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H. Berger, M. Dittenbach, W. Merkl, A. Bogdanovych, S. Simoff, C. Sierra:
"Opening new dimensions for e-tourism";
Virtual Reality, 11 (2007), 2-3; S. 75 - 87.

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 this happens 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.

e-tourism, virtual environment, multi-agent system

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10055-006-0057-z