One of the things that keeps physical shops alive is the desire to hold a thing before you buy it, the desire to see how big it is.
Given that I've seen people doing augumented reality hacks in Flash... you could actually get around that for an Internet-based store. Build a little Flash app that sucks in a low-res 3D mesh of the product, have the user print out a marker tag at a known size, and presto: you can get a real, intuitive sense of how big the object is.
This wouldn't work for clothes, I think. You need to try them on. But for other physical objects, it could be pretty damn cool. If your object started life as a 3D model, it should be pretty easy to generate a low-res model; if it's physical, things are a bit more interesting. I bet we're about at the point where there's enough processor power and open-source frameworks out there to build a quick and dirty 3D digitizer out of a webcam and an old turntable, though! [edit: Yes, it is!]
This idea, of course, came to me while I was wondering if there were good places to buy a bong on the Internet. *sigh*
Given that I've seen people doing augumented reality hacks in Flash... you could actually get around that for an Internet-based store. Build a little Flash app that sucks in a low-res 3D mesh of the product, have the user print out a marker tag at a known size, and presto: you can get a real, intuitive sense of how big the object is.
This wouldn't work for clothes, I think. You need to try them on. But for other physical objects, it could be pretty damn cool. If your object started life as a 3D model, it should be pretty easy to generate a low-res model; if it's physical, things are a bit more interesting. I bet we're about at the point where there's enough processor power and open-source frameworks out there to build a quick and dirty 3D digitizer out of a webcam and an old turntable, though! [edit: Yes, it is!]
This idea, of course, came to me while I was wondering if there were good places to buy a bong on the Internet. *sigh*