Kinset: “Straight Retailing” 3D VR

by on 23 October, 2007 - 10:35

I’ve just given Kinset, a 3D virtual shopping application, (Link) a spin. Before I offer my opinion, let’s start off with what it’s supposed to be. From the website:

"Kinset is for those of us who like to shop. Stroll down an
aisle with hundreds of items on display. Pause when something catches
your eye. Browse and linger while discovering new things. That’s what
real shopping is about, and that’s what makes Kinset the first online
shopping that’s truly enjoyable."

Also, because it
came up in the above interview, let’s get a sense of how Kinset is
intended to compare with what is arguably (if only in mindshare) the
major player in the virtual world space, Second Life. According to Kinset CEO John Butler (from the above video):

"Second Life is a kind of hobby space; people who enjoy
Second Life are people who spend - usually devote - hours to figuring
out how to move around, dress themselves… and then it becomes a social
hobby environment. Something where you turn up for those sorts of
satisfactions.
.
[Kinset] is straight retailing. Basically, this is about creating
high-fidelity retail spaces; that is, stores that look and feel like
real stores and that you can go into and use within 30 seconds."

So now that we know what Kinset is supposed to be about, what’s the verdict?

Disappointing.

-

As
Kinset is supposedly a “high-fidelity” 3D virtual shopping application,
my first interest is in what it looks like, so let’s start there.

First,
if the goal is “high-fidelity”, Kinset fails miserably from my
perspective. They don’t come close to looking “just like real stores”.
In truth, the quality of the real-time 3D is lower than what one might
find in Second Life, and the lag is (for me) a bit worse. Considering
both rendering quality and lag are sore points consistently raised by
Second Life detractors, Kinset needs to at least achieve something closer to their professed goal.

Second,
and a bigger disappointment, was that the products were only pictures
on boxes; not at all what I was expecting given the “high-fidelity”
boast. Worse still is that these boxes aren’t product packaging but
product images slapped onto geometric primitives (I suspect the images
are coming from Flickr, btw; something to consider given the recent
Virtual Earth/3DVIA news - reLink).

As
I walked around I happened to come across a product which I helped to
develop, a Black & Decker Ergo Chopper (larger screencap here: reLink).
I’d just joined the corporate design department when the initial design
effort, by now-defunct Anderson Design consulting, was completed. I was
tasked with finishing some of the details and delivering a toolable 3D
CAD file to our OEM.

With Second Life’s “sculpties“,
I could probably model this relatively well, and there’d likely be no
appreciable impact on the client’s performance since the geometry is
based on offsets derived from an image file. If Kinset has any normal-
or displacement-mapping capability, it’s not apparent. And as a
triangle data set Kinset would almost certainly choke worse than it
already does. And it does choke… especially when walking through all
the DVD boxes crammed together (I may “capture” the geometry and
investigate it since I suspect it’s not as optimized as it could/should
be and would run better if it were).

In short, Kinset doesn’t look very good.

-

Okay, so that’s a rough idea of what someone will see. Now let’s talk about the User Experience.

With
regard to the low-level basics, while the user interface may be simpler
than Second Life’s, it’s not especially elegant. I personally don’t
like having to hit the ESC key to prevent every object that
falls underneath the “hand” cursor - no matter how far away it is -
from popping up an advertising/sales sidebar. And with just the arrow
cursor, my mouse functionality changed so that I couldn’t navigate as
easily as with the “hand” cursor functionality. Supremely irritating.

On
a higher level, as far as I’m concerned, Kinset’s more “real” shopping
experience is non-existent. I’d rather browse pages of 2D images than
walls of 3D images like those in Kinset. While I won’t argue with the
reasoning that browsing 3D is in some cases more efficient than using 2D, I don’t see it being especially efficient as implemented.

Furthermore,
I take issue with the use of the term “immersive”. This is not
immersive. I don’t get the sense of being inside a store. Kinset has
neither the visual fidelity nor those other qualities that facilitate
user immersion. Hate to say it, but this amounts to being not much more
than dancing 3D baloney; exactly the sort of example anti-3D people
reference on academic sites like Terra Nova.

I could go on but you get the picture. Kinset needs some work.

-

For
what it’s worth, I confess to having a problem with Kinset right from
the start because I disagree with the assertion that opening a 3D
application and browsing images on boxes “avatar free” is “what real
shopping is about”. Real world shopping in brick-and-mortar stores is,
if anything, a social experience; either enjoyed with friends
and family or endured with strangers (or vice-versa). Casually
stripping out the social element makes no sense to me, but Kinset CEO
Butler seems to believe people will be satisfied opening a lonely 3D
application and walking down uncrowded (read: empty) aisles. Right.

I tend to think it feels like shopping after the Apocalypse. Only you still have to pay. What a drag.

Is
it possible that the folks behind Kinset haven’t been paying attention
to all the social applications making the news? I noticed their CEO is
on LinkedIn, but does he use it or did he sign up because it was the
“in” thing to do? The whole approach to Kinset suggests the latter.

I think some of the assumptions that went into Kinset need to be reconsidered.

-

In
conclusion, Kinset doesn’t seem to me to offer anything to retailers
other than a PR blurb… and a virtual island isolated from an uncontrollable
virtual mainland; a technical/security advantage which may evaporate in
the near future and which seems to me to be akin to foregoing a mall
filled with shoppers for a spot in the middle of the Sahara. But not
too close to an oasis. It might get crowded.

For more coverage:

“Kinset Announces First Technology for High Fidelity 3D Immersive Retail Stores” (Link) - Kinset Press Release

“A shopping trip, aisle by virtual aisle” (Link) - Boston Globe

“Kinset Launches 3D Web-Based Stores” (Link) - Mashable

{Screenshots taken from Kinset application; Copyright © 2007 Kinset, Inc. }

Original post: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=1399