High performance virtual reality distributed electronic commerce: application for the furniture and ceramics industries

This paper presents an e-commerce tool that extends the conventional online store with a new section called room planner, a web application which is embedded in the virtual store. It allows the specification of the geometry of the room, placement of the objects and selection of the point of view. Then a realistic picture of the scene can be obtained. This functionality is very suitable for the furniture and ceramics sectors. In order to generate the images a parallel radiosity illumination algorithm has been implemented, which can be used in low-cost platforms such as a cluster of PCs, so that these technologies are affordable also for SMEs.