Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes
By Guy Vardi
The Manolo Blahnik shoe line is highly regarded in the fashion industry and has an extremely loyal customer base. Blahnik, the shoes' designer, says he designs more than just shoes; he makes "gestures, objects that happen to be fashion." This meant a challenge for our firm, RichFX, when we created the site. We had to design a storefront for gestures.
The technology to sell shoes online is well established, but gestures? This would require a different take on the standard e-commerce experience. Working closely with the Neiman Marcus team, we developed a concept and solution to meet Blahnik's high standards for product and brand presentation.
Tool Walkthrough
Our firm provides e-commerce infrastructure for clients, and our primary product is RichFX Environments, which efficiently streams 3D images. So, naturally, we used RichFX Environments on the site. These environments include RichFX Player, RichFX Server, and RichFX Encoder. We feel that this software combination produces a shopping environment with more depth than standard e-commerce sites.
Shoppers view the 3D environment through the RichFX Player, which is a plug-in ActiveX component or a plug-in for RealNetworks' RealPlayer. The RealPlayer supports RichFX's proprietary format, VPEG. This media type is a computer-generated movie compressed by the RichFX Encoder. The file contains server data types including geometry, textures, lights, setting, and so on. The RichFX Player uses realtime rendering to combine this data into a movie, streaming only the necessary data for each view.
