Virtual reality technology has been around since the 1970s and has been used typically in video games, movie theaters, and amusement parks. In recent years, VR has expanded to other areas, including employee training and shopping experiences, both in-person and online. While the technology hasn’t yet been fully adopted in loss prevention, there are some compelling future use cases for both employees and their customers if retailers can determine how to scale VR across their businesses.
VR: What It Is, and How It’s Used in Retail to Date
Virtual reality utilizes computer technology to create a simulated environment. Using headsets, users can then interact with a three-dimensional space.
In retail, VR enables consumers to fully immerse themselves in a shopping experience through virtual storefronts, where they can browse products, complete transactions, visualize a product in their homes, and even “try on” an outfit or lipstick shade. And shoppers seem to enjoy it—one in three said they were “very or extremely interested” in using VR to shop in brick-and-mortar stores, from home, or work, according to a 2024 PYMNTS survey. In this way, VR bridges the gap between physical and online shopping. Industry experts believe that the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) will likely spur demand for VR in the retail market. There are numerous examples of major retailers utilizing VR and these other technologies to enhance the customer shopping experience:
- Nordstrom’s TextStyle service utilizes virtual reality to offer personalized shopping experiences by analyzing shoppers’ preferences and purchase history.
- Lowe’s Holoroom is a virtual reality tool that helps shoppers visualize home improvement projects, including materials and room design.
- The North Face VR lets customers test outdoor gear in various weather conditions and terrains.
- Audi’s VR Car Configurator allows customers to customize their dream cars in a virtual showroom, offering a range of models, colors, and features.
It’s not a giant leap to assume that if shoppers are increasingly open to experiences that blend physical and digital the way VR does, so, too, might be the employees who work at these retailers. VR is a powerful technology because it is designed to elicit a sensory, emotional response, which is more impactful than the standard computer or pen and paper method when training employees to deal with a range of different scenarios, from a coworker stealing to an armed robbery. There are numerous other benefits to considering the technology for training purposes based on the outcomes other industries have seen using VR.
The Organizations Testing VR for Training and LP Purposes
The Homeland Security Training Institute (HSTI) at the College of DuPage offers specialized training programs for law enforcement, first responders, school safety professionals, emergency management personnel, and corporate security teams. Some of their training leverages VR. Matt Gorecki, the primary range master for the HSTI, is a retired special agent with twenty-three years of service with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). He notes several benefits of using simulation technology such as VR.
“Scenario training is amazing because you can customize the scenario to fit your specific task or mission statement, but it’s personnel-exhausting,” he said. “You need role players. You need observers. You need safety officers. And you need instructors. With any kind of simulator technology, whether it’s screen-based platforms or headsets, I can run an entire team of individuals all by myself. I can run the program, observe what they do, and debrief accordingly, all by myself. That’s the advantage.”
DuPage utilizes VR in several ways. They have a dedicated simulation room that provides a 300-degree threat radius, featuring a five-screen platform with rear projection mounted on the ceiling. They also possess devices that can simulate firearms. More recently, the college has begun using Street Smarts, a VR system that allows trainees to wear headsets and immerse themselves in a specific environment. “The beauty of that is its portability,” Gorecki said. “You can bring it anywhere and run it anywhere. Once you map out a room, you can do it in your living room; you can do it in your garage, or a basketball court, or a conference room.”
Depending on the technology of a given platform, an instructor can create a scenario where, for instance, an unarmed security guard encounters a crime in progress and can either escalate or de-escalate the situation depending on the trainee’s posture. If the trainee appears a little indecisive, the instructor can escalate the scenario so that the individual can make a decision.
Additionally, the Loss Prevention Research Council’s research, simulation, and live store labs, located on-site at the University of Florida, enable its research team and partners to conduct experiments and test new LP technologies and strategies. The Digital Worlds Institute, also located on the university campus, develops virtual reality environments for the organization. Cory Lowe, PhD, director of research for the LPRC, notes that companies are at different stages in their adoption of VR. “There are several companies that have been using it for several years now to train their employees, particularly on the types of incidents that have a very visceral element of surprise, or something that might generate an emotional response,” Lowe said. “I think that’s generally where it’s at.”
The outcomes of the LPRC’s VR research projects enable its members and other retailers to apply the findings in their stores. These experiments haven’t just been to gauge the impact of different variables on retail employees and customers—they also assess how it affects the offenders themselves. “We use it for our research because we can manipulate one thing at a time,” Lowe said. “So, we’ve done projects with lighting and a variety of other things, signage in environments to see how it affects customers and offenders in our labs.”
