On-Line Shopping Gets a Second Life
Given my frustrations with Second Life I was very skeptical to learn that both IBM and Sony have distinct but similar plans to develop virtual stores where avatars can stroll the shopping aisles and interact with sales people and customers to make the shopping experience more “real”.
First of all, you should know that I do enjoy a bit of shopping now and then (especially if shoes are on the list!) and I love the idea that shopping on-line from the comfort of my home could more closely equate to the real thing but even in real life patience isn’t exactly one of my virtues (I have been known to dump those “perfect” shoes because I can’t stand long line ups). If these environments are anything like Second Life which I find to be slow, sporadic and cumbersome to manoeuvre then there’s absolutely no chance of me getting getting my shoes (or any other item for that matter) in a virtual store until there’s a vast improvement in performance.
I see that Sony has delayed the release of its virtual PS3 environment Home and I wonder if that could be the very reason. Home is described as “a real-time interactive online world” - perhaps they are delaying the launch until the can truly put the “real” in real time!