The Strange World of 3-D E-Commerce
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Second Life experimentation aside, major retail chain Tweeter is wondering if 3-D e-commerce might prove to be practical and a major advance for shoppers.
When discussing the possible future intersection for e-commerce and 3-D interactive environments with realistic avatars, the line between Web transactions and science fiction gets blurry.
But consider this scenario. A consumer shopping for a home entertainment system accesses a 3-D CADCAM representation of his home and drags it to an entertainment e-commerce site.
This large digital file, however, is much more than a mere architectural depiction of the consumer's home. It includes window placement and the times of day, during different months, that the sun shines through various windows and at roughly what intensity and for how long. Someone has entered the style of thickness of the rug and wall-coverings and a database lookup has associated those with their likely sound-dampening characteristics.
In a surround-sound speaker purchase, the image depicts a light coming from each speaker, with a progressively lighter shade representing the weakening sound as it travels farther away from the speaker. That representation has been updated to factor in the various acoustical properties of the room.
When the customer selects a time and date, it approximates glare, to try and suggest the best placement of a monitor, given the times of day it will usually be viewed. Moving furniture around the room is a simple point-and-click.
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