Alibaba offers a VR girlfriend or boyfriend for China’s online Valentine’s day

How do you celebrate the love holiday when you’ve got nobody to love? In China, one option is to get yourself a VR sweetheart.

Over the weekend, as Chinese net users celebrated 5/20 – a kind of made-up online valentine’s day – Alibaba took advantage of the occasion to offer some special services: virtual boyfriends and girlfriends.

Users of the Taobao mobile app who also have a VR headset can scan this QR code through the app to be transported to the event page. There, they can opt for a virtual boyfriend or girlfriend experience in 180-degree VR. If you’re looking for a boyfriend, famed (and famously handsome) actor Yang Yang will play the part. If it’s a girlfriend you need, you’ll experience a slice of life with Chinese TV star Dilraba. In the video, your virtual significant other will do things like tell you to get up, joke around, and cook breakfast for you.

The virtual sweethearts are just a gimmick, of course. The point is to attract users to the rollout of Alibaba’s new VR video player, which links with the Taobao mobile app and allows users to save products, make purchases, and follow shops within VR.

So why the virtual love theme right now? This past weekend was Valentine’s day in China. Not the real Valentine’s day, or even the traditional Chinese one, but a mostly-online holiday that comes on May 20 and 21st. It’s based primarily on the fact that the numbers 520 and 521 sound vaguely like “I love you” in Mandarin. Like other online holidays, it’s mostly popular among China’s younger generations.

Alibaba, of course, has some experience with turning made-up online holidays into piles of cash, so it’s no surprise the company was interested in putting on some sort of event for 520.