As a virtual tutoring system, the ANT project involves a dynamic curriculum planning module that assists the virtual tutor to customize a series of tutoring sessions for a real life student. In a virtual tutoring environment, the interactions between a real life student and a virtual tutor tend to be subtle. These subtleties should be captured and modeled when a tutoring session is conducted. S...

Simulating autonomous virtual actors living in virtual worlds with human-virtual interaction and immersion is a new challenge. The sense of "presence" in the virtual environment is an important requirement for collaborative activities involving multiple remote users working with social interactions. Using autonomous virtual actors within the shared environment is a supporting tool for presence....

The rise of digital technologies like 3D virtual worlds has the potential to open new directions in virtual ethnography researches. Although there has been a lot of discussion about conducting research in online spaces and in virtual games, there are few studies on conducting research in virtual worlds. In this study, within a holistic perspective, the virtual ethnography research potential in ...

This paper describes an approach how to integrate virtual agents into the 3D multi-user online world Second Life. For this purpose we have implemented a new client software for Second Life that controls virtual agents (“bots”) and makes use of the Multimodal Presentation Markup Language 3D (MPML3D) to define their behavior. The technical merits and limitations of Second Life are discussed and s...

In order to feel the sense of presence in the Virtual Environment, it is important for the participants to become a part of this environment and interact with it through natural behaviors. This is even more emphasized in Networked Collaborative Virtual Environments where the participants need to see and interact with each other. We present the Virtual Life Network (VLNET), a joint research effo...

This paper presents a case study centered on the virtual restitution and virtual life simulation of a highly complex and endangered heritage edifice: the church of Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, Turkey (added in 1996 in the annual list of endangered monuments by the World Monuments Watch). The goal of this article is to describe the techniques used in order to achieve a photo-realistic simulation o...

Cloud computing is a result of the continuing progress made in the areas of hardware, technologies related to the Internet, distributed computing and automated management. The Increasing demand has led to an increase in services resulting in the establishment of large-scale computing and data centers, in addition to high operating costs and huge amounts of electrical power consumption. Insuffic...

Perceived as the form of organizing of the future, virtual teams have proliferated all over the world. However, the meaning of virtualization is more than just a work arrangement. People actually enjoy the benefits of remote communication via ICT in daily life. Given the communication difficulties in virtual teams, this paper reviews the literature of virtual teams and the literature of virtual...

Virtual world simulators like Second Life represent the latest and most successful frontier of online services for entertainment and business. People have virtual lives in these worlds using personal avatars. Bridging real life and these virtual worlds together is challenging, but enables new application scenarios for these systems. Existing work focuses on the representation of objects inside ...

Virtual worlds such as Second Life have recently gained increased visibility from businesses seeking to market products “in-world” to virtual world participants. However, without understanding the sociological orientation of virtual participants, the effectiveness of marketing approaches in virtual worlds may be limited. This study utilizes a Delphi approach to determine the sociological orient...