Before an environment can be populated with characters, a set of models must first be acquired and prepared. Sometimes it may be possible for artists to create each virtual character individually for example, if only a small number of individuals are needed, or there are many artists available to create a larger population of characters. However, for most applications that need large and hetero...

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that virtual communities can be traced in the online ‘tells’ retained by popular virtual settlements like Facebook and Twitter. In this article, the authors push this line of research toward an analysis of pre-requisites and constrains of virtual settlements that determine the understanding of community life across settlements. The approach followed is ground...

This paper describes an approach to construct interactive virtual environments, which are suitable for the development of artificial virtual human life simulations. Our main goal is to have virtual human actors living and working autonomously in virtual environments. In our approach, virtual actors have their own motivations and needs, and by sensing and exploring their environment, an action s...

Virtual worlds, avatars and cybersex are becoming more commonplace and acceptable. Virtual environments such as Second LifeTM allow for the construction and exploration of virtual selves or agents that are bounded only by imagination and fantasy of their participants. However, they are also informed by the attitudes, limits and agendas of the real life participants that invade these worlds. For...

Science teaching detached itself from reality and became restricted to the classrooms and textbooks with their overreliance on standardized and repetitive exercises, while students keep their own alternative conceptions. Papert, displeased with this inefficient learning process as early as 1980, championed physics microworlds, where students could experience a variety of laws of motion, from Ar...

Second Life is an online virtual environment which is populated by users from all over the world. The virtual environment is split into a variety of public and private areas; these provide avatars with a chance to explore a wide range of environments and interact with other users. There is also an opportunity for users to create personalised environments; organisations such as the BCS have crea...

When we grow older, we become more vulnerable to certain reductions in quality of life. Caregivers can help, however human care is limited, and will become even scarcer in the near future. This thesis addresses the problem by contributing to the development of electronic assistive technology, which has the potential of effectively complementing human support. In particular, we follow the vision...

A virtual world is a computer based environment, typically in three dimensions, where a person can interact and manipulate objects and communicate with others. Users are represented in the virtual world as avatars, although these are typically ’humans’, they can have any shape and size. Virtual worlds have been used for a number of applications including research, commerce and education. In thi...

Virtual environments define a new interface for networked multimedia applications. The sense of "presence" in the virtual environment is an important requirement for collaborative activities involving multiple remote users working with social interactions. Using virtual actors within the shared environment is a supporting tool for presence. In this paper, we present a shared virtual life networ...