Controlling and Assisting Activities in Social Virtual Worlds

Abstract

Since its beginning, web technology has advanced from a text-based to a visual-based interaction. This evolution has been facilitated by both high speed internet connections and PC's graphical power. Virtual world (VW) technology began as standalone applications (e.g.. virtual simulations) but soon evolved into web-based applications. Nowadays, home users for entertainment and wide-spread enterprises or institutions for business can exploit virtual worlds to develop remote activities between friends, employees, clients, teachers or students (Sherman, 2002). Then, virtual worlds have clear applications in e-governance, elearning and e-commerce, and therefore it is mandatory to study mechanisms ensuring the assistance and the control of activities taking place in these applications. We focus on social virtual worlds populated by participants that act in order to achieve common and individual goals (Bartle, 2003). Due to the type of activities taking place in a Social Virtual World (SVW), the virtual environment should be prepared to be a dynamic space where participants are informed about activities' evolution and where norms are used to organize participants' actions, to define actions' consequences and to prevent undesired participants behaviours. We rely on electronic institutions (Esteva, 2003) to set up participants' valid interactions and on virtual objects, named intelligent objects, populating the virtual world, to enforce norms and to give assistance to participants (Rodriguez, 2008). This work exploits the Virtual Institution (VI) concept which is a combination of both multiagent and virtual world technologies (Bogdanovych, 2007). We have designed a general framework of object behaviour control tied with an IA based external module and prepared to be exploited by several virtual world platforms. This is done creating a specific module to capture participant interactions on objects populating the virtual world and connecting this module with an external and generic one in charge of deciding what should be the virtual object action. Decision depends on an organizationbased multiagent system (MAS) which, as said before, establishes the valid interactions participants may have and the consequences of those interactions. Our main objectives are:  Establish participants' roles, activities and norms by means of a multiagent system named electronic institution. Participants can be both software agents and humans. Controlling and Assisting Activities in Social Virtual Worlds 13