Tesco dreams big with fully immersive virtual reality store for the Oculus Rift

Why visit a Tesco store in real life when you could visit one in virtual reality?

Has virtual reality gone too far with this off-the-shelf offering?

If you could use technology to recreate a virtual world of your choosing, what would you go for? Maybe something in the fantasy vein, full of dragons and sweeping vistas, or perhaps something from science-fiction, with exotic, alien fauna leaping about underneath a double sunset?

Whatever you’d choose, we’re pretty sure you wouldn’t recreate the interior of a Tesco store - although it seems that the advertising bods of the retailing dreadnought would disagree, as seen in the frankly bizarre promotional video below.

Created by production studio Figure Digital and spotted by tech site Gizmodo, the video shows a demo for the Oculus Rift (you know, that revolutionary virtual reality headset so realistic it gives people motion sickness) that lets customers explore an eerily empty Tesco store.

We’re sure that rows upon rows of immaculately stacked shelves probably constitute someone’s fantasy world, but it’s not anyone whose company we’d like to share for longer than the time it takes to say ‘hello, how are you, goodbye’.

And while the end of the video does suggest that customers might get to play virtual football with a virtual Pelé (maybe? Sort of?) the stadium itself is so atrociously rendered you almost want to go back to the store. At least there things weren't unsettlingly out of proportion (that football is about three times bigger than it should be) as if the whole set-up was the work of some an alien race unfamiliar with how humans work. By which we mean to say, Tesco: leave virtual reality alone, you're creeping us out.