About a year ago, I was momentarily entranced by blended reality— a hybrid of Second Life-style virtual reality and, er, reality. Rather than building graphical renderings of cityscapes and store-interiors, blended reality relies heavily on 360-degree videos—more commonly found on real-estate sites offering virtual home tours. Viewers move through “reality TV” aided by cursor keys, zoom controls, and an occasional icon marker.
I filed this away, and then I learned recently that Google is experimenting with Google Store Views for its Maps software.
I test drove a blended reality service way back in 2007 (check out EveryScape). Navigating through a small book store , you quickly appreciate the advantages of using your visual cortex to find interesting book titles, versus unproductive keyword searches on a flat 2D web site.
At the current state of the art, the 3D video displayed by my Flash plugin is a little herky-jerky, and I found myself frequently spinning in place. But at some point, blended reality videos will make perfect sense for small retail stores that have lots of inventory (clothing, hardware, wine, …), and limited IT expertise and investments in Web infrastructure.
Why spend on Web developers, graphics artists, and, ahem, copy writers, when you can hire a videographer? Instant website!
The one weak area, of course, in pure video content is that remote customers will want information about products coming into their field of vision. True blended reality does incorporate back-end database processing to do lookups on book titles and product names, and then displaying standard Web pages with price, description, and possibly availability.
Here’s my theory on Google’s plans. With their limitless racks of servers and some secret video-processing algorithms, they’ll be able to minimally grab text buried in images, and very likely interpret product shapes. So a click on a book jacket or a a pair of pants, will instantly bring up an information rich Web page.
Retail stores—and I mean of the small, non-chain variety—will get a Google Store Views web page for a reasonable monthly cost, and Google will have yet another opportunity to match ads to clicks.