1,502 research outputs found
Virtual Environment Technology Laboratory Research Testbed: Project Report #8 Year Two Final
Report discusses the status of software installation at the University of Houston Virtual Environment Technology Laboratory, including prototype demonstrations, status of serving as a node within a shared virtual environment testbed, exploration of the integration of virtual environments at UH, and the initiation of a study of the representation of human figures in virtual environments via high level architecture
Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life
Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningWhile virtual worlds share common technologies and audiences with games, they possess many unique characteristics. Particularly when compared to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds create very different learning and teaching opportunities through markets, creation, and connections to the real world, and lack of overt game goals. This chapter aims to expose a wide audience to the breadth and depth of learning occurring within Second Life (SL). From in-world classes in the scripting language to mixed-reality conferences about the future of broadcasting, a tremendous variety of both amateurs and experts are leveraging SL as a platform for education. In one sense, this isn't new since every technology is co-opted by communities for communication, but SL is different because every aspect of it was designed to encourage this co-opting, this remixing of the virtual and the real
The Eyes Have It: Measuring Spatial Orientation in Virtual Worlds to Explain Gender Differences in Real Ones
Here, we explore how 3D, networked
virtual worlds - in particular Second Life, which enables users to create and modify their own
environments - can act as a kind of \u27virtual\u27 laboratory for studying gender difference. By
tracking users\u27 eye movements as they navigate a virtual rendition of the Morris Water
Maze (the \u27gold standard\u27 for measuring gender difference in spatial orientation, navigation
and mobility), this work constitutes an empirical basis for claims that we have attempted to
make in the context of ethnographic work with female and male video game players, both
novice and expert: that mastery of, and the ability to competently navigate through space,
both real and virtual, is as much (if not more) learned and acquired, as it inheres in the
bodies and brains of differently-sexed subjects
Current trends on ICT technologies for enterprise information sÂČystems
The proposed paper discusses the current trends on ICT technologies for Enterprise Information Systems. The paper starts by defining four big challenges of the next generation of information systems: (1) Data Value Chain Management; (2) Context Awareness; (3) Interaction and Visualization; and (4) Human Learning. The major contributions towards the next generation of information systems are elaborated based on the work and experience of the authors and their teams. This includes: (1) Ontology based solutions for semantic interoperability; (2) Context aware infrastructures; (3) Product Avatar based interactions; and (4) Human learning. Finally the current state of research is discussed highlighting the impact of these solutions on the economic and social landscape
Virtual Humans for Animation, Ergonomics, and Simulation
The last few years have seen great maturation in the computation speed and control methods needed to portray 3D virtual humans suitable for real interactive applications. We first describe the state of the art, then focus on the particular approach taken at the University of Pennsylvania with the Jack system. Various aspects of real-time virtual humans are considered, such as appearance and motion, interactive control, autonomous action, gesture, attention, locomotion, and multiple individuals. The underlying architecture consists of a sense-control-act structure that permits reactive behaviors to be locally adaptive to the environment, and a PaT-Net parallel finite-state machine controller that can be used to drive virtual humans through complex tasks. Finally, we argue for a deep connection between language and animation and describe current efforts in linking them through the JackMOO extension to lambdaMOO
Postinternet Art of the Moving Image and the Disjunctures of the Global and the Local: Kim Hee-cheon and Other Young East Asian Artists
Jihoon Kim discusses in his Postinternet Art of the Moving Image and the Disjunctures of the Global and the Local: Kim Hee-cheon and Other Young East Asian Artistsâ ways in which moving image works by East Asian artists Chen Chen-yu, Lu Yang, and Kim Hee-cheon engage the postinternet condition, a situation in which the internet and digital technologies are no longer perceived as new but as fundamentally restructuring our subjectivity and world. By opening a platform for intersecting the postinternet condition with a discourse on globalization, which has yet to be fully discussed in the existing Western-centric discourses on postinternet art, a key specificity of the postinternet art of the moving image by contemporary East Asian artists lies in its attempts to create spreadable images of multiple political, aesthetic, and cultural layers. The artistsâ rigorous aesthetic juxtapositions of virtual and physical spaces should be seen not simply as indicating the artistsâ cosmopolitan postinternet sensibilities but also as expressing their engagement with the contradictory and unstable disjunctures of the global and local in contemporary East Asia
Theory of the Avatar
The internet has given birth to an expanding number of shared virtual reality spaces, with a collective population well into the millions. These virtual worlds exhibit most of the traits we associate with the Earth world: economic transactions, interpersonal relationships, organic political institutions, and so on. A human being experiences these worlds through an avatar, which is the representation of the self in a given physical medium. Most worlds allow an agent to choose what kind of avatar she or he will inhabit, allowing a person with any kind of Earth body to inhabit a completely different body in the virtual world. The emergence of avatar-mediated living raises both positive and normative questions. This paper explores several choice models involving avatars. Analysis of these models suggests that the emergence of avatar-mediated life may increase aggregate human well-being, while decreasing its cross-sectional variance. These efficiency and equity effects are contingent on the maintenance and protection of certain rights, however, including the right of agents to free movement, unbiased information, and political participation.information and internet services, computer software, equity, justice, inequality, synthetic worlds
Network traffic characterisation, analysis, modelling and simulation for networked virtual environments
Networked virtual environment (NVE) refers to a distributed software
system where a simulation, also known as virtual world, is shared over a
data network between several users that can interact with each other and
the simulation in real-time. NVE systems are omnipresent in the present
globally interconnected world, from entertainment industry, where they are
one of the foundations for many video games, to pervasive games that focus
on e-learning, e-training or social studies. From this relevance derives
the interest in better understanding the nature and internal dynamics of
the network tra c that vertebrates these systems, useful in elds such as
network infrastructure optimisation or the study of Quality of Service and
Quality of Experience related to NVE-based services. The goal of the present
work is to deepen into this understanding of NVE network tra c by helping
to build network tra c models that accurately describe it and can be used
as foundations for tools to assist in some of the research elds enumerated
before.
First contribution of the present work is a formal characterisation for
NVE systems, which provides a tool to determine which systems can be
considered as NVE. Based on this characterisation it has been possible to
identify numerous systems, such as several video games, that qualify as NVE
and have an important associated literature focused on network tra c analysis.
The next contribution has been the study of this existing literature from
a NVE perspective and the proposal of an analysis pipeline, a structured
collection of processes and techniques to de ne microscale network models
for NVE tra c. This analysis pipeline has been tested and validated against
a study case focused on Open Wonderland (OWL), a framework to build
NVE systems of di erent purpose. The analysis pipeline helped to de ned
network models from experimental OWL tra c and assessed on their accuracy
from a statistical perspective. The last contribution has been the
design and implementation of simulation tools based on the above OWL
models and the network simulation framework ns-3. The purpose of these
simulations was to con rm the validity of the OWL models and the analysis
pipeline, as well as providing potential tools to support studies related to NVE network tra c. As a result of this nal contribution, it has been proposed
to exploit the parallelisation potential of these simulations through High
Throughput Computing techniques and tools, aimed to coordinate massively
parallel computing workloads over distributed resources
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