5-Applying Virtual Reality and Multimedia5-Applying Virtual Reality and Multimedia for Trust-building Online Shopping Environments.docx for Trust-Building Online Shopping Environments

7/29/2019 5-Applying Virtual Reality and Multimedia5-Applying Virtual Reality and Multimedia for Trust-building Online Shopping Environments.docx for Trust-Building Onlin

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This work was supported bythe Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universitiesof China

K12JB00130

Applying Virtual Reality and Multimedia for Trust-building Online

Shopping Environments

Xiaoguang Hei

[email protected]

Graduate School of Information Science, University of Nagoya, Nagoya, Japan

Wei Zhou

[email protected]

School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

Mamoru Endo

[email protected]

School of Information Science and Technology, University of Chukyo, Nagoya, Japan

Shigeki Yokoi

[email protected]

Graduate School of Information Science, University of Nagoya, Nagoya, Japan

ABSTRACT

Online shopping is very popular currently.However online shopping is also a double-edged sword.It simplifies your life, and its drawbacks cannot be neglected. How to reduce the drawbacks ofonline shopping is a hot topic of current research. We present a virtual reality online shopping modewhich not only allows users to enjoy online shopping freely, but also improve the level of onlineshopping trustworthinessgreatly.

The paper proposed utilizing the Google Maps and the Panorama to build a virtual onlineshopping environment and use the Object Virtual Reality Movie (OVRM) to show the commodityin full dimensions, meanwhile, many multimedia technologiesare used to share and transmitinformation about commodity. Compare to conventional web stores it offers an advanced customer

experience and enables the building of customer trust. This paper presents a prototypeof virtualshopping mall environment. Users are able to enjoy the convenience of online shopping and enjoythe funshopping just like in a real world shopping mall. This paper is the first work of fully 3Donline shopping environment which integrated the 3D and 2D information of commodities with thevirtual space.

Keywords: Object VR Movie, Panorama, Online Shopping, Virtual RealityINTRODUCTION

The Internet has changed many aspects of life, perhaps none more so than how we shop for goods andservices. The potential benefits of online shopping for consumers include convenience, various selection, lowprice, original services, personal attention, and easy access to informationetc. Online retail sales are estimated

to grow from $172 billion in 2005 to $329 billion in 2010 [1]. There are 32 countries worldwide with theInternet penetration rate higher than 50% [2]. Consumers tend to stick to what they know when it comes toonline shopping, according to Nielsen [3]. It is very important to capture the tens of millions of new onlineshoppers as they make their first purchases on the Internet. If shopping sites can capture them early, andcreate a positive shopping experiencefor them, they will likely capture their loyalty and their money.

In the context of online shopping, risk can be divided into two predominant types behavioural riskand environmental risk [4]. Behavioural risk arises from online retailers who have chance to behave in anopportunistic manner by taking advantage of the distancebetween sellers and buyers as well as impersonalnature of e-commerce, besides these reasons, there is the governments inability to monitor all transactions
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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effectively. It includes product risks, psychological risks, and seller performance risks. Environmental risk iscaused by the unpredictable nature of the purchasing mediumInternet, which is beyond the control of onlineretailers and consumers. Itis composed of financial risks and privacy risks. How to build a real onlineshopping environment, and establishes a system with good supervision and management so as to increase the

security of online shopping is the crucial problem.From the conventional online shopping websites, consumers can only get very limited image information

and some basic introductions relevant to some items, such as price, shape, colour, etc. There are manydisadvantages in the conventional online shoppingenvironments. Firstly, conventional websites only showvery little images of the products. Online shoppers canhardly fully understand the commodity at all via thelimited images. And sometimes the commodity description is ambiguous, this result in that the onlineshopperscannot understandit easily or even buy the wrong commodity. Compared with the traditionalshopping, changing and refunding commodity of online shopping is inconvenient, what s more, it will lead tothe cost riskin many cases. And thirdly, lack of interest. Online consumers like surfing on the Internet in theinteresting way. If there are the interesting methods toallow shoppers enjoy the online shopping process, itwill deeply attract them.

In recent years, the 3D shopping mall is also applied to online shoppingfield. The strong sense ofstereoscope and interactive will attract the attention of a large number of online shoppers. However, there are

big defects in the 3D shopping mall. Mainly in the following aspects: firstly, 3D technology development isrelatively complex, and its hardware configuration, especially the Internet speed, is in high demand. Thesecond is the complex application. Visiting the 3D shopping mall is similar to play online 3D games. Thereare a variety of roles and functions that are not convenient for the users who are not familiar with the onlineoperations. More importantly, authenticity of the commodity is insufficient. Consumers do not know thedifferences between the 3D models with the real commodities.

This paper proposed a virtual online shopping environment which can reproduce the shoppingenvironment and product information faithfully. For consumers, the most reliable shopping way is to see thereal scene and the real product. Our purpose is to reproduce a real online shopping environment, andestablishes a good supervision and management system to increase the security of online shopping.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the advantages of image-based virtualreality technologies and reviews the previous works about the researches of trust building technologies usedin the online shopping. Section 3 presents our system methodology. The experimental results are given inSection 4. Finally, conclusions are drawn.

