Virtual "Stores".

[Bluearrowll]

So we may all know about things such as Amazon, and eBay, and Grocery Gateway, which are online websites that one can visit and create transactions without ever actually leaving the premises of a computer. However, none of these are actually "stores", they're just webpages.

Today was the first of 3 weeks of presentations that my Communication class is doing, (my presentation is in the final week), but today there was a very interesting presentation about Virtual Shopping, which caught my attention. Unfortuneately there really wasn't much of a question period that this guy gave, and the interactivity stopped at browsing a website based on a random store.

Here are a couple Virtual stores to try from:

http://enjoy3d.com/
http://www.themallplus.com/index.html

I imagine neither of these have really been fully fixed yet, as playing around with them, I noticed you could walk through walls and such, but it's really something interesting. Another interesting thing to point out that I found out is that enjoy3d is amazon. I do not know what themallplus is, but they're both different in their own ways, and the same in their own ways.

enjoy3d appears to be you, just you in a vast area, and you just narrow down to what kind of store you want to go into, and walk up to a product and click it to get details about it, and "add to your shopping cart."

themallplus is actually alittle more "mall like" in the sense that when you walk inside stores, there are clerks that are busy at work there, but it appears to be the same process as enjoy3d.

Having said all this, do you think this can take off? I mean, there are several pros and cons to this:

Obvious pros:

-No lineups
-Never have to leave your home (technically, this could be debated as a con)
-Huge display to choose from

Obvious cons:

-Lag
-Exclusive to the middle-upper class (you need an internet connection, a computer and some form of purchasing equipment at bare minimum to use this).

What do you guys think of it?