A virtual reality system for product configuration and analysis based on Web, VRML, and CORBA

Abstract

It has been shown that virtual reality (VR) can be utilized for sales and marketing since it can enable the users to virtually and realistically experience the products they want to purchase. Further, there have some efforts to extend such VR systems by adding product configuration, analysis, and manufacturing/production information services. The limitations of these previous efforts were that they used expensive and proprietary VR tools, and they did not address the issue of integrating distributed and heterogeneous data sources. This paper proposes an information system architecture to overcome these limitations. The architecture is composed of a product configuration module (PCM) based on Java and Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), and a product analysis module (PAM) based on Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The PCM enables the users to virtually experience products from their own Web browsers on any computer platforms anywhere anytime. The PAM performs product analysis and provides decision-making information from distributed and heterogeneous data sources, for example, part information from vendors around the world. That is, the users can configure and virtually experience the products that they want to purchase on any client workstations such as PCs, Macintoshes, and Unix workstations. Further, they will be provided with the product analysis and manufacturing/ production information from various data sources including relational databases such as Oracle, Sybase, etc. A prototype system has been implemented to show the feasibility of the proposed architecture. The results of this paper can be used to greatly expand Web-based global marketing services, especially for virtual enterprises. Significance: The proposed information system architecture and the prototype are the first attempt to provide a generalized framework and implementation guidelines for integrating VR systems and various data sources to provide platform-independent product configuration, analysis, and manufacturing/production information. They can also contribute to extend current Web-based global marketing by allowing customers to virtually experience the products of interests on their own Web browsers via VRML.