She begins to move forwards, heading down the hall towards where amazon.com must presently reside. But then she remembers that the supply of freezer’d coffee beans in Laura’s apartment is beginning to run low, so she turns her head towards Starbucks— the entire orientation of the virtualscape rotates with the motion of her head, as though she were revolving in an office chair—and she steps forwards and passes through the door. The hallway dissolves away into a fizz of pixels and is replaced by a mock-up of a Starbucks retail store. The setup is economized, of course, made up mostly of brown and green polygons fit together, but the shape of the space nonetheless feels familiar: it’s a long room full of circular tables, there are walls lined with shelves, in front of her is a counter. Various windows—rectangular blocks of light containing words and options—appear around her, gently drifting, like lethargic fish. The natural, childike impulse is to reach out and touch them—they seem as beautiful and ephemeral and mysterious as soap bubbles on a sunny day—but you have to be careful: if you just start touching things in here you end up buying stuff you never intended.
This is the way the Virtual Mall works. Gordon surfs the Net and finds websites belonging to companies that he wants in the Mall. Any sort of website that sells anything will work, technically, but Gordon is picky: he looks for really-well-designed websites from companies that really have something to offer. Then he and Dmitrovitch write code for platforms that create VR interfaces between the person strapped in the console and the website. Instead of getting to, say, amazon.com by typing in the URL on your at-home Net browser, you just walk through the door. Instead of using your mouse to point at the buttons you want to press, you just point with your finger and then make a fist. When you need to type something in—like the name of a book for amazon.com—you use the keyboard that’s floating there above your forehead. All Virtual Mall has really done is make websites into places you can walk around in.