Gemsta.com, which launched in December last year, was developed by real world architects, landscapers, interior designers and programmers to create a photo-real world across a number of ‘islands', complete with light reflections on rippling water and the sound of rustling palm trees. Using the latest Flash animation technology, visitors can travel through different virtual arenas, browsing various shopping categories and clicking on brand ‘posters' to be taken through to that retailer's website. 

At Gemsta, you can buy everything from mobile phones and insurance to women's fashion, homeware or gifts. The first ever 3D Virtual Farmers Market (vfmuk.com), which launched this January, takes care of your food and drink. Using the latest games technology, this site lets you ‘stroll around' a 3D farmers market and ‘meet' the producers behind the products.

So whats the future?
In an era of iPlayer, Xbox and Playstation, when we take virtual exercise on our Nintendo Wii and watch movies such as Avatar in 3D, it seems only natural that we should be able to shop online in the same intuitive way. On Second Life, the virtual world, users interact and carry out activities via avatars, which they can send in to shops to pick up and try on items of clothing and pay with virtual money. While Gemsta and Virtual Farmers Market are not quite at this stage yet, at the rate technology develops, such an experience - but this time using real money and buying real items - cannot be far away.

The future of shopping - to be continued.

One of the growing topics ive noticed popping recently has been around phasing out IE6. This browser certainly takes the oscar award for being a terrible browser to build web applications around. The browser as its stands has many rendering bugs and lacks support for so many things that is simply a nightmare to work with. Im sure there are millions of developers out there that all feel the same.

The amount of time and money wasted in supporting this browser across the web is staggering. As a project manager this is not the best use of your resources as most of their time is spent on hacking layouts ensuring that everything looks right.

So is it right to kill off IE6 once and for all?

There was a time not so long ago when all web developers wanted to be using IE6. The goal back then was to kill off IE5. So now we are facing a similar history of behaviour to IE.

We yearn for the more modern versions, only to end up hating those same versions later on. This will not change with the death of IE6. Soon, it will be IE7 that we are trashing, and then IE8 will be the bane of our existence.
So while we celebrate the death of IE6, let us not forget that there will be a new thorn in our side to take its place in short order. IE7, you're next.

The project is a chamber in which the viewer is surrounded by LCDs displaying synchronised imagery from Google's Street View or Google Earth, giving the effect of flying through landscapes - including Google Earth's latest seabed imagery.

Want to know where the Google Street View car is? In the UK, there was a collaborative effort to track it through pictures and crowdsourced maps when it was over here collecting the pictures for Google Nostalgia (ah, those days when Woolworths was open).

But a team of German artist-pranksters - the self-assigned Free Art & Technology group - has done rather better: while the Street View car was idling outside their offices, they nipped over and attached a GPS device to it.

The result: for a while on Sunday you could see in real time just where it was, and the group also generated a map showing where it had been. (Or see the really large map.)

Much hilarity ensued, although Google obviously got wise to it and seem to have removed it. (Either that or they've been parked since Sunday, which seems unlikely.)

The fabulous irony being their instruction to people to: "Come help us find and tell your friends about the evils being committed by Google's streetviews car and crew."

Which they've plotted on a ... Google Map.