Handling subjective user feedback for reputation computation in virtual reality

Abstract

As the interest in virtual reality is growing both from academia and industry, its new application areas emerge, one of which is the virtual marketplaces. We have previously proposed that buyers may share their experience with sellers in virtual marketplaces by exchanging their feedback. The feedback is composed of terms describing merchandise based on the users' five senses. However, some of these terms (e.g., soft) may be subjective and have different semantics for different buyers. Thus, alignment of the feedback containing subjective terms becomes an indispensable step before using exchanged feedback for reputation computations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to align subjectivity in user feedback for reputation computation in virtual marketplaces. We demonstrate how sensory data in virtual reality can be exploited to handle subjectivity and describe how the aligned feedback can be used in seller reputation computation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.