Black Friday reimagined as nightmarish VR experience by Wieden+Kennedy

Wieden+Kennedy London has created Shopageddon, a nightmarish VR experience based on Black Friday. “We’ve taken the worst of the digital and physical worlds and merged them together, on your face,” explains the agency.

Designed for a mobile browser to be used with a VR headset, the Shopageddon site imagines what future online shopping might look like. “Your retinas are about to experience an onslaught of consumer goods,” the agency warns, and that’s no exaggeration. Boxes emblazoned with product logos and advertising are thrown at you incessantly for a 60-second period, recreating the frenzied stress of the Black Friday sales.

Then at the end of the sequence it tells you “Your eyes added these items to your shopping list,” and gives you a selection of the products you’ve supposedly looked at for the longest, so you can buy them.

Purposely intense and hectic, the satirical project is a prototype produced by the agency as a result of experimentation with VR technology.

“We’ve been experimenting with VR, making random things, and trying to figure out what it might all mean beyond entertainment,” says Iain Tate, ECD at Wieden+Kennedy London. “Last week we built this odd shopping experience as a rough proof of concept. And there’s only one moment appropriate to launch such an OTT shopping experience – Black Friday”.