Lizeth: Agent Mediated E-Commerce in a Virtual Environment

The explosion of the Internet, and most recently e-commerce, has caused great interest in agent technologies. The development of virtual environments has also increased in the last few years. A growing number of real-time applications use graphics with photorealistic quality, especially in the field of training, but also in the areas of design and ergonomic research. We describe an attempt to develop a framework that provides customers with multimedia information and interactive experiences with a virtual shopping environment. The application presented consists on a virtual visit to a music -store where the user is guided by an intelligent agent named Lizeth which responds in real-time to user's requests with precise information about music, artist's biographies, prices and related products to help the user to make decisions. The potential of UML and the Java programming language is discussed to show their application in the field of intelligent agents as mediators on shopping processes. We conclude that the proposed framework leads to the creation of application with a potentially significant impact in the development of e-commerce systems embedded in virtual environments.