Controlling and Assisting Activities in Social Virtual Worlds

Since its beginning, web technology has advanced from a text-based to a visual-based interaction. This evolution has been facilitated by both high speed internet connections and PC's graphical power. Virtual world (VW) technology began as standalone applications (e.g.. virtual simulations) but soon evolved into web-based applications. Nowadays, home users for entertainment and wide-spread enterprises or institutions for business can exploit virtual worlds to develop remote activities between friends, employees, clients, teachers or students (Sherman, 2002). Then, virtual worlds have clear applications in e-governance, elearning and e-commerce, and therefore it is mandatory to study mechanisms ensuring the assistance and the control of activities taking place in these applications..

Intelligent Objects to Facilitate Human Participation in Virtual Institutions

Our research combines electronic institutions and 3D virtual worlds for the construction of virtual institutions which are virtual worlds with normative regulation of interactions. That is, a virtual world where participants actions have to comply with predefined institutional rules. In this context, the actions a participant may perform depend on the institutional rules and the current execution state. We propose to include iObjects, intelligent objects, as entities having both visualization properties and decision mechanisms in the virtual institution. They are a new key element to improve users participation in virtual institutions. We situate them in a middleware infrastructure in order to be independent of 3D virtual world platform and to provide a general solution in which participants could be connected from different immersive environment platforms