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Virtual World Interoperability: Let Use Cases Drive Design

Virtual worlds are slowly creeping into our daily lives. While some early 
 adopters have been using them for entertainment, research and training 
 over the last 20 years, virtual trade shows and online conferencing with 
 user avatars are putting them front and center on the desktops of workers 
 around the world. However, while a "walled garden" virtual world may be 
 useful in and of itself (just like a cell phone being able to call other 
 cell phone customers using the same carrier), the real usability 
 explosion will come when the different virtual worlds start talking to 
 each other (just like cell phones being able to call any phone number in 
 the world, no matter who the destination carrier or operator is).
 
 This article will examine the history of virtual world interoperability 
 as evidenced through early systems like DIS and HLA, current systems such 
 as Second Life / OpenSim teleport and OLIVE simulation interoperability, 
 and will examine some common use cases for the future, interconnected 
 metaverse. Based on this learning, a comprehensive approach to 
 standards-based virtual world interoperability is described, and the 
 article ends with a call for action.
 
 The author has a unique depth of perspective on virtual worlds 
 interoperability, having worked with a variety of technologies ranging 
 from military simulation all the way to massively multiplayer online 
 games, having worked for a leading virtual world platform provider 
 since 2001, and having shipped public virtual world interoperability 
 solutions since 2005.

Towards an Interest Management Scheme for Peer-based Virtual Environments

A fundamental task in peer-to-peer-based Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments is providing all peers with a consistent view of the environment. To do so, state changes must be propagated to peers. To limit the resulting network traffic, existing approaches often restrict the distribution of a state change to peers for which it is relevant. The identification of such peers is known as Interest Management. Typically Interest Management is done based on so-called Areas of Interest. An Area of Interest is a spatial area around a user's avatar. If a change occurs inside this area, it is relevant and must be reported to the corresponding peer. We propose to extend this approach with so-called Areas of Effect. An Area of Effect specifies the spatial area of the virtual environment that is directly influenced by a given state change. A state change is propagated to all peers whose Areas of Interest intersect with the change's Area of Effect. This allows us to model complex state changes with arbitrary and possibly dynamic influence areas. They may even affect multiple areas at once. In this paper we describe our approach and give an overview on the current state of it's implementation.

The Hand Is More Easily Fooled than the Eye: Users Are More Sensitive to Visual Interpenetration than to Visual-Proprioceptive Discrepancy

A virtual environment (VE) user's avatar may penetrate virtual objects. Some VE designers prevent visual interpenetration, assuming that prevention improves user experience. However, preventing visual avatar interpenetration causes a discrepancy between visual and proprioceptive cues. We investigated users' detection thresh-olds for visual interpenetration and visual-proprioceptive discrepancy and found that users are much less sensitive to visual-proprioceptive discrepancy than to visual interpenetration. We propose using this result to better deal with user penetration of virtual objects.

The Hand Is More Easily Fooled than the Eye: Users Are More Sensitive to Visual Interpenetration than to Visual-Proprioceptive Discrepancy

A virtual environment (VE) user's avatar may penetrate virtual objects. Some VE designers prevent visual interpenetration, assuming that prevention improves user experience. However, preventing visual avatar interpenetration causes a discrepancy between visual and proprioceptive cues. We investigated users' detection thresh-olds for visual interpenetration and visual-proprioceptive discrepancy and found that users are much less sensitive to visual-proprioceptive discrepancy than to visual interpenetration. We propose using this result to better deal with user penetration of virtual objects.

Brick-Building Interface Support for Cocreative Communication

To support cocreative communication between people who are in separate, remote locations, embodied communication (communication expressed through the physical body) is crucial, and a common place for communication should be established. This article proposes an idea to integrate remote physical places into a shared virtual space to bridge these remote places and to describe interface systems for cocreative communication. To show a typical example of cocreative communication with a high degree of freedom for bodily actions, this study focused on brick-building play, in which people are free to construct structures spatially with physical objects. For remote collaborative communication, including modeling with physical bricks at each physical place, two interface systems were designed: the brick-modeling interface system and the brick-reader glove interface system. The brick-modeling interface system makes it possible for users to act out others' brick plays with physical bricks in the remote places and in shared virtual space in real time. The brick-reader glove interface system enables users to act out the modeling process with virtual bricks and virtual avatars of both remote users in the shared virtual space. The experiment clearly suggests that these interface systems are useful for creating a shared virtual space and for supporting collaborative work in three dimensions with a sense that the remote people were together in the same place.

アバタとエージェントを利用した仮想対話インタフェースによるSoft Interaction

A virtual dialogue interface for soft interaction between a system and a user is proposed. It enables the information acquisition as a sub task without hindering the user main task during the main task execution. A virtual dialogue is performed with suitable timing between the two characters used in this interface: the user avatar with a model obtained by observing the interaction of the user and the environment, and an agent having the knowledge about the environment. The user is usually an indirect participant performing ``soft interaction'' as an onlooker of the system behavior (dialogue between the user avatar and the agent), and only when required he can participate through a direct interaction instead of his avatar. A car navigation interface was used to examine the applicability of the proposed technique. A task of memorizing information about one's profile while performing an operation task was given and the rate of main task execution and rate of related information memory were used as evaluation criteria. Our proposed method showed outstanding results comparing to the conventional direct interactive interface. Moreover, the degree of favorable impression for the proposed interface was higher than the conventional one and the subjectivity evaluation clearly showed that it was considered as a sociable interface.