Via Geekzone comes news of a 3D shopping mall, called The Mall Plus, that has just been released in New Zealand. After seeing this, memories of the mid to late 90’s came flooding back to me – a time when websites built on real world metaphors filled the Web landscape. For example the very first ISP I used, back in the mid 90’s, used a virtual town as its metaphor (if I remember correctly). For further background about those days, here is how I described it in an article Joshua Porter and I co-wrote a while ago for Digital Web Magazine:
“During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals.”
So I have to admit it is surprising that the virtual shopping mall, as a concept, is alive and well in 2006. Lately we’ve heard that Boo.com, an infamous 3D shopping website of the late 90’s, is making a comeback later this year. But one that has actually launched already is The Mall Plus, where users navigate a virtual shopping mall in a 3D environment. All of the shops are a part of the The Mall Plus, rather than being external sites. Geekzone quotes The Mall Plus CEO Nigel Kirkpatrick as saying it’s “the next generation of retail, through a virtual environment”.
The Mall Plus was discussed on the NZ 2.0 mailing list and the first comment was spot on: do people really want to shop online like it is a real shop, or do people want to use the internet as a tool to make the shopping experience better? Right now the answer is that people use the Web to enhance their shopping experience – e.g. to find out more information about products, or the best price. e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay are obviously huge success stories, but neither mimics the real world. Both Amazon and eBay are Web native services that utilize the best characteristics of the Web – collaborative ratings, personalization, many-to-many auctions, etc.
Perhaps if you could interact with other shoppers in The Mall Plus, then that would be a killer feature – e.g. if it became like a social networking / shopping experience. But currently the 3D people inside the mall are “lifeless and static”, as one NZ 2.0 commenter noted. Another point made on the NZ 2.0 list was that virtual 3D shopping actually slows down the user experience – whereas with Amazon and other e-commerce sites, the idea is to make online shopping as efficient as possible.
I can actually see a long-term future for 3D virtual shopping, so I applaud The Mall Plus for tackling this. However I don’t think it’s a viable idea right now, as the likes of Amazon and eBay – along with new meta services like uGenie – are much more Web native in the year 2006. But in 2016? Who knows, maybe it will be a 3D virtual shopping world. What do you think?
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)