While many retailers are still grappling with the concept of social shopping and some big names are only now entering the realm of f-commerce, one Georgia-based company wants to skip right to the end and recreate the entire shopping mall experience for users to enjoy without leaving their homes.

DimensionsMall.com, Inc. is in the process of developing a photo-realistic shopping center that will allow users to create avatars of themselves and then stroll around the mall, entering their favourite stores and making real purchases – a retail equivalent of Second Life, if you will.

A Dimensions Mall spokesperson said that the mall will be designed to allow shoppers to more effectively connect with products: “The idea here is to give the shopper more of an experience than just gazing at one-dimensional static images of products on a screen. Within the Dimensions Mall portal, visitors will be able to walk through virtual versions of well-known stores, ‘pick up’ items and interact with them in a more familiar way before making a real purchase.”

The mall experience will offer a host of other features, too, including a social element which will allow users to meet up with friends and family in real time and effectively go shopping together. Other aspects include wish lists, a virtual dressing room and an online food court, which will allow users to buy discount coupons and gift cards for popular eateries around the world.

The mall’s ‘grand-opening’ is planned for late summer this year, but a development of this size and scale is no mean feat, and as yet there’s very little information available on the project. The demonstration video (below) uses Samsung as an example store – does that mean the electronics giant is already on board? And as the website continually plugs the global aspect of the mall, will we see it incorporate country-specific names as well as worldwide brands?

No doubt, a Second Life style shopping experience is an inevitability for f-commerce, and it’s no surprise that developers are already working on it, but is Dimensions Mall up the task, given its fairly bewildering website? Could any company deliver a such a huge product in such a relatively short period of time? If they manage it then forget embedded Facebook stores and social shopping apps – the face of online shopping will have changed forever.