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Opening new dimensions for e-Tourism

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Abstract

In this paper we describe an e-Tourism environment that takes a community-driven approach to foster a lively society of travelers who exchange travel experiences, recommend tourism destinations or just listen to catch some interesting gossip. Moreover, business transactions such as booking a trip or getting assistance from travel advisors or community members are constituent parts of this environment. All these happen in an integrated, game-like e-Business application where each e-Tourist is impersonated as an avatar. More precisely, we apply 3D Electronic Institutions, a framework developed and employed in the area of multi-agent systems, to the tourism domain. The system interface is realized by means of a 3D game engine that provides sophisticated 3D visualization and enables humans to interact with the environment. We present “itchy feet”, a prototype implementing this 3D e-Tourism environment to showcase first visual impressions. This new environment is a perfect research playground for examining heterogeneous societies comprising humans and software agents, and their relationship in e-Tourism.

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Notes

  1. http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/

  2. http://www.virtualtourist.com/

  3. http://www.tiscover.com/

  4. http://www.expedia.com/

  5. http://www.secondlife.com/

  6. http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/

  7. The faces of Elaine and later on Sebastien in the figures are taken from a report on face morphing (Braun et al. 2001).

  8. http://www.madkit.org/

  9. http://e-institutor.iiia.csic.es/

  10. http://www.garagegames.com/

  11. http://earth.google.com/

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Acknowledgments

We thank Ingo Seidel for designing and modeling the 3D virtual world of “itchy feet”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. E-Commerce Competence Center–EC3, Donau-City-Straße 1, 1220, Wien, Austria

    Helmut Berger & Michael Dittenbach

  2. Institut für Rechnergestützte Automation, Technische Universität Wien, Karlsplatz 13/183, 1040, Wien, Austria

    Dieter Merkl

  3. Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Anton Bogdanovych & Simeon Simoff

  4. Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

    Carles Sierra

Authors
  1. Helmut Berger
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  2. Michael Dittenbach
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  3. Dieter Merkl
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  4. Anton Bogdanovych
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  6. Carles Sierra
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Correspondence to Helmut Berger.

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Berger, H., Dittenbach, M., Merkl, D. et al. Opening new dimensions for e-Tourism. Virtual Reality 11, 75–87 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-006-0057-z

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