Design and Implementation of a Collaborative Virtual Shopping System

E-commerce has rapidly grown with the advent of information and communication technologies. It has also become a promising field for applying VR and AI techniques. However, customers are not provided with the realistic shopping experience as they will enjoy in an actual store or mall. Therefore this paper proposes a multi-agent support for collaborative shopping systems by focusing on simulation and interaction. With combination of the sociality with a virtual environment, the proposed Easy Mall system cannot only imitate real interaction among target customers who are favorable to the same products, but also support the communication between multiple avatars. The system is implemented using VRML, intelligent agents and computer network technologies.