What is it and where does it come from? Well, Immersion is a widely used term meaning to become a part or indulge in matter. Use of the term got “big” in the early naughties theatre scene in London with Immersive theatre productions.

The Concept of Immersive (Web) Shopping was discussed during the earlier days of the web but it was not tangible back then due to the limitations of upload speeds. Early Second Life -like ventures such as The Virtual Mall, trying to come up with virtual environment for consumers. Those failed, miserably.

Why would 3D world shopping fail? Product futurists, UI/UX experts and psychologists studied those fails extensively. The general conclusion and psychological-perception terminology to be understood here is — cognitive dissonance. The term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. In our case, a visual environment. An interesting study by Cornell and University of Ohio focused on showing how cognitive dissonance could negatively affect users of a virtual environment.

The Virtual Mall and Second Life failed because they tried to represent real world 3D, with poor graphics, slow load times and a general lack of real world aesthetic similarity which created user frustration.

Today the internet, infrastructure and rendering technology is no longer a barrier. 3D eCommerce is gaining traction for the obvious reason — user want it. Why obvious?

Imagine a world where brands make immense efforts to look great, design and bring out the individual qualities different shoppers may like from the brand and experience. All this effort is summed into an excel like sheet of a website. It’s ugly, it’s boring and so 2002…

In 2016 I ran a 250 member experiment — a focus group on real world scans of shops, an Immersive 3D shopping experience. The obvious can only be obvious with more than 90% of my test subject said that no doubt they prefer to shop this way. This is why everyone should be getting on board of this train. We are living in user centric world — please them and win.

Is there common sense in web 3.0?

More than you think.