Virtual world builder toolkit

In this paper we present a system that automatically generates a 3D virtual world from a virtual institution (VI) specification, namely of activities that will take place in the virtual world. A virtual institution is an interaction environment where both human and software agents participate in a joint 3D virtual world. A VI is visualized as a 3D building composed of rooms representing the different activities defined in its specification. To support the generation of the 3D scene, we propose an extension of shape grammars called virtual world grammar (VWG). A VWG incorporates information about the definition of the activities, properties of the different shapes (i.e spaces), functions to evaluate and validate the generated design, and a set of heuristics to guide the generation process. A definition and execution of Virtual World Grammars and a 3D transformation mechanism are integrated in a so called Virtual World Builder Toolkit (VWBT).