Trading giant Mitsubishi Corp claims to be offering three-diensional virtual shopping via personal computer in April next year. Subscribers to its personal computer-communications service will be able to call up three-dimensional images of a virtual shopping mall. Operating the network will be People Worlds Co, Japan’s third-largest personal computer-communications firm with 400,000 subscribers. US virtual environment specialist Worlds Inc will be the third partner. The consortium was established by IBM Japan Ltd, Mitsubishi, Hitachi Ltd, Toshiba Corp and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. The service will use a mixture of Worlds’s software and IBM’s Virtual Reality Modelling Language+ to transmit three-dimensional images over phone lines. Mitsubishi hopes to attract 3m subscribers to the People Space multimedia service by the year 2000 and attract annual sales of $148.5m.
