Walmart (WMT), the world’s largest retailer, is using the same virtual reality to train its store associates that a pro football quarterback might use for an on-the-field simulation.

Always in a search for new technologies, Brock McKeel, Walmart’s senior director of digital operations, had looked at virtual reality a few years ago, but the enterprise versions he came across weren’t great.

“We couldn’t figure out how you make this fit in a Walmart environment,” McKeel said. “But as I followed the technology, I kept seeing these stories about how it was working in football.”

He visited the football program at the nearby University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and witnessed the players using the VR technology.

“I saw the football players doing was good repetition in a safe environment with scenarios that you couldn’t create on the practice field, and the lightbulb went off.”

Walmart worked with STRIVR, a virtual reality company by college and professional football teams, to create various training scenarios for the retail environment.

In the last few weeks, close to 1,000 Walmart stores in the U.S. have received the Oculus Go virtual reality headsets with the STRIVR training. The rest of the chain, approximately 4,700 stores in all, will get their delivery by the end of the year.

All in, Walmart will have 17,000 units across its fleet, four for each supercenter and two for each neighborhood market or discount store. Approximately 1 million associates will undergo the new virtual reality training by the end of the year.

The idea to use virtual reality on a broader scale came out of Walmart’s Academy, the relatively new training program located in the back of 198 stores that teaches associates customer service skills, retail math, and how to use new technology.

“You process so much faster off of visual, and you retain a lot more off of visual because that’s how the brain receives images versus text. We really looked into that aspect and brought it in stores,” said Tim Peterson, a 21-year veteran at Walmart and senior manager for Academy Operations Support for the retailer.

“Holiday rush” virtual reality

Ahead of Black Friday, many associates will undergo the “Holiday rush” virtual reality module to go over customer service and safety “in an environment that cannot be reproduced.” That’s because the simulation is an actual Black Friday event that was filmed at one of the stores using a 360 camera behind the electronics counter.

“On all of our trainings, they’ll set up that camera wherever they want it and we’ll record live footage on how we’re not supposed to do things because it happens,” said Peterson.