Due to the current advances in Information and Communication Technologies and consumers' increasing interest in entertaining and interactive retail environments, the sector of retailing is forced to pursuit innovation to maintain existing consumers and attract new ones. Especially the use of virtual reality techniques offers tools for supporting the design of innovative systems capable of enhancing this process. The aim of this paper is to integrate the consumers' experience in the development of innovation process for retailing. In particular, our findings highlight how the immersive technologies can be an efficient tool for pushing innovation in retailing. Therefore, the paper provides important issues for scholars and practitioners.
Grid technologies promise to improve the way we think about e-learning allowing wide-scale learning resources sharing in heterogeneous and geographically distributed environments consenting, in this way, the implementation of distributed learning spaces where different organizations and individuals are able to cooperate in pursuing similar and complementary learning and training objectives. But is the e-learning ready for this evolution? In this paper we try, starting from an existing e-learning platform named IWT, to sketch a possible migration path toward a Grid based environment. IWT was selected because it presents a flexible, service-oriented, layered architecture suitable for migration in an OGSA compliant environment. The new approach will provide more flexibility, in fact, it will possible to leverage on the resources distributed across the Grid in order to build the learning experience that best fit student requirements. A use case scenario is also provided in order to emphasize differences between the two approaches. After a brief introduction of Grid and Learning technologies (section 1), a brief summary of IWT is given and the execution scenario is shown (section 2). A possible OGSA-based deployment of IWT is then sketched together with the new version of the execution scenario (section 3). Some conclusions are, then, presented (section 4).
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