The public got its first hard look at Mark Lucente—and the things that preoccupy him—three years ago in the IBM booth at computer trade show Comdex. At the time, the 30-something MIT-trained researcher was exploring new ways for people to interact with computers, and many still talk about the demonstration he gave—part David Copperfield, part high-tech soothsayer—in the crowded Las Vegas Convention Center.

Lucente, now 36, has spent his career inventing technology like this—natural interfaces to computer data that might someday be the way we all control machines. His work at IBM making computers responsive to body movements was a milestone on the road to seamless human-machine relations. Someday, indeed, the break throughs Lucente has pioneered might help seismologists model oil fields without touching a keyboard or online shoppers inspect merchandise that isn't really there. Nothing would make him happier.

But for an ambitious young inventor, the promise of someday is a carrot. After a while, the meat and potatoes of now start to look tasty too.

Now means e-commerce, which Lucente hopes to revolutionize with user-friendly tools. So in a Silicon Alley loft space, as chief technology officer of startup Soliloquy, Lucente is building tools that let Web merchants bring their products to shoppers on more human terms. We're not talking about video holograms and gesture-based interaction—not yet—but we're talking about tools that can bolster companies' bottom lines today.

The first of Lucente's tools is something called Notebook Expert, which lets visitors at a Web site type a phrase like "Find me the lightest laptop that plays DVDs," and receive a list, plucked from a product database, of lightweight, movie-playing computers. It sounds like a simple natural language database query, but it's much more. Lucente's computer expert has a dialogue with the user, assembling what resembles a human understanding of what the shopper really wants. It might be just an explanation of how much RAM you need for playing games. Or it might be a very accurate and insightful product recommendation, and an easy way to buy the notebook you want.

Online Brain: What do you want to use your notebook for?

Shopper: I play Tomb Raider.

Brain: The latest computer games require a fast computer with a big screen, a large hard drive, and lots of memory. There are 60 items that satisfy your requirements; here are some examples. How much money can you spend?

Shopper: I need something cheap.

Brain: There are 25 items that satisfy your requirements . . .

In the course of that short dialogue, the brain has pulled data from various places: from its internal knowledge base to interpret what "play" and "cheap" mean in the context of notebook computers, from the seller's product database, and from the profile it is building of the shopper.

Does it work? In a five-month trial on Acer America's Shopacer.com site, nearly one-third of shoppers who used Notebook Expert clicked through the "buy" page, and Acer's online notebook sales rose by 21 percent. To e-tailers, that's magic—even more amazing than waving at a screen to make a blue ball appear.

And it's just the beginning. Soliloquy is working on more experts—to help shoppers learn about and choose mutual funds, home mortgages, and cars.

Lucente brings his technological genius to e-commerce at a critical time. BizRate.com, an e-shopping rating and comparison site, estimates that shoppers abandon online shopping carts 78 percent of the time. Boston Consulting Group estimates that e-tailers missed out on $15 billion thanks to aborted purchase attempts in 2000, on total sales of $61 billion. This sky-high rate of e-commerce interruptus frequently happens when shipping charges are revealed or shoppers are reluctant to fill in forms, but it's also often a result of disorientation or inability to find the desired information.

And that's why Lucente hopes his work connecting customers with information could give the e-tailing industry a boost. It turns out that being there to hold shoppers' hands when they need it—to help them find what they need, even to literally close the sale—is another one of those fundamental good-business practices that never really went away.