second life Papers

Criminal activity in virtual worlds is becoming a major problem for law enforcement agencies. Forensic investigators are becoming interested in being able to accurately and automatically track people in virtual communities. In this paper a set of algorithms capable of verification and recognition of avatar faces with high degree of accuracy are described. Results of experiments aimed at within-virtual-world avatar authentication and inter-reality-based scenarios of tracking aperson between real and virtual worlds are reported. In... Read more

The security of virtual worlds has become a major challenge. The huge progress of Internet technologies, the massive revolution of media and the use of electronic finance increasingly deployed in a world where the law of competition forces financial institutions to devote huge amounts of capital to invest in persistent digital worlds like Second Life or Entropia Universe whose economic impact is quite real [1]. Thus, virtual communities are rapidly becoming the next frontier for... Read more

The presence of consumers and companies in the virtual worlds has increased in recent years. It is predicted that 80% of active Internet consumers and Fortune 500 companies will have an avatar or presence in a virtual community, including social networks, by the end of 2011 (eMarketer, 2007). The increase in the number of consumers with avatars emphasizes the need for a better understanding of who these consumers behind the avatars really are in order to convert these individuals to online and... Read more

Virtual Worlds such as Second Life provide unique opportunities to simulate real life scenarios and immerse the user in an environment that can be tailored to meet specific educational requirements. In these Immersive Learning Environments, students and faculty can interact from anywhere in the real world. From a general education perspective, they allow for virtual classrooms, virtual libraries, interactive role-playing, remote seminars, etc. From a medical education and science perspective, Immersive Learning Environments such as... Read more

Virtual communities such as Second Life and Entropia Universe are quickly becoming the next frontier of cybercrime. With GDPs of virtual economies of persistent worlds approaching billions of dollars it is necessary to develop tools for protection of virtual environments similar to those utilized to secure real world’s infrastructure, such as biometrics security systems. The first step in the development of such security methodologies is wide availability of datasets necessary for training and... Read more

This paper presents recent work on the addition of emotions and affective behaviour to robotic avatars within Second Life, as part of continuing research and development in the area of interactive agents for games and simulations. The development is based upon the E-AI architecture [1] which is a proposed computational model of emotions intended to be used by developers who already have their own agent AI systems. In this work, the E-AI architecture was applied to... Read more

This report documents the work done for the Technology Strategy Board feasibility study Applying Techniques from Intelligent Robotics to Autonomous Avatars in Virtual Worlds. At a high level this project can be seen as taking theories and technologies developed for building intelligent robots that interact with humans and their surroundings [5, 16] and investigating how they operate in Second Life (SL).The following section describes the background to the project in more detail, then subsequent sections detail the work... Read more

Unlike computer games where Non-Player-Character avatars are common, in most virtual worlds they are the exception. Deploying an embodied AI into a virtual world offers a unique opportunity to evaluate embodied AIs, and to develop them within an environment where human and computer are on almost equal terms. This paper presents an architecture being used for the deployment of chatbot driven avatars within the Second Life virtual world, looks at the challenges of deploying an... Read more

In this paper we present an implementation of a embodied conversational agent that serves as a virtual tour guide in Second Life. We show how we combined the abilities of a conversational agent with navigation in the world and present some preliminary evaluation results. Read more

The virtual world of Second LifeTM does not offer support for complex facial animations, such as those needed for an intelligent virtual agent to lip sync to audio clips. However, it is possible to access a limited range of default facial animations through the native scripting language, LSL. Our solution to produce lip sync in this environment is to rapidly trigger and stop these default animations in custom sequences to produce the illusion that the... Read more