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Miami Company To Take Shopping To "Virtual" New Level

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MIAMI BEACH (CBSMiami) - Lincoln Road on South Beach. It's considered by many to be one of the premiere shopping avenues in the world with dozens of stores to satisfy any shopaholic.

But imagine if you could shop on Lincoln Road without physically being here.

It's possible. Miami-based Avenue Planet has developed a fully immersive 3-D world on an app and Lincoln Road is just one of 12 famous shopping plazas you can visit from the comfort of your home.

Kabir Frutos spent four years developing the free app that lets you shop around the world.

"You can buy Japanese things. You can buy European things. Clothes in Paris. You can buy these things here in Miami," Frutos said.

You'd have to hop on a plane to get your fashion fix in other cities. With Avenue Planet you can peruse stores on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, check out 5th Avenue in New York City, walk around London's Oxford Street or Tokyo's Ginza.

Users simply plug their smartphones into a pair of virtual reality goggles you can buy at any electronics store and you are instantly transported. But it's more than just shopping. Concerts, sports game, and experiences you otherwise wouldn't be able to do, like floating in space.

"We don't have limits. We can create a thousand stores in one avenue," Frutos said.

Avenue Planet now gives any store an international audience.

Frutos added that retailers don't don't actually have to have a storefront on these streets to be a part of the app, even stores with no brick and mortar shop can now have shoppers from anywhere in the world.

The real world and the virtual world meld in this app.

Just be careful, the bill is real in either world.

You'll be able to virtually shop on Lincoln Road and around the world by the end of the year. Avenue Planet launches the app in December.

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