Abstract
During the last years, E-Commerce, and online shopping in particular, has known a strong popularity and rapid growth. At the same time, computer hardware, software, and Internet broadband access has allowed to spread the use of Virtual Reality(VR) online. As innovation is an important aspect on the Web, Virtual Reality is a promising technology. By attracting the user both visually and in terms of intuitiveness, VR may seriously increase online retail sales. However, development cost and
development time stays high. Moreover, the complexity of the development of VR application requires the need to involve VR experts and allows only partial involvement of domain experts. In this thesis, we present SHOP-WISE, an approach to develop VR online shops that permits domain experts to be much more in control, and OntoShop, the supporting tool. Using high-level concepts modeling and by requiring only a minimum amount of technically difficult work, a complete VR shop can be (semi) automatically generated. The generated 3D environments are completely functional and ready for the customers to be used. The VR shop can be visited and products can have different behaviors (like turning). Moreover, shopping tasks like buy or calculate shipping cost can be executed. Based on ethnographical studies, an intuitive graphical user interface for the OntoShop tool has been created for the shop designers. Typical shopping tasks, behaviors and infrastructure concepts (like walls and racks) have been pre-defined. In this way, the work done by the domain expert is reduced to a minimum.
| Date of Award | 23 Jun 2006 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Olga De Troyer (Promotor) & Frederic Kleinermann (Co-promotor) |
Keywords
- E-Commerce
- Virtual Reality