Improved Amazon Shopping in Second Life

Last month I blogged about the Life2Life store in Second Life. This store smoothly bridges the virtual and the real, making it possible to search the Amazon catalog from within Second Life. For a week or so, Tabatha and Hugo (the store's proprietors) had kept me apprised of their work to integrate Amazon's Remote Shopping Cart system into the store. The goal was to create a smooth, integrated checkout experience to add that last bit of realism to the shopping experience.

After an invitation from Tabatha we had a meeting at the store late last night. She paged Hugo and he came online, and there we were. To make things even more interesting, I paged another friend of mine who's happened to be online. He's following developments in Second Life very closely and it was really fun to participate in this impromptu meeting just a few minutes before midnight (all of these pictures link to double-sized popups if you want to see more):

Hugo and Tabatha gave me an update on their development progress, we chatted for a while, and then Hugo handed me a Landmark to their official business office in Second Life, so that I could see the entire system in action.

I just spent a little while visiting the business office. It is of a thoroughly modern design, wholly appropriate given the space age work that's taking place within:

At Amazon we characterize the shopping experience using the terms find, discover, and buy. The Life2Life product supports all three of these elements. Let's look at each of them in turn.

Finding implies searching through the catalog. I'll step over to the search region and "speak" my search term. In Second Life this means that I use the "say" command, and I type "/1 say Harry Potter". The search results are displayed in an embedded QuickTime panel, so I had to click the Play button on the Movie control first. Here's what I see:

I decide to purchase that book, so I click on it to add it to my shopping cart. The Life2Life shopping cart is linked to my avatar so that more than one person can be in the store and shopping at the same time. I do another search and also choose a good book on the Ruby programming language:

As I said before, discovery, or the ability to simply browse to find interesting products, is also an important element of the shopping process. Life2Life has a number of rotating product samples. Due to some limitations of Second Life, the samples don't display product images. They do show the product name and Amazon locale in some floating text, like this:

I could simply touch any of these items to add them to my cart. I don't happen to need any of them, so I'll just wander on down to the checkout area:

This area shows the checkout units (the blue posts) for 4 different Amazon locales (UK, Japan, Canada, and the US). Units for the other locales (France and Germany) are currently being tested and will be available soon. What you can't see in this screen shot, but which adds to the realism, is that the flags are seemingly made of a flexible fabric,and that they are swaying back and forth (they must have the A/C turned on).

I select the US checkout option, walk over to the flag, and click the checkout unit:

A dialog pops up which will link me over to Amazon:

I press the button, and I am back in the familiar (yet now somewhat pedestrian) world of the 2D web:

And there you have it. The virtual world reaches out and pulls in data from the real world, and the virtual world provides an efficient and compelling way to find, discover, and buy.

There are already several installations of this technology within Second Life. The best place to start is on Info Island. Once you have the Second Life client installed and running, simply click here. That's a specially formatted link known as a SLURL, or Second Life URL. It will open up a map, and with your consent, teleport you over to the store. Here's the store:

You'll need to talk to Tabatha or Hugo for details, but my understanding is that they will soon be vending all of the components needed to create your own store in Second Life. If you need to get in touch with them, send me ("Jeffronius Batra") a Second Life IM, and I'll make an introduction.

I hope that you've enjoyed this little photo tour! One thing I should point out is that Second Life is a real  platform, just like Windows or Linux, with a scripting language and a very rich set of APIs and events. Perhaps you've got some ideas for Second Life applications of your own. Build something cool using our services and I'll be happy to pay you a visit and write another blog post.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

Dear Jeff,

I don't mean to tell you your business here, but I do have some responses to the lay-out. I feel that presenting the 2-D sort of cardboard cutout stand-up of the book representation you have here presents some problems in the 3-D world mainly for users and retention to the site.

a) Textures can rez very slowly depending on both sim performance and the user's own connection and graphic card. So you have to make sure to use no greater than 512 x 512 m2 textures to have less loading issues for people on arrival, that can be limiting. Even so, a huge field of textures remaining unloaded means people leave.

