virtual worlds Papers

Unlike computer games where Non-Player-Character avatars are common, in most virtual worlds they are the exception. Deploying an embodied AI into a virtual world offers a unique opportunity to evaluate embodied AIs, and to develop them within an environment where human and computer are on almost equal terms. This paper presents an architecture being used for the deployment of chatbot driven avatars within the Second Life virtual world, looks at the challenges of deploying an... Read more

The incorporation of games and virtual worlds into the workplace is happening more and more often. One analyst predicts that 80 percent of information workers will have an avatar at home or work by 2011. Why would a company ask its employees to create avatars for themselves? In this paper, the authors explain why avatars and the virtual environments they inhabit are so important to the future of work and demonstrate how engaging employees through... Read more

This paper presents a quest for the most suitable setting and method to assess the naturalness of the output of an existing algorithm for the generation of multimodal referring expressions. For the evaluation of this algorithm a setting in Second Life was built. This paper reports on a pilot study that aimed to assess (1) the suitability of the setting and (2) the design of our evaluation method. Results show that subjects are able to... Read more

This paper describes the design and training of an agent that helps users navigate in Second Life (SL), a massively multi-player online game environment.SL allows users to create a virtual avatar and explore areas constructed by other users.With the increasing number of places to visit it is difficult for a user to explore all the places.The built-in keyword search mechanism is fairly limited and users typically find new places through personal exploration or tips from... Read more

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