Ideas

a virtual visit you mean thru your propose site? ala secondlife mall?

@ saigon

more city oriented, not avatar... the accent is on the product / services that are advertised and not on the avatar interaction.

also, the world needs not to be so well designed. The key is simplicity. It should be very easily "navigatable", searchable, etc.

hmmm... you mean "city"..am not familiar with 3D city..i thought its a second life thingy but set in a city you mean?

looks cool..isnt it been done yet in 2ndlife..you know even interviews are being done there now =)?

I'm also thinking second life
Tommy

from what I know, this specific product has not been done yet. Yes, second life COULD do this, but the user would need an id... and the second life world is big, contains all sorts of information... Ad City just offers a services... think of it as a tv channel only for commercials.

How would this be different from what Google maps offer? How do you differentiate it? What would you see when you are at the mall? Would it be an Iframe of their website and a direct link that goes to another page and away from yours? Or would it offer coupons for that particular business?

Google maps is not 3d... you can walk this city.

In a building for say Audi, you can see their cars, 3d rendered. If the company who advertises on Ad City wants an IFrame with its site, that is the easies way to go.

You can buy the products from Ad City (as an intermediary) or point them to the sites where those products can be bought.

On top of that, you get a special building (place) where clients can see product reviews, comparison, ratings, etc.

The most important difference from Google Maps is that GM is real :). This city is an 3d rendered city with virtual avenues (not a real city) for each industry.

If I'm looking for a laptop for instance, i would have "computers avenue" with "laptop street" where HP, Dell, etc advertises their products.

This is the ideal situation -> when big companies like HP or Audi come and advertise here. At the beginning I am sure only little companies would be interested. This is a marketing problem, I don't do marketing :). Anyways, the point is the site doesn't promote products or services on its own, only based on a contract with a company which offers that products or services. Ppl at Ad City are not to scope the market and add products or services. They can do review thought, clients of the site can also do that.

This might work, but I think you should spend some time in a place like 2nd Life and see how it is already being implemented...Read about what corporations are doing to further their designs in this regard. The differentiation of "like" objects on your "city" street would be difficult to show how products are much better from one vendor than another. I'm giving you a thumbs up...but this needs more work.

Secondlife has proven that this doesn't really work for large corporations (at least not yet) and they have the additional incentive of user created content. I don't think there would be any incentive to visit a 3d world consisting totally of virtual malls and advertising, real-life is enough like that already.

However... as technology continues to improve, there are plenty of other virtual worlds either active or in development all hoping to leapfrog Secondlife, so there could be room for another one.

http://www.there.com/
http://www.moove.com/
http://www.activeworlds.com/
http://www.outerworlds.com/
http://www.worlds.net/

Similar view as above man.

i wonder what you guys would've said about the sell pixel advertise on a blunt web page :). And that guy made a lot of money and a lot of copy-cats followed.

This is similar to that, only that it really tries to help consumer.

It ain't second life, not even close to. It's just "commercial tv" in browser. Come to think of it, would you have considered that idea not worth it too?

..Si, pardonme but i vision this as functional GTA: http://planetgrandtheftauto.gamespy.com/

I think it's totally worth a shot, but what would the startup costs be like? Is it expensive/time consuming doing all that 3d rendering, or would you try to have the companies themselves build their HQ's and then import them into your virtual world?

my idea is to build the virtual world FOR the companies which what to advertise here. This is the service we'd be offering for them. For the clients, besides the ad world, there could be the "review" part.

Startup costs -> time for development to build the world (a few months). I would definetly do this if I had another two devs.

I see that i didn't convince you with this. I will try to consider all the details involved in this and resubmit the idea in the next rounds. Maybe then it will be as appealing to you guys as it is to me :)

I don't see it as a good idea. I remember VRML from years ago and the whole "surfing" on a 3D environment with buildings and storefronts.... no one bought into it. It's not natural and takes longer visually.

The "red light" district will dominate your city :(

Besides that, I don't think 3-D surfing is any more "natural" than 2-D surfing

It could make money, but my question is why would someone want to visit your 3-D ad city? A lot of people I know get ad block plugins for fire fox because they are tired of being buried in advertisements.

i would come to this site for reviews and ideally, because all the products can be found here, easily.

There are lots of 3d worlds this is not new.

So basically you are taking PC Magazine and other vendor related websites and virtualizing it so it looks like a GTA or 2nd Life thing vice a regular website.. I like it but I think your problem will be draw time...How long will it take for all the images to refresh on your screen..

You could multi-phase this with phase one more of a cheesy street look that users dont move down smoothly but have a tabbed like look along the sides of the street with the names of the vendors on that street..Even a search that would take you to the front of the 'store'...

Later phases would add more realism to the view...But hopefully after we all have tons of bandwidth and superfast machines to browse from..

Almost like taking a phone book's categories and breaking each one into a street...Then build a store front per entry and then open up to vendor's website...Allow 'street searches' using keywords provided by the vendor, so a search for new cars will turn up a newly made run time street with all the vendors that those keywords hit on...

As time goes on and you get more vendors, you might need to do multi-level store fronts with a key word describing all the "offices" of that vbuilding...

ya this would look cool and might be more fun that lookin thru a million link hits but it has to be fast and I dont think it would work until it is fast to refresh..

Jim

There are probably lots of other aspects about a product that are more important to advertise vice just a 3d model of it. This can be done fairly effectively with flash or some of the virtual tours imaging software (see almost any hotel site to see a "virtual 3d tour"). I would prefer to see a site that concentrates on the specs and how to use the product.