In what could be a harbinger of future shopping, or, as some experts warn, a misreading of public taste and computing power, Siegel and Gale, a communications agency, is developing a 3-D VRML shopping space prototype for The Gap. Scenes from the Gap store were featured at Ed McCracken's keynote speech at the Moving Worlds conference last month, and the success or failure of the Digital Gap store is considered by key players as portentous for the VRML industry in general.
"A lot of stores are looking at doing something like this for the future. I think a lot will hang on how this will work as an example," says Mark Pesce, a VRML pioneer. Pesce predicts that the success of The Gap will hinge on designers working out interface issues, pointing out that if it's harder to use than a catalog, people won't go there more than once.
Michael Gough, architect at VRML design company Construct, warns that other companies that have tried to do online stores have "failed miserably." For VRML shopping to work, the personal experience of shopping by catalog must be successfully combined with the entertainment that people find by shopping in well-designed stores, Gough says, suggesting that The Gap site designers stop trying to make their product look like a typical Gap store and think about taking more advantage of cyberspace. Early demos by The Gap and others may have done more harm than good because they focused viewer attention on limited resolution, navigation difficulties, and overall file-size limitations, Gough says.
The Digital Gap store will feature a combination of 3-D VRML elements and 2-D HTML, so that things like detailed photographs showing texture and styling details will be evident, says Steven Dolbow, VP of Siegel and Gale's interactive unit. The site may be up by august, Dolbow says. Customers will be able to tour the store, for instance, and click on whatever they find to see a photograph of it.
Dolbow is also excited about what VRML could mean for the future of customer service: "Tech support questions could be answered more easily if you could dial into the virtual world and actually see the product in front of you and poke, demonstrate, and take apart the item."
