vCOM: Electronic commerce in a collaborative virtual world

Existing e-commerce applications on the web provide the users a relatively simple, browser-based interface to access available products. Customers are not provided with the same shopping experience as they would in an actual store or mall. This experience, however, can be achieved by the creation of a virtual shopping mall environment, simulating most of the actual shopping user interactions. The virtual mall brings together the services and products of various vendors. Users can navigate through the virtual shopping malls, adding items of interest into a virtual shopping cart, and perform searches assisted by `intelligent agents'. A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) can realize a sophisticated virtual shopping application. In such a CVE, a large number of potential users may interact with each other. In this paper, vCOM, a VRML and Java3D-based prototype is presented, which permits users to navigate around virtual e-commerce worlds and perform collaborative shopping and in...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: ECRA
• Authors: Xiaojun Shen, T. Radakrishnan, Nicolas D. Georganas
• Keywords: ECRA 2002, Virtual Mall, Virtual Shopping, Virtual Shopping Malls