Defining the VR-Mall Content

In the proposed system, creation and maintenance of the adaptive VR-mall is undertaken by two stakeholder groups, namely content creators and domain experts, who perform their tasks using specially crafted content management tools. Content creators provide the digital forms of the VR-mall merchandise in the appropriate form (pictures, 3D models, sounds, videos, etc.). Content creators additionally design the space elements that are used within the VRmall, including rooms, halls, corridors, shelves, display cases, and stands. Space elements generally contain merchandise placeholders, which are replaced by appropriate merchandise items or navigation aids when an instance of the VR-mall is created. For example, shelves may contain placeholders indicating where products will be placed, whereas a placeholder within a corridor may be replaced by a sign listing the merchandise categories along the corridor. All resources can be provided in multiple levels of detail. High levels of detail are used for e-shoppers with broadband connections and when eshoppers explicitly request highly detailed images of items; low levels of detail are used to reduce download times, because the size of the digital representation in low levels of detail is significantly smaller.
To enable the selection of the most suitable items for each user, the adaptive VR-mall system needs to possess certain information regarding each item, such as the item category (e.g., furniture, electric appliance, holiday pack), target age group, shopping season, and so forth. This
information is provided in the form of property-value

Adaptive Virtual Reality Shopping Malls

pairs by domain experts—that is, VR-mall stakeholders who have significant expertise on the merchandise. This information is stored alongside the digital representations of the merchandise and is exploited by the VR-world generator in the process of selecting the items that are considered to best match the interests of the current eshopper.