3D Web Applications in E-Commerce - A secondary study on the impact of 3D product presentations created with HTML5 and WebGL

This empirical study is a secondary evaluation building on Franka Moritz´s work “Potentials of 3D-Web-Applications in E-Commerce - Study about the Impact of 3D-Product-Presentations” [1], which was presented at the Ninth IEEE/ACIS International Conference. As in the above work, the core objective of this study is to compare 2D and 3D product presentations in web interfaces. Elaborating upon the outcomes of Moritz´s study, two main factors should be considered when implementing 3D visualizations in e-commerce scenarios. First, whereas Moritz´s test applications were based on Flash and Java Applets, the downside of these technologies with regards to limited performance and render quality has been extensively discussed in several other previous works [2], [3]. The approach of this work is based on the latest HTML5 specification and WebGL, which enables a near-photorealistic render result while ensuring application performance. Secondly, instead of comparing arbitrary products and brands to unspecific test participants, focus is placed on a single product range and selected experimental subjects corresponding to product manufacture´s target demographic group.