Faculty of Design

Industrial Design

Shiyu Wang

VR Online Experience for Gentle Monster

What if online shopping can be fresh and exciting?This project focuses on creating an immersive and interactive online experience for the Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster, in order to increase the brand influence and its sales volume in a digitalized post-pandemic world. Virtual reality is used as the delivery method to achieve a sense of immersion.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, I did a lot of online shopping, way more than usual. And I found shopping online is not as exciting as shopping in store. So I started to think, how can we improve that? The research showed the pandemic has negatively impacted a lot of industries, the fashion industry is one of them and many brands had to move to online sales. Besides, online shopping is expected to be the mainstream in the future, which means there is a lot of space for development. To be more specific, I chose the Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster. This brand is famous for its offline experience. They used a lot of artworks in their physical stores and it’s more like a modern gallery instead of the eye-wear store. However, I found their online store is not that outstanding. So the design goal is to offer customers a fresh and exciting online shopping experience to increase the brand influence and the sales volume in a post-pandemic world. I used VR as the delivery method to achieve the immersive experience. To create the virtual environment and interactions, I used unreal engine. I also build some models to make the virtual style align with the brand style. In the outcome, there are several different worlds where people can explore and interact with Gentle Monster’s product. The whole shopping experience is like a journey, or a game. ”