The Strange World of 3-D E-Commerce - ' SciFi Morphs Into Reality'
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SciFi Morphs Into Reality?
Does this scenario drift too far into science fiction? Maybe, but Mark Stearns, the director of e-commerce for home entertainment chain Tweeter, with more than 2,400 employees in more than 100 stores in 18 states, thinks it might happen. After all, he's paid to envision the future of home entertainment shopping.
The way most home entertainment shopping is done today has its pros and cons. Stores like Tweeter's have demonstration rooms set up to showcase their equipment. The downside is that such rooms may be unrealistically created and might deliver a sound and visual show that is unlikely to be replicated in the typical consumer home.
The upside is that no PC screen or speaker is likely to accurately depict how a high-resolution screen looks or what an expensive speaker will sound like.
Yet, if that room could be setup exactly like a typical consumer living room, it would only be like the living room of one kind of consumer. The only fair way to evaluate such equipment is with a room as close to identical to that consumer's living room as possible. In Stearns' view, that will ultimately be done with a combination of the in-store and potentially a 3-D Web experience.
But how could that sophisticated representation of the consumer's home be cost effectively created? Tweeter is already sending employees into customers' homes. Once there, a digital camera could capture the core information about the rooms and their dimensions and window placement. A physical inspection, plus the asking of a few questions to the homeowner, could fill in the missing pieces about the carpet material, thickness of the walls, etc.
Presumably, the homeowner would be very happy to help. From the retailer's perspective, once such a digital representation was created, that customer would have a very strong incentive to shop with that retailer as the shopping experience could potentially be so much more accurate.
This is especially useful as Tweeter doesn't focus on the living room nearly as much as it does the entire house. "We'd have to be measuring out all of the sonics in the whole house," Stearns said.
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