Virtual reality will let you “walk” through Web businesses and see merchandise in greater detail as you get “closer” to the object on your screen. You can vary the angles, too. So you could use your mouse to tour a parking lot of automobiles. You could spot the Volvo or the Saturn of your dreams, and admire not only the outside but also the interior.
No, the Web will never replace actual shopping in most cases, but virtual reality will be increasingly good at helping you screen preliminary choices.
Keep an eye out, then, for WebSpace—the new 3D viewer from Silicon Graphics, the California company whose technology helped create many of the special effects in Jurassic Park. WebSpace will work as an add-on with popular Web browsers such as Netscape and Spyglass Enhanced Mosaic.
WebSpace-style technology, needless to say, is far too good to waste on shopping alone. Virtual reality software for the Web may also help you tour the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, or Mount Kilimanjaro—not to mention Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro.
3D technology could revolutionize the financial world. Small investors, not just high-powered stock analysts, could “see” stock market trends. Your screen might display a “Bulls’ Corner” with a collection of corporate logos color-coded according to the improvement in the stock price. You could open up the logos and go on a tour of various divisions, wandering around them electronically with far more ease than you could with less advanced software.
Similarly, at the suggestion of your broker, you could tour a Bear’s Corner and see why you might avoid or sell off certain shares.
Mind you, there are negatives. Corporations—whether stores selling merchandise or companies seeking investors—may use this slick technology to fool the public. On the other hand, the Internet is already a godsend for consumers and small investors. Via Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists, they can swap information, taking care of course to look for plants from companies trying to sway grassroots impressions.
Lilienfeld himself put in most of the set-up hours. It took him a few days of programming to design the Web site and scan in the pictures of more than two dozen items—the train sets, the puzzles, the tops, the blocks—and like an old-fashioned art director he had to create within the limits of the medium. The big problem was photos. If they were too big to move over the Net quickly, then the peeved readers might give up and go on to another Web site. If too small, however, the pictures would lack enough detail to show off the store or the merchandise. In many cases Bob would let readers click on pictures of bears to see larger versions of the photos.
He also had to worry about the software the readers used on the Internet—certain Mosaic-style browsers would show smaller objects first. Other challenges arose. What if technical standards changed so that only certain browsers would work with Bob’s site? The real White Rabbit might be a victim of acts of God such as the ebb and flow of automobile traffic, and the virtual Rabbit needed to worry about patterns of Net traffic, but it also could be subject to Jehovah in the form of macho software firms who wanted everyone on the Net to use their brainchildren.
Companies such as Netscape Communications Corporation actually gave away Mosaic-style products to us Netfolk for free, hoping to make fortunes instead off the software that merchants and others denizens on the Web would run. Netscape was the champ in late 1994, the one that let you go from page to page faster than any competitor did. Many people feared Netscape would be to the Web what Microsoft was to software; suppose Netscape used technical prowess and marketing skill to trample competitors, and maybe overcharge the customers.