Developing semantic VR-shops for e-Commerce

Increased bandwidth, cheaper and faster hardware, dedicated technology and the success of e-commerce make VR-shops feasible. VR-shops are similar to the e-shops currently available on the Web, with the difference that the products are visualized as 3D objects in a virtual world. Although VR-shops do not require sophisticated VR technology, they should be very flexible: it should be easy to add, remove and rearrange products; and to add, change or remove functionality. Therefore, an appropriate approach that can be used by a non-VR expert and which provides a short development time and easy maintenance is necessary. Also usability is very important because this is crucial for the success of VR-shops. In this paper, we present an approach to develop VR-shops that meet these requirements. It allows specifying a VR-shop using high-level conceptual specifications and in terms of domain terminology; semantics are captured by ontologies; existing product information can be incorporated; and the actual code is generated.