Adidas opened a store in Second Life last week to promote its a3 Microride sneakers. This is not the company's first foray into the game space; last year Adidas announced it would make its Hyperride shoes part of the upcoming PSP title Freerunning. Adidas follows the growing number of other brands that have already established presence in the virtual world: Scion and Starwood are the most recent additions, and American Apparel has set up its own boutique earlier this year.

The store sits on a private island away from the Second Life's mainland. Besides the store itself, the Adidas complex includes a dome that projects a branded video clip, a few billboard installations, and an orange "testing area" trampoline to demonstrate the shoes' "bouncy" positioning. The shoes themselves contain a script that makes avatars jump to the sky.

The interior is spacious and is built to accommodate convenient camera controls. The video screens on the sides play the same promo spot and invite visitors to check out the Adidas campaign site What's Next. Besides this brief mention of the site's URL and a bookmark you receive with your purchase, it doesn't seem the website and the Second Life store are tightly connected. The site has a store locator feature and it would have been a nice nod to the Second Life's fan base if it had mentioned the Second Life outlet. Unlike the American Apparel store, Adidas here sells only one SKU - the a3 that comes either in white or red and black styles. There are no attendants behind the counters and you buy the shoes by clicking on one of the boxes and paying 50 linden dollars (about 20 real-world cents).


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