These projects include the perception of public view monitors and signage that might accompany them. In the lab, Lowe and his research team can add monitors and signage saying, “Shoplifters will be prosecuted,” bring customers and actual offenders through, and then interview them about their perception of the environment. The researchers can control that one element at a time—in this case, whether people see the monitor and signage or not. The LPRC has also had shoppers and offenders wear VR headsets and walk through a simulated retail parking lot to assess the effect of different lighting conditions. These are scenarios that would be difficult to replicate in the actual physical environment. “If I try to go out to a retailer and do that same thing, I won’t be able to control the parking lot without irritating everyone who works or shops at that store,” Lowe said.
A Few of the Companies Providing VR Training
Roundtable Learning offers training of all types. About ten years ago, they began exploring newer technologies like virtual reality as another tool for training—increasingly in the retail space. “The benefit is they’re doing a lot of training based on knowledge from the past,” said Nick Day, vice president of sales and marketing at Roundtable Learning. “And that’s what they’ll use as things change, and we can now add new scenarios as they arise. Perhaps they’re only observing a limited number of situations occurring in a region. But they’re noticing that it could spread now. They can issue new training on all those headsets.”
The company has created a virtual store, encompassing everything from the warehouse environment to the store aisles and the parking lot. Using this store, employees can recreate in-store situations, allowing them to practice their responses in a virtual reality environment. Roundtable Learning can then train on everything from inventory control to more loss prevention-specific use cases, such as an active shooter scenario, in a much more engaging way than traditional methods. “A lot of these large brands that we all know for years and years continue to go about training the same ways,” Day said. “However, their employees consume content and learn in different ways, which has evolved. So, there’s been a huge disconnect.”
This is especially true for younger workers, who are digital natives less likely to engage with dated videos, long lectures, or pen and paper training, he added. New technologies with which they are already familiar—Gen Z possesses the highest rate of digital gaming penetration, and their VR use is expected to exceed that of Millennials by 2027, according to eMarketer—can better engage this population at work. Michael Mason, who is retired from his roles as chief security officer at Verizon, which previously tested VR, and executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Branch, echoes this sentiment. “You know, we’re in a generation now that embraces this kind of training young folks are seeking creative and innovative ways to bring training to them,” he said.
Verizon used a company called Strivr for its VR pilot program. In terms of LP use cases, “clients have primarily used VR for training retail associates to practice identifying and handling receipt matching—ensuring all items are accounted for—as customers leave retail stores,” the company’s VP of marketing, Kristi Rawlinson, wrote in an email. There is also the immersive aspect of VR, which can keep employees more focused on whatever they’re supposed to be learning or practicing. “I have zero distractions,” Day said. “The dog isn’t barking, the doorbell isn’t ringing, the Amazon guy’s not here. You have my undivided attention while I’m in this headset.”
The advent of hybrid work post-pandemic has opened up an additional opportunity to train workers more flexibly. So, if a retailer has an hourly workforce that comes in to reload inventory, they can train them using VR during that specific time. On the flip side, a retailer could send VR headsets home with employees to do training in their own time and then follow up with a quiz or questionnaire gauging if they understand what they’ve learned, said Jim Leitch, founder and CEO of UK-based Link Integrated Security Solutions Ltd., which delivers innovative security solutions, including VR. “You don’t need to say, ‘Well, I’m booking a course for Monday morning,’” he said. “If I’m taking a new guard or a shop member, you can say, ‘There you go, put your headsets on,’ and you could do it now.”
The implication is that instead of an employee trying to remember the steps they should take to handle a specific situation based on training that they were physically removed from, VR gives them a chance to simulate the experience. In this way, the employee forms a muscle memory that can serve them well when they eventually face the scenario in real life. “There’s always going to be that difference between reality and any kind of training you do,” Mason said. “But the closer you can bring it to reality, and the more you can coach and teach people, the better.”
The Verizon VR Test Case
Verizon utilized the Strivr platform to provide VR training to 22,000 frontline employees across its more than 1,600 locations in 2019, according to a video testimonial Mason participated in that year.
The company utilized past security camera footage from actual in-store robberies to design a curriculum that incorporated new live action footage for Verizon’s custom armed robbery VR training simulation, which employed 360-degree video cameras and featured hired actors at a Verizon retail store location. The course consisted of three modules, each simulating an armed attack during a typical workday. Employees participated in a debriefing session between modules to reflect on their responses in each scenario.
“This was the value of that immersive technology; they quickly learned what they missed,” Mason said. “So many people got it wrong, like, ‘Which way did the bad guy go—right or left when he left the door?’ And we learned how many people were essentially guessing at that because they weren’t completely dialed in.” Mason elaborated that leadership requested candor regarding whether employees loved, hated, or felt indifferent about the technology. They also made it clear that they weren’t trying to scare their employees—they were trying to educate them. After completing the training program, 97 percent of retail associates reported feeling more confident and better prepared for potentially hazardous situations.
