Avon sought to create an immersive buddy-shopping experience to encourage online shopping between friends, and more importantly to better understand the shopping behavioral dynamics between friends who influence each other’s buying habits. Wyndstorm built a three—dimensional pilot for corporate evaluation offering an online shopping experience that enabled shoppers to enter the 3-D shop, to browse, try-on, and buy cosmetics. Visitors were able to browse products at a cosmetics counter, select products, read information about those products, try-on makeup see the results in a mirror, and then proceed to the shopping cart.

This experience also enables buddies to chat with each other, post in several community venues (a Wall, product reviews, etc.), as well as send images of their try-on selection to their friends via email.

Our system was used internally to finalize the online buddy-shopping experience that would minimize technical constraints, including bandwidth restrictions by some ISPs, user interaction and navigation habits, integration with other existing 3-D worlds, such as Second Life, and others.