Performing embodied identity in virtual worlds

The Avatar as Sociomaterial Entanglement: A Performative Perspective on Identity, Agency and World-Making in Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are utterly contrived and artificial simulations of the actual world. As such, they offer exciting new opportunities to question taken-for-granted, supposedly naturally-occurring binaries such as subject/objects, human/non-human, and reality/fantasy and to explore computer-mediated work and play in ways that do not rely on a priori boundaries between people and technology, online...

Task-Oriented Collaboration with Embodied Agents in Virtual Worlds

The Evolution and Development of Self in Virtual Worlds

Understanding the concept of Self and its relationship to virtual worlds is not a luxury. Virtual worlds render a universe not limited to present laws of nature, where perception of gravity may be suspended and humans may morph and communicate in ways yet imagined. As technology progresses, distinguishing virtual from reality may become more difficult. For some, this offers gains. For others, s...

Multimodal Human Machine Interactions in Virtual and Augmented Reality (v-dij-14)

Virtual worlds are developing rapidly over the Internet. They are visited by avatars and staffed with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). An avatar is a representation of a physical person. Each person controls one or several avatars and usually receives feedback from the virtual world on an audio-visual display. Ideally, all senses should be used to feel fully embedded in a virtual world. S...

A Virtual Tour Guide for Virtual Worlds

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.