University of Athens

Facutly of Science, Department of Informatics

Project Coordinator
Drakoulis Martakos
martakos@di.uos.gr

World Name: e-scape
 

Project Description

The aim of our research is to investigate how trust can be built in business-to-consumer commercial relationships that are developed within electronic environments. We have developed a theoretical model for the formation of trust in business-to-consumer e-commerce relationships and we are currently investigating the role of virtual reality and agent technology in providing an e-commerce environment that enables the formation of trust in business-to-consumer relationships, according to our model. We intend to validate our conceptualization of trust and its formation by performing an empirical testing of our model. For this purpose, we aim to conduct an experiment to test our model in the context of a virtual multi-user e-commerce environment. The intended environment will be designed and implemented as a three-dimensional virtual world depicting a shopping mall comprised of virtual stores. Each store will represent an e-commerce company, offering products and/or services available by it. This virtual environment will be populated by anthropomorphized avatars representing customers and sales persons. A customer will be able to visit the virtual servicescape in the form of an avatar and engage in sipping activities by interacting with the salesperson avatars, which will be implemented as agents salesperson agents will be divided into two categories, mall agents and business agents, depending on their role in the e-servicescape. Mall agents will welcome and greet the customer visiting the virtual mall and guide him to the stores. They will be able to perform a search and recommend the stores with the products or services that are best suited to the customer needs. Business agents will act as surrogates of company's stores salespersons serving the customer that visits a store following the suggestion of the mall agent and offering assistance in the product or services available by the business represented by the virtual store. We will be using the Active Worlds Educational Universe in order to develop the virtual e-commerce environment above and perform an empirical study for our theoretical model of trust formation.