adidas.com
The adidas site is an online gallery for its fashion products. As you go between pages you experience a sense of movement - it feels like you are in a real 3D space. The animations are very impressive with unfolding rooms and photo-quality graphics.
Navigation is not particularly easy. It is difficult to know whether you are going back or forward and this, combined with the large number of pages, makes it easy to get lost. I am unsure whether this is an intentional, 'designed' feature of the interface because although it is a bit annoying it means that you are exposed to much more of the content when you are trying to navigate.
At the top of each page there is a link to a 'site map' which is an unusually boring page. This gives you access to all the pages via named links.
Window or Mirror?
As with most websites adidas.com functions as both a window and a mirror. As a window it allows a view into the adidas range of products.As a mirror it is interactive - the user can navigate around the spatial site and even participate in a digital croquet game. This interaction creates a two-way communication as the computer responds to the users commands.
The interface shapes the way we experience the site. The realistic look of the models and the spaces that they occupy and the way the interface moves you between pages (rooms) creates a surreal 3D affect - pulling the virtual world closer to our physical one. This creates an effective selling point for adidas and a unique experience for the viewer.
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