Created by Siemens researchers in Munich Perlach within the framework of an EU sponsored project, the new MPEG 4 standard based multimedia front-end provides an attractive user interface for internet shopping.
Shoppers walk around in a virtual three-dimensional shop and look at the products from all angles. Additional information can be retrieved in the form of a video clip, and the price can be directly negotiated with the shop assistant in a video conference.
Once the shopper decides to buy, the multimedia front-end connects to the e-commerce software and processes the transaction. Its interface is designed to communicate with all commercially available e-commerce systems, so the shopper has a look and feel that is very similar to shopping in an actual store.
The three-dimensional e-business shop uses the facilities of the MPEG 4 standard for communicating multi-media information. It was developed with major input from Siemens researchers and aims to provide a comprehensive standard for multimedia, ie, audio, video, virtual realities and virtual persons, which are also referred to as avatars.
MPEG 4 enables the composition of complex scenes from individual objects such as a video sequence and virtual scenes. Objects can be created separately and extracted from their environment, cut out and assembled at another point.
In their new context, these objects can be rotated, tilted, enlarged or coloured. This is particularly relevant for video films when MPEG 4 is used in a video, for example, to detach a person standing in the foreground from the background, to communicate the foreground separately, to do without the background altogether, or even exchange the whole background for another background.
In a virtual shop, the live video image of a shop assistant can thus be shown conducting a live video conference with the shopper. By singling out the background in a technique similar to a blue screen, the shop assistance can be placed in a perfect virtual scene. An inserted object may be a video sequence running on a screen which is part of the scene.
Based on the high data compression rate of the MPEG 4 standard, all these actions can be run on the Internet. The MPEG 4 standard thus opens up an almost endless variety of designing video scenes and Internet appearances.
This standard, though, is insufficient in itself to allow a complete e-commerce application, which requires the shopper's data to work smoothly with the logistic operations of the e-commerce software and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, thus permitting complete integration of the existing process environments.
This is why the Siemens researchers, working together with Siemens Business Services experts responsible for the enterprise application integration, have developed both an interface between the multimedia front-end and commercial available e-business system components such as Websphere Commerce Suite and, at the back-end, a process integration in SAP R/3. The new interface enables the e-business system to send MPEG 4 instructions to the multimedia front end via the proven HTTP Internet protocol.
The developers used SAP standard mechanisms for both synchronous, real-time integration and asynchronous communication scenarios. This means that this excellent solution is highly flexible and can be easily extended. It can also be integrated into existing EDI scenarios. Moreover, it can be adapted to new standards and allows an open exchange of business vouchers. The consistent use of enterprise application integration technologies also makes it possible to easily include such applications as customer relationship management (CRM) and call centre applications.
The multimedia front-end was developed as part of the EU project on "Portals of Next Generation", SoNG for short. It is currently undergoing a thorough test phase following which it will be further developed to a marketable product together with Siemens Business Services and a local Munich company called Bitmanagement Software GmbH.
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