Tateru's Monday Reality Mix

Tateru Nino's weekly take on mixed reality...

Phil's Supermarket - A good taste or a bad taste?

Well, we've already seen that trying to flog a real scent in a virtual world isn't such a successful idea - so, what would you say about real groceries? Kraft and America's Phil Lempert sure hope you'll give their virtual supermarket a checkout. I took myself and a couple of friends down there, to see if we could find a parking space and check out the specials.

Shopping at Phil's Supermarket and a roundup of mixed reality happenings. Join us after the jump.

The first step is to know what you're getting into and what Kraft and Lempert have in store for you. Exhibit A is this video. If you haven't got sound, skip it. The audio track is where it's all happening. The concept sounds like an interesting one. Much of this is information is information that I'd like to have about food and food products. I'd like the concept to succeed, though I'm betting there's some way to go. Thus armed with our expectations primed, we moved on to the field trip.

We arrived in a large carpark (SLURL). There were a few cars, and someone had left their engine running, apparently. The Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile (misspelled!) in the parking lot was the first sign of trouble. While Kraft is a worldwide brand, outside of the USA and Canada, you've probably never heard of Oscar Mayer, nor for that matter, Phil's Supermarket or Phil Lempert.

The second sign of trouble was textures. There are more than a thousand high-resolution packed into a small area. We stood around chatting while our texture caches filled. Still, worth it for the ingredients and nutrition information for the products, one might think.

Inside we went. None of us have ever seen a supermarket styled like this. It most resembled a cross between a cineplex, a buffet-style restaurant and a Blockbuster video store, thankfully roofless to support the more airborne avatar.

Right inside the door is the new products section. The first item that came under my mouse-pointer was clickable. I did, and it linked me to a product web-page... that didn't exist. The second clickable item handed me a notecard. A third tossed up a script error. None of the others responded to poking or prodding, being simple unscripted boxes.

Actually not so simple. Most of the boxes consist of between two and six prims each resulting in textures clashing and unpleasant shimmering. While there must have been a good reason for it, I cannot fathom why so many prims were used for simple rectangular boxes.

The shelves are static, being eye-candy only, while a number of three-prim vendors allow the purchase of product boxes, they only show a single representative box that does not change as you cycle through the available products - however many of the vendors don't even function. The area is set no-rez; to examine what you just got, you have to attach the box to your body and squint at it with the camera. Trying to read the sides of some boxes without turning them so that the text is horizontal is an eye-watering experience.

My companions confided to me that the site, taken as a whole, left them thinking "Meh. Can I leave now?" - There's certainly not a lot of incentive to stay and interact.

So, is this the future of the supermarket? Is it, as the video suggests, a key new wave of market research and eventually electronic commerce? Flaws aside, perhaps it is.

I'd love it if one of my supermarket chains had this sort of thing. I'd love to see and examine products, ingredients and nutrition information, check prices and specials. The few stores that provide any information on the web do so in pages-long tabular lists that frankly don't do a lot for me - their best search engines can't help me find a product in the time it would take me to walk to it in a physical store.

Granted, it's not like the folks from Kraft had a whole lot of virtual-supermarket precedent to learn from, and it is still early days and baby steps for this sort of thing, though I can't help but think that the whole experience could benefit from being considerably more orthogonal and cohesive.

On the market research angle, it would certainly be a boon for food makers to know which products people look at and express practical interest in. Studying how people move through stores and experimenting with alternative layouts might also be possible to some degree.

Conceptually, this seems like a rather good idea. The video goes a long way to selling that notion, certainly. The food items themselves are purely North-American with little to interest those from other parts of the world. The execution and content creation has done the whole thing a disservice though, full of rough, unpolished, and defective patches badly in need of a quality assurance pass or two. The product certainly fails to satisfy as is, and falls far short of what it could be.

Mixed Reality Happenings

• The Destroy Television Ten-Day Second Life Avatar Lifelogging Art Show Movie Thing [Sheep blog/Jerry Paffendorf]
• IBM opens virtual business sales center [Second Life Insider]
• Giant memorial quilt to be centerpiece of Second Life Pride festival [PixelPulse]
• Second Life Best Practices In Education Conference this week [Second Life Insider]
• Actor Bruce Willis virtual Q&A [IGN] (Disclosure: This appearance is being advertised on New World Notes)
• Spanish politics goes the griefer route [Second Life Insider]
• CBS features Machinima at Carnegie Hall [3pointD]
• Anshe Chung and Neverdie create Virtual World Academy Awards [Yahoo]

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Got a mixed reality tip for Tateru?  E-mail her at [email protected].  And visit her blog.

Comments

[Cyn Vandeverre]

I've looked at grocery store webpages, and used a service for ordering groceries; my impression is that their interfaces are awkward and with long lists because they didn't want to spend the money it would take to do it right. Friends who have worked in grocery store management say it's a very thin margin business.

That said, five years ago when I was using Peapod (delivered groceries) the interface was fairly useable, just not up to computer-person standards.

[TIllery Woodhen]

In an interesting side note, I was actually attending the trade show where Kraft announced the virtual supermarket. In RL, I work for a food industry trade magazine. So to see something from my downtime at something I was getting paid for was a little weird. I did sneak on at the trade show (they had computers set up for that) and transported to the market. Attending the show virtually and in person was a bit of a mix.