One Small Step for Adidas

by on 15 September, 2006 - 01:00

Via 3pointD comes news that the virtual Adidas store is up and selling inside Second Life (Link). I just popped in to take a peek, and as I’ve come to expect from Rivers Run Red, the store is… white. But there is some grey too. In a few places.

Y’know, RRR should really give some thought to expanding their palette. It’s okay for a while, but it does get old. And everything I’ve seen of theirs so far - their home sim, the BBC event, a virtual film festival, and now this store - are all shades of white. It makes sense, actually. Making and applying textures is time-consuming and contributes to sim lag. But still. That said it’s a nice build and the store is easy to navigate. There are two styles of the a3 Microride shoes on sale. And while the shoes look nice, while checking out the place some avatars arrived and did what I’d intended to do: checked out a shoe’s prim count. One of the visitors appeared distraught at the high count (216 prims according to one of them; unfortunately I forgot to verify afterward).

For those who don’t know, the higher the number of prims - geometric primitives - that go into an SL model, the greater the impact on virtual world performance. If there’s too much going on (too many prims, too many pieces of code running, too many intense textures), then “lag” can cause the world to stutter. As these shoes have a high number of prims as well as a script to make the wearer bounce around, they might cause some people problems. Makes me wonder if Adidas has a refund policy. Customer service can be a very real issue even in a virtual world.

Before leaving I did purchase a pair though; at L$50 it seemed a bargain. Now I’m curious to know if this is competitive or is undercutting the current SL prim shoe market. I don’t know. Surprisingly, this is my first prim shoe purchase (those Elmo slippers I gave to Ilya, who I suspect passed them on to Henry Jenkins, don’t count).

The last thing I’ll mention is that I found it interesting that during my checkout the automated vendor asked if I wanted to connect to an Adidas website (nothing new there; I played with web-connections myself over a year ago). Only the connection is to Adidas’ UK website. Considering that the majority of SLer’s are in the U.S., I find that a bit curious and it makes me wonder if Rivers Run Red are actually working as part of a regional effort and not a global one.

Original post: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=1015