Let's Meet in the Mall!

Let's not go too far into the social networking features without showing you the heart and soul of our site - the 3D mall itself. This is where we're breaking new ground. To the best of our knowledge, we created the first, operational virtual, 3D shopping mall. I'll share the origins of the idea in a later post but for now, suffice it to say that we began development in December of 2005 and initially launched in July of 2008.

To visit the mall, one must first load the free software on your PC (sorry, Mac's not supported. borrow your parent's PC ;) Instructions for loading the mall software are at the Installation Guide Button next to the Load Mall Button on the main homepage. There's also a load mall button on the profile page in the upper right corner.

Once you load the free software, a launch button is installed in the lower right of your computer screen. It will appear each time you start your computer. This is how you enter the mall each time. Click anywhere in the center of the button to launch the mall.

You'll first encounter an entry screen. If you have registered on the website and have an account, you can enter your login/pw and enter as a registered users. If not, you can either go to the web pages and register or enter as a guest. Guests cannot create personas or collect coupons but can do anything else in the mall.

We have limited the number of malls to a main mall at present, but we'll add more - specialty malls (men, women, teens) and city malls - over time.

Click the main mall and wait a minute for it to load (or do something else. you'll hear mall noise when you have entered.)

You enter the mall in the main atrium.

You move around in the mall using your arrow keys: left, right, forwards and backwards. We'll look around in our next post but feel free to explore on your own.

As always, if you have questions, please contact us at support@virtualeshopping.com. We're open to your ideas, so please share them generously!

- virtualEmark