A company in Massachusetts has thrown in their 2 cents on the future of online shopping. Kinset, founded in 2006, has built a very basic 3D platform custom fit to the needs of online retailers. Basically, they’ll take a product feed and throw them into a 3D store that each retailer gets to design.
Their first major partner is Brookstone, which now advertises the ability to shop in a 3D world on their site. This seems like a pretty lofty achievement for the young Kinset, especially after you experience the Kinset interface for the first time. Let me give you a rundown:
The Good
Potential, potential, potential. I think the idea is great. No matter how easy online shopping can be, it’s still almost always a pull market, meaning that the customer goes knowing what they want and then hunting it down and price shopping. Kinset opens the door to push marketing online - where you have users who just plan on shopping as a leisurely experience and don’t necessarily have their purchase in mind. In some regards, it reminds me of the StumbleUpon vs Google argument. People go to Google looking for something in particular (and it’s great for that), but when you don’t know what you want, you hit Stumble! and not Google.
The Bad
A few biggies here for me:
1) The UI needs some aesthetic touchups before it’s really ready for mass-market appeal. People get so much out of a shopping experience with regards to pleasing the senses when in the real world - colors, easy-to-navigate stores, smells, sounds, touch, etc. When all you really have to work with is sight and sound, you better make it darn good. Kinset falls short here.
2) Learning a new UI for people who don’t know it. Having played my fair share of 1st person games, I adapted pretty quickly to the movements and view changes (although I kept wanting right mouse click to jump when it just brings up a menu). But to someone who doesn’t have the same background, I could imagine this would be a frustrating experience.
3) Long download/setup/update times. Kinda speaks for itself. I’m on a few T1s here at work and had a long download time. After initial setup it’s not too bad, provided you don’t have a required software update. I can’t imagine dialup users realistically accessing this, though.
4) No social interaction (yet?). Don’t know if these guys have heard - but it turns out the Internet is a very social medium. I don’t want people’s avatar’s standing in my way when I want to see the newest movies out on DVD, but it’d be nice to know I’m doing something other people are doing. I’d like to know I can ask them if they’ve ever seen The Prestige and what they thought of it. Add people interaction, limiting the number of people in a given store/server.
The Ugly
1) Client crashing issues. I think most of these have been resolved, but I did have the client just sporadically kapoot on me. Kind of frustrating when just playing around, but probably really irritating when you’ve just finished 2 hours of online virtual shopping.
2) Uncomfortable load times walking into a store for the first time (or the second, or third). Plus, no matter how many times you walk into that store or how recently you did, shelves are all empty until you stand near them for a significant amount of time.
I hope the guys over at Kinset are listening since I think that their technology could be the start of something beautiful. It needs some serious work, but it’s got lots of potential.
