Hacking together Shopageddon.biz
We just launched a weird VR shopping experiment to bring the excitement and terror of Black Friday directly into your home and eyeballs. It’s called Shopageddon.biz. Give it a try, especially if you have a VR headset and don’t get motion sick too easily.
It came about through playing around with various different APIs and frameworks we found interesting, primarily Web VR and Associate Earning programs.
If you don’t know what an API is, it’s a very quick and simple code interface to do something that would otherwise be very complicated and time consuming. You write some simple code and get back a simple answer, and don’t need to worry about all the complexity that happens in between. Basically you’re standing on the shoulders of people much cleverer than you. Better still, these clever folk often give their work away for free or at very, very low cost. And because they’re all web-based and work in a browser without having to download an app, you can use them all at the same time, mushed together.
To make the VR part, we used a-frame.io which lets you create 3D scenes and objects with standard html code.
For example, here’s how you make a scene: <a-scene id=”scene”>
Here’s how you make a box: <a-box depth=“10” height=“10” width=“10”></a-box>
Easy right? Put on a VR headset and test it – you just made a VR experience! An exceptionally dull one admittedly, but not bad for 1 minute of effort.
We used another API to find random products to sell (and generate affiliate income should anyone actually buy anything). Another called Responsive Voice to read out a description when you look at something. Playing with the pitch, speed and voice type is another 4 lines of code.
Being able to make things so quickly lets you get started straight away and use your time thinking about the fun stuff like animations and crafting the overall experience. Every few hours we could pass a prototype around the team and let everyone have a go, make a few changes and try it out again.
There are tonnes of other APIs out there. Here’s a few we’ve already played with or intend to play with soon.
- Image detection APIs like Clarifai.com can tell you the objects in a photo with freakish accuracy. It correctly guessed ‘Blue M&M’ when I tried.
- Face detection APIs let you submit a photo and get back information about the age, gender, race, emotion of the people in it, plus pixel-perfect locations of eyes, ears, chins and any other features you feel the need to know.
- Twilio is an API for sending and receiving texts and phonecalls. It’s how Airbnb and Uber send you messages.
- IBM have an API to access Watson, their artificial intelligence who won Jeopardy.
- Google have loads of APIs, obvious stuff like search but also translating between languages, recognising speech and natural language, doing machine learning.
- Monzo (new banking startup) have an API to search your transactions.
- If This Then That lets you link APIs together with no code.
- API.ai let’s you create chatbots and text interfaces really, really easily.
With amazing APIs, and platforms like A Frame, all you need is your imagination and a small portion of practical know-how to start making really compelling experiences in not much time at. What are you waiting for?
