness to music to sports products and solutions.

In an exclusive to this Santa Monica location, Verizon showed off their new NFL virtual reality experience made in collaboration with Two Bit Circus. The installation sits on the top floor of the retail space and invites customers to get in the game. Visitors who are game, put on a Samsung Gear VR headset, lower a giant sized helmet over their head, and experience what it’s like to run back a kickoff in the NFL.

The VR experience brings you onto the field rushing with your team, jumping in a huddle, receiving a kickoff, running and then getting tackled. An extra bonus, when you finally get “tackled” in the experience, the floor underneath you rumbles.

Virtual reality and the many other additional tech experiences at the store represent a new way of engaging with customers to help them discover all that wireless technology can add to their mobile lifestyle. For the most part, we at VRScout scout brand VR experiences that are temporary and event activation oriented. It is great to see some permanence with this latest Verizon NFL VR experience.

The Santa Monica Destination Store is the first on the West Coast and the fifth in the country. The store is seven times the size of a normal Verizon retail location and offers 16,000 product SKUs on site, where a typical store has 3,000. The store officially opened its doors for business on July 1st.

Image Credit: VRScout & Two Bit Circus