A web DSS approach to building an intelligent internet shopping mall by integrating virtual reality and avatar

This paper is concerned with designing and implementing the Internet shopping mall by using a virtual reality-driven avatar and web decision support system (Web DSS). Traditionally, the Internet shopping mall has been designed based on the combination of several hyperlinks, images, and texts. However, this sort of approach results in a lower performance because possible customers cannot make accurate shopping decisions. To overcome these kinds of pitfalls facing the current Internet shopping malls, we propose using a combination of virtual reality and Web DSS. The main virtues of our proposed approach to designing the Internet shopping mall are as follows: First, the virtual reality technique is emerging as one of the alternatives that guarantee a sense of reality for the customers' part and facilitating the complex process of shopping decision makings. Especially, the avatar, which is an artificially designed man working on the Internet, can make the Internet shopping-related decision making processes easier. Second, the Web DSS approach can provide an effective decision support mechanism for customers. Especially, we design a set of intelligent agents for the proposed Web DSS. Experimental results with an illustrative example showed that our proposed approach can yield a new Internet shopping mall paradigm with which customers can benefit from a high level of decision support functions.