Hewlett-Packard's future vision of shopping online

You are traveling through a dimly lit maze of brick walls with various posters looming back at you. Suddenly, you turn to view one and with a click of a mouse, a movie starts playing. It's not the latest video game - it's Hewlett-Packard's future vision of shopping online. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based computer and printer maker recently unveiled its VEDA (virtual environment design automation) project to the press. The OpenGL and XML-based application is used as a visualization database that can be viewed in 3D to create online stores that you can walk through on your monitor, browsing through rooms of items sorted by your category of choice. Inspired by first-person video games, the demo showed some eerily similar qualities to shooting games like Doom and Quake. However, HP Labs research scientists Nelson Chang and Amir Said assured there were no mutants or monsters crouching behind the turns, only endless possibilities for enterprise. "Here you have an interface that a 10-year-old kid could understand," said Chang. "Instead of a static Web page, you have interactive content that appeals to users visual senses and adds the benefits of physical stores to online stores." Chang said VEDA's backend software creates a framework for rich media including audio, video, and 3D models, which could be manipulated. The demo simulated a trip through HP's product catalogue including cameras and other materials that could be viewed 360-degrees. The virtual store could also be approached at the floor level or from a third-person overhead advantage point, allowing the user to skip to other sections without getting lost.