Hi, I’m Francesco of eSimple.
Our company is developing Unity projects to make business applications instead of games.
Our first “public” project is VirtuyMall, the first 3D interactive shopping center in the world.
We have used the webplayer to make a 3D web application that integrates between the portal and the 3D experience.
The user can walk inside the mall, seeing the displays and buying real products.
You can try the mall at this URL:
http://3d.virtuy.com
you can enter as guest or you can register for free to customize the avatar and take pictures inside the photobooths.
We have also developed a Standalone 3D editor to build the shops, you can see a demo video here:
http://www.esimple.it/it/newselem/3D-Shop-Virtual-Editor-by-eSimple/
The developing of the complete project has taken about 2 years, and from October until now, we have rewritten all the multiplayer logic to support SmartFoxServer (thanks to ThomasLund APIs).
Let us know your impressions!
Francesco
eSimple CEO
Interesting concept. I’ve been doing a lot of on line shopping of late and I tend to want to know a great deal more about a product than what your shops show, ie. photos from all sides, full specifications, all size options, other buyers’ product reviews, etc. One of the nice things about buying on line is the wealth of info that can be attached to a product so the buyer can make an informed decision. But it’s always interesting to see what other folks are doing with Unity. Good luck!
Sounds like a great idea, don’t get me wrong. You might want to rethink labeling yourself as the first 3d interactive shopping center tho. Just a quick google search brought up several before you.
http://www.themallplus.com/
I’m sure there are several others.
We have being doing this for 5 years using cutting edge level soft/hardware with multi nationals.
It’s also photoreal and contains an entire stock system, laser eye scanning tech and profile building for customer profiling.
Like your work
All good
First?
Sadly poeple have been doing this for 10 years
http://www.themall.tv/
They are all poor… and people will lose interest, kind in mind most people can’t use a simple shopping cart!!! as they are morons.
Main issues are band-width and people getting bored, also it’s no match for an info rich shopping cart regards ease of use and speed.
We need a full vr head-set and very fast photo-real stores, with the same level of interaction a real store has.
In ours we have a full Super-store and it’s photo-real, one shelf loaded with individual products that you can pick-up and read takes a serious amount of power to render in real-time, we can do this but not on-line and not using Unity, we use the Cry2 engine and some serious hardware and a team of crack 3d artists to produce the content and code.
Somone has to pay for all this dev, it’s not an easy sell in the currect market so we use it for a different task, and it works very well.
In 5 years it’ll be much more easy
Ok, we already known themallplus and also arielcenter.it (is an italian virtual mall)
A new entry for us is themall.tv, but all of them are not really interactive or in real time because they are pre-rendered flash videos that you can browse “interactively”, like the old multimedia cdroms.
So none of them is in real “3D” (and I think that if you are on unity forum you can understand the difference! 
)
We also know second life… but it’s not “web based”, it weights about 80 mb… and you can’t open your “real” shop inside to sell real products.
We also have multiplayer networking with chat that none of those mentioned above has (only second life), and our project works inside the browser in a large base of pc’s and macs (the platform downscales the quality to work also in old hardware).
for bigkahuna: I agree with you. If I need to buy something online I want to do as fast as possible… so we have connected the 3D experience to a web portal (http://www.virtuy.com) for the one like me and you Obviously the source of the product is the same database between the 3D and 2D version… so you can choose how to buy!