So I ran out of coffee.
I have a lot of work to do at home this evening and I really have no time to get in my car, go to the store to get a bag.
Good thing I have my Second Life account.
Now, I can quickly log on, virtually drive to the grocers, pick up a bag of my favorite Blue Mountain coffee, and drive home in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.
What makes this experience even more tasty, is that within a half an hour, I get up to answer the door in my real house, and tip the delivery driver for my bag of coffee.
Can this be real? Could we interact virtually with the real world? There was a time a few years ago when I could order 100 lbs of dog food online and have it delivered to my door. But that idea went belly-up, or to the dogs as it were. Now pizza is easily delivered to your door via the Web. Why couldn't our groceries be delivered?
Looking over lists of products is too overwhelming, too much textual overload. Wouldn’t it be easier to tour our local grocery store or supermarket aisle by aisle as if we were in an online gaming environment?
This idea came to me as I read Cory Ondrejka’s Web 3.0 presentation description for the upcoming O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference scheduled for March 6-9 in San Diego, Ca. (Cory is the VP of product development, as well as team leader in developing "Second Life," Linden Lab's user-created digital world.)
Cory’s presentation description poses several interesting questions which include “how will 3D worlds be used to better manage data, convey information, and enable new forms of communications?” Good question. And I'll bet he has an answer.
He goes on:
By granting broad intellectual property rights to its residents and embedding the tools needed to build almost anything, [Second Life] has enabled large scale creativity that bridges the 3D and web worlds. Projects ranging from games and shopping malls to medical research and education have been built on top of Second Life's core technology and then linked to companion web sites, blogs, and wikis. This is only the beginning, however. Currently, Firefox is being embedded within Second Life so that web content can act as a fundamental building block of the world as animations, textures, or audio.
So it seems only a matter of time before we are grocery shopping online in an environment similar to where we actually shop. Sign me up!
Now if I could just find some way to wash my dog without getting wet.
Keywords: coffee, Emerging Technology Conference, online gaming, Second Life, shopping, virtual worlds
Comments
I've been buying my groceries online for years - first by braving the text lists you mention, and these days by accepting a more random basket of in-season organic produce every week. Aside from the extra fee (normally around £5) it's a very economical and convenient way of doing things. It could be more so if an online supermarket were to start up, eschewing expensive display aisles for an Amazon-style series of warehouses.
These are the problems that VRML was trying to solve in about 1995. Probably it was too early; computers were slow enough that loading the 3D environment was a painful process at best, and e-commerce hadn't really developed so most applications were either very academic or bedroom hacks. MMRPG environments have brought online 3D spaces back into the public eye - the problem is, they incur a fee and involve dedicated software. We have the technology to create 3D spaces in a Shockwave plugin, for example, and it's surely a matter of time before that comes into play.
I would imagine, seeing as games are often at the forefront of these things, that the first step will be a first person shooter MMRPG you can just play in your browser (thereby allowing office workers all over the world to goof off in more and more bloody ways). Following that, someone will develop an OSS emulator library for their own games, and we'll be good to go ...
One thing to consider is how the disabled, or people with mobile devices, fit into all of this. I think those text lists will still be around for a while.
Ben,
Thanks for sharing. Not being up on the technical design side of the fence, it's helpful to get such a perspective. I also appreciate your comment regarding people with physical disabilities, they are often overlooked in the webosphere.
In my position at work, I am often approached with "solutions looking for a problem" from a variety of software designers/vendors. I like most of what I am seeing regarding web 2.0 applications. I believe the future looks promising.
-cds