virtual world Papers

The JISC-funded PREVIEW project aims to develop problem-based learning (PBL) scenarios in Second Life (SL) for distance-learning healthcare students. One of the target courses - a Paramedic course run by the joint faculty of St George’s University of London and Kingston University – uses PBL that is based upon a ‘virtual patient’ model. In order to keep scenarios as sustainable and portable as possible we adopted the MedBiquitous VP Standard – or MVP - designed for... Read more

During the last decade research groups as well as a number of commercial software developers have started to deploy embodied conversational characters in the user interface especially in those application areas where a close emulation of multimodal human-human communication is needed. Incarnations of such characters differ widely in type and amount of embodiment - starting from simplistic cartoon-style 2D representations of faces, fully embodied virtual humans in 3D virtual worlds to physically embodied androids co-habiting... Read more

This paper proposes two simple and robust algorithmic solutions for two frequently encountered problems in in-habited virtual heritage worlds: a) the 'still-frozen' behavior of virtual actors once their predefined-scripted anima-tion is executed and b) their real-time rendering which is mostly often based on non physically-principled local il-lumination models. Our described framework thus provides a) a procedural keyframe generator for realistic idle motions blended with the virtual actor's scripted behavior and b) an extension to precomputed... Read more

To explore the use of animated agents for task-oriented collaboration in virtual worlds, we have designed such an agent: Steve (Soar Training Expert for Virtual Environments). Steve is fully implemented and integrated with the other software components on which he relies (i.e., visual interface software, a simulator, and commercial speech synthesis and recognition products). We have tested Steve on a variety of naval operating procedures; he can teach students how to operate and maintain the... Read more

Asynchronous, Hierarchical Agents (AHAs) provide a vertically structured multilevel abstraction hierarchy. In this paper, we argue that this multilevel hierarchy is a convenient way to create a human-agent interface at multiple levels of abstraction. In this way, the agent has several layers of specication (input) and visualization (output) which facilitates users with problem solving, because such an interface parallels the hierarchical and iterative nature of human creative thought processes. The AHA interface presents an intuitive,... Read more

This paper was presented at The First International Conference on Cyberspace held in May 1990 at the University of Texas at Austin. It was published in Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (ed.), 1991, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Lucasfilm's Habitat was created by Lucasfilm Games, a division of LucasArts Entertainment Company, in association with Quantum Computer Services, Inc. It was one of the first attempts to create a very large scale commercial multi-user virtual environment. The Habitat... Read more