A Realistic Chat Environment for Virtual Avatars in Cyber Space

Chat is a crucial function in current virtual worlds. Since virtual worlds are becoming increasingly popular, we need a realistic and efficient communication framework for multi-agents participating in a virtual world. This paper proposes a unified communication framework for multiple avatars in a v...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Soo-Hyun Park, Seung-Hyun Ji, Dong-Sung Ryu, Hwan-Gue Cho
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Avatars
Chat
Computer science
Graphics
Greedy algorithms
Information technology
Internet
Multimedia systems
Protocols
Robustness
Second Life
Virtual World
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:Chat is a crucial function in current virtual worlds. Since virtual worlds are becoming increasingly popular, we need a realistic and efficient communication framework for multi-agents participating in a virtual world. This paper proposes a unified communication framework for multiple avatars in a virtual world, (e.g., second-life). Current chat systems in virtual worlds provide a set of special communication protocols such as pairwise, group and secret chat, independently. Therefore, modern virtual communication systems have adapted artificial chat techniques such as 'one-to-one chat' and 'group chat' to a virtual 3-D space. Our framework exploits spatial relationships (distance, and viewing vector) between several agents, without including a specialized chat protocol layer in communication. The main contribution of our work is threefold. First, we propose a realistic and unified communication framework which enables 'complete chat' and 'partial chat' in terms of spatial relationships between avatar agents without including an additional communication protocol. Second, we propose a single greedy algorithm to find an optimal position in 3-D virtual space which optimizes chat availability. Third, our system reconstructs a dialogue graph which maintains all transcripts in the form of directed graphs with temporal (dialogue sequences) and spatial information (physical positions) about communicating agents.
DOI:10.1109/CW.2008.71