Virtual reality has been used to bring people into isolated environments that either mimic the real world or abstract worlds. This game demo presents SonicWalker, a virtual reality based city that places the participant into the environment of a person who is blind. The participant is required to navigate city streets without using any vision relying only on 3D audio.

This paper presents research that engages with virtual worlds for education users to understand design of these applications for their needs. An in-depth multi-method investigation from 12 virtual worlds participants was undertaken in three stages; initially a small scale within-subjects eye-tracking comparison was made between the role playing game ‘RuneScape’ and the virtual social world ‘Sec...

This paper presents research that engages with virtual worlds for education users to understand design of these applications for their needs. An in-depth multi-method investigation from 12 virtual worlds participants was undertaken in three stages; initially a small scale within-subjects eye-tracking comparison was made between the role playing game ‘RuneScape’ and the virtual social world ‘Sec...

3D Virtual worlds are computer mediated environments intended for the users to inhabit and interact via their representational avatars. Trading virtual goods in 3D virtual worlds plays an important role in realizing the virtual economy. This essay examines the impact of the unique virtual goods permission settings (Copy, Modify, and transfer) on creators’ pricing strategies. We collect data of ...

Futurists anticipate that within just three years, 70-80% of businesses and Internet users will have a 3D virtual presence. This should be welcome news to our current ‘digital native’ undergraduates who have grown up in a digital era, and who are said to prefer environments that are highly interactive, immersive, multi-modal and connected. 3D virtual learning environments not only fulfil these ...

A significant problem of designing 3D virtual worlds (such as metaverses) is developing a scalable architecture that can manage millions of simultaneous users in an interactive 3D environment. This paper presents XPU (Extremely Partitioned Universe), a hierarchical client-server architecture for developing highly scalable metaverses. This design addresses the problem of dynamically partitioning...

The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) was created to put interconnected 3D worlds onto every desktop. The 3D VRML format has the potential for 3D fax and TeleManufacture. An architecture and methodology of using VRML format to integrate a 3D model and Solid Freeform Fabrication system are described in this paper. The prototype software discussed in this paper demonstrates the use of VRML...

As of today, the behavior of avatars in virtual worlds is usually realized by script sequences which provide the illusion of intelligent behavior to the user. In the research project ISReal, our research group developed the first platform for deploying virtual worlds based on Semantic Web technology, which enables agents to reason about and plan with semantically annotated 3D objects. Powerful ...

E-learning has seen tremendous growth in recent years. More and more, university courses are now available online to a potentially global audience. however, a significant shortcoming of e-learning technologies has been poor support for grouporiented learning. We believe that virtual worlds offer a potential solution. Unlike videoconferencing (for instance), virtual worlds provide a shared visua...

As the number of 3D virtual worlds grow, the distributed nature of the Internet will juxtapose many different kinds of spatial environments. Moving between these environments can be disorienting due to the lack of structural continuity. How can we create an easily navigable experience in a realm so different from the stable, natural world that we inhabit? This paper provides background about na...