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Agents and Virtual Environments
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Agents and graphical virtual environments

  • Michael Powers (powers@petroglyph.com) maintains web pages on interactive characters and electronic communities. The focus is mostly on applications to the arts and entertainment -- "Interactivity is about relationship with authored characters. Some of these characters have recognizable bodies that are cel animated, photo-realistic, or rendered. Many others, such as the structure of these Web pages do not have an easily recognizable "body" yet they carry a relationship with a narrator-author, much like the narrative voice of a novel. This experience is the mediation of a relationship between author and participant through electronic structures, some crude, others polished. The author or authoring group always creates an interactive experience that engages the participant in an emotionally laden activity - whether high drama or mechanistic interaction. The potential to draw out a dramatic and entertaining experience lies in the development of sophisticated interactive engagement with responsive characters." 8/12/96

  • Sandia's Virtual Reality/ Intelligent Simulation Laboratory is using scriptable agents and human controlled avatars in VR scenarios to train small team, close quarters operations. Their interest is in training a person to handle a specific situation or set of scenarios, rather than to perform a given task. 5/20/96

  • The Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratory ( MERL ) is focused on exploring "social virtual reality", where the the emphasis is on the interaction among people in virtual environments, rather than on maximizing the perceptual realism of an individual experience using special input and output devices. "At MERL, we envision group learning environments where people learn from each other and teachers, and by interacting with computer simulations. We envision collaborative work environments where people at different locations interact with each other and shared, computer-simulated artifacts to design a machine, plan a large-scale disaster relief effort, or diagnose a complex equipment failure. We envision on-line play environments where people participate in distributed games, historical dramas, or create virtual microcosms for each other's entertainment." See Research on Social Virtual Reality: Diamond Park and SPLINE -- What's beyond head-mounted displays and combat games? 5/20/96

  • Agents as Avatars? Habitats are graphical online communities populated by avatars. OnLive! Technologies announced the first commercial habitat which will support real-time voice communications between multiple people in a "three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world." They say that "Multimedia PCs equipped with standard modems and sound cards are all that is necessary to access 3-D voice chat. Using the OnLive! Traveler, users will navigate through communities of 3-D environments, represented by their own 3-D "avatars," or on-screen personas, and talk with groups of other users in real-time." Traveler is based on the VRML standard. 1/5/96

Agents and text-based virtual environments

  • Muds: Bots 'n the MOO: Conversational Robots, Susan Jacobson. 5/18/96

  • Knowbots and Interactive Television -- The Knowbotic-Interface-Project as challenge to AI. An abreviated version of a lecture, held within the context of a workshop on "Interactive TV" at the Institute for New Media, Frankfurt June 7, 1994 by by Dr. Gerd Döben-Henisch, Institute for New Media, Frankfurt. The task of the project is the automatic translation of natural linguistic texts into images of a pictorial world. This is made possible by using knowbots. Knowbots are intelligent programs which can be "educated". They live in virtual realities and are capable of accumulating knowledge about the world on their own. Relative to this knowledge, they are able to learn any natural language. 5/17/96

  • Julia, a Chatterbot

Edited by Tim Finin & Yannis Labrou of UMBC ebiquity and the UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. Comments to agentweb@agents.umbc.edu. Hits in red Who points to it? shows inverse links. Built by bk2site.