This holiday season certainly demonstrated the power of e-commerce.
Some early estimates indicate that Web traffic doubled and sales tripled.
Complaints were up, too, as some stores struggled to deliver their goods on time. Most industry insiders agree that e-commerce sites will need to evolve to suit customers' needs if they want to have any chance of survival. And one of those evolutions may involve a switch to 3-D presentations. This technology lets customers stream, scale, or even manipulate 3-D objects within the online store they're visiting. One of the biggest players in the field is MetaCreations Corp., which recently decided to focus solely on its MetaStream 3-D streaming technology, currently used by Sony as well as other retailers.