“What most of the people said was how realistic it was,” Mason recalled. “And it always helped to have someone in the audience whose store had actually experienced a robbery. And then to have them say, ‘I’m telling you, that’s exactly how it happened; that brought a lot of value.’ So, the more realistic you could make it, the better.”
Barriers to VR Adoption for LP
Much of the above is easier said than done for even the most prominent retailers with the most significant budgets.
Most of the retail businesses Lowe was previously aware of that were testing VR for LP—including Mason’s former employer, Verizon—no longer do so for the aforementioned reasons of cost and scale. “It’s probably just because it’s much more complicated, and it doesn’t scale well,” Lowe said. “The cost of development, equipment, and distribution would have to go down. The technology itself is there. You can create high fidelity scenarios today, but the cost of developing and maintaining them is a concern. People aren’t maintaining a program long-term.”
Even the vendors we spoke with acknowledged that cost will always be a significant barrier to implementing VR, particularly for large brands with numerous locations. Roundtable Learning’s approach to addressing this challenge is to examine scenarios that are prohibitively high cost and high risk to replicate. VR is also not a fit for every application, Day said, which is why his company does what he considers full-service learning. “Those start to become great use cases because they happen infrequently, but when they happen, they can cost a company a lot of money,” Day explained. “Retail has the extra hurdle in that many large retailers have a lot of locations, so they do have to look at the hardware scale to say, ‘How do I get this into the hands of all my associates?’”
Leitch of Link Integrated Security Solutions Ltd. has a different perspective on the costs of VR in retail. “I think the flexibility and the fact that you spend big once, but it lasts for a long time, I think VR’s got a real place in retail,” he said. “I don’t look at the cost. Look at the ROI.”
Verizon similarly faced challenges distributing VR headsets to all its stores and finding a way to update the simulated scenarios, Mason said. They filmed the handful of scenarios in actual stores after hours, which was a logistical challenge. “Even with the immersive technology, the whole idea is to keep that sort of response thing ever present in somebody’s mind so that it could potentially become muscle memory, so that you could minimize the processing time,” he said. “The key is finding a way, if you have a large and expansive population, to get it to them on a routine basis, with enough changes that it becomes something they look forward to instead of something they simply have to check the box on.” 
Still, Mason also has an alternative way of thinking about costs: are they worth it to prevent potential negative impact on the business, in terms of more costs, reputation, or the physical safety of employees or customers? “We have to deal with probabilities, not possibilities,” he said. “Notwithstanding the probability of an incident, what is the consequence? How do we address that? What are our options? And so, oftentimes, you can convince the people with the purse strings, not by scaring them, but by having a logical discussion about, ‘What should we be doing? What can we afford to do?’”
Rawlinson said for Strivr, whose deployment process includes a pilot program to set customers up for success from day one, customers have found that the cost savings have outweighed the cost of deployment in many cases when done at scale, “saving time, resources, and overall retention vs. traditional training methods.” In terms of enabling wider adoption for more specific LP use cases, Rawlinson said that as headset devices continue to advance in terms of form factor and cost, this will promote wider access. This, along with connectivity such as reliable Wi-Fi and the evolution of AI, will become more important to ensure that authentic, dynamic, immersive experiences can be deployed.
There’s also the educational aspect of VR to contend with, just like with any new technology in retail. The industry as a whole can be slow to adopt new systems and tools, so gaining an understanding of the pros and cons, the risks and rewards, and the use cases and costs of VR is imperative. “The trend I’ve been seeing over the past probably eighteen to twenty-four months is that more of the retailers are starting to become more educated on this,” explained Day. “But there’s still a lot of education out there to be done.”
VR’s Future Potential in LP
This doesn’t mean retailers can’t apply VR to more specific LP use cases in the future. Lowe said the LPRC plans to do more extensive research on the technology in 2026. “If loss prevention had a greater say in product placement, VR could be used to give people the experience of what happens when you move a product around in the store and how they can affect guardianship of that product and other things.”
Hyo Kang, assistant professor at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida, sees interesting potential in the further use of VR and other technologies for LP. “For example, digital twin technology—creating a real-time, AI-enhanced replica of a physical space—could be used to simulate different in-store scenarios and test out LP strategies virtually,” she wrote in an email. “It could also help retailers analyze how people move through a space and where vulnerabilities might exist, all without needing to run real-world trials.” Another project Kang’s team is working on involves using generative pre-trained transformer-powered virtual instructors in VR lab environments. It’s being applied in educational settings, but Kang “could imagine something similar being used in online shopping—like creating a virtual shopping assistant or guide that personalizes the experience.”
Time will tell if VR and other related technologies are fully adopted at scale forLP programs. History has shown us that as emerging technology becomes more accessible and in demand over time, the costs and logistical challenges of implementing it across large organizations with multiple locations may become more manageable. This could become the case with virtual reality.
