How “View in 3D” and “Duplex for Web” Will Change Website Performance
Let’s consider new features announced at Google I/O 2019. Notably: View in 3D and Duplex for Web.
Website Performance
It is not a secret that the higher website’s rankings at Google SERP’s, the more traffic website gets. This also increases sales. And there is another great way to improve click-through rate and engage with users before they visit the website — Google’s “Enriched Results”. The “View in 3D” feature allows to attract potential clients and readers even further through the experience of augmented reality.
It is obvious that holding a “virtual” version of the product “in your hands” makes you feel like you already own this thing and this in turn increases the chances of a potential sale. For exapmle, it is totally different feeling when you just look at the picture of shoes and when you see them on the shelf, next to the rest of your collection.
These UX improvements have been announced at Google I/O 2019 and should be available this summer. However, we are sure that it’s real to predict some changes that will come when the features get implemented on eCommerce and other websites.
Spoiler: schema.org is the key.
Customizing Search Results
There are some tools that help to change search results, still, Google decides by itself whether the results will be basic or enriched.
Let’s take a look at all the possible results:
Basic Result
Enriched Result
Rich Result
Knowledge Graph Result
Carousel
And now, also, View in 3D
All of these can be created with schema.org vocabularies.
Schema.org is a community created by Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex for webmasters to invent a universal way of data structuring on their web page for optimal parking using search crawlers and other bots.
Here is the list of possible content types:
And if you’re a software developer reading this, you’re probably finding that many of these are analogous to programming classes.
Also, many of these enhancements can be applied to almost all content types (Breadcrumb, Star, Carousel, etc.)
Now, let’s talk code!
There are several options to create Structured Data:
1) Microdata
<p itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Person">
Hi, I’m
<span itemprop=”name”>Alice</span>.
</p>
2) RDFa
<p vocab=”http://schema.org/" typeof=”Person”>
Hi, I’m
<span property=”name”>Alice</span>.
</p>
3) JSON-LD
<p> Hi, I’m Alice. </p>
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org",
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Alice”
}
</script>
Let’s look how JSON-LD works.
So, if we want to figure out how to use the “View in 3D” and “View in your area” features we would likely need to follow the same basic structure with some additional snippets:
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org/",
“@type”: “Product”,
“name”: “New Balance 1080 v9 woman’s”
“image”: [
“https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg",
“https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"
],
“model”: [
“https://example.com/models/model.obj",
“https://example.com/models/model.max",
“https://example.com/models/model.gltf"
],
“description”: “…”,
“sku”: “0446310786”,
“review”: {
“@type”: “Review”,
“reviewRating”: {
“@type”: “Rating”,
“ratingValue”: “4”,
“bestRating”: “5”
},
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Fred Benson”
}
},
“aggregateRating”: {
“@type”: “AggregateRating”,
“ratingValue”: “4.4”,
“reviewCount”: “89”
},
“brand”: {
“@type”: “Thing”,
“name”: “ACME”
},
“offers”: {
“@type”: “Offer”,
“url”: “https://example.com/anvil",
“priceCurrency”: “USD”,
“price”: “119.99”,
“itemCondition”: “https://schema.org/UsedCondition",
“availability”: “https://schema.org/InStock",
“seller”: {
“@type”: “Organization”,
“name”: “Executive Objects”
}
}
}
</script>
You can take a closer look at the code. It may seem pretty simple, but we’d recommend you to pay special attention to the “model” field in line 10.
The filed names might change when Google releases these features to the public. However, we’re pretty sure that the 3D model will be connected in exactly this way.
What about formats, it’s like that Google will implement WebGL-based model viewers. If that’s the case, we’re likely going to find ourselves working with formats such as gITF and OBJ.
And, if we look at Google’s current examples of Web AR implementation, we can see that they’re using WebXR and gITF.
But then, of course, we’ll only know for sure once all of these features are released to the public.
