virtual worlds Papers

It is desirable to address accessibility issues within virtual worlds. Moreover, curbing criminal activities within virtual worlds is a major concern to the law enforcement agencies. Forensic investigators and accessibility researchers are gaining considerable interests in detecting and tracking avatars as well as describing their appearance within virtual worlds. Leinhart and Maydt have introduced a novel-set of Haar like features by extending the Viola Jones approach towards rapid object detection. We test this Haar... Read more

The security of virtual worlds has become a major challenge. The huge progress of Internet technologies, the massive revolution of media and the use of electronic finance increasingly deployed in a world where the law of competition forces financial institutions to devote huge amounts of capital to invest in persistent digital worlds like Second Life or Entropia Universe whose economic impact is quite real [1]. Thus, virtual communities are rapidly becoming the next frontier for... Read more

This work presents an approach for applying face recognition to non-biological entities (avatars) in virtual worlds to achieve authentication. Massively multiplayer online games involve virtual worlds which require avatar identification to avoid fraud. First, virtual worlds and avatars are briefly discussed. Next, the concepts of facial biometrics and the face recognition systems are presented. Later, support vector machines and wavelet transforms are introduced as classification tools. Finally, the dataset and the designed biometric system are... Read more

There are significant advances in virtual world technologies that permit collaboration in a distributed, virtual environment. In the real world environment, distributed teams collaborate via face-to-face communication, using social interactions, such as eye contact and gestures, which provide critical feedback to the human decision maker. The virtual world affords the system designer the ability to evaluate an operator’s ability to respond to information (e.g., events, goals, objectives, etc.) in a complex, distributed team environment. The... Read more

This paper presents an overview and classification of security approaches based on computer analysis of human behavior. Overview of different methodologies is followed by an analysis of achieved accuracy rates, required equipment and prospects for future improvements. In particular the following broad categories of behavior-based authentication mechanisms are examined: Behavioral Biometrics (Authorship based, Human–Computer Interaction based, Motor Skill, and Purely Behavioral), Behavioral Passwords (syntactic, semantic, one-time methods and visual memory based), Biosignals (cognitive and semi-controllable... Read more

Domestic and industrial robots, intelligent software agents, and virtual world avatars are quickly becoming a part of our society. Just like it is necessary to be able to accurately authenticate identity of human beings, it is becoming essential to be able to determine identities of the non-biological entities. This paper presents current state of the art in virtual reality security, focusing specifically on emerging methodologies for avatar authentication. It also makes a strong link between... Read more

The work discussed in this chapter involves a proposal to add human like attributes (emotions in this instance) to characters in games and virtual worlds to enhance user experience. The chapter begins by defining these computer controlled characters in the context of both games and virtual worlds, followed by a discussion on the human like aspects currently being integrated into these characters by developers. The chapter continues by focusing specifically on a particular case study... Read more

In everyday life, one increasingly encounters virtual characters. Virtual (online) worlds, on the one hand, are populated by avatars, that is, mediated human interlocutors represented by a virtual body. Examples are Second Life or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft. On the other hand, websites, pedagogical programs, or technological devices are increasingly being equipped with virtual characters programmed to act autonomously and to conduct basic verbal and nonverbal interaction with the... Read more

This paper presents recent work on the addition of emotions and affective behaviour to robotic avatars within Second Life, as part of continuing research and development in the area of interactive agents for games and simulations. The development is based upon the E-AI architecture [1] which is a proposed computational model of emotions intended to be used by developers who already have their own agent AI systems. In this work, the E-AI architecture was applied to... Read more

This report documents the work done for the Technology Strategy Board feasibility study Applying Techniques from Intelligent Robotics to Autonomous Avatars in Virtual Worlds. At a high level this project can be seen as taking theories and technologies developed for building intelligent robots that interact with humans and their surroundings [5, 16] and investigating how they operate in Second Life (SL).The following section describes the background to the project in more detail, then subsequent sections detail the work... Read more