Although Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) is often noted as the inspiration for virtual worlds like Second Life, virtual environments were flourishing prior to its publication. Multi-user dungeons (MUDs), text-based and multiplayer environments for role-playing games, were popular in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, a new trajectory for online spaces was mapped by the introduction of what beca...

Background Today we live in a world where the limited spatial boundaries are overcome by virtual ones derived from the advancements reached in ICTs that pushed virtual communities to share information, interests and targets in a wider environment. In last years, virtual words (VWs) such as Second Life (SL) are increasingly used by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as shared, interactive and ...

Background and Objectives: Virtual inertia control, as a component of a virtual synchronous generator, is used for the implementation of synchronous generator behaviour in microgrids. In microgrids that include high-capacity distributed generation resources, in addition to virtual inertia, virtual damping can also lead to improvement of frequency stability of the microgrid. The purpose of the c...

One of the most successful and useful implementations of 3D virtual worlds is in the area of education and training. This paper discusses the use of virtual worlds in education and describes an innovative 3D visualization design project using one of the most popular virtual worlds, Second Life. This ongoing project is a partnership between IBM and three universities in the United States: the Un...

This paper presents a generic architecture for the development of a virtual enterprise (VE). This architecture, which is based on the notion of agent, includes all the concepts necessary to ensure all the phases of virtual enterprise life-cycle. Thus, we propose several types of agent, namely, the enterprise agent representing an individual enterprise, the broker agent, which is the initiator o...

Virtual worlds like Second Life are becoming important tools for, among other activities, socialization, social networking, entertainment, collaboration, and business development. These environments offer information systems researchers a unique opportunity to study how these environments are built and managed by operators, how they are used and misused by users, and the impact that they have o...

This paper describes the design and training of a recommendation system that helps the user navigate in Second Life (SL), a massively multi-player online environment. Second Life allows users to create a virtual avatar and explore areas built by other users. However, unlike the real world, virtual attractions can be constructed within hours and previous ones often rapidly fall into disuse. With...

Students who have grown up with digital technologies are said to respond best to multimodal activities that involve multi-tasking in collaborative, networked environments. It is also argued that such students are interested in ‘things that matter’ (Oblinger, 2008) and have a desire for experiential learning that engages them in ‘real world’ issues. This paper describes the use of the 3D virtual...

in current societies because of development of technology and information also ever increasing of variety of services and goods and… makes a vast difference in current and last generation's experience and decrease of reproduction of social values in new society. the aim of this study is to consider the difference of life style dimentions in mothers and daughters in yazd and then consider i...

Li Yunfei , Chen Chengqin School of Computer science & Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou ,Jiangsu,China [email protected] (Telephone: 086-0512-67799890) Abstract: The virtual instrument based on agent technique has such characteristics like adaptability, coordinative and learnable abilities in addition to these inherent advantages of virtual instrument. This paper introduces the architectur...