I-Room : Integrating Intelligent Agents and Virtual Worlds

Introduction  Application of a virtual space for Intelligent Interaction  Provide support for formal business meetings, tutorial, project meetings, discussion groups  Used to organize and present pre-existing information as well as displaying real-time information  Communicate with participants, facilitate interactions, record and action the decisions during the collaboration

I- Room concept within virtual worlds

 Gives a collaboration an intuitive grounding in a persistent 3D space in which participants representation (avatars) appear.  Artifacts and resources used in the meeting are close at hand  Avatars can meet each other face-to-face in a virtual world when their human counterparts can’t  Can be a effective alternative to face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, or video conferences.  Beyond these, I-Room can be used to deliver intelligent systems support for meetings and collaborative activities.

Framework  I-Room is designed to draw on I-X Technology, which provides human participants with intelligent task support, process management, collaborative tools, and planning aids.  Can also utilize a range of manual and automated capabilities or agents in a coherent way.  Participants share meaning information about the processes or products they are working on.  Framework is flexible to provide participants in meetings with access to knowledge- based content

Intelligent Systems Technology  Key intelligent system used in the I-Room is the I-X Technology support framework and I-Plan.  I-X is a suite of tools designed to aid in processes that create or modify one or more “products”  I-Plan is an intelligent planning aid  Decision makers could use the I-X planning technologies when local or remote from one another by interacting through a shared web interface.  However, the technologies lacked a simple and intuitive means to enable awareness of other decision-making agents presence or share artefacts.

After the advent of 3D Virtual Worlds  With the advent of 3D virtual worlds (second Life, OpenSimulator), they are able to link I-X Technologies so that they could support a community connected via such a virtual worlds meeting space.  Flexibility of scripting facilities in virtual worlds made the integration of intelligent systems relatively easy  Virtual worlds also supports good connections to web based static- media and dynamically generated web content.  This enabled voice, video, text chat, and presentation sharing across the virtual world.

I-X Technology and I-Room Meeting Support  This technology provides a user interface that acts as a sophisticated “to-do” list.  I-Room created within a virtual world linked to I-X Systems external to the virtual world to support collaborative meetings  It can support common requirements for meeting by automatically generating a framework for meeting keeping track of actions during the meeting recording decisions automatically generating an outline of the meeting minutes

 I-Room can sense avatars presence and respond to commands through an object in virtual world called I-X helper.  I-Room can provide additional support by monitoring participants comings and goings in the meetings prompting in-world “screens” to display the meeting agenda or any relevant images, media, documents, or webpages unobtrusively documenting the meetings progress and outcomes.  Linking the I-Room to real-world knowledge-based systems can potentially extend the support they offer into this virtual space.

Underlying Concepts for I-Room Collaboration a mixed-initiative collaborative model for refining and constraining processes and products; communication based on sharing issues, activities and processes, state, events, agents, options, argumentation, rationale, presence information, and status reports; the use of the ontology for representing the processes used and products developed during meetings; I-X Technology and its suite of tools to provide task and process support; the use of issue-based argumentation about options; the use of agent presence models, as in instant messaging, and awareness of agent context, status, relationships within an organizational framework, capabilities, and authorities; and external shared repositories of descriptions of processes, products, and other domain-defined objects.

I-Room Capabilities  I-X helper  Image Generator  LED Display  Media Controller  Avatar Sensor  Inventory Giver  I-Room Questioner

Connecting an I-Room to a Virtual World

 IX-helper, any convenient object in virtual world contains scripts to communicate with avatars  It communicates through one nominated IX-Agent to various IX- Services via a communication channel  Message from either end can be queued and sent later if both aren’t available  IX-helper can communicate with avatars via text channels in virtual world  Uses dedicated private channels to communicate with other devices such as screens  Provides a sensor for determining when avatars come into range  In general, IX-helper lets participants with external I-X agents and let those agents communicate with and control devices in the virtual world.

I-Room Applications  Emergency operations centers used for experimentation and exercise  Support for geographically dispersed cross-disciplinary team engaged in creating multimedia products  Commercial application involving expertly tutored whisky-tasting and sales  Slam Games

Slam Games I-Room

Whisky I-Room

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