The mission of BookAlive.com was to provide the opportunity for serendipity and leisurely browsing in a three-dimensional on-line bookstore.
We developed a prototype using VRML and a Java Servlet back-end that dynamically populated shelves from a database of thousands of books. This process took into account the cover art, dimensions, and in some cases high-resolution highly compressed renderings (using AT&T's DjVu technology) of the contents of the books, and created a much higher fidelity on-line rendition of the bookstore experience than is conventionally available.