Greening a virtual yard

Each week, the Browser features some pop-culture places on the World Wide Web offering the coolest in free interactive sounds and action.

Lowe’s home-improvement chain celebrates the season with a virtual world asking visitors to buy stuff and welcome back spring (www.welcomeback spring.com).

Visitors are taken to the surreally sappy confines of Sunnyville, U.S.A., a town stuck somewhere between “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Pleasantville.”

All is wonderful, brightly colored, perfectly manicured and very chirpy and green as the photo-realistic but stylized interactive video screens introduce four neighbors. Each is happy to stop and chat, offer views on their neighbors and pass on some tips for living in suburbia.

An overview of four back yards gives the visitor a choice of meeting Iris, Moe, Gus and Mike.

Click on Moe to find a smartly dressed fellow with the perfect lawn who will stop blowing away a few stray grass clippings to talk. Little bubbles pop up around him to present fun things to do and see in his yard.

Besides lawn-care tips, such as “a lawn will not love you unconditionally,” Moe hawks a full set of products available at Lowe’s.

He also has an activities area led by Moe’s Manuals. These virtual books with pages that really “flip” offer online guides to leaf blowers, string trimmers and mowers. The very informative library, with details down to types of trimmer replacement line, also can be downloaded as a PDF.

The lawn fanatic also offers a game called Moe’s Pattern Challenge. A player uses a walk-behind mower to chop turf in a timed event. As he flies through courses such as Suburban Traditional, clips of grass scatter as his mean machine sputters away. The brutally difficult game uses keyboard commands to maneuver the cutter and engage the blade.

The same types of interactivity are available when hanging out with Gus, the barbecue expert, who offers a food serving calculator and book of recipes. There’s also gardening expert Iris, who provides a planting zone chart on a magical blackboard.

Life, however, gets really bizarre in Sunnyville when the visitor stops by Mike’s yard. Mike, a very large grizzly bear, apparently is a homeowner, proving that anyone — or anything — could qualify for a mortgage during the real estate boom.

Mike growls a lot — subtitles are provided — but happens to be an outdoor furniture expert. Visitors will enjoy trying to keep him happy in a game that requires they match his current state with an appropriate product. So if he is warm, a patio umbrella would work. The bear either will dance with approval for right choices or get pretty agitated if the player is wrong.

A final spot to explore is the Yard Creator. This expansive drag-and-drop simulation has the virtual homeowner design and maintain an outdoor environment.

He has access to decking, grills, shrubbery, flowers, lawn furniture and ponds to place in the grassy area while using a familiar set of tools to maintain any overgrowth. Finished projects can be saved and e-mailed.

Overall, Lowe’s has done a fantastic job of capturing the attention of surfers in a site as amusing as it is educational and fun. It would be easy to bust on the steady stream of buy messages, but the site is just so slick, it’s hard not to smile.

Have a cool site for the online multimedia masses? Write to Joseph Szadkowski at the Browser, The Washington Times, 3600 New York Ave. NE, Washington, DC 20002; call 202/636-3016; or send e-mail to jszadkowski@washingtontimes.com).