Not just luxury car buying. I've been convinced for a while that AR and/or VR will be the future of almost-anything-buying. It's one significant disadvantage

Not just luxury car buying. I've been convinced for a while that AR and/or VR will be the future of almost-anything-buying. It's one significant disadvantage to buying things online now: you get way more choice, but it's often difficult to be really sure what something will be like, going only from 2D pictures and a text description. And in some cases - clothing in particular - even if you have exact specs and great images of the item itself, it isn't terribly useful without context. (Cars would fit in that category too.) With VR though (and help from 3d cameras and body mapping), shopping for clothes online could be a better experience than in person. You could virtually try on 10 shirts faster than you could get into a fitting room in the real world, and see them from arbitrary angles as well. Or take furniture. Rather than looking at pictures, how about seeing exactly how that side table will look in your living room? The possibilities are endless. Admittedly until we get true "virtual reality" you won't be able to tell how a pair of pants or a couch or whatever actually feels, nor will you really be able to virtually test drive a car (which as the article suggests is a pretty significant part of the buying process) but it will still be a completely different world from e-commerce today, and in many ways better than shopping in brick and mortar stores, even aside from the convenience of not leaving your home and the infinite selection of the internet.