The success in the growth of haptic hardware becomes especially obvious when examining the example of CLAW, an innovative haptic controller created by a Microsoft development team.

When it comes to design, CLAW has few things that differ from existing haptic controllers. However, when looking closer, you can find out that it has a motorized arm that can rotate the index finger relative to the palm to provide force feedback.

The controller contains the standard functionality like thumb buttons, 6DOF control, and index finger trigger as well as unique capabilities, such as taking and moving virtual objects while receiving force feedback from the device.

Moreover, force feedback depends on a material virtual objects are “made” of. The harder the material is, the stronger the resistance a user will feel while using the controller.

When a user tries to touch a virtual object, CLAW generates some resistance to prevent the user from penetrating a virtual object. The controller also generates vibrations to allow users to feel better a virtual object’ surface.

In fact, the device has a wide range of unique capabilities, but the point is that such devices bring virtual reality to an incredibly new level where we will soon experience difficulties in distinguishing what is real and what is not.

The emerging VR technology improvements expand the horizon for both online and offline retailers and provide them with a possibility to give their customers a shopping experience which would be significantly limited in reality.

Conclusion

The potential of the immersive VR technology in the ecommerce sector is hard to overestimate.

Due to rich visualization capabilities, VR can help customers visit online stores without even leaving their homes and make shopping decisions by allowing them to try an item without any restrictions or risks to damage it.

Even though taking into account the numerous benefits of virtual reality and its further improvement by a wide range of vendors, the immersive technology will hardly fully replace traditional offline stores.

However, when it comes to virtual reality in 10 years, it will definitely cut their quantity across the entire world. We can now observe the situation where online stores without any immersive features start replacing bricks-and-mortar stores because of their advantages like the absence of the necessity to pay for the facility rent.

Thus, we can imagine how popular ecommerce businesses will soon become when they implement virtual reality solutions that can be used through a web browser.

Apart from providing full information about each item in any store, virtual reality gives a customer a unique opportunity to try a product out, examine it from any side as well as interact with it without the need for leaving home.

This immersive technology significantly simplifies the process of making shopping decisions. Virtual reality is not about manipulating customer minds; it’s about moving a traditional shopping experience in offline stores to consumer homes.