Alibaba develops virtual reality mobile pay technology – the launch could be at the end of September

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said it is developing virtual-reality enabled mobile payment technology – as the ecommerce giant bets big on VR driven shopping for future growth and is wrestling with arch rival Tencent Holdings Ltd for supremacy in the booming digital payment market.

The Hangzhou based company confirmed to China Daily that it is working on the futurist technology , which could allow users to pay bills in a 3D virtual world by nodding their heads or making other gestures to log in payments accounts.

The revelation of its latest move comes shortly after the company offered a preview of itsBuy+ virtual store. Wearing a headset and with two hand controllers, consumers can get into a 360 degree virtual environment where they can hold, feel and try on bags, shoes and lingerie as they do in real life.

Consumers won’t－yet－be able to pay using VR.

„Consumers of Buy+ can shop in a virtual world, but they will still have to take their headsets off and go back to the real world to pay bills.” said Ant Financial, the financial affiliate of Alibaba.

„We are working on the VR-driven payment tool to offer a real immersive and complete VR shopping experience,” added Ant Financial, the owner of Alipay, the most popular mobile payment tool in China.

The company declined to disclose when the new technology will be released, but local media site yicai.com quoted an Alibaba employee as saying that it could possibly be launched as soon as the end of September.

Experts said the difficulty of developing VR-enabled payment tools lies in how to ensure security while keeping it easy to use.

Li Chao, an analyst at research firm iResearch Consulting Group, said it would be hard to persuade shoppers as well as sellers to accept VR-enabled payment tools. „The VR industry is still in infant stage. VR games are still a niche, let alone VR payment. Also when it comes to financial payments, consumers value security more than just being cool,” Li said.

It’s not just virtual worlds that Alibaba is seeking to conquer, the company is also targeting Europe through a deal between Ant Financial and POS giant Ingenico. in order to push its mobile-payment system. According to the Wall Street Journal, Ingenico will let Ant’s Alipay platform access its network of offline merchants in exchange for service charges.