b) Even if loaded/rezzed, the avatar may not be able to keep focusing on static cut-outs, especially if other things cloud the field (not sure the yellow build around it will help or hurt there, would have to see) -- but regardless of optics, you still have the problem of holding the avatar's attention and keeping him engaged, when presenting something that is less visible than the old 2-D Internet, and less compelling, and yet not within the optimal environment of the 3-D world he's already learned to manipulate.

c) I'd therefore suggest having more 3-D, clickable scenes, as if the book has come to life, a theater-in-the-round. That is, Harry Potter is not just a stand-up cardboard cut-out ad, flat, white, with text on it, but is a virtual scene, with perhaps an antique high-backed chair, bats flying, strange potions brewing with particle bubbles somewhere, something clickable in the scene, i.e. a free wand that the visitor can copy and take home or else rez out of his inventory to play with while in this scene, etc. etc.

Obviously, prim count limitations would limit the number of books that could be rendered as 3-D scenes like this, but having at least some of the books come to life like that could help.

e) I've tried developing an infohub or newbie learning station with this ancient "Memory Palace" idea, I called it "Memory Bazaar". The idea is to have the objects and 3-D scene be part of what helps learning, assocation, memory. I have talk-script to chat the question a visitor might have when he arrives and starts clicking on stuff--most people are keyed to click when the go in any video game world/virtual world, and notecard giver gives him a text. Ideally, if we had more tools, the avatar could voice and the object would voice too, its text could come up as a cloud or something less difficult than a notecard. The advantage of the notecard is just that you can keep it and re-read later when you can make sense of it.

Here's the location:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ross/35/242/60/

Prokofy

[Hugo Dalgleish]

Prokofy,

We do try and keep a user's attention with the image displays. Through some clever scripting, we're able to utilise the client-side Quicktime streaming to display the images of items for sale, much like you'd see by browsing amazon.com. However, because SL only permit us to overlay one texture like this we can only show one image per land parcel, and it severely restricts what we can display.

One of the hardest things we've found when developing the store is how to represent real-life items in the virtual world. I wanted the objects to be very abstract, but some basic research showed that users like virtual items to look like real life items. It's why where we sell books, we use objects that look like real life books, where we sell magazine subscriptions, we use objects that look like magazines and so on.

Your idea of a fully immersive environment for shopping is a great one, and I can truly see it working for a themed store in a themed mall. Imagine a bookstore that only sold murder mystery books and having some chalk outlines on the floor, bloodstained carpeting, and a smoking pistol on the table. For a generic store (like our current one in Baekje sim) that might not work as well.

Now, if a publisher were to do a book launch inside Second Life, your idea would be very appealing...

[rikomatic]

This is a cool build, that I'm sure will stimulate lots of ideas and new multi-verse development.

What would seem to be one possible next step is applying the "Other customers also were interested in ..." functionalities to the virtual store. I.e. when you search for "Harry Potter" the store might display other magic and fantasy related products whose proximity to the Harry Potter object would vary depending on how close a match they were.

As you click on one of these items, the discovery tool would refocus on that item, perhaps displaying close matches to "magic wand" or "spell-casting".

The other interesting application of the technology would be the "your store" function of Amazon to the virtual store. A customer entering, with their consent, would allow the store to read their amazon preferences and build a virtual store to their interests and products they tend to buy. New items and sale items might appear up front, while more peripheral but potentially interesting items in the back.

But the most dramatic usage of a virtual store would be sharing the shopping experience with another avatar. The store would re-stock itself with items that might be of interest to both of you, say suggesting a movie you would both like to watch, or a book you might both want to purchase together. That would best leverage the community-based, 3D web functions to their fullest.

[Hugo Dalgleish]

Rikomatic, we already have working prototypes of some of the ideas you've mentioned. One big issue is that of privacy. Most people in Second Life want to keep their SL and RL personas seperate, so won't give out personal information (like amazon usernames) inside the virtual world so we can't retrieve your real life shopping habits and provide recommendations based on those. However, we've come up with a completley opt-in way of providing recommendations for you based on the products that you've been shopping for at our virtual stores.

Watch out for this feature coming soon!