RELATED WORKS

The use of virtual reality in e-commerce has an enormous potential for transforming online shopping intoa real-world equivalent. The shopping process in real life is a social one and therefore an e-commerceapplication should integrate elements with the social context, such as trust, which is one of the mostprominent social aspects of shopping in physical and online environments. Virtual reality applications fore-commerce allow for the accommodation of the social context by simulating a real-world experience,especially in the case of virtual shopping mall environments.

Online customers display low trust levels for web-based merchants. It is an important reason why manycustomers do not shop online. Lack of face-to-face interaction, customer trust is difficult to establish. Somestudies have discussed the various mechanisms used online to promote trust between trading parties includingtrusted third parties and online reputation systems. Other studies have proposed new methods of promotingtrust in e-commerce such as agents and virtual reality technologies.

QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) is a type of image file format developed by Apple Inc. It allows thecreation and browse of photographically-captured panoramas, and the exploration of objects through images

taken at multiple viewing angles. It functions as a plugin for the standalone QuickTime Player, as well as

works as a plugin for the QuickTime Web browser plugin [5]. The basic feature of QTVR is the ability to

achieve 360o panoramic observation of an object or space. It can create a virtual space to surround by

arbitrary angle in the scenes, and it also can observe an object in the range of 360 o. We can change the point

of view arbitrarily. The images are connected to each other, so long as the images are sufficiently fine, the

connection is closed correctly, and we can get the feeling of real space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.


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Panoramas are panoramic images which surround the viewer with an environment (inside, looking out),

yielding a sense of place. They can be "stitched" together from several normal photographs or 2 images taken

with a circular fisheye lens, or captured with specialized panoramic cameras, or rendered from 3D-modeled

scenes [6]. According to the different ways of projection, panoramic image is divided into cylindrical

panorama, Cubic panoramic and spherical panorama. The structure of cylindrical panoramic images isrelatively simple. Cubic Panorama [7] is generally composed of six 90 wide-angle pictures which cover the

six faces of cube, so it can be rotated horizontal 360and vertical 180. As the same as cubic panorama,

spherical panoramic image [8] is also supported view the scene at any angle. The method of using panoramic

equipment (wide angle or fish-eye lens) to take pictures of real scene is available.

In contrast to Panoramas, which are captured from one location looking at it from various angles,

OVRMs are captured from many locations pointing in toward the same central object. In recent years, OVRM

technology has been widely used, such as the application in the clinical field of education [9], the field of

e-commerce [10], and virtual museums [11], etc. OVRM is an image-based modeling and rendering

technology which uses real images for interactive displaying and browsing of the items. It is a very good

representation to catch the eyes of customers online. Acquisition of an OVRM also requires to take images of

an object from different viewing directions, but the images taken in such an object-centered manner cannot be

stitched into a single image because they are not acquired form a fixed (or roughly fixed) viewing center. In

practice, acquisition of OVRM can be achieved by using some device designed particularly for this purpose[12-14].

METHODOLOGY

We addressed a three-level virtual shopping mall generation model (Figure 1. (a)). The first level isbased on the Google Maps. The second level is involved in shopping mall management. And the third level isthe shoppers in the shopping mall. Figure 1. (b) shows the relationshipdiagram. As we know, building thevirtual shopping mall is not a work once and for all. It needs to update the images frequently. The paperproposed the grading management mode which has the following advantages: (1) the different managers inthe different level have the ability to manage and update the information. Shoppers create the virtual store oftheir own and are entitled to manage and update theircommodities information. The shopping mall createsthe virtual scenes outside the virtual store. (2) Another important advantagelies in that the shopping mall hasthe ability to supervise the business behaviors of the web stores. If the web store provided the fakecommodities or bad services, the shopping mall can stop their services. (3) Thirdly, it can reduce thegeneration cost and risks of shopping mall shoppers. QTVR provides the powerful functions to make thescenes. It can roam from panoramic image to the OVRM, from panoramic image to panoramic image or fromOVRM to OVRM. It contains the following contents:

Build the shopping mall virtual space and the web store virtual space: When one or morepanoramic images or OVRMs connected by means of hot spots, this formed the orderly collectionof panoramic images and OVRMs Scenes.To establish a complete roaming scenario, eachindividual 3D scene needs to be strung together as anetwork, that is to say, all panoramas arelinked by location of the corresponding point of view. For example, when a user views a scene andis interested in the related place of a building or a road that leads to that, the user can reach thescenehe interested in by a hyperlink. Generate the OVRMs of the commodities(Figure 2.): In previous section, there are kindsof method to capture images for creating the OVRMs. According to the specialty of the

commodities in the online shopping, we proposed using the turntable and curve arm to captureimages.

Showing the 3D and multimedia information of commoditiesand creating the onlineshopping system (Figure 3.): It is the one of the most important functions of displaying theinformation of commodities. The users have the abilities to view the commodities by 360o OVRMin a pop-up window when they are roaming in the virtual shopping mall. There is the researchabout integrating the OVRM in the Panorama. But this system not only shows the OVRMinformation, but also shows the introduction text data, videos, movies, and the other multimediasharing technologies, for example, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Moreover, online orderly is the essential


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function. Integrating the virtual shopping mall with Google map:The real 3D display platform can

be added 2Dnavigation map, a variety of graphics and multimedia audio and video information.3D real scenecan be browsed in web pages.One integration application of 3D scene and Google

Maps is according to the navigation function of Google Maps, adding icons on 2D map of GoogleMaps system based on the geographical coordinates of the scene, and corresponding 3D real sceneand icons. Then users will be able to click on the icon to enter the corresponding 3D scene, to roam3D scene of road or interior architecture; the other is roaming among different scenes throughroaming path of scenes determined by Google Maps.

Level 3: Store: Create the virtual space of store,create the OVRMs and display information of

commodities

Level 1: Google Map: Support the Geographic

information

Level 2: Shopping Mall: Create the virtual space

of shopping mall.

(a) (b)

Figure 1. (a) Generation levels of virtual shopping mall(b) Relationshipdiagram

Figure 2. Capture method of the commodities Figure 3. Showing diagram of commodities

EXAMINATION

We have designed interactive virtual shopping malls which consist of the Google Maps, panorama,OVRM, video and other multimedia technologies. First of all, users find the shopping mall in the GoogleMaps. Then users roam in the panorama scenes. When the users want to roam into a store, they can go insideand also view the commodities in the interactive way. At last, it can complete the online shopping in the realscene environment.

In this paper, we integrate 3D virtual shopping mall with Google Maps. Using Google Maps serviceinterface,we added label layers into Google map and mark 3D scene on Google Maps. After getting the

geographical coordinates of virtual shopping mall, the main steps of adding virtual shopping mall into GoogleMaps are: first, using of Google Maps API in the GMap class set map and add zoom andother basic mapbrowsing tool; then, according to coordinates of virtual shopping mall, using GMarker class mark3D sceneson the map and use GMap2.addOverlay to add the map marked layer; then useopenInfoWindow () providedby GMarker class to pop-up the information window of label on the map. The virtual shopping mall iscorresponding to the point shown in the pop-up information window. We generated a prototype ofGoogle-based virtual shopping mall shown in Figure 4.


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When we click the label, thereis a pop-up window showing 3D scene. In this way, we can browse 3Drealscene through Google Maps.There is an arrow mark in front of the virtual shopping mall. When we clickthe arrow, we can go into the shopping mall and roam in the panorama way. Figure 5 (a) is the panorama viewinside the FAYA Sport shopping mall. In the same way, we can go into any store in the shopping mall to view

the panorama scenes (Figure 5. (b)). Furthermore, when we interest in some commodities, for example, theshoe in the Figure 6, if you single click the shoes, there is a popup window to show the bigger image andbasic information; if you double click the shoes, the popup window will show the OVRM of the shoe and thedetail information. We can get the all direction image information of the shoe from the OVRM (Figure 7.).We added the shopping cart feature which is not available in the general 3D shopping mall. We also joinedthe online sharing functions (for example the Facebook, Twitter, etc.). It has combined the advantages oftraditional online shopping site with 3D website.

Figure 4. Integrate 3D virtual shopping mall into Google Maps

(a)

(b)Figure 5. Panorama view inside the FAYA Sport shopping mall

Figure 6.Select the product from panorama scene and shows the details of the product


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Figure 7. Users can get the image information about the commodity by OVRM

CONCLUSIONS

We proposed an online shopping mode which is constructed in an interesting and image based realvirtual online shopping mall. All of the images in the virtual shopping mall are captured from the real scene.Users roam in the panoramic environment and enjoy the commodities by the 360o OVRM. Multimediatechnology is also widely used in the virtual shopping mall. We proposed a hierarchical management mode

which is easy to manage and update for shoppers. This system allows users to get a full range of shoppingmalls and commodities information which effectively improved the online shopping credibility problem, andthe shopping mall managers can play the role of supervision and management to effectively prevent sellersfrom cheating consumers viciously.

The virtual reality and multimedia technologies have changed online shopping greatly. It tended toobscure the differences between online shopping and reality shopping, which makes people more comfortablewhile they are shopping online. It will increase the trust of the online shopping. Online shoppers become apart of real world at all.

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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR.

Chen, C., Chan, L., Tsai, Y., Hung, Y. (2006) Augmented Stereo Panoramas. ACCV (1) 41-49.

Heung-Yeung Shum, Richard Szeliski. (2000) Construction of Panoramic Image Mosaics with Global and

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Using Three-Dimensional Animation Technology (Vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 299-303). Journal of VeterinaryMedical Education, University of Toronto Press.

Franka Moritz. (2010). Potentials of 3D-Web-Applications in E-Commerce - Study about the Impact of3D-Product-Presentations (pp.307-314). IEEE/ACIS 9th International Conference on Computer and

Information Science.Proctor, N. (2011). The Google Art Project: A New Generation of Museums on the Web . The Museum

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