Papers about Virtual worlds

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

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

Avatars, a word once uttered by only hardcore gamers and science fiction fans, have begun to make their way into living rooms across the world. Their infiltration into our everyday lives has grown from a subtle trend to a suddenly marked phenomenon. Avatars appear as virtual sales associates that assist consumers on websites and as feature realistic digital representations that move in sync with the players’ movements in console video games, such as Microsoft’s Kinect... Read more

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation... Read more

Virtual Worlds such as Second Life provide unique opportunities to simulate real life scenarios and immerse the user in an environment that can be tailored to meet specific educational requirements. In these Immersive Learning Environments, students and faculty can interact from anywhere in the real world. From a general education perspective, they allow for virtual classrooms, virtual libraries, interactive role-playing, remote seminars, etc. From a medical education and science perspective, Immersive Learning Environments such as... Read more

Virtual communities such as Second Life and Entropia Universe are quickly becoming the next frontier of cybercrime. With GDPs of virtual economies of persistent worlds approaching billions of dollars it is necessary to develop tools for protection of virtual environments similar to those utilized to secure real world’s infrastructure, such as biometrics security systems. The first step in the development of such security methodologies is wide availability of datasets necessary for training and... 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

Agents cannot be decoupled from their environment. An agent perceives and acts in a world and the model of the world influences how the agent makes decisions. Most systems with virtual embodied agents simulate the environment within a specific realization engine such as the graphics engine. As a consequence, these agents are bound to a particular kind of environment which compromises their reusability across different applications. We propose the ION Framework, a framework for simulating... Read more

Many researchers associate a culture with some form of knowledge; other scholars stress the importance of the environment inhabited by the knowledge carriers; while archaeologists learn about cultures through the objects produced in the environment as a result of utilizing this knowledge. In our work we propose a model of virtual culture that preserves the environment, objects and knowledge associated with a certain culture in a 3D Virtual World. We highlight the significance of virtual... 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