The big box discount chain said in a blog post early Tuesday that it had bought a virtual reality startup, Spatialand, as a cornerstone of its strategy to develop technology that it’s betting will eventually reshape how shopping takes places both in its stores and online. It is the latest acquisition by Walmart, which in the last year and a half has bought digital businesses ranging from big like Jet.com to much smaller ones such as online retailer Modcloth.
But unlike those, which immediately lifted Walmart’s online sales, the Spatialand acquisition is aimed at building tech that won’t offer a payoff in any short term. Instead, Spatialand is working with Walmart’s Silicon Valley-based tech incubator, Store No. 8, an initiative launched last year as an in-house innovation cluster whose entrepreneurs enjoy autonomy from Walmart’s Bentonville corporate office, to develop the retail tech it wants in the next decade to go toe-to-toe with Amazon.com (AMZN, -1.18%)more effectively.
Spatialand creates software that enables the transformation of already created content into something immersive.
See the full story here: http://fortune.com/2018/02/06/walmart-virtual-reality/