Itchy Feet: A 3D e-Tourism Environment

In this chapter we describe an e-Tourism environment that places emphasis on a communitydriven approach to foster a lively society of travelers. It enables them to exchange travel experiences, recommend tourism destinations or just catch some interesting gossip. Moreover, business transactions such as booking a trip or getting assistance from professional travel agents are a constituent part of this environment. All these interactions happen in an integrated, gamelike, 3D Virtual World where each tourist is impersonated as an avatar. We draw a retrospective on the specification, design and implementation of this e-Tourism environment and present the status quo. We describe how we applied Electronic Institutions, a framework developed and employed in the area of Multi-Agent Systems, to the tourism domain. Furthermore, we present our approach to connect a 3D Virtual World with Electronic Institutions. Our goal is to provide a test bed for assessing the acceptance of virtual environments, as a medium to overcome the nontangible nature of tourism products.