Walmart has acquired VR startup Spatialand

Not sure how VR would solve this, non-VR 3D people models that could be customized in various dimensions, along with models of the dress and simulation of the fabric could improve the shopping experience.

VR is probably more applicable to buying items for the home, rather than clothes.

I feel this is the biggest opportunity : how will these clothes fit you. Let me use my smartphone to register my body automatically(ios or android, they have enough sensors to map my body just with the camera and ML), then show me how this jean will fit me.

Of course one of the biggest issue would be that clothes have pretty large size variation (most of the fabrication is still done manually).

In addition, there's a huge focus now on material, both in the niche digital-only nerd-friendly companies like Outlier, Mission Workshop and Taylor and Stitch but in more mainstream companies like Banana Republic.

Online shopping has often been a mental goto for people trying to imagine how technology will change commerce. The 90s boom/bust was full of retailers, cargo-cult online versions of regular retailers. Amazon worked, but nothing else did. Even Amazon never made profits directly from retailing physical products.

In reality (post bust) the first big industry to really go online was travel, with hotels, flights and such going mostly online very fast. Even faster than software, interestingly.

I think it's a parallel to robots for automation. For automated hotels or whatnot, people generally imagine an atm-like check-in desk. Robot maid. Robot room service. Robot consierge.. Jetsons. In reality, the check-in is your phone, an extension of your non-existant travel agent. The robot maid might be a self cleaning bathroom, where the entire room "flushes". Room service is just-eat...

People use robots as mental place-holders, for tasks people will not do in the future. Sometimes they take it literally. They do the same with digital department stores, for ecommerce.

So.. I dunno. I doubt Walmart will be the thing that's revolutionised early by ar/vr. Maybe a vr view of a model wearing something would be good, but I doubt it's important until the devices are ubiquitous. Ie, not a "killer app", which is what matters now.

For now, I think you'd get more mileage by developing the current generation of online stores. For example, have 3-4 models of different ages, shapes and sizes wear stuff. Use video for browsing. Use a Starbucks instead of a runway. ..way better/more content..use the technology people already have.