Interactive Visualisation of Products in Online Configurators

Numerous companies develop interactive environments to assist users in customising sales products through the selection of configuration options. A visual representation of these products is an important factor in terms of user experience. However, an analysis of 100+ existing configurators highlights that not all provide visual representations of configured products. One of the current challenges is the trade-off developers face between either the memory consuming use of pregenerated images of all the combinations of options, or rendering products on the fly, which is non trivial to implement efficiently. We believe that a new approach to associate product configurations to visual representations is needed to compose and render them dynamically. In this paper we present a formal statement of the problem and a model-driven perspective for addressing it as well as our ongoing work and further challenges.