*Correspondence: Mel Slater , Event Lab, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Campus de Mundet – Edifici Teatre, Passeig de la Vall d’Hebron, 171, Barcelona 08035, Spain e-mail: [email protected] We introduce a novel technique for the study of human–virtual character interaction in immersive virtual reality.The human participants verbally administered a standard questionnaire about ...

This thesis presents solutions to many of the problems associated with large-scale, widely distributed virtual reality, based on an architecture of heterogeneous devices and limited publically accessible bandwidth. The emphasis is on achieving multiuser , interactive virtual reality via the Internet, which inherently involves the associated problems, due to the nature of the Internet. The order...

This paper describes recent developments in the Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen. The core of the research infrastructure is the use of Virtual Machines or Linux containers. We liken these to a “kitchen”, because they provide “appliances” (e.g., speech recognition tool-kits), “recipes” (scripts for creating state-ofthe art systems), and “ingredients” (language data). Users can now download a ...

The Java Virtual Machine [LY99] is an abstract machine designed to support object oriented languages. The strong security guarantees enforced by the JVM and it‘s portability make it a desirable target for distributing mobile code. Haskell [JHA99] is non-strict, higherorder functional language. Mapping non-strict higher order languages to any stock machine poses many unique challenges [Jon92]. M...

In this paper we discuss our research on interactions in a virtual theatre that has been built using VRML and therefore can be accessed through Web pages. In the virtual environment we employ several agents. The virtual theatre allows navigation input through keyboard and mouse, but there is also a navigation agent which listens to typed input and spoken commands. Feedback of the system is give...

Leveraging the experiential cognition and motivational factors of 3D games, we conduct a pilot study that utilizes Ever Quest 2 as pedagogical learning tool for English as a second language (ESL) students. We combine the benefits of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and second language methodology to create a digital learning environment for second language acquisition (SL...

To increase productivity and product quality in software development, companies invest in qualification of their engineers, improvement of their development processes and many other approaches. We believe that in addition a much more powerful way to go in the above direction is to try new complementary organizational forms of how people work together. Specifically the network form seems to fit ...

Conventional telemedicine has limitations due to the existing time constraints in the response of a medical specialist. One major reason is that telemedicine based medical facilities are subject to the availability of a medical expert and telecommunication facilities. On the other hand, communication using telecommunication is only possible on fixed and appointed time. Typically, the field of t...

We propose VAlloy, an extension to the first order, relational language Alloy. Alloy is suitable for modeling structural properties of object-oriented software. However, Alloy lacks support for dynamic dispatch, i.e., function invocation based on actual parameter types. VAlloy introduces virtual functions in Alloy, which enables intuitive modeling of inheritance. Models in VAlloy are automatica...

In this paper we discuss work in progress on an interactive talking agent as a virtual language tutor in CALL applications. The ambition is to create a tutor that can be engaged in many aspects of language learning from detailed pronunciation to conversational training. Some of the crucial components of such a system is described. An initial implementation of a stress/quantity training scheme w...