Semantic Virtual Environments Research Articles

An Ontology for Semantic Modelling of Virtual World

This article presents a new representation of semantic virtual environments. We propose to use the ontology as a tool for implementation. Our model, called SVHsIEVs 1 provides a consistent representation of the following aspects: the simulated environment, its structure, and the knowledge items using ontology, interactions and tasks that virtual humans can perform in the environment. In SVHsIEVs, we find two type of ontology: the global ontology and the local ontology for Virtual Human. Our architecture has been successfully tested in 3D dynamic environments.

Populating semantic virtual environments

ABSTRACTThe capacity for knowledge representation within simulated environments is a growing field of research geared toward the inclusion of detailed descriptors within the environment through which to provide a virtual agent the knowledge necessary to afford decision‐making and interaction. One such layer of representation is that concerning the natural‐language, or semantic, depiction of the environment and the objects within it. However, even as technology grows more capable of representing such information‐rich environments, the process of authoring and injecting this knowledge has largely remained a manual effort. Not only is this effort arduous for the author in both time and energy expenditure required, but the process also lends itself to limiting the ontology of the simulation further constraining the extent to which such knowledge may be used. Here, we offer an affordable method for semi‐automating the generation and injection of semantic properties into a virtual environment for the purpose of producing more natural agent‐object interaction. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Simulating socially intelligent agents in semantic virtual environments

AbstractThe simulation of synthetic humans inhabiting virtual environments is a current research topic with a great number of behavioral problems to be tackled. Semantical virtual environments (SVEs) have recently been proposed not only to ease world modeling but also to enhance the agent–object and agent–agent interaction. Thus, we propose the use of ontologies to define the world’s knowledge base and to introduce semantic levels of detail that help the sensorization of complex scenes—containing lots of interactive objects. The object taxonomy also helps to create general and reusable operativity for autonomous characters—for example, liquids can be poured from containers such as bottles. On the other hand, we use the ontology to define social relations among agents within an artificial society. These relations must be taken into account in order to display socially acceptable decisions. Therefore, we have implemented a market-based social model that reaches coordination and sociability by means of task exchanges. This paper presents a multi-agent framework oriented to simulate socially intelligent characters in SVEs. The framework has been successfully tested in three-dimensional (3D) dynamic scenarios while simulating a virtual university bar, where groups of waiters and customers interact with both the objects in the scene and the other virtual agents, finally displaying complex social behaviors.

3차원 게임을 위한 시맨틱 가상환경 생성과 네비게이션 제어

3차원 게임 프로그래밍에서 요구되는 가상환경 생성에 있어서 가상환경의 기능이 단순한 배경 제공의 기능 외에 실세계 환경과 직접적으로 관련되는 정보를 포함하는 것이 필요하다. 본 연구에서는 게임에서 실제 환경을 가시화한 가상환경에서 캐릭터가 진행할 때 가상환경에서의 지리적 위치를 알게 함과 동시에 환경과 관련된 정보를 실시간으로 제공하는 시스템을 구현한다. 이러한 기능은 가상환경이 특정 지역에서 고유한 정보를 보유할 수 있게 하고 환경의 조건에 따라 장면을 제어해갈 수 있는 점에서 시맨틱 가상 환경(Semantic Virtual Environment) 구현의 한 방법을 제공한다고 할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 게임에서의 시맨틱 가상환경 구현을 목적으로 유비쿼터스 환경에서 위치기반 실시간 정보 입력을 가능하게 하는 시스템과 가상환경 내 특정 위치를 찾아 대화형으로 네비게이션을 제어할 수 있도록 해주는 방법에 대해 설명한다. In conventional game systems, virtual environments usually have just the role of a background without the direct relationships for game characters. nev do not consider the semantics about virtual environments. In this paper, we develop a game navigation system that provides semantic information about virtual environments including geographical, historical or my other location-dependent information. Then, the game character obtains the geographical location and its related information when it navigates through a virtual environment. It can be an implementation method for a semantic virtual environment because it can have the environment maintain its semantics depending on the specific location. In addition, we describe a method that can control a character's motion in the semantic virtual environment interactively, and that can input specific information according to the location of the character.