In view of the latest developments in computer and network technology, research organizations and companies have proposed several distributed systems that realize a 3D multiuser virtual shared environment. Within that framework, we have developed PAWˆ2 (Personal Agent World), a personal agent-oriented virtual society that built upon the avatar-and-text-communication Community Place system and exposed it to the Internet. PAWˆ2 is a virtual society that improves upon existing virtual environments by providing autonomous personal agents that interact with users in a virtual environment with a social infrastructure. It is publicly accessible on the Internet. In this paper, we report and discuss the results of e-commerce evaluations of the use of PAWˆ2 on the Internet. The underlying hypothesis for these evaluations was that defining the value of a virtual object in a virtual society makes it possible for that object to be sold for money like real goods. The evaluation consisted of selling a virtual item to approximately eighty thousand registered PAWˆ2 users over a period of approximately two months. The results of the evaluations showed that, in a virtual society, a virtual object that adds functions to a personal agent and can be used as an avatar accessory can be sold like real goods.

In recent years, communication networks and computer technologies make it possible to create a cyberspace on the Internet. Recently, several 3-D shared virtual spaces and worlds have been realized in which users can share the same experience in a shared virtual environment. The next important step is to extend these environments into a virtual society. To realize a virtual society, it is important to obtain a large number of users in a virtual world and evaluate what kind of functions (especially, social functions) and interface should be supported. For this purpose, we constructed a personal agent-oriented virtual society called PAW (Personal Agent World) based on our Community Place system. PAW is a 3-D personal agent-oriented virtual society. PAW has improved upon past virtual spaces based on avatar and text communication by providing autonomous personal agents that interact with users plus a social and environmental infrastructure. Each user owns a personal agent that acts as user's partner and a mediator in the shared space. PAW was available on the Internet for eight months, during which it attracted hundreds of simultaneous user accesses and thousands of accumulated user accesses. In this paper, we give an architectural and design outline of PAW and the results of a questionnaire survey.