Running Head : IMMERSIVE 3 D ENVIRONMENTS AND MUTLINGUALITY

Virtual Worlds may become primary tools for learning many aspects of history, for acquiring new skills, for job assessment, and for many of our most cost-effective and productive forms of collaboration (Metaverse Roadmap Report, 2007). We will present some non-intrusive and dynamic e-learning based scenarios related to multilingual textual information within an immersive 3D environment. We refer to these scenarios as non-intrusive because they do not interrupt the user’s activities within the immersive 3D environment. Rather, they enrich his/her individual experience. Obviously, these scenarios need to be dynamic, because user interaction occurs mostly in real-time. In addition, these nonintrusive and dynamic e-learning-oriented scenarios exemplify how a standardized framework for textual multilingual support associated with an immersive 3D environment, may considerably change the way people usually deal with multilingual information and with language learning on the Internet. We would like to illustrate that, in the context of immersive 3D environments, dealing with multilinguality is more than just localization and real-time automatic translations. Finally, the analysis of these non-intrusive and dynamic e-learning based scenarios lead us to propose a general architecture allowing immersive 3D environments to deal with multilinguality in the most general and dynamic